“You wrote to me about her.”
“Well, we were talking, and you know what she said? She said she was so glad to live to see the day when a young man from a French bourgeois Catholic family could marry a Jewish girl.” I stopped short. This was, I realized, not necessarily the fate a Jewish grandma would wish on her only granddaughter. “Is it okay with you?” I asked. “Is it okay that I moved to France and married a goy?”
Grandma made an impatient noise. She reached around and smacked me on the bottom. “Mirandali, forget it. All that is in the past. You have to live your life forward. Go eat some lunch.”
My grandmother died on September 19, 2010, the day after Yom Kippur. I was, as she had foreseen, too pregnant to fly home. Our daughter, Estelle Anna, was born three months later to the day, on December 19, 2010.
On the eve of Yom Kippur, through fasting and prayer, you are supposed to break your bonds with the physical world in order to make yourself right with the Holy Spirit, in order to be sealed in the book of life for another year.
I stood in a synagogue in Paris thinking hard about all the bonds I had and hardest of all about the one I didn’t want to break. I knew Grandma was lying in her bed in Pearl River, with my mother and uncle beside her, preparing to breathe her last breath.
I listened to the cantor begin Kol Nidre, the prayer that cancels debts, vows, and obligations, and as the congregation joined in, I broke my bonds with my grandmother. “You can go,” I whispered to her. “We’ll be all right without you.”
“What do I regret?” my grandmother wrote once, many years ago.
Looking back … I regret deeply only to have lived in a world which never replicated the simplicity and happiness experienced in my native country’s villages. Seeking villages, when occasion permitted, I tried to see if they could replicate what I searched for, but it was in vain. Most probably the exaggerated feelings I thought I experienced as a child and teenager, meaning elation, happiness, hope, started to fade and [I found them] irreplaceable when I reached adulthood and the world around me started to disintegrate. And thus only living in the present—not looking back, or too much forward—made sense. I became the person full of awareness that the past can’t be brought back and regrets are futile, impeding going forward.
My mother says that on the day before she died, my grandmother’s eyes flew open, and she looked up toward the ceiling, as if she were being greeted by all the elation, happiness, and hope that had faded when her world disintegrated. The last words she responded to were my mother’s telling her that Julien and I were expecting a girl and that the girl would be named for her. When she heard that, she smiled.
After our daughter was born, Julien and I moved back to Alba, where we bought a medieval ruin of our own. (Which, incidentally, was previously owned by the wife of John Ford, who filmed the Nuremberg Trials.) And so I am writing these words from a village—exactly the kind of village my grandmother longed for as a young medical student; the kind of village that saved her and my grandfather during the war; the kind of village she feared would be lost forever to her family when she moved to America.
Now I know the house is not a rocky exoskeleton meant to hide me from the pain of remembering; I can’t come to La Roche to escape the past, to live smoothly among flowers and stones. Life here is no less fragile, no less shattering. It is just like any other place in the world: ugly, mundane, dirty, and boring, but also beautiful, exalted, and full of love. That is the gift—the miracle—my grandmother made in buying the house: the opportunity for me to live my life forward, even as the past swirls and eddies around me.
When I first arrived in La Roche, I believed in a fairy tale: Anna and Armand fell in love, bought a house, and never spoke again. Then I tried to tell the tale, and it fell apart on me. Maybe my grandparents loved each other, maybe they didn’t. Maybe both. Maybe they would have divorced anyway, without the war—but perhaps that’s a moot point, since maybe they wouldn’t have married without the war. And after all that searching, all those facts, and all that doubt, I came home to La Roche and realized it really was that simple: Armand and Anna fell in love, bought a house, and never spoke again. The point of a fairy tale is never in the details. The point is that it’s easy to remember, to carry, to tell. We’ll continue telling until the stones fall down, and then we’ll rebuild and start again.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would never have made it to its current form without the steady guidance, good humor, encouragement, and understanding of my agent, Lydia Wills. Nor would it be what it is today without Miriam Chotiner-Gardner, in whom I found the thoughtful, smart, engaged, and rigorous editor every author dreams of. I am deeply grateful to both of you for your hard work and commitment to this project. This book has also benefited from an exceptional team of dedicated, gifted, and enthusiastic people at Crown, and I am thankful to each and every one of you.
My heartfelt thanks to my readers: Annelies Fryberger, eagle-eyed critic and tireless breakfast mate; Anne Chernicoff, Erin Fornoff, Keramet Reiter, Ria Tabacco Mar, and Rachel Taylor; and Matthew Quirk, for reading the most drafts and for the bicycle lessons.
This book also owes its existence and an immense debt of gratitude to the following people and organizations:
To the Harvard College Research Program, for early research support; to the Henry Russell Shaw Traveling Fellowship, for a postgraduate year to work on this project; and to the Harvard Hillel Netivot Fellowship, which encouraged me to grapple with the big questions that underlie the little ones in these pages.
To Patrice Higonnet, for teaching me how to write history, for encouraging me to write other things, and for giving me my first translating job. His personal insight and excellent graduate seminar on Vichy France helped me to lay the historical groundwork for this book.
To Mary Lewis, whose course on comparative citizenship in France and Germany helped me with certain knotty questions regarding my grandparents’ nationalities (and my own).
To Rachel Taylor, for seeing my path and pushing me down it.
To Leslie Epstein, for his enthusiasm and encouragement before I had any idea of what I was doing.
To David Zane Mairowitz, for a room—and a bathtub, a library, and a workspace—of my own.
To the village of Alba, for taking me in.