Inventing Memory Read Free Page B

had married young. Now that her search had proved delusional, she felt adrift—fiercely independent one minute, terrified the next. If only she could find some anchor, some identity that would sustain her through the crisis of divorce that seemed imminent. If only someone had left a note in a bottle, some sacred text that would give her the strength she needed to go on.
    She had studied with a professor at Columbia who insisted that "ancestor worship is the only true religion." He used to say that line of descent was the earliest way of organizing historical information and that the Book of Genesis was so full of genealogy because it was the way the earliest humans fixed and celebrated identity.
    Sara had always instinctively felt he was right—even though her own ancestors were wrapped in fog like gods who dwelt on misty mountaintops. Nor was she so sure she liked a world where ethnic identity was more important than anything. She was not certain it would not lead to anything but more of the tribal warfare that had so far marked the millennium.

    Sara arrived at her door just in time to hear her phone ringing.
    "Congratulations to our new resident scholar!" Lisette de Hirsch crowed.
    "How on earth? I thought you had to consult with the board and your other development directors."
    "I am the board," said Lisette, "and the only development director who matters."
    "I can see that," said Sara.
    "We'd like you to start as soon as possible," said Lisette, restoring the fiction of a "we" behind her autocratic decision.
    Sara felt a cold knife of fear in her heart. If she took this position, would she be free to finish her dissertation, or would they find a million other tasks for her? It was true that the Council library—brimming with exactly the research information she needed—would be at her disposal, but would she find the time to use it for her own research? She was never very good at saying no to authority figures, and that could greatly impede her progress, but she tried to convince herself otherwise—and with a divided heart, she accepted.
    That night, after she put Dove to bed, Sara couldn't get the image of that early-twentieth-century woman out of her head. Normally she was contemptuous of people who undertook a search for their roots, feeling that they were cloaking their sentimentality in history—or at least sociology. Whenever friends of hers made pilgrimages to Vilna or Prague or the East End of London, she would accuse them of tracing their "joots"—her shorthand for Jewish roots.
    But a picture is capable of hypnotizing as few other artifacts can. There was something in that face—defiance mixed with an undeniable prettiness—that made Sara feel she was encountering a reflection of herself. Back in that vanished world of bowler hats, hobble skirts, sawdust saloons, tenderloin parlor houses, rattling trolley cars, horse-drawn wagons, and brand-new subways, there was a woman who might have been her twin.
    What brought this Sarah to America? Did she come alone? Did shesucceed or perish? Create a dynasty or become dust in a potter's field? Where was the rest of her story? Would it somehow predict Sara's own?

2

    Sarah in the Golden Land
    1906

    It's not as good with money as it is bad without it.
    —YIDDISH PROVERB

    I t started on the boat—my American life, I mean. The boat was called Der Goldener Stern , its home port was Hamburg, and from the outside it looked like a floating palace, strung with lights. But within, you descended a ladderlike stair to the very bowels, past half-naked coal-dusted demons with contorted faces who shoveled black nuggets into a fiery furnace, and you discovered a stinking steerage, full of tightly packed bunk beds, the roar of ventilating fans, and the stench of seasick humanity.
    I can still close my eyes and see the darkness of that hold, hear the creak of the ship's sides, and smell the monkey-house smell of poor people packed together. It has been the curse and blessing