This Lviv
I walked home from my high school along sidewalks bordered with dirty snow that spurned the sun. It was, I think, April 1974, and springtime wouldn’t come, at least not to the Toronto suburb where we lived. I shut the side door of our house —yours, Daddy’s, Alan’s, and mine — pulled off my salt-crusted boots, climbed up a short flight of stairs, and sat down on a vinyl kitchen chair. You stood at the counter over an electric kettle that released a cloud of steam, and you were singing a Yiddish song: Vi Ahin Zol Ich Geyn? — Where Can I Go? Inside two slightly cracked china cups, you spooned instant coffee for us both, then carefully poured the boiling water. Was I wise enough to grasp the craggy archipelagos of memory you occasionally unearthed from your throat, Ma? Your memories of the Holocaust, did they produce any true anguish in me at the time, or did I feel they were sad fossils imprinted in bygone air? Yet those memories give rise to the rough gnarls in me that hurt my gut. I am reading a headline — “Photographing Hell” — about Russia’s genocidal war against Ukraine. I watch Ukrainian President Zelenskyy on TV. With a stern and sorrowful face, his eyes grip the light of the television’s rows of pixels. His voice is a bell. It tolls, “I don’t believe the world” when he speaks about the world’s proclaimed support of his battered country. Does he mean that people like me are, in some way, complicit? Many of us in the West ask ourselves, “How can this be happening?” It is, after all, 2022. But our question hangs helplessly over ruins.
I look away from the newspaper, from the TV. The empathy you bred in me doesn’t allow me to witness suffering for very long. In my mind now, I locate two rocky islands of recollection you grounded there. I hear you recount, in your heavily accented melodic English, a story that I might have clung to once, when I was very young, like an upsetting but fascinating fable. In 1946, just after the end of World War II, outside the Polish city of Wrocław — you called it “Brotslev” in Yiddish — you cradled your newborn son, Anchel, my brother Alan. You sat in the back of an open horse-drawn wagon; it was crowded with Jews who had survived the Holocaust. The pewter sky pelted rain. When the wagon reached its destination in the city, the driver confessed to you and the other passengers that he’d planned to kill everyone, and it was only the fierce frigid downpour which hindered him.
I locate another craggy island: the story of how you, your mother, and youngest sister escaped from your village in southwestern Poland during the autumn of 1939, a shtetl then occupied by the Nazis. You fled to Lviv, now part of Ukraine — Lwów in Polish, or Lvov as you pronounced it, also Lemberg — but at that time, part of the Soviet Union. Before the war, Lviv was a center of Jewish cultural, political, and religious life. It was where Daddy, whom you hadn’t yet met, tore off his uniform and hid in a Jewish cemetery after the Polish cavalry, you later told me, disbanded. He didn’t like to talk about his past, you said, yet tangled knots of memory clustered in his mind and belly.
“Hi, Ma,” I say to you that afternoon in April 1974, my voice probably endeavoring tenderness, but edged with nerves. I would be taking a math test the next day, and tests made me anxious, unreasonably so. And, anyway, free-flowing anxiety moving in a steady stream was part of our family’s daily reality. “What’s for supper,” I most likely ask with a firmer warmth, anticipating our having coffee together, and being distracted from my stressful studies.
I have always carried in me shadows extending from what I could never know of your past. These shadows still lengthen every day, and their darkness can dim even my brain’s gray matter. Their shade is acquisitive, hungry. And so, my writing seems almost always to be about your fathomless legacy, how the Holocaust’s long arms trapped you with their force and unspeakable mass —
It is 1:33 AM on a cool morning in April 2022. The full moon shimmers like a dime in the glasslike indigo sky above Greenwich Village. Blossoming on my street are Callery pear trees, whose flowers convene to form a lace canopy that ruffles the air. I’m scanning the headlines in the online edition of the New York Times. Although you have been dead for 22 years, Ma, I feel as if we are still sipping cappuccinos at 4:00 on a sunny afternoon in a fashionably darkened downtown Toronto café. You are always, for me, everywhere at once: at the sink in my Lower Manhattan apartment, rinsing potatoes before Passover in 1995; in Harlem with me, during the summer of 1979, the first time you and I visited what would be my art studio for two years while I was a graduate student at Columbia; peering longingly through the bright yellow curtains of your suburban Toronto home in 1999 as I entered a taxi for the airport the autumn before you died of pancreatic cancer. It is this image of you staring out of the tall window, sunlight sweeping your kitchen as it often did, which impales me most at this moment, punctures me with regret and grief; I’d been offered a part-time teaching job at New York University, and you wanted me to take it, although you were dying, and it meant I would be far away. I did take it, for a while, but returned to you nearly immediately because your story, so unsteady during your last months, was stumbling over time.
This morning, my anxiety is tightly packed along the arc of my brain. Anxiety always struggles for space there, clenching itself into a fist. I tug my hair away from my face. The images of the dead in Ukraine are not hypothetical shadows. They are daggers of light — the manicured fingers of a murdered 52-year-old named Iryna Filkina, an aspiring makeup artist. Her upturned motionless hand, her crimson nails, all flecked with debris, glow amid what I think are shards of a bombed building’s concrete; other than the diagonal of her extended arm attempting to reach out beyond the photo’s edge, the scene is all shrapnel and rubble. Her still beautiful hand, budding from a royal blue sleeve of what I guess is a warm anorak, appears to be gripping something, to be holding onto this world.
Maybe the glow of Iryna Filkina’s hand resembles your own hand’s glow as you once caressed your belly large with your son. Although Anchel’s passport will later indicate that he was born in Poland, I remember you telling me how you gave birth to him — your mother, the midwife — in Samarkand, one of the oldest cities in Uzbekistan in Central Asia. The year Alan was born, 1946, Uzbekistan was an independent republic within the Soviet Union, where you, your mother, your sister Esther, and my father were interned in a Siberian labor camp during the Second World War. You had all escaped to Lviv from Nazi-occupied Poland. The Soviets then imprisoned you. When you were freed from the camp, you made your way to Samarkand together. To stay alive, your family sold dress fabrics on the black market, for which you were thrown in jail, Ma, when your belly was still round. It was there Daddy ate horsemeat and contracted typhus. I imagine his headaches, feverish forehead, delirium, and the purple rash all over his body. Typhus, I have read, is a disease which causes high mortality rates during famines and wars.
Why are there wars, Ma? I wonder this listening to fire engine sirens flush the air red outside my apartment building. The Ukrainian city of Mariupol, according to a gleaming banner that announces “Breaking News” across my TV screen, “has been wiped off the earth.” Another banner claims, “Putin knows he can threaten the world with nukes.” “Potential desperation,” the CIA director observes during an interview, “could push Putin to use nuclear weapons.” I imagine Iryna Filkina’s delicate fingers stroking my hair, which my own fingers have disheveled. The photograph of her hand stilled forever — no, her hand dead — vibrates among ads for how to fill in balding eyebrows, Subaru’s new car lineup, and “51 Rare Photos from Princess Diana and Prince Charles’ Wedding.” Russia’s state-controlled TV network declares, I hear, that World War III has started. A beautiful Russian television host confirms that the conflict can “safely” be called the Third World War.
Why War? I can’t stop asking myself this question from the moment I see a person’s foot shod in a white sneaker — a mother’s foot, a child’s, a teenager’s — jutting out from a bank of a mass grave. The grave is in Bucha, Ukraine. Its long trench was dug in 2022. This is not the mass grave created in 1941 in Babi Yar, a ravine located in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, where Nazis forces fighting the Soviets during World War II murdered approximately 34,000 Jews. But, as if attempting to extinguish memory itself, in March the Russian military fired on and damaged the Holocaust Memorial site near the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. Swiftly, my TV screen flashes from this sneakered foot to an ad for Dr. Scholl’s insoles. But there are no ads for souls. These I have to imagine.
I picture my tattered copy of Plato’s Republic, parts of which I studied in a course on rhetoric when I was pursuing my PhD. Imagining the soul, I seem to always remember Plato — that even after death, he claimed, the soul exists and is able to think. This comforts me. Neon-green Post-its stick out of my book like antennae feeling for signs of something. Maybe they are feeling for a drinking glass foggy from cleaving milk, a glass left behind, perhaps, by a child trying to flee the bombs thrown indiscriminately by the Russians onto Bucha, or the antennae are feeling for the child. It is in this book where Socrates recounts the “Allegory of the Cave,” describing people who have been chained to a cave’s wall all their lives. They see shadows projected onto the wall, the shadows of things passing in front of a fire lit behind them. Although these shadows are the prisoners’ reality, they are not faithful representations of the world, just shards of a reality that can be perceived through the senses. But beneath the sun, are things — objects — that represent “true” forms which humans can grasp only by using reason. The prisoners in the cave aren’t willing to abandon their prison; they know no other, better kind of life. They don’t perceive the world through reason.
On my TV, the Pope is now calling the Russian war against Ukraine “a cruel and senseless conflict.” Sense: ideas and things we understand through reason, which is defined as “a sane and realistic attitude to situations and problems” in the New Oxford American Dictionary. Socrates explains that reason is one of the higher levels of reality, which philosophers strive to comprehend. Plato refers to reason as the “natural monarch,” which should rule over other parts of the mind. Do only philosophers fathom war’s reason? And those of us who aren’t philosophers — are we like the ill-informed, complacent prisoners in the allegory who are shackled to one reality?
Although I am not a brave person, I need to know. I scour my shelves for books about war. Their spines, some misshapen, shine, casting a brilliant light from my living room walls, my own “cave,” I suppose, a repository containing the 66 years of my life. The books seem to be emitting brightness. And I think about what you once said, Ma, your words throwing down ashen shadows: that when you were young, you knew nothing about war. You would laugh when adults spoke of it.
I am opening Tom Bissell’s The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam. The book’s title derives from Heraclitus, whose words are the volume’s epigraph:
War is the father of all and king of all.
Some he shows as gods, others as men.
Some he makes slaves, and others free.
Bissel ends his “Author’s Note” by observing, “War is appetitive. It devours goodwill, landscape, cultures, mothers, and fathers — before forcing us, the orphans, to pick up the pieces.” I now hear the broadcaster on MSNBC quote Putin: “In case of further resistance from people in Mariupol, they will be eliminated.” I listen to the same broadcaster repeat Zelenskyy’s words about whether the West has provided Ukraine with enough weapons, and he answers, “Enough isn’t possible.” I watch on TV a Ukrainian man who has survived Russia’s bombardments. He sweeps away rubble, clearing a pathway to the ruins behind him.
I’ve spent much of my life contemplating war. I remember that even when I was a very young child, you and your friends would speak about the lager, the Yiddish word for “camp” — forced labor camp, death camp. As you stirred lumps of sugar into glass cups ambered with tea, this word — lager — seemed to roll off your tongues, then it would be thrust into the kitchen air by wind blowing from an open window. I’m now sure that you and your friends choked on this word more than a little bit, as when one holds back tears. The restraint, for me, doubles the emotion’s intensity.
Pacing my apartment’s rooms, I think about their fragility, their impermanence — how they could be destroyed in a minute. I consider how frail a thing our freedom is, if we are lucky enough to live “freely.” I open another book in which there are poems written by the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, translated by Clare Cavanaugh and Stanislaw Barańczak. One poem, “The Century’s Decline,” speaks of the twentieth century. It states the following:
Too many things have happened
that weren’t supposed to happen,
and what was supposed to come about
has not.
A couple of problems weren’t going
to come up anymore:
hunger, for example,
and war, and so forth.
I switch the station on my TV. An anchor on CNN reporting from Lviv is visibly unnerved by the sounds of bombs exploding not far from him, explosions caught live on television. In a bulletin from Reuters, the mayor of the city, Andriy Sadoviy, is later quoted as saying, “Seven peaceful people had plans for life, but today their life stopped.”
I recall, Ma, that you and Daddy clung to the words of news reporters. Because your past was irreparable, you tried to embrace what was current, modern, as refugees tend to do. Did you learn, over time, that war is a blueprint for human behavior? I remember the rolled up sheets of architectural plans in Daddy’s basement office. I imagine smoothing them out on the floor. Next to his office,was your sewing room, which always seemed dim to me, even when the ceiling lights shone.
Ma, I can see myself carve small figures from shadows. Do they, in some way, represent your history? It has been a slow process, this searching for whatever I can find amid the rubble of your stories.