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It’s after midnight. They are sprawled around the living room, draped over chairs, stretched out across the floor. The children are asleep. Louis Armstrong’s “Shine” floats from the record player.
Addy sits beside Caroline on the couch. Her head is propped against a back cushion, her eyes closed. “You are a saint,” Addy whispers, interlacing his fingers with hers, and Caroline smiles, her eyes still closed. Not only had she orchestrated the call to the States to reach Jakob—the whole family had piled into the neighbor’s living room to voice their hellos—she’d also proven a courteous, patient host, catering in her calm, quiet manner to the boisterous polyglots who’d swarmed her small home. There must have been three languages spoken at any given moment throughout the evening—Polish, Portuguese, and Yiddish—not one of them English. But if Caroline was at all fazed, she never let on.
Caroline opens her eyes, turns her head to meet Addy’s gaze. Her voice is soft, sincere. “You have a beautiful family,” she says.
Addy squeezes her hand and leans back to rest his own head against the couch cushion, tapping his toe gently to the music.
Just because I always wear a smile
Like to dress up in the latest style
’Cause I’m glad I’m livin’
I take these troubles all with a smile
Addy hums the tune, wishing the night would never end.
Author’s Note
Age one, with my grandfather.
When I was growing up, my grandfather Eddy (the Addy Kurc of my story) was, for all I could tell, American through and through. He was a successful businessman. His English, to my ear, was perfect. He lived in a big, modern house up the road from ours, with floor-to-ceiling picture windows, a porch perfect for entertaining, and a Ford in the driveway. I thought little of the fact that the only children’s songs he ever taught me were in French, that ketchup (un produit chimique, as he called it) was strictly banned from his pantry, or that he’d made half of the things in his home himself (the contraption that dangled his soap by a magnet over the bathroom sink to keep it dry; the clay busts of his children in the stairwell; the cedar sauna in his basement; the living room drapes, woven on his handmade loom). I found it curious when he’d say things like “Don’t parachute on your peas” at the dinner table (What did that even mean?), and mildly annoying when he’d pretend not to hear me if I answered one of his questions with a “yeah” or “uh-huh”—“yes” was the only affirmative answer that met his grammatical standards. Looking back, I suppose others might have labeled these habits as unusual. But I, an only child with a single living grandfather, knew nothing different. Just as I was deaf to the slight inflection my mother now tells me he carried in his English diction, I was blind to his quirks. I loved my Papa dearly; he simply was who he was.
Of course, there were things about my grandfather that impressed me greatly. His music, to start. I’d never met a person as devoted to his art. His shelves overflowed with 33-rpm records, alphabetically arranged by composer, and with books of repertory for the piano. There was always music playing in his home—jazz, blues, classical, sometimes an album of his own. Often I would arrive to find him at the keys of his Steinway, a no. 2 pencil tucked behind his ear as he plotted melodies for a new composition, which he’d practice and tweak and practice some more until he was happy with it. Every now and then he would ask me to sit beside him as he played, and my heart would race as I’d watch him closely, waiting for the subtle nod that meant it was time to flip to the next page of his sheet music. “Merci, Georgie,” he’d say as we reached the end of the piece, and I’d beam up at him, proud to have been helpful. On most days, once my grandfather was finished with his own work, he would ask if I’d like a lesson, and I would always say yes—not because I shared his affinity for the piano (I was never very good at it), but because I knew how happy it made him to teach me. He’d pull a beginner’s book from the shelf and I would rest my fingers tentatively on the keys, feeling the warmth of his thigh against mine, and I would try my hardest not to make any mistakes as he walked me patiently through a few bars of the theme to Haydn’s Surprise Symphony. I wanted badly to impress him.
Along with my grandfather’s musical prowess, his ability to speak seven languages left me in awe. I attributed his fluency to the fact that he had offices around the world and family in Brazil and in France, although the only relative of his generation that I knew by name was Halina, a sister with whom he was especially close. She visited a few times, from S?o Paulo, and occasionally a cousin my age would come from Paris to stay with us for a few weeks in the summertime to learn English. Everyone in his family, it seemed, had to speak at least two languages.
What I didn’t know about my grandfather when I was a kid was that he was born in Poland, in a town once home to more than 30,000 Jews; that his birth name wasn’t actually Eddy (as he later renamed himself) but Adolf, though when he was growing up everyone called him Addy. I didn’t know he was the middle of five children, or that he spent nearly a decade of his life not knowing whether his family had survived the war, or whether they’d perished in concentration camps or been among the thousands executed in the ghettos of Poland.
My grandfather didn’t keep these truths from me intentionally—they were simply pieces of a former life he’d chosen to leave behind. In America he had reinvented himself, devoting his considerable energy and creativity entirely to the present and future. He was not one to dwell on the past, and I never thought to ask him about it.
My grandfather died of Parkinson’s disease in 1993, when I was fourteen. A year later, a high school English teacher assigned our class an “I-Search” project intended to teach us research skills while we dug up pieces of our ancestral pasts. With my grandfather’s memory so fresh, I decided to sit down for an interview with my grandmother, Caroline, his wife of nearly fifty years, to learn more about his story.