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

Sunday, February 11, 2007

I remember the Gulf War. I remember our heder atum. We made our sealed room in Yossi's bedroom, a smallish one with only a single window to seal up; I remember a lot of duct tape was involved. I remember decorating the outside of my gasmask box. I covered it with newspaper clippings, pictures, headlines and protected them with clear packing tape.

I only clearly recall three times in a heder atum. The first was with my family, and I suppose I remember it because I was writing about it at the time, probably a letter to my best friend, Elisheva, but possibly in my journal, so I noticed things, like how uncomfortably tight and heavy the gasmask felt, and how stiffly frightened my parents seemed, and how thirsty we all were, and how unwilling we were to take off the masks to take a drink. The other two times must have been Friday nights: the fuzzier memory is of a siren interrupting dinner at the Werthans, and all of us trundling from the Shabbat table into Moshe and Libby's heder atum, the room I thought of as the library but which was really Moshe's office. I vaguely remember this, but I distrust the memory: could I have made it up? It seems likely that something like this would have happened--that year, we shared a meal with Moshe and Libby just about every Shabbat, war or no war. The clearer memory must have taken place shortly after candlelighting. Lonny was out davening, I guess, and I was downstairs with Tammy and their children. I remember understanding that there was no way, short of cruelty, to keep the baby, Neriya, inside the protective cot for any length of time. And there was no way to carry it with you, so if you took him anyplace, you couldn't really protect him in case of a chemical attack.

At the beginning, there was something exciting about the drama--what I could write to my friends in the States!--but after a few weeks, it wore me down. The question, 'how much danger are we really in?' was impossible to answer. The missiles didn't seem to be doing much damage, but you never knew what could happen the NEXT time. Knowing that there was no way to protect Neri, my beloved Neri, didn't make me want to think very hard about the possibilities.

I remember Moshe, our sweet, generous, and gentlemanly neighbor describing a dream in which he killed Saddam Hussein.

I remember rooting for Norman Schwarzkopf and Bush senior.

I remember refusing to translate the news for my father, though I was fluent in Hebrew and he was not, and though he asked me repeatedly. I remember refusing to watch (or listen to) the news at all.

After the initial shutdown, I remember going back to school. It seemed like nobody else's father was at home. Almost everyone had been called up for reserve duty. I remember the real tension on the faces of the girls whose dads were up North, tension reflected on the teacher's grave faces. And I remember that the war ended around Purim time, and that even after we were given the all clear, it took me several days and a serious talk with my father to be able to leave the house without my gasmask.

For the rest of the year, every time the daily train whistled its return from Tel Aviv, I heard a siren.

posted by Rosasharn 6:44 PM
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