Inventing Memory (2 page)

1

Sara's Story

2005

Parents can give a child a dowry but not good luck.

—YIDDISH PROVERB

T
he Council on Jewish History in New York City (called the CJH for short) is located in a limestone mansion built by a turn-of-thelast-century robber baron in imitation of some great European pile. Rows of scallop and nautilus shells circle the ground-floor frieze. Bronze dolphins dance the quadrille in the cascading fountain of the inner court (used for spring fund-raisers, cocktail parties, and the occasional doomed tryst between resident scholars). The rose window from a deconsecrated Gothic cathedral forms the centerpiece of the library skylight, although stained-glass figures of Adam, Noah, Moses, Maimonides, Spinoza, Einstein, and Freud—no women are in evidence—flanking the great dome give the ceiling the requisite patina of Jewishness. Around the library wainscoting, carved in Hebrew letters, the motto KNOWLEDGE IS POWER appears, and potential donors being given the grand tour of this sanctum sanctorum are often moved to remark on the almost sacerdotal feeling of the place. What they mean is that it is a portentous and gloomy space—the gloom broken only by shafts of colored light, indicating the divine presence of the eternal unnameable one.

An
aron
, or ark, from a small synagogue in Ferrara, later destroyed by Mussolini's Blackshirts, was propitiously transported to the Council on Jewish History in 1928 by a grateful Ferrarese Jew who had made his fortune in New York real estate during the Roaring Twenties. It still stands at the back wall of the reading room, where it is used to display the CJH's priceless collection of Renaissance silver Torah crowns,
kiddush
goblets, and chased silver
menorahs
given through the years by other donors (who doubtless believed that a gift to the CJH would guarantee admission to that obscure heaven of the Jews). The CJH is that sort of place—the oldest Jewish research institute in New York and the most prestigious.

Sara was taken on her first tour of this impressive edifice on a brilliant day in April, when the inner courtyard was ablaze with cherry blossoms, brought back from Japan by a horticulturally inclined Warburg—or was it a Rothschild? (Even afterward, when she had been toiling in the library there for several months, Sara could never remember.) The sky was that sublime Côte d'Azur blue of isolated spring days in New York, and birds were singing in the blossoming trees. The medieval herb garden, laid out in a pattern of eighteen aromatic herbs to symbolize
life—chai
, in Hebrew—was just starting to return from its winter hibernation.

Sara followed CJH's director of development, Lisette de Hirsch, a stalwart but fashionably anorectic woman in her late fifties, white-haired, blue-eyed, who was partial to black vintage Chanel suits with gold buttons, brilliant scarves with rampant suns and moons, and low-heeled shoes handmade in Venice by a cobbler who also supplied the dancers of the Fenice and La Scala theaters. She was an old family friend of Sara's not-quite-stepmother, Sandrine, who had always encouraged Sara to call her for a job.

Lisette de Hirsch did not need the salary her position provided. Her husband was from an ancient Jewish family that had quadrupled its money in every boom since the Civil War and preserved its capital in every bust—including the Great Depression. But Sara was not so fortunate. Not yet thirty, she had masses of wavy auburn hair, a voluptuous but somehow also slim-waisted figure, green eyes with yellow flecks that made you think of topazes one moment and emeralds the next, and an aristocratic aquiline nose like an Italian Renaissance beauty painted by Bronzino; she tended to chew the lipstick off her full crimson lips when nervous, as she was now. She desperately needed the grant she was interviewing for. She had booted her husband out on New Year's Day, after discovering that he was bewitched by his twenty-two-yearold graduate assistant, Stoddard (nicknamed "Stoddi") von Meissen—the Nazi
shiksa
from hell. This left Sara with their six-year-old daughter, Dove, to support, the rent on a rambling West Side apartment, and not a penny in child support. Lloyd now had his Ph.D. in history, and Sara, despite having supported all three of them, had most of hers—all but the dissertation. They had both received fellowships to grad school, but there had been the costs of baby-sitters, preschool, and the other unexpected expenses of parenting, so that by the time Lloyd fell under the spell of Stoddi, Sara's small savings were long gone. Lloyd had promised to support the family while Sara finished her dissertation. But before that could happen, Prinzessin von Meissen waltzed into Lloyd's seminar on modern Jewish history at Columbia and sang the siren song of youth and shiksatude that lures Jewish men from the partners who have in creasingly begun to remind them of their mothers and grandmothers. Lloyd was now beginning to make noises about wanting to come back, but Sara was suddenly not so sure she wanted him. She had come to like her independent life, rigorous as it was.

"It's an amazing building," said Sara, hoping to ingratiate herself with Lisette de Hirsch, who absolutely glowed with pride during the tour.

Privately Sara thought the place over the top, a mishmash of architectural styles—none of them in the best taste. The library, with its gaudy ark and priceless silver (all accompanied by donor plaques almost as big as the objects), was crammed with leather-bound volumes housed in dark mahogany bookcases, one of which revolved to expose a spiral staircase leading down to several levels of library stacks and a secret conference room with a green baize door and a round conference table that has been built into the bedrock of Manhattan. Nobody knew whether the chamber had originated as a wine cellar or if the Vanderbilt who created the house circa 1905 had added it as a hideaway during World War I. The subsequent owners refashioned it into an underground dining hall or conference room, with a dumbwaiter to the kitchen on the ground floor.

Lisette opened a paneled door and pressed a button; elevator cables whirred as the dumbwaiter descended. It was fitted out with circular depressions for decanters of wine, dish racks for china, and a flat shelf for conveying large servings of food.

Lisette proudly displayed this gadget to Sara. "They didn't
have
a servant problem in those days," she said, not knowing how much she sounded like a caricature of a rich woman. "One butler was waiting here to plate and serve the food and two kitchen maids to send it down after the chef had done his final seasoning. Some menus from those days survive. They were inordinately fond of seven-course meals, from soups to savories."

Sara laughed rather too appreciatively. After all, this woman was one of the three who would decide whether or not to anoint her. She didn't want to sabotage her chances of getting the grant.

For the moment, she would have to forget that her husband possibly believed himself in love with the Nazi bitch from hell, that since Daddy moved out her daughter had been wetting her bed and had begun therapy with a child psychiatrist who charged an outrageous three hundred dollars per forty-five-minute "hour." She had no wealthy relatives to bail her out and she was already behind with her rent and Dove's school bills.

Sara knew she was short-listed for the plum of resident scholar at CJH, and she'd be damned if her habitual ironic defiance would lose it for her. She couldn't afford irony and defiance now. She had a kid to support.

"What days those must have been!" Sara exclaimed in her best ingratiating manner. "Those days before income tax, those Edith Wharton, Emma Goldman, days…"

"Edith Wharton—though not Emma Goldman—was said to have dined in this very room." said Lisette, the buttons on her suit gleaming. "Apparently there was a literary dinner, and Henry James was also here. This was before they both abandoned New York for Europe."

"I would be honored to work in such a house," gushed Sara, wondering if she wasn't laying it on a bit thick.

Lisette's eyes lit up behind her expensive gold-rimmed granny glasses.

"Oh, I do so wish more young people felt like you," Lisette said. "After the Holocaust, Jewish history
must
be preserved. It has never been more important. How did
you
get interested in Jewish history?"

"When my mother died last year, I decided I had to know everything about our family—and naturally I was drawn here…. There's some rumor that my great-grandmother—whom I'm named after—was part of an oral history project before I was born or just after, but nobody seems to know where the tapes are."

Lisette looked blank. Fund-raising, not what the money was
for
, was her domain.

Sara hurried on: "I've become passionate about the history of the Jews…particularly the stories of the women in these families…. I would like nothing better than to rescue these women from oblivion…."

Now Lisette looked like she would burst with pleasure. Sara knew in her gut she had the position—and with it the grant that would save her life.

She trailed Lisette back to the gloomy library stacks (which were groaning with the sort of research materials Sara needed for her dissertation) and watched her pull out a large leather box and open its clamshell top. It was filled with turn-of-the-century photographs of serious-looking women, many in wire-rimmed glasses, who wore "waists," hobble skirts, feathered hats.

"We are determined to computerize our photo archive," said Lisette, "and that would be one of your first challenges." (Lisette was the sort of person who habitually employed words like "challenge." It made Sara think she was not being given some essential piece of information about the sort of expectations that went with the grant.)

Lisette closed the box of antique photos and carried it to a carrel in the stacks, where she placed it with a thump, flipped it open, and began holding up the photographs one by one. Some were dated in an oldfashioned hand and some were undated. Many were stamped with the names of photographers in Odessa, Novgorod, Kishinev, Warsaw, Vilna, Hamburg, London, New York.

Suddenly Lisette held up a photograph of a dark-hatted woman with huge, light, luminous eyes.

"She
looks
like you!" Lisette exclaimed. "If you imagine the clothes updated, the hat removed, and the hair unloosed."

Sara took the faded sepia photograph and examined it carefully. There was no question of the resemblance—or perhaps her desperation was just making her supersuggestible.

She turned the photograph over. On the back was stamped the name
American Studio, Odessa and Novgorod
, and in light pencil, something in Hebrew script, then in English and almost rubbed out by time: "Sarah S., 1905."

Sara felt like something of a fraud as she walked across blossoming Central Park to her own apartment. Her sense of her own Jewishness was not as unambivalent as she had let on. She had not really known she was Jewish till she started living with her mother, the mythic folksinger Sally Sky, at the age of fourteen. And sometimes she felt that the sufferings of the Jews were all their own fault for being so damned insistent on their chosenness, specialness, superiority. She had been raised largely in Montana by a poet-father who believed that fly-fishing and religion were the same thing, and later in Europe by a divorced mother who worshiped only at the shrines of AA and room service—and who died long before Sara was ready to lose her, leaving plenty of unfinished mother-daughter business. Even when her mother or father
was
around, Sara had often felt like an orphan. Both parents were so self-centered. Typical products of the sixties, they believed that their self-expression was all that mattered. They
loved
Sara. Of course they loved her. But they were always so busy with their own dramas that their love for her hardly seemed like a priority in their lives. To Sara anyway.

Sara's father, Ham Wyndham, was forever busy reinventing himself as the Thoreau of Bear Creek, Montana. And Sara's mother—before she died, at any rate—was busy atoning for having become one of the most famous singers of her generation. Sally Sky alternated between running from her notoriety and secretly courting it—just as she alternated between sobriety and drunkenness, celibacy and promiscuity, accumulating money and compulsively squandering it. She
loved
Sara, wrote songs for Sara, drowned Sara with gifts, goodies, all that money could buy—but she was too much of a child herself to give Sara stability. Searching for that elusive commodity, Sara had married young. Now that her search had proved delusional, she felt adrift—fiercely independent one minute, terrified the next. If only she could find some anchor, some identity that would sustain her through the crisis of divorce that seemed imminent. If only someone had left a note in a bottle, some sacred text that would give her the strength she needed to go on.

She had studied with a professor at Columbia who insisted that "ancestor worship is the only true religion." He used to say that line of descent was the earliest way of organizing historical information and that the Book of Genesis was so full of genealogy because it was the way the earliest humans fixed and celebrated identity.

Sara had always instinctively felt he was right—even though her own ancestors were wrapped in fog like gods who dwelt on misty mountaintops. Nor was she so sure she liked a world where ethnic identity was more important than anything. She was not certain it would not lead to anything but more of the tribal warfare that had so far marked the millennium.

Sara arrived at her door just in time to hear her phone ringing.

"Congratulations to our new resident scholar!" Lisette de Hirsch crowed.

"How on earth? I thought you had to consult with the board and your other development directors."

"I
am
the board," said Lisette, "and the only development director who matters."

"I can see that," said Sara.

"We'd like you to start as soon as possible," said Lisette, restoring the fiction of a "we" behind her autocratic decision.