French Lessons: A Memoir Read Free

brick apartments bordered on one corner by the reform temple, Temple Israel, and on the other by the Red
Owl Supermarket. It was a quick walk to pick up sprinkles
for sugar cookies or some bridge mix or to go to services.
"Don't get in a car with any strangers, don't go with strange
boys!" She would give me a lesson when we walked alongside some innocent blonde grocery boy, wheeling the cart
to 2¢I O Fremont Avenue for his twenty-five-cent tip.
    Danger was at bay inside her house. Every surface, from
the gray nubbly upholstery of the chair next to the window,
to the green silk with gold thread covering the couch, to the
gray-green oil painting of my glamorous Aunt Helen, spoke
of familiarity and comfort. Only books were missing. Three
books perched timidly on a built-in bookshelf dividing the
dining room from the living room. One of them was a biography of Pola Negri, the star of silent film. My Aunt Stella
had worked for her. We knew that Pola Negri lost her stardom when talking films came in. No one in Hollywood
liked her accent in the movies, so she retired. I picked up
the Pola Negri biography every time I went to my grand mother's and looked for my Aunt Stella in the index. I
wished Nanny would get some different books. I suspected
she couldn't read or write but I didn't want to ask. She had
an acute sense of propriety, for herself and for anyone who
was Jewish. "It's a shame for the people" was Nanny's line
about any Jewish person who committed a crime, lapsed in
behavior, or called attention to themselves.

    There were some topics you couldn't bring up around
Nanny. The social security form she had to sign remained
untouched for months on her coffee table. She had never
voted. In her mind an evil force, bigger than the Red Owl,
bigger than the Temple, lurking, perhaps, in the Social Security Administration or the Registrar of Voters, was waiting to
send her back. Back to Trask, Lithuania, where her mother
had hidden her in the closet so the Cossacks wouldn't rape
her.
    Looking at a photo of my grandmother when she was my
age, thirty-eight, I see that she looked like me. The same
lines from her nose to her lips. Low forehead. Full cheeks. A
Victorian pompadour, a heavy bodice swathed in gauzy fabric, a high neck. When she was eighty, our family snapshots
show her in her pink wallpaper brocade, holding herself
primly, her lips pursed disapprovingly.
    "Who's that boy? Don't you go with any boys. You don't
know what they're going to do with you."
    "Nanny, stop it!"
    I made fun of my grandmother's warnings. They came
out of nowhere. Sometimes I thought she was making a
joke. Then I would look at her up close and see the trembling around her mouth, the tightening of her jaw. She was
terrified.
    My parents thought it was a good idea to have people other than family members around Nanny. Around outsiders, she would hide her fears so as not to shame her people. After Nanny moved out of the Fremont Avenue duplex,
I took my friend Valerie Golden to visit Nanny's new apartment on this theory. Valerie was the other Jewish girl in my
class at school. She understood about Nanny. "You can't
come in girls, they're coming for me. Not safe, not safe."
Nanny's vowels were fast and choppy. Her tongue was clicking against the roof of her mouth as she talked through the
door. It barely sounded like English anymore. Valerie and I
never even got her to open. Her sociability had stopped
working.

    For eight years she languished in the Sholom Home, on
thorazine. The Sholom Home nursing facility, serving the
Jewish community, was located in a no-man's-land between
the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. You had to follow the freeway signs for "The Midway: State Fairgrounds"
to get there. The false promise of those freeway signs annoyed me.
    At Sholom I could hear the foreign din as soon as I walked
in the door. Old people sat in groups and spoke Yiddish.
There was a singular quality to the