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By Root 2064 0

1950, she wept with happiness, and with misery. She had lost her husband and children, but after the liberation rediscovered a childhood friend she had once loved and who had loved her. He, too, had lost his children and their mother in Birkenau. Ironically, years earlier their families had blocked their marriage. Now there was no opposition; the families were gone. Married at last, they seemed happy enough. Did they, in some illogical way, feel guilty? As for me, I am dogged by a feeling of remorse when I think of them. They gave me some money to buy and bring something back to Tel Aviv from Paris, but I never saw them again. They died before I was able to send what they had asked for. I had been too slow.

Grandma Nissel’s other two daughters lived in Sighet. Zlati, the youngest, was chronically despondent because people called her an old maid behind her back. She married late, you see—at twenty-one. I remember her husband, Nahman-Elye, as a distant, haughty man who paid no attention to those he considered beneath him, and these were many. They had two young daughters.

“Do me a big favor, will you, Grandma?” I asked during one of our weekly meetings, a Friday in June, between the holidays of Pesach and Shavuot. Zeide the melamed had let us out of heder earlier than usual, and I had time to kill.

“Ask me for the secrets of the forest and I shall lay them at your feet,” she said, her voice soft and tender. “Ask me for the world and its riches and they’re yours.”

I had never heard her speak so many words at once.

“No,” I stammered, embarrassed. “All I want is for you to tell me about Grandpa.”

Her face darkened.

“Why?”

“Just because. I mean, since I’m named after him …”

She was silent for a long moment, her eyes wandering in the distance. Was she praying, or remembering how it was when she was young and beautiful? She still seemed beautiful to me.

“Your grandfather, my boy, your grandfather … How can I explain it? … He loved God and His Torah. He never lived apart from or outside God, apart from or outside the holy Torah. From morning to night, even at the store, his nose was buried in the holy books. I sometimes wonder if he even noticed me.”

There was no rancor or complaint in her voice. On the contrary, she seemed proud and happy to have been married to such a pious man.

“But what about you, Grandma? Did you notice him?”

“Constantly. I would watch to be sure he was well and lacked for nothing, to make sure his shirt wasn’t torn or his caftan didn’t need mending. When he smiled his light brightened my darkness. When he sang, the whole world answered him. Shabbat with him was paradise. The house and garden were bathed in an indescribable heavenly purity and I could hear angels singing with us, in his honor. I wonder if I was worthy of it. But I felt elevated, yes, elevated to the divine throne.”

I knew that Grandpa Eliezer had been killed in World War I not far from our city, in a savage battle. A stretcher-bearer, he was trying to help a wounded man. He died for the Fatherland, for the glory of His Majesty the Emperor Franz Josef.

“When they told me,” my grandmother said, “I learned what catastrophe meant, and I knew my mourning would never end.”

Motionless, her hands still folded, she began to weep in silence, tears flowing down her cheeks and disappearing into the knot in her scarf. I felt stupid and clumsy. I didn’t know what to say to make her stop. I stared at her, transfixed.

“Remember, little one,” she finally whispered. “Remember the name you bear. Try not to dishonor it.”

Many years later, when I returned to my town, I went to the cemetery in search of my grandfather’s grave. The stone, overgrown with weeds, loomed over its neighbors, but it was hard to decipher the inscription. An emotion I had never felt before took hold of me. I saw Grandma Nissel again, and her words echoed in my memory. I recited a psalm and began to talk to the man whose presence had sanctified a small piece of the universe. “It’s me, Grandpa, Eliezer ben Shlomo ben Eliezer, your grandson. I would like to say Kaddish for