It’s not the ending I’d hoped for but maybe it’s a truer, more appropriate ending. Because at heart this was never really about whether or not I was successful in reclaiming family property; those stakes are hollow. Let’s say I did in the end get it back. Then what? Would I have “won”? Completed my memory-quest? Beaten the final boss? What epiphanies would be suddenly realized, what sentimental circuit would be suddenly completed? I can’t even say for sure that it would have been what my grandfather wanted. Maybe he would have much preferred that none of his descendants ever went back to Poland than that his father’s investment property be reclaimed. Maybe he’d gladly have given up the building if it meant I wouldn’t write about the dispute between his children. Maybe he’d have been outraged that I erased his eldest son from the Polish legal record. It’s less about the building than what the building stands for, and in turn what the reclamation stands for; and these are open-ended questions. What matters here is less the name on a deed than trying and failing but trying still to understand what it means to have, to lose, to take, to take back, to intrude, to inherit, to define your legacy, to declare your legacy, to impose your legacy, to misread your legacy, to impute value—historical, material, sentimental—and then immediately doubt that value, to assume the role of the protagonist in a story that isn’t yours and that you can never understand, to unpause someone else’s moral journey, to trace the ouroboric spiral of questions of family, history, justice, money, religion, ego, object, memory, meaning. This isn’t a mission, in other words, that can simply be completed. Yes: the more I think about it the more I think that in the most morally honest version of this story the reclamation would be perpetual, irresoluble, Sisyphean; my children and their children should inherit not the building but the struggle to reclaim it, the struggle to understand what it is they’re trying to reclaim.
When I first told my father about Abraham, about how I’d discovered this new relative, he was incredulous, he was sure I was making a mistake. “It makes no sense,” he said. “How could it be that my father had a first cousin who survived the war, who lived in Israel, who even published a book, and either my father didn’t know—which is impossible—or never mentioned it, which is just as impossible?” It was a good question. For a while I wondered if maybe my father was right, if I was in fact making a mistake, if somehow I’d gotten confused. But then I learned that Abraham’s brother, Chaskiel, the one who’d escaped to Argentina before the war, had had a crystal company, Kaiser Crystal, and this jogged my father’s memory—he remembered that when he was a kid a relative had come to the house with his crystal wares, had offered my grandfather a job; and my father remembered that some of the crystal that he and my mother had inherited from his parents—a vase and a set of shot glasses, which I’d always loved—was in fact Kaiser Crystal, samples from Chaskiel. It was conclusive, but hardly comforting—because while it meant that Abraham was in fact who I thought he was it also meant that my father knew even less about his father than he’d realized. For months afterwards, every time my father and I talked, he’d come up with fanciful scenarios in which his father wouldn’t have told him about Abraham, or, even more fanciful, wouldn’t have known about Abraham. He was rattled, I could tell. And later, after all my missteps, my misconceptions, I could see how this had been but the beginning of a never-to-be-broken pattern: at every step my grandfather’s legacy seemed to retreat. (Here is the building he grew up in but in fact he didn’t grow up here and also this isn’t the building.) I ended up finding, falling into, another legacy entirely: the ease with which I was able to enter Abraham’s story put into relief just how inaccessible my grandfather’s was.
I wish I knew my grandfather. I wish I knew his history. It’s a kind of longing for longing: I want to be able to mourn.
I do not trust the genre I am writing in, that of the grandchild trekking back to the alte heim on his fraught memory-mission—it’s too certain, too sure-footed, meaning is too quickly and too definitively established; there is no acknowledgment of the abyss, the void, the unknowable space between your story and your grandparents' story. (I admit I’m also jealous—all the other grandchild authors seem to be able to so easily access the memory and the meaning of the memory of their grandparents.) I get why we write these stories this way, why we frame our memory-descents as missions—it’s what’s expected, it’s what works, it’s what’s most suspenseful and most accessible and most marketable, and also when you’re in it it does feel like a mission; there are places to go, obstacles to surmount, clues to discover—but it’s a lie, or at least not the truest truth, because “mission” suggests the possibility of completion, redemption, catharsis, but there can be no completion, redemption, catharsis, because our stories are not extensions of our grandparents’ stories, are not sequels. We do not continue their stories; we act upon them. We consecrate, and we plunder.
For nearly as long as I’ve been writing this book I’ve been asking myself if I’ve been going about it wrong, if it had been a mistake to write
