Journeys with My Mother Read Free Page A

anti-Semitism in the struggle for political power, that finally discredited the Party in my parents’ eyes. The edifice of their beliefs collapsed, as if they finally grasped that the heavens were empty of God and they could no longer believe. The pain was excruciating. Because it was their Party, they too – rightly or wrongly – felt tainted. I think about their hopes for progress, the courage of their convictions for which they had suffered. It had all come to nothing.

    One day when boarding a bus I saw my mother. She looked tense and not altogether well.
    The heaviness of her mood weighed on my shoulders. I sat down next to her and together – we could not help it – we stared at the street banners, at the messages of derision and hatred, one slogan after another, while the bus carried us home.
    August of that year turned out to be the last month of our life in Poland, the last we lived together as a family, in the same city, in the same country where our predecessors were born and where they had died. My mother was fifty-seven, my father five years her senior – both younger than I am now. Yet I thought them ancient and worried that they might not have long to live. They were both very dear to me but what I shared with my mother ran especially deep; we’d been together during the most harrowing years of the war. I knew every part of her face: its oval shape and perfect nose, her gentle brown eyes and every line around them. I admired her steadfastness and open, all-understanding heart. I was proud of her as a person; her beauty, an added gift.
    I was not a perfect daughter but her trust in me was absolute.
    Not long before she died – years later, in Australia – I asked her if she would like to go with me for a picnic. She answered as if we were about to set off for a long voyage together. ‘I would go to the end of the world with you,’ she said. It took my breath away.
    It seems a long time ago when she said these words, half turning towards me, smiling. Maybe because of that trust I feel able to take her on a journey through the complicated, precarious journey through her twentieth-century life.

2
    Nowolipki, Nalewki
    I was thrilled. Haneczka, who still lives in Warsaw, ferreted out my mother’s original birth certificate. Now I know that one day in January my grandmother, Brana Szlang, travelled from Warsaw to Grodzisk Mazowiecki and made her way to the civil registry office, not far from the railway station. She was there at ten in the morning, reporting the birth of a baby named Sura.
    There wasn’t anything extraordinary about this – except that the year was 1937 and Sura was already twenty-six years old. Brana could have procrastinated a bit longer but my mother, whose birth was then recorded, needed a passport.
    Looking at the document, I imagine the clerk at the civil registry office taking a deep breath when writing the long, convoluted sentences with scarcely any commas. The poetic prose, inscribed in elegant copperplate, occupies the entire folio.
    While at the office, Brana also registered the birth of another daughter, twenty-eight-year-old Tosia. The clerk appears to be displeased; the last sentences in both documents are stern: The delay in preparation of the certificate is caused by parental negligence.
    Until then, I had no idea that my mother was born in Chrzanów, just outside the town of Grodzisk Mazowiecki; I did not know she was named Sura, because everyone called her Ola, a diminutive of Aleksandra, her formal name.
    At the time, that part of Poland was under the reign of Tsar Nicholas II; in this antediluvian era, Chrzanów was a small village of a few unmade roads and no electricity. In 1911, the year my mother was born, Pyotr Stolypin, the Russian Prime Minister, ‘the butcher’ of the 1905 revolutionary uprising, was assassinated, and a Jew named Mendel Beilis was accused of the ritual blood killing of a Ukrainian boy.