Sometimes letters were addressed to us at Venice Street, Ulitsa Venetsii. Our building was situated on a canal, which not all letter writers knew. The letters arrived, because there was no Ulitsa Venetsii in Kiev, and so we were responsible for all of Italy. Because of this Venice, water came pouring into my dreams and flooded everything in them, but rescue always arrived when the water had risen as far as my seventh floor, always in the form of a golden gondola from a misty distance that came for me alone. I gave no thought to the neighbors drowning below me, forgetting them in my dreams.
Three floors below us there lived the lonely Makarovna, an elderly Ukrainian villager who had survived collectivization as a child only to lose her parents and fiancé in the war. For years she sat on the bench in front of our building in slippers and a headscarf. She was the feistiest of all, the brashest and unhappiest, always tipsy, sometimes amusing but never cheerful, and she gave us children candy so old it seemed to have dated back to the war provisions of last resort. In her bright yellow headscarf with shiny flowers in maroon and green, in her dark blue dressing gown—the retired woman’s uniform—and a look of intensity in her faintly bulging eyes, she struck me as one of the last of the strong, wild, beautiful people that had once settled here at the threshold of the Ukrainian steppe. Later she gave me all kinds of superfluous things, felt boots for infants or thickly embroidered handkerchiefs, which I have kept to this day; she gave things away because she needed money, but I didn’t understand that back then. From time to time she recounted jumbled bits and pieces about the war, family members who had died, and the collective farms known as kolkhozy, but either I hadn’t been paying enough attention or her delirium was making her mix up the Soviet catastrophes; in any case the years did not match up. In some accounts her family died in the war, but in others the family starved on the kolkhoz, and her fiancé had never come back, or had never existed, as I secretly feared. The war was to blame, that was the only part that was certain.
I wanted to go back up and look at the bicorne that Napoleon lost at Waterloo, but my daughter dragged me down to the ground floor for the twentieth century. I sought to distract her with Dürer and Luther, but in vain; she brought me to the 1920s, where we raced through the strikes, the hunger, and Berlin’s golden age, for she wanted to go on, to go there, and as we neared the 1930s, I tensed up. She pulled me along to join up with a tour for adults; Let’s not, I said, but she reassured me, I know the score, Mama, and her comfort with the subject discomfited me more than her knowledge. She was eleven. We strode through the seizure of power, the ban on forming associations, the persecution of Communists, and when we were standing in front of the chart with the Nuremberg Laws and the tour guide—the Führerin, funny that’s the word for the woman doing this job, she was just in the middle of talking about the Führer—launched into an explanation of who, and what percent, my daughter asked me in a loud whisper, Where are we here? Where are we on this chart, Mama? The question really ought to be asked not in the present tense but in the past, and the subjunctive: where would we have been if we had lived then, if we had lived in this country—if we had been Jewish and had lived here back then. I know this lack of respect for grammar, and I, too, ask myself questions of this sort, where am I on this picture, questions that shift me from the realm of imagination into reality, because avoidance of the subjunctive turns imagination into recognition or even statement, you take another’s place, catapult yourself there, into this chart, for example, and thus I try out every role on myself as though there was no past without an if, as though, or in that case.
Where are we on this chart, Mama? my daughter asked. I was frightened by her directness, and to protect her from being frightened, I hastened to reassure her that we were not on it at all, we would have been in Kiev by that point or already evacuated, and by the way we weren’t even born yet, this chart has nothing to do with us, and now I had almost said if, but, and as though after all, when a man from the guided group turned to me and said, By the way, we have paid.
Even before I understood that he was telling me that the guided tour was not free of charge and that he thought that I too should pay or we would be freeloaders, my daughter and I, as though we had filched this eight-euro history, although, thanks anyway, I would not filch this kind of thing, so before I understood that without paying we had no right to stand in front of the chart or on it, that we had come to the paying circle too late; even before or as I thought all of that, tears came to my eyes, although I wasn’t crying at all, something was crying in me, I was cried for, and also the man was cried for within me, although he had no need of it, because he was in the right, we hadn’t paid, or rather, we actually had, but there is always someone who hasn’t.
He who does not find himself finds that his family will swallow him whole.
—ANCIENT CHINESE PROVERB
Seven generations, said my mother, two hundred years long we have taught deaf-mute children how to speak; my mother always said “we,” although she herself never taught deaf-mute children, she taught history. Surely she couldn’t think that teaching deaf-mutes and teaching history were one and the same profession. The way she described it, we would forever remain captive in this selfless dedication, and even future generations would not be free of the responsibility of the We, the responsibility of teaching others, of living for others, especially for their children. These seven generations sound like the stuff of a fairy tale, as though seven generations were enough to reach eternity, to attain the word.
We have always taught, my mother said, we have all been teachers, and there is no other path for us. She said it with such conviction that it sounded like one of those adages that our country thought tried and true, like “A voice cries in the desert,” or “A prophet is without honor in his own country.”
Her sister, her mother, her grandfather, and all her grandfather’s brothers and sisters, his father, and his father’s father taught deaf-mute children; they founded schools and orphanages and lived under one roof with these children, they shared everything with them. These altruists drew no distinction between their job and their life. My mother loved the word altruist; they were all altruists, she said, and she was sure that she, too, carried this altruistic heritage within her, but I was equally certain that I did not.
When my mother told me how our ancestors spread out across Europe and founded schools for deaf-mutes in Austria-Hungary, in France and Poland, I recalled the passage in the Old Testament, or so I thought, but it was actually in the New Testament: Abraham begat Isaac. Isaac begat Jacob. Jacob begat Judah and his brothers. Judah begat Perez and Zerah with Tamar—and more unfamiliar names. I knew this passage as vaguely as my own genealogy, but it seemed to me that our set of ancestors had no end either. One generation after the other, beyond our line of vision and beyond the horizon of family memory, taught speaking to the deaf-mutes. Do you hear their fervid whispering?
Sh’ma Yisrael, in the morning and the evening, Sh’ma Yisrael, Hear, O Israel, hear me!
The first ancestor we knew by name was Shimon Heller, Simon Geller in Russian. Maybe he was following the call of his Hebrew name; Shimon means “he has heard, the one who