Inventing Memory Read Free Page A

tapes are."
    Lisette looked blank. Fund-raising, not what the money was for , was her domain.
    Sara hurried on: "I've become passionate about the history of the Jews…particularly the stories of the women in these families…. I would like nothing better than to rescue these women from oblivion…."
    Now Lisette looked like she would burst with pleasure. Sara knew in her gut she had the position—and with it the grant that would save her life.
    She trailed Lisette back to the gloomy library stacks (which were groaning with the sort of research materials Sara needed for her dissertation) and watched her pull out a large leather box and open its clamshell top. It was filled with turn-of-the-century photographs of serious-looking women, many in wire-rimmed glasses, who wore "waists," hobble skirts, feathered hats.
    "We are determined to computerize our photo archive," said Lisette, "and that would be one of your first challenges." (Lisette was the sort of person who habitually employed words like "challenge." It made Sara think she was not being given some essential piece of information about the sort of expectations that went with the grant.)
    Lisette closed the box of antique photos and carried it to a carrel in the stacks, where she placed it with a thump, flipped it open, and began holding up the photographs one by one. Some were dated in an oldfashioned hand and some were undated. Many were stamped with the names of photographers in Odessa, Novgorod, Kishinev, Warsaw, Vilna, Hamburg, London, New York.
    Suddenly Lisette held up a photograph of a dark-hatted woman with huge, light, luminous eyes.
    "She looks like you!" Lisette exclaimed. "If you imagine the clothes updated, the hat removed, and the hair unloosed."
    Sara took the faded sepia photograph and examined it carefully. There was no question of the resemblance—or perhaps her desperation was just making her supersuggestible.
    She turned the photograph over. On the back was stamped the name American Studio, Odessa and Novgorod , and in light pencil, something in Hebrew script, then in English and almost rubbed out by time: "Sarah S., 1905."

    Sara felt like something of a fraud as she walked across blossoming Central Park to her own apartment. Her sense of her own Jewishness was not as unambivalent as she had let on. She had not really known she was Jewish till she started living with her mother, the mythic folksinger Sally Sky, at the age of fourteen. And sometimes she felt that the sufferings of the Jews were all their own fault for being so damned insistent on their chosenness, specialness, superiority. She had been raised largely in Montana by a poet-father who believed that fly-fishing and religion were the same thing, and later in Europe by a divorced mother who worshiped only at the shrines of AA and room service—and who died long before Sara was ready to lose her, leaving plenty of unfinished mother-daughter business. Even when her mother or father was around, Sara had often felt like an orphan. Both parents were so self-centered. Typical products of the sixties, they believed that their self-expression was all that mattered. They loved Sara. Of course they loved her. But they were always so busy with their own dramas that their love for her hardly seemed like a priority in their lives. To Sara anyway.
    Sara's father, Ham Wyndham, was forever busy reinventing himself as the Thoreau of Bear Creek, Montana. And Sara's mother—before she died, at any rate—was busy atoning for having become one of the most famous singers of her generation. Sally Sky alternated between running from her notoriety and secretly courting it—just as she alternated between sobriety and drunkenness, celibacy and promiscuity, accumulating money and compulsively squandering it. She loved Sara, wrote songs for Sara, drowned Sara with gifts, goodies, all that money could buy—but she was too much of a child herself to give Sara stability. Searching for that elusive commodity, Sara