A Small Memory
I am a child of the Diaspora. My parents and grandparents, together with a few other family members, fled Nazi Germany in the mid-thirties. The rest did not make it out. Those who did are, even now, spread around the world: Australia, South America, Israel, London, Austria, and South Africa. To say that we were a dysfunctional family is a redundancy, but since I knew no other way and thought all children had homes like mine, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.
Am I scarred by it? Probably. Does it matter? Not really, except in that I am who I am because of it.
When I was six, my mother married for the third time.
During her periods of adjustment–which never quite happened–I was sent to live with my beloved grandparents. As I recall, the third one was shortly before Passover. Their flat was a’flutter with cleaning and cooking. My boredom quickly became a nuisance to Oma, my grandmother, who decided my grandfather, Opa, should teach me to play Canasta.
I learned fast. After a Passover game to help digestion after the Seder, I was declared a natural.
“But I didn’t win,” I said.
Oma left to make a pot of tea. “You explain to her, James,” she said in German.
Opa took out his small, oval snuffbox. Delicately, he dipped into it with his left pinky. Holding one nostril closed, he inserted snuff into the other and inhaled. There followed a gigantic sneeze, a shudder, and a satisfied sigh.
“This is the most important lesson you will ever learn in your life–it should only be a long and healthy one. We cannot influence the cards we are dealt in life. What we can do is learn to see the opportunities opened by those cards and have the courage to grab them by the throat and use them. That is what you did and that is why you will be a winner.”
And so they began to teach me — my grandfather about
always being just a little bit kinder than necessary, my grandmother about opportunity, and both of them about the value of listening more than I talked.
