I remember / je me souviens

I remember / je me souviens

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For those limbic bursts of nostalgia, invented by Proust, miniaturized by Nicholson Baker, and freeze-dried by Joe Brainard in his I remember and by Georges Perec in his Je me souviens.

But there are no fractions, the world is an integer
Like us, and like us it can neither stand wholly apart nor disappear.
When one is young it seems like a very strange and safe place,
But now that I have changed it feels merely odd, cold
And full of interest.
--John Ashbery, "A Wave"

Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
--Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

Thursday, February 06, 2003

I remember that my uptown grandmother's mother died just after being liberated from Auschwitz. I think my father called her "black omama," while his father's mother was "white omama," just from the color of their hair. I called my uptown grandmother just "Omama" (which got me into the same kind of unfair trouble -- but more unfair -- that I got into with Rabbi William Berkowitz for saying "Hi, Billy, I'm Billy" to him: Marc Bilgray and I discovered a common feature when it turned out he called his grandmother "Ommy;" I met her once and liked her. One day I was accused by Marc, and by his father, and questioned by my parents whom Marc's father (Felix! -- an entertainment lawyer) had called, of calling her up and calling her "a stupid old Ommy" which is how she must have reported it. I vigorously denied this: it seemed obvious to me then, and still does now, that she had misheard something that someone said to her, being, well, being a stupid old woman. What I couldn't believe is that anyone would have gotten me so wrong -- that my own parents would have gotten me so wrong -- as to think I might do such a silly thing). So my Omama told me one day as we were driving up Broadway near City College -- an occasional alternate route we'd take between Washington Heights and Riverside Drive -- I liked tracking the brief elevation of the IRT and then its return underground as my grandfather drove -- that her mother had feasted on eggs after her liberation and died hours later of the excessive food she'd eaten. This seemed very odd to me -- and confirmed the distinction between me and the denizens of that world. What was also odd about it was that it had the sound of a story with a happy ending, a fairy-tale ending: how my great-grandmother survived Auschwitz to unimaginable bounty and generosity. But then the food killed her. The narrative surprise was a terrible shock. But it was also an interesting fact, one that I felt I had to file away for use at some emergent occasion: don't eat a lot of eggs after being systematically starved for years. Byron in Don Juan says "That famished people must be slowly nurst / And fed by spoonfuls, else they always burst." So the interesting fact turned out to be true!

Years later my grandmother showed me a letter from my great grandmother, postmarked, I remember, by the Red Cross, from Auschwitz, full of insipid no-news. It all looked normal and bland. (It was in German: my grandmother helped me read it.) It reaussered them in the U.S. It turned out, of course, that this was part of German defensive propaganda: nothing to complain about in Auschwitz. Only sanitized letters got through. But it was still very important to my grandmother -- this tenuous and mendacious contact. After all, that was her mother's writing on that slip of paper. I now recall that my parents own portraits of my great grandparents, inherited from my grandmother, done by some reasonably well-remembered portraitist of the twenties. I never really put together the woman in the portrait wearing pearls with the abject woman in the story. Nor with Omama Schwarze. But she did have dark hair.

posted by william 3:43 PM
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