Susu (My grandmother): first draft!

“Mom, where is Susu from?”

I don’t mean where does she live.  I mean, where did she learn that other language?

This question about Susu arises when I’m sick.  I’ve had the usual childhood diseases, but this time is different, more serious somehow.  I’m alone in my parents’ room, flat on my back.  Susu is worried about me, enough to come to see me.  She talks over me in a language I don’t know.  I never hear her speak that language any other time, and I don’t hear anyone else use it.  So I wonder, where did she learn that?

My mother hedges.  “Sort of Germany, sort of Russia,” she says.  Later, after we left Bay Village, I would learn about Latvia and the Jewish Pale of Settlement.  But my mother knew that this knowledge was not safe in Bay Village.  She lived in fear that Susu would visit and be seen: this woman was so obviously Jewish, that would be the end of my family’s welcome in Bay Village.

So now, she does not want to go there.   Later I learn that Susu used to go to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the huge Episcopal cathedral in New York, and pray her Hebrew prayers.  She lived a limbo faith, an underground faith, as I did for so long.

Later no one remembers that Susu came to see me.  There’s no record or memory of my being so sick (though I did spend two weeks flat on my back after hitting my eye with an elastic exercise rope).  I wonder, did I make it up?  But no.  Susu may not have flown out on a plane and entered my room, but she definitely came, and she prayed, and I learned about prayer and about Susu and eventually about Judaism and Jewish history and the Holocaust.  I will struggle with feelings of loyalty when I work to find a faith that works for me.  Through Susu my world got big, and complicated.

In Bay Village, all I know is that Susu loves me, and she speaks in tongues of power.  I love her back, fiercely.  Susu will die in 1966, but I will hear her and feel her presence for years.  She will keep me safe and encourage me until I can find my way.  Susu, I barely knew you, but your love kept me alive.  Your domineering nature, your steely will, your prayer, spoke to me and lived in me when I needed you.  Thank you.

Memoir and Amnesia - and Self-Doubt

These days I'm writing about my earliest memories, my family and life in Bay Village Ohio.  I just decided to begin at the beginning, after a bit of preparatory jumping around.  It's hard, but even as I write this I'm not sure why.  Let me try some explanations.

I have very few clear memories before the age of ten.  I have snapshots, occasional remarks.  I have my baby book and a record of my school performance, so I have some jogs for my memory, but I don't have detailed visual memories.  And the memoir books and teachers tell me I need them.  So I'm trying to call them up, knowing that sometimes I'm likely making things up (they say that's OK, memory is unreliable anyway, just don't manufacture stories and lie), but mostly I hit these walls.  For example, I want to tell you about my older brother Dal.  Dal is - was? - almost eleven years older than me.  He left home when I was seven, and only visited occasionally after that.  I don't have a lot of memories of Dal.  But Dal is important, to me and to my story.  So how do I write about Dal?  How do I tell you what matters?

So the first voice says:  other people remember their childhoods.  Have you blanked out all those years in response to the incest and other trauma of those years?  If so, how can you write about this?  You're a mess.  You need to remember.

Here's where the other voice kicks in.  The problem is not that I can't remember, this voice says.  The problem is with my expectation that I need to, and that there's one sort of memoir - full of details - that others want to read.

So my memory issue is actually related to the question of what kind of writer I am.  I keep trying to measure up, to have lots of details and conversations, when really I'm more an idea and impression kind of person.  I'm an essayist trying to be a memoirist.  I used to be an academic writer who wanted to write essays.  Now I can write anything I want, and I'm making rules to make things hard on myself!

I have lots of ideas.  I live in ideas.  You know that, if you've been reading my other posts for a while.  I love ideas.  But I do want to convey the texture of my life as well as my reflections on it.  So: I think I'll listen to the second voice.

I promise this week to post some of what I've written.  I have a lot about Bay Village, where we lived from 1955 to 1966.  I'll figure out how to share some of that.  Thanks for checking in here.  Back in a bit!