A Letter to my Grandmother on the One Year Anniversary of her Death About the State of the World on the One Year Anniversary of her Death

Dear readers, sorry it's been so long...

Dear Nanya,

It is a strange and unsettling exercise to write you a letter that you will never read. It has been a year since you passed away and, since then, I have thought of you often and, sometimes, unexpectedly. You have come to me in many dreams – both reveries of time together in Old Lyme and surreal, disturbing contortions of you living, dying, and dead. You have come to me in flashes and bursts and sudden pangs of deep feeling and vivid memories. You have come to me through conversations and in absences –  in Poppy, at home, in items tucked away in closets. You have come to me and I too have gone to you.

I spent this summer in France, retracing your footsteps during World War 2. It was a strange summer, alone and unmoored in the French countryside, in pursuit of an ever-intangible, ever-slippery feeling of closeness. I was constantly co-mingling with my invented images of you in 1942, superimposing myself onto them. It’s true that, in Brive, I ate an upscale lunch at the hotel Terminus, enclosed by the same walls that held you – a young girl, newly arrived in Brive, hiding in a place that would soon be infiltrated with Nazis who would wake you with calls of “Raus” each morning. And too, in Varetz, I biked between country roads just as you once had, but my journey was not one of unsafe passage and, instead, was searching for your site of refuge, scouring the countryside for abandoned farmhouses, trying to find you in every one I passed. Separated from you by time and circumstance, I was steeped in disquieting dis-synchronicity. At the end of the summer, I wrote: 

“My memories are not of the War, but of my grandmother…. There were Nazis inflicting immense violence on the same street as the expensive boutique that I am now free to peruse and both of those realities are equally my family’s history. I will always be tied to those horrors and they are not exactly my own – they are mine in the way that something can be yours three generations out. I know of them intimately – my life has been sculpted by them – and, too, my time in France is one of autonomy and summer fellowship. I realize now that my work is really all about that gulf – the inheritance of stories, the passage of time, the loss of life as it has occurred on so many scales and from so many angles.”

Despite my efforts, there is so much of you that I do not know – that I never knew and never will know. 

When mom visited me, we biked from Vernon to Honfleur, tracing the Seine’s contours and carrying our possessions in panniers. We passed brilliant blazing fields of sunflowers and cows clustered under sleepy sycamores and mom talked often about her own trip to Brive, decades earlier, as a teenager with you. What she remembers – and this is a theme of her recollections of you – is how much you fought and how horrible things between you were and it is clear that there is great pain that remains unresolved in her. It is true that I never really fought with you even though I remember how harsh your words could be. Most of what I remember of you – or perhaps have chosen to remember by way of my (un)conscious – is tender; time spent sitting beside you exchanging murmurs and making faces, which is mostly what we did in the last several years of your life. I do not know you like mom or Poppy or Rachel did and none of them knew you as I do. This is perhaps a problem of family (of grandmothers), or of Alzheimers, or of perspective, or maybe it is just a problem of people. 

This letter is thus written to a ‘you’ – to you – who is and will remain irrevocably incomplete to me. Not only are you dead but our relationship and my understanding of you is a mere fragment. I am newly consumed by this perennial truth because now, on the one year anniversary of your death, there is a brutal massacre being waged in the name of Jewish people, and I cannot talk to you about it and cannot know what you might think. This massacre, of course, is one Israel’s many attacks on Palestinian people but this bout of violence – begun after Hamas attacked Israel and killed over 1000 Jewish Israelis – is particularly deadly. The death toll of Palestinians, which is over 17000, more than 7000 of whom are children, is rising every second and the internet is filled with images that are so horrific and devastating, they are beyond description. 

Unlike many of my Jewish peers at college, I did not grow up being told that Israel was my people’s homeland. You and Poppy lived a mostly secular life as did mom and I. I did not attend a Jewish day school nor, like many of my friends, a Jewish summer camp that culminated with a trip to Israel. And, Kolot Chayeinu, our temple, where I became a bat mitzvah and grew into my Jewishness, was early to call for the cessation of the violence being perpetrated now. I grew up being told to stand up wherever I saw injustice in my community, my earliest memories of Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn later corroborated by the years of work you and mom spent doing peace and anti-nuclear advocacy. And, so, it is perhaps unsurprising that, in the face of such massive violence, I would feel moral clarity; it is perhaps unsurprising that, although I mourn deeply for the Israeli lives that were taken, the enormous violence directed towards Palestinians is plainly barbaric and genocidal to me. 

I think you would join me in my outrage but, of course, this is where not knowing is sticky. In the interview you gave to the Shoah foundation in 1998 you said, “I’ve experienced the two extremes: the extraordinary evil and the extraordinary goodness… how can we never have that evil again and you read the news and it just goes on and on… how do we prevent such evil? How do we foster that goodness?... how do we have peace?... there should never be war again.” In the face of such violence, I would like to believe that you would be similarly calling for peace.

Indeed, I will always remember finding a magazine that you had saved for me about the history and experiences of children in the Holocaust. You had scrawled “for Coco” on its cover and it was a sort of remarkable discovery because this was at a time when your dementia had progressed such that you were no longer reading or writing, already starting to lose your speech. But, despite this all, you had wanted me to, to understand – perhaps even to imagine you, just a child yourself, in the Holocaust and to know what it means for genocidal violence to be waged against babies as is being done now. 

Then again, even though I grew up with a relatively neutral attitude towards Israel, our family’s history and relationship to it is more storied and complicated. Mom, of course, became a bat mitzvah on Mount Sinai at your encouragement. And too, you spoke of how you “became an ardent Zionist in [your] adolescence” in response to your experiences in the Holocaust. You say, “I thought, if I’m leaving [France] I want to go to Israel… I had spent a summer in the Habonim camp and it was wonderful [because] everyone is Jewish”. Instead, your parents brought you to the US where you “still, when [you] meet people, wonder if they are anti-Semites and” always ask yourself  “what would they do if they had to save me?” I cannot fathom your fear or the depth of your trauma and I know that those experiences were deeply intertwined with your Zionist beliefs. Yet, I cannot help but to wonder how the need for Jewish safety – your need for Jewish safety – has oft been used to justify such tremendous violence. Proponents of Zionism argue for Israel’s ‘right to self defense’ and while I know that this claim is wrapped up in public politicking, I also know that for some, perhaps for you, a feeling of defenselessness is rooted in visceral memories of persecution. At the same time, the Israeli government has an incredibly powerful military whereas the Palestinians have none so, in many ways, they are a defenseless people. While Israel commits violent acts in the name of Jewish people, it is abundantly clear to me that this is not actually a war about the safety of Jews but the elimination of innocent people. It has always troubled me that a people who have experienced genocidal persecution could feel justified in committing such atrocities against another people. I wonder, did it trouble you too? Oh, Nanya, you could not imagine the hospitals bombed, babies in NICUs becoming mutilated, whole neighborhoods razed, whole families removed from the civil registry, the number of people displaced from their homes. 

This, too, is a moment where antisemitism is on the rise. There has been a deeply concerning uptick in white nationalism in the US: synagogues bombed, swastikas spray painted, rabbis shot. And, while these serious acts of violence are becoming more common, there has also been extensive public rhetoric equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism and labeling people like me, who have been vocal about this issue, self-hating Jews or even un-Jews. Some of this vitriol has come from other Jews; one of the pains of this moment – so minute in comparison to the explosion of violence – has been to be isolated from my community. I do not know what you would think and so, I do not know if we would be isolated from each other should you be alive to bear witness to these atrocities. I do not know what it would mean to love someone, to love you, should you have seen this violence as just. And, because, so much of my Jewishness and so much of my self and familial understanding comes from what I know of you – the pain, the love, the pursuit of justice – I wonder what it would mean for me, for my sense of self and the world, if we were to be in opposition about this. 

Dear Nanya, I am so scared. I am scared for the people who are being killed and I am scared to be living in a world – and under a government – that predominantly believes it is warranted and right. I am scared that some of the people who do not care are people I know and people who I have loved. I am scared that it is increasingly unsafe to be a Jew and I am scared that this reality has been contorted to justify extreme violence against others. I am scared about how much is being lost right now and even though I have already lost you, I am scared that, if you were alive right now, I might be losing you in a different way.

I love you, probably more than I was ever able to tell you with my words, and I miss you beyond belief. 

זכרונה לברכה

May your memory be a blessing – as it is to me

All my love,

Coco