Cut Loose
The sudden spell of undisrupted gorgeous sunny weather over San Francisco is mocking me.
The weight of a headache I carry uphill to my apartment is threatening to grind me down into the pavement. I welcome the stupor that comes with excess food and drink. My maternal grandmother has passed away.
We were not close. I could not describe who she was, what were her passions or driving motivations in life. She did not fascinate me when as a teenager I watched her serve food or light the Sabbath candles. I don’t regret in typically nostalgic manner not having taken more time to know her. Our relationship for all it was and wasn’t, was a result of a generational and cultural gap which neither one of us could honestly transcend. The lacerating wound of her departure comes not from close emotional loss. It is strangely visceral. I know that in her death, there is a little bit of my own.
With my grandmother’s passing the single persistent link to my Jewish heritage has disintegrated as if let loose by her last breath. The history of the Jewish community of Bessarabia and later the Soviet Republic of Molodva seems a little less my own.
Dr. Zvi Vasilavski on Yizkor Book Project wrote:
Small and tiny was the Jewish tribe that placed its tent, a nomadic Jewish tent, in the wide fields of Bessarabia. Poor and negligible was this tribe among the great Jewish tribes that lived in the dry lands of Vohlin, Podolia and new Russia and that were densely populated and carried an ancient history. Minute was also its part in the Jewish culture of the Diaspora of the last generations: A few sad melodies, a gypsy Moldovian-Vohlin Jewish mixture, bringing tears to your eyes and softening your heart with the sunset on a Saturday evening, and bringing a unique flavor in the prayers during the days between Rosh Hashana and Yom-Kippur – this is the only gift to the nomadic Jewish temple, that Jewish Bessarabia brought with it. Simple Jews lived there. Their food – mamaliga, and their drink – Bessarabian wine. Their food more than an egg, while their religiousness, less than an olive. Only the reflecting light of the Podilic Hasidim, is shining their light from the black land to the blue sky. Their life table is full, but their spiritual table, poor and miserable. If a Jew from Lita would come by, only lightly knowledgeable in the Bible and the Mishnah – he would be considered a scholar, a Rabbi. In contrast, many of the Jews are farmers, workers of the land, muscular and strong. In their love for the land, they were not blessed with being overly pampered, but were closer to the origins of life and the world.
At the turn of the 20th century Kishinev ’s Jewry constituted 43% on the city’s inhabitants, attracting migrants escaping persecution from within Russia while offering a glim hope of better living conditions. While the Kishinev pogroms were the birthright of my great grandparents, my grandmother’s lot included the Soviet takeover of Moldova soon followed by the Nazi invasion. Riva Milshteyn-Rozenfeld must have been her contemporary, only a few years older. Her memoir describes those days.
My mother’s youth set apart by another 20 years, was an energetic break from the past. She as many of her generation, took on a true progressive outlook encouraged by the Soviet propaganda, shedding the burdens of history by distancing herself from Jewish identity and religion. She still understands and speaks a little Romanian. This language did not traverse the next consecutive generation however, and is entirely foreign to me. The only reminder of this part of my genetic compound is the knowledge and affinity of mamaliga .
Not having formed any deep attachments to places or loyalties to new nationalities while having traveled a lot, I remain a true cosmopolitan. On sad days like this, I find myself being eroded, as if with the sale of the piece of land which belonged to my father’s family and where I was born, and with the passings of my family members - what constitutes me, my heritage, my brief personal history, is being cut loose and floats off into the distance, bit by bit.