by Alena Deerwater
“I was born dancing,” my grandmother says from her wheelchair in the nursing home. Four words. My only gem from the entire interview. But it is perfect and whole. Tiny and beautiful. Thank you Grandma, for the glimpse into your life.
She is having a hard time speaking. And I? I am eager and naive. After about an hour I crash, heavy with disappointment. She won’t talk. I ask questions. My Mom tries to cajole her into answering. We get a word, maybe even a sentence. But no story. The heaviness sinks over me, tamping down a hidden vein of anger. Speak, woman, speak! I want to know our family’s stories. I love stories. I read them, I write them, I study them. I’ve read over two-thirds of the books on the Masterpiece List for my exams in graduate school. I’ve taken special seminars on Faulkner, James Joyce, Dostoyevsky, and Virginia Woolf. I know Greeks myths. I know Torah stories. God said, “Let there be light.” My grandmother says nothing. Well, nothing I can sink my teeth into.
We’ve been struggling ever since I turned on the small cassette tape player with the microphone attached. I had bought it back when I was taking oral histories in school. She is my first family interview and I believe I have failed. Or she has failed me. Tissie, she has been called most of her life. Tissie, short for Isabel. Isabel Batavia Jacobson.
I try interviewing Granny Weil, my father’s mother, later in the week. Most everyone calls her Babe. She will live to be 100. Granny is much more forthcoming. Telling of how her mother said reading books was bad for girls. Quoted her own mother saying, “That hump in your back? It’s from sitting and reading, reading and sitting, Reading, reading, reading.”
Granny calls me in a panic the next day.
“Erase the whole thing!” she pleads. “I only want to say nice things about family.”
What is with these people? Why can’t they talk about their lives. Tell stories to be passed down the generations. That’s what people do, right?
I sit here now, over 20 years later, writing from my own life. Oh. It is hard. I get a word, maybe even a sentence. But no story.
Tissie, Babe, please forgive my younger self for her impatience, disappointment and anger. God, it seems, had an easier time creating the universe than my ancestors and I have creating our lives, telling our story.