If a Tree Falls Read Online Free PDF

soundly. But Bill was hunched over her crib, his face buried in his arms. His body was heaving, inches above the crib railing. I touched his shoulder.
    Bill wiped his wet face with his sleeve. His puffy, tear-filled eyes met mine. “I guess I just lost it,” he said. I hugged him tight. “Or maybe I found it.” He laughed through his sniffles. “I don’t know.”

    That night, I was unable to sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about Bill. About Sophia. About my great-great aunts Nellie and Bayla, tying a string from their wrists to their babies in the night. A line, an anchor, a way of hearing their children. I had to find out more : how they fared, what became of them. Did anyone before make an effort to know them? I stole into my study and turned on the computer. I could try an ancestry search.

    Within minutes, I was staring at a 1910 Census Report that showed Nellie Wertheim living in Brooklyn, New York! Born in 1871, to Pearl and Moshe Wertheim, her occupation was listed as sewing corsets. She emigrated from Austro-Hungary, the Gallizien Province.
    Had Nellie’s sister, Bayla, emigrated with her? I searched for Bayla Wertheim in all available US Census Reports. No records. I searched for their mother, Pearl. Nothing. Pearl’s other six children. No.
    What about Judith Fleischer? My cousin Phyllis had not yet located her. Upon typing in her name, the computer screen filled with listings. The Fleischer name was more common than I’d supposed. Without a birth date or home address, I’d never find her. I narrowed my search using her parent’s names, Sam and Gertrude Fleischer. No matches.
    I was restless. I longed to know my ancestors’ stories —especially Pearl’s and her children’s. But how would I ever uncover them? I couldn’t glean Nellie’s experience from a single Census Report. In the shtetl books I’d read, the portrayals of deaf people were heartbreaking. The deaf were considered mentally impaired, isolated, and ostracized. Is that how my ancestors lived?
    For the first time, I felt part of a larger line, reaching back to the past and stretching forward into the future. With the faxed pages of my family tree scattered around
me, I opened a new blank journal I’d bought. It was bound in soft black leather, with a long string meant to mark a last writing page then wrap round and round to keep the journal closed. From down the hall, I could hear Sophia rustling in sleep, Bill snoring softly. I stared at the curves and dips in the stucco walls of my study. I breathed in the pulpy scent of the blank page, open before me.
    For the moment, I was left with just my own imagining.

    Galicia, 1871
     
     
     
    WHEN YOU FIRST TRY TO LISTEN, all you hear is noise. So much noise.
    In the shtetl, the noise of men is the din of argument. A challenge to interpretation. A reconstruction of theory. In a circle, rounded with pride, shrouded in humility, trumped up with faith, the men pester their texts, tease their minds, and block out the cries of their own and everyone else’s hearts. The noise of women is the ruffle of contempt for the men who pester texts, the cackle of gossip and the grind of work and the hardening of hearts that chokes a child’s whinny.
    The cloudy morning of 17 Adar, in the Hebrew year 5630, a baby’s wails rip through the Gallizien village of Tasse. Just two days old and little Shimon, Pearl and Moshe’s boy, is filled with inconsolable sorrow. Boiling but ashiver, wriggling and swollen red. Pearl bounces and bobs him. She rocks him, rubs him, wraps him to her chest in her scarf of azure.

    Pearl’s mother hovers about with damp cloths, her eyes settling deep in their sockets. Pearl’s father, with his left arm wound in leather straps, fastens a fragment of scripture to his head. Then he ushers Moshe out of the house, away from the women, off to shul.
    Before going, he ties a string around the baby’s hot ankle, and as they walk down the narrow village streets of Tasse, he lets the