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Michelle Levy's avatar

I read every word. The phrase “inherited continuations” struck me. I nodded “yes” to that phrase. Grandparents never spoke to me of the Holocaust--I just know factoids, not stories. I saw numbers tattooed on arms. I heard and absorbed stories from many survivors who weren’t my grandparents. I honored their silence, and reluctantly accept my dad’s same seven or eleven tales he’s willing to tell. He doesn’t realize I recognize his scripts as armor--he thinks he’s inviting closeness telling the same stories with the same words on various occasions. I see them as rehearsed social dances and gave up plumbing his depths. I got as far as I’ll get. He’s let me know by refusing to elaborate on any aspect of his scripts. So, I love and cherish the scripts, for they relay his body of wisdom. Maybe he’s shielding us as well as himself. Yes, I think the refusal to reveal new layers is also passed down, and is an act of love--of shielding us from the wars they lived through.

I remained in Manhattan during and beyond 9/11, suffered nightmares we were under attack for a year, and still bristle when it’s brought up. We brought our daughters to the top of Freedom Tower and from the window I saw where I’d been watching with my naked eyes that day, and cried, and my young children didn’t really understand.

Now they do. Their 18yo cousin in Jerusalem describes cowering in the dormitory stairwell (now regularly, but at first she was petrified) (she’s probably still petrified by sirens, but swiftly taking shelter is being integrated as practice); describes feeling jealous of those who have bomb shelters, because the stairwell feels inadequate. We’ve lost acquaintances. We’ve chased the tail that forms behind the comet of these war stories... that leads to World War III and hope the comet dies or changes course before hitting our earth, our soil.

Inherited continuances...

Touching someone’s scars... Is war an heritable disease?

Ugh it’s 7am and I’ve been up since 4am.

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Rona Maynard's avatar

Jane, this is magnificent, bristling with sensory detail that brings you, your parents and their world to the table where I sit with my coffee. The chewed fish bones, the bombed house like a peeled-open can of sardines... I could go on.

My Jewish grandparents survived pogroms in their native Russia. They didn’t speak of the atrocities they must have witnessed. My grandmother had been raped by a cossack at age nine, but she made light of it. Resilience was a point of pride for her, as it was for your parents. The only difference between those who rampaged through her shtetl and those who slaughtered innocents for Hitler and Hamas is weaponry. Your piece leaves me wondering about the impact of her trauma on my mother. Much has been said, and rightly, about the burdens carried by children of Holocaust survivors. Pogroms were the precursor.

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