Inventing Memory (33 page)

Sara had come to understand that she was fated to be the author of their stories as she was to be the author of her own life. The women in her family had always written letters to their daughters, and the chronicle she was writing would eventually be her own letter to Dove.

At first Sara found herself wrenching the material this way and that, trying to make a story with a moral. She started with the
pogrom
in the Pale and the death of little Dovie (as if she were making a movie), and then she followed Sarah to America on the creaky old ship. She liked the transition from the sweatshop to the grand "cottage" in the Berkshires, and she liked the love triangle with Levitsky and Sim Coppley. She liked Salome in Paris during
les années folles
and Salome's Berkshire odyssey. But no matter what she did, she could not find a conventional moral in the story. It astonished her that she should have been seeing a man named David (also called Dovie when he was little) during the research for her family history. Synchronicity…but what did all these more-than-coincidences mean?

Again and again, Sara came back to the question of whether women were better off now than they had been a hundred years earlier. It just was not
clear
. She wondered about old Sarah. "If I let her speak, what would she say?" Sara asked herself; and then answered herself by letting old Sarah narrate the beginning of her tale.

She remembered that early notebook in which she had written down the quote about making magic by telling a story.
We cannot light the fire,
we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story
of how it was done….
Wasn't
that
what she was doing?

And sometimes she caught herself dreaming Sarah's dreams or Salome's or even Sally's. For in truth she was all these women. Each of them had a part in making her who she was. But she was also herself. Their blood ran in her veins. Their DNA spiraled in her cells. Their memories teemed in her brain. She was telling a story—
their
story—the story of how one generation gave way to the next, the story of how the strengths of one generation rescued the next generation even in its darkest moments.

When we dream, we invent our own memories, and this is also true when we write. The holy teachers were right: telling a story
is
a kind of prayer, a kind of meditation, a sacred act. It makes magic happen.

Or is the story
itself
the magic?

The exhibition was only a way of beginning. Sara used the exhibition as a means of getting into the story. But at the same time as she was being a good little girl with Lisette and the board members, she was telling the true, the secret history in her own way—whether or not the Council approved its contents. And as she wrote, she began to see that only by telling
this
particular story, by inventing memory itself, would she be free to go on with her life.

But who would be the heroine? Sarah Sophia, Salome, Sally—or Sara herself? Did it really matter? After all, wasn't
she
the portrait painter with the robber baron bleeding on her stoop, and the flapper in Paris who goes home to find her country sunk in Depression, and the singer of the sixties who throws away her talent and her life? She had to try on the souls of all these women in order to become herself.

And so she began with what she knew had to be the first line of her story.
Sometimes, in dreams, my firstborn son comes back to me….

A Note on
Inventing Memory

Inventing Memory—
the book was originally called
Of Blessed
Memory—
grows out of my fascination with Jewish families in America and how they have enriched our culture. Memory is at the center of my tale because memory is at the very heart of Jewishness. Jews are people who can't sleep until they have told their story. No wonder so many of us become writers.

Of course there were Jews in America before the Revolution, but the greatest migrations took place at the beginning of the twentieth century, before the First World War. The first generation of Eastern European Jewish novelists who came to America told stories about the rise out of the ghetto, like Michael Gold's
Jews Without Money
or Anzia Yezierska's
Bread Givers
. Later Jewish writers became more assimilated and more learned. Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick were influenced not just by the ghetto but also by Henry James. It was only when Asian-American and African-American writers began to raise their voices in the seventies, eighties, and nineties that we were prompted to rediscover our ethnicity in a new way.

Often I've been inspired to write books that tell previously untold stories. In the case of
Inventing Memory
I wanted to focus on Jewish women, who had largely received a bum rap from male writers. I wanted to write about their tenacity and ferocity. I was aware of the leadership of Jewish women in the labor union movement, the settlement house movement, and the civil rights movement. I wanted to account for the fervor that drove them to change the world. It was their Jewishness and femaleness that led them to empathize with the oppressed. And their concern was not only with their own people but with all suffering humanity.

But the most important theme in this novel is the theme of memory. Memory and creativity cannot be divided. Jews believe that as long as the dead are remembered they aren't really dead. We believe in the immortality of the word. And we believe it is the word that makes us immortal.

After I published this book, it was my misfortune to have to sit on endless panels trying to define the Jewish-American writer. The more I talked about this subject the more I realized that a writer is a writer is a writer. It is our attempts to transcend our roots and find the universal in our stories that makes us writers, not wallowing in our ethnicity. Our ethnicity may provide us with rich compost out of which to grow, but unless we transcend the compost and make stories anyone can understand, we have not employed our sources well. This is the paradox of our fascination with ethnicity. We must move beyond it to full humanity to become useful to our readers.

My family was both typical and atypical of American Jewish families. My maternal grandfather arrived in New York from England, and before that Russia, and established himself as a commercial artist and portrait painter. My father was a musician who became a businessman. My mother and aunt were both painters. In writing about the eldest Sarah in my story, I was trying to imagine my grandfather's life had he been born a woman. I was also trying to imagine the march of the generations in America—the naked hunger of the first generation, the rebellions of the second and third, and the search for identity of the fourth.

Often in American Jewish families, there is competition between those who go into the arts and those who choose business—the age old seesaw between "making a living" and making life count. The drive to commit life to memory through art is very strong. We are always looking for something more, something to prove our lives were meaningful, and something to prove we did not live only to acquire things and bear children. Perhaps it's that relentless need to make our lives count that stimulates the envy of other groups and nurtures anti-Semitism. We seem to set a very high bar for ourselves and we seem never to be satisfied. Perhaps people who can't sleep attract the hatred of those who would rather dream their way through life. Our inability to be easily satisfied roils us up and also inspires jealousy in the people around us. That is both our blessing and our curse.

—Erica Jong New York City, February 2007

Glossary of Yiddish Terms

alivai

I hope, I wish, if only I had

alter cocker

old fart

bar mitzvah/bat mitzvah

boy’s/girl’s coming-of-age cere
mony at age thirteen

beshert

destined

bissel

little

boychick

a kid

broykis

angry, resentful

brucha

a blessing

bubbameisehs

old wives’ tales

challah

Sabbath bread

chazerei

junk, worthless things (literally, 
pork)

cheder

Hebrew elementary school

chuppah

wedding canopy

chutzpah

nerve, brass

das kind

the baby

der fremde

the foreign world (America)

doven

pray

dreyer

operator

du bist eine Yankee

you are a Yankee

dybbuk

spirit

emis

truth

eppis

thus

feh!

pooh!

fersteh?

understand?

feygele

male homosexual (literally, little 
bird)

fussgeyers

those who go on foot (especially 
across Europe)

ganaiven

thieves

ganse meshpocheh

the whole family

gay vais

go know (who could have known?)

gelt

money

gevalt

expression of astonishment

gonif

thief or chiseler

goy, goyim; goyishe

gentile, gentiles; gentile (adj.)

goykopf

gentile mind

greeneh, greener

newly arrived immigrant—a 
greenhorn

gruber yung

upstart

kaddish

mourner’s prayer

kayne hore

may the evil eye be avoided

kiddush cup

ritual wine goblet

kishkes

guts

klezmer

musicians

kopeck

Russian currency

kreplach

dumpling

kum mit mir

come with me

kurveh

loose woman

kvell

swell with pride

kvetch

nag

landsman, landsleit

countryman, countrymen, particu
larly from the same town

luftmensch

a person with his feet firmly 
planted in air

malech ha-movis

angel of death

mamichka, mamanyu, mamele

darling little mother

matzo

unleavened flat bread for Passover

mayne kind, mayne shayner kind

my child, my beautiful child

mayne leben, mayne neshoma, mayne libe

my life, my soul, my love

mayne schwester, mayne shayner schwester

my sister, my beautiful sister

menorah

candelabra for Chanukkah

meshuggeh, meshuggeneh

crazy

mikveh

ritual bath

minyan

quorum of ten men needed for a 
religious service

mishegas

madness

mit geschmecht

with pleasure

naches

pride

narishkeit

nonsense

nebbish

weak, helpless person

nu

so?

nudnick

fool

oleha ha-sholom

rest in peace

pflommen

plums

pisher

jerk, squirt

pogrom

anti-Semitic raid

punim

face

pushke

collection box for charity

schlepper

one who drags, goes slow

schmearer

someone who bribes people/or a 
bad painter

schmegegge

fool

schnorrer

leech, sponge, moocher (literally, 
beggar)

schreiber

writer

schtupping

fucking

sechel

smarts, wisdom, common sense

shabbas goy

the gentile who lights candles on 
the Sabbath when Jews are forbiden to work

shande

scandal, shame

shaygetz

gentile boy

sheitl

wig worn by Orthodox wives

shicker

drunk

shifskarte

ship’s ticket

shiksa

gentile woman

shoah

holocaust

shreiing

screaming

shtetl

village

shul

synagogue

sitsfleish

tenacity

starke

strong man, tough guy

street speilers

kids who dance in the street

takeh

so, thus

trayfe

unkosher food

tsuris

troubles

tush

behind, bottom

vantz

prick

veys nicht

I don’t know

yenta

busybody (female)

zaydeh

grandfather