By: Klaira
A couple of weeks ago, I decided to interview my younger brother Naum (or Numa as we call him) about his knowledge of our family history, and more specifically, about our great grandmother Chaya. Since he has read my blog, I was expecting him to reiterate everything that I have been writing here, with his own personal spin. However, what he said both surprised me and shed light of the nature of memory.
Numa struggles to recall what he has read and what he was told by his parents, grandparents, and myself . He recollects the facts due to their excessive repetition but can’t piece them together. Perhaps we are putting too much pressure on the importance of remembering one’s history, at such a young age. Maybe it is just too much weight for an eleven-year-old to carry on his shoulders.
Eventually –keep in mind that the original interview is close to 13 minutes–Numa admits that what he doesn’t remember is really what he doesn’t know. This makes me wonder: what is the essence of Chaya’s story that will be passed on to the next generation? Or will she be just a name in our family tree?
At the end, I asked him what he thought was the moral of Chaya’s decision. Even though his answer was quite tentative, his ultimate message was very strong. And it offered an alternative idea about Chaya’s story that I had never thought of before.
the opening of The Cannery, Leonard enjoyed press and celebrity, a diplomatic hambone and entertainer. He was a character and very rarely timid, even in his own creation of shocking situations: yelling at waiters, pushing aside (in a tipsy state) old folk waiting for a cab, opening champagne so the cork nearly skimmed an ear in its flight across the room. That part of him must have come across in my father, and me too, in some way. In my father I see traces of Leonard—at times a mischief-maker with a fiery temper—though his general personality follows that of Susi’s: floating and modest. But it seems my grandfather also gave him his idealism and hyper-sensitivity. Leonard’s uncle, Peter, was almost pathologically shy and self-conscious—Russian traits, so my dad says. My father says I have “barbarian” on both sides of my family: from Leonard and from my mother’s Mongol father.
While climbing the back of the Lawrence Hall of Science whale or creating patterns in the woodchips of the Berkeley Jewish Community Center, I wouldn’t be able to live in the moment. Even if time travel were possible, my brain has developed too many circuits that frenetically wind around each other in order to go back to the childhood I so fondly remember.
