Gayle Brandeis

Inventory of Articles Left by Dora Meyers: Died April 24, 1917.

Gayle Brandeis is an alchemist. She goes on walks and where the rest of us would encounter dirt, grass, pavement, Gayle finds fallen baby pinecones transformed into birds’ feet; droplets of ice encasing spring buds, as if in amber; and eerie, green, beheaded ghost girls. The same is true with her writing. The tiniest moments take on lush resonance. Her language, insights, stubbornly beautiful divination of the world despite the myriad sorrows carry her wisdom to all of us. And she’s fluent in every genre. The Art of Misdiagnosis is a memoir revolving around her mother’s suicide, Many Relestless Concerns centers the voices of the victims of Countess Bathory through poetry, and her YA novel My Life with the Lincolns explores the possible reincarnation of the 16th president and his family. Not to mention all the essays and poems and additional books she’s published. The depth and breadth of her magnificent mind astounds me.

I can no longer remember how I met Gayle but we share a reverence for nature, a curiosity about the strengths and delicacies of the body, and an almost obsessive interest in ancestral inheritance—which Gayle delves into her staggeringly beautiful essay. The way we move from bathrobes and low shoes to stolen language and the weight of lineage, bowls me over.

Gayle’s forthcoming collection of essays, Drawing Breath: Essays On Writing, The Body, And Grief, is available for preorder. Preorders really help writers! So if you love Gayle’s writing as much as I do, here’s the link!

If you have a moment, please share in the comments the ways in which you experience your own lineage—and the possible longings for lost family.

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—1 hat

—2 sweaters

—1 bath robe

—1 cap

—1 shawl

—1 coat

—8 skirts

—2 kimonas

—1 suit

—4 dresses

—4 waists

—1 suit case

—1 pr tights

—4 union suits

—2 pr drawers

—1 pr slippers

—1 pr rubbers

—1 pr low shoes

—2 pr glasses

—2 daughters (Rebecca and Gertrude) raised by their aunt and uncle (Rose and Abraham) in Omaha, years before Dora was sent to Denver, first to the National Jewish Hospital, then to the sanitarium of the Jewish Consumptives Relief Society.

—2 sons (Hyman and Sidney) sent to the Jewish Orphan Asylum in Cleveland, also years before Dora was sent to Denver.

—1 great granddaughter (Gayle, daughter of Arlene, granddaughter of Gertrude; one of Dora’s many great grandchildren) wanting to know why Dora’s children were sent away before Dora left Omaha, herself. Was she already ill with tuberculosis or some other malady? Destitute and depressed after her husband died? Traumatized from fleeing pogroms in Russia, from fleeing her motherland, her mother? Was it easier to let her children go than face them being ripped from her arms?

—1 (the same) great granddaughter discovering Russian Jews were considered inferior to German Jews at both the Jewish Orphan Asylum in Cleveland and the National Jewish Hospital in Denver, discovering her great grandmother and great uncles were not allowed to speak Yiddish, their mother tongue, in these institutions, discovering their language had not just faded with assimilation, but had been stolen.

—1 (the same) great granddaughter trying to learn Yiddish herself now, to reclaim those pillaged syllables, to retrain her eyes to read from right to left, to learn a new alphabet, an old alphabet, one written into her DNA.

—1 (the same) great granddaughter hungry to know Dora, a great grandmother whose name she didn’t know until recently, a great grandmother who didn’t feel real until she found Dora listed in the Jewish Consumptive’s Relief Society archives online, until the archivist sent her this scanned list of the belongings Dora left behind at the time of her death, a list typed like a telegram, a list that made the great granddaughter weep, a list that made Dora’s body real to her, a body that filled those union suits and drawers and “kimonas”, a heart that beat inside those dresses, lungs that labored inside those waists, legs that itched in those tights, feet that filled those low shoes, eyes helped by those glasses, a body warmed by those sweaters, a body that wrapped itself in that shawl, leaving skin cells and stray hairs and sweat (and maybe blood, maybe tears) in its weave.

—1 (the same) great granddaughter wanting to know all the colors of the items on this inventory, all their textures and scents and hefts, who can only picture these clothes white, like ghosts, like hospital sheets, but knows they must have had various shades and patterns and warps, knows her great grandmother must have had a favorite skirt among the eight, one that felt just right on her hips.

—1 (the same) great granddaughter who looks at her own inventory—too many dresses, too many shoes—and sees them as ghosts already, shed skins her children will inherit.