Elegy: An Anti-Memoir. (Memoir)

Beginning of article

I prune my garden. The spirit of an unknown grandmother hovers. In my mind's eye I can see the hundred-year-old rose garden that surrounds the site where my father was born, the comfortable square house, long since replaced, with its red tile roof pictured in faded photos. She loved her garden, my father told me as we stood on the unpaved road in the village. Deported and gassed to death she was, in her eighty-fifth year.

(My other grandmother, across the border, was shot just outside Auschwitz. Her eyes and my cheekbones share the slant of the marauding cossack from the east.)

Thirty years ago, I eagerly traveled with my reluctant parents to eastern Hungary to visit the graves of my grandfather and a few cousins, the lucky ones. The Jewish cemetery in Szikszo is on a hillside overlooking the town. I gazed at the black marble slab, and as my father intoned the Kaddish, a deep satisfaction filled me. I was at the grave of my ancestor, a Jew …