because they fear the waters are too deep or that all will drown, once the dam is breached. Sometimes when I walked into her bedroom she would give me a sign that she was lucid, the movement of one finger or an almost comical look of self-awareness, amazement she was still alive.
One evening in 1985, after dinner, we were sitting together having our tea and she handed me a book. I turned it over in my hands, not knowing what to make of it, or of her gesture. It was Viktor Frankl’s
Man’s Search for Meaning.
“You need to read this now,” she said.
I gave her a sardonic smile. “Will it comfort me?”
“I met your father in Bergen-Belsen, fourteenth of July, 1943,” she said. She did not pause for this revelation to sink in. “When you have read this, when you think you understand what it means, and not just in that analytic mind of yours, you ask your father to tell you how we came to be there. And then how we came to be in Brooklyn when you were born, and finally here in Buenos Aires. Ask him about all the things we were trying to escape.”
I felt such a sense of shame before her. And she gave me such a look, the compassion only a parent can offer her self-absorbed child.
I began the book that evening stunned, which made it almost an act of distraction. But Frankl’s description of his spiritual crisis in Auschwitz pulled me forcefully in and I read it straight through. His triumph over despair, his refusal to become the victim of his own sense of injustice, was mesmerizing. I scrawled questions in the margins. “Who is the family, waiting at home, for whom you choose life?” I wrote. “What comes after freedom from suffering?”
The next morning I dug out an old journal, the one I had last kept, and tried to write. I tried to get the tumble of emotions and thoughts I was experiencing to come together: my mother’s revelation, which she may have chosen to make to me now because she knew she was dying. My strangely euphoric sense of renewal on finishing the book. The choices I might now make.
I knew I did not want to see my father, not right away. Instead, after writing out more of the flood that was pushing through me, crossing words out, rearranging sentences and paragraphs, I went to find Ernesto Guadalquivir. Ernesto and I had gone through architecture school together in the late sixties but had not spoken much since those days, now long past. Two or three times I’d been to openings at a print shop he owned in San Justo where he had broadsides and limited-edition books he’d published on display. He also had a small list of trade books, many of them about the culture of the Guaraní Indians. He was Marxist-Leninist when we first knew each other but, to judge from what he had published, his views had softened over time. He had apparently given up strident accusations for accommodation.
I wanted to share with Ernesto what I had written. For the first time since I had put away my journals I felt as if I had thrown off the fever of a jungle disease, that I was now able to make a coherent and even penetrating statement. My words were not punctuated with anger or built up on abstractions. They opened out onto possibilities that were strikingly new to me. I was not at all sure about the courses now possible, my thoughts still so compelled by Frankl’s genius; but I felt I might realize again in conversation with Ernesto the beliefs and emotions of my early years, find a politics now that did not paralyze me with wrath, and that could lead to a statement as vital and unambiguous as the monument to the steelworkers at Homestead.
Like me, Ernesto understood how much thinking had to go into the design of a building that stood strong but lithe. It was the same process that once opened the walls of the French cathedrals to the passage of light. With the newly discovered flying buttress in place to take the weight of the roof, the once solid walls could frame expanses of glass. The dark caves of the eleventh
One evening in 1985, after dinner, we were sitting together having our tea and she handed me a book. I turned it over in my hands, not knowing what to make of it, or of her gesture. It was Viktor Frankl’s
Man’s Search for Meaning.
“You need to read this now,” she said.
I gave her a sardonic smile. “Will it comfort me?”
“I met your father in Bergen-Belsen, fourteenth of July, 1943,” she said. She did not pause for this revelation to sink in. “When you have read this, when you think you understand what it means, and not just in that analytic mind of yours, you ask your father to tell you how we came to be there. And then how we came to be in Brooklyn when you were born, and finally here in Buenos Aires. Ask him about all the things we were trying to escape.”
I felt such a sense of shame before her. And she gave me such a look, the compassion only a parent can offer her self-absorbed child.
I began the book that evening stunned, which made it almost an act of distraction. But Frankl’s description of his spiritual crisis in Auschwitz pulled me forcefully in and I read it straight through. His triumph over despair, his refusal to become the victim of his own sense of injustice, was mesmerizing. I scrawled questions in the margins. “Who is the family, waiting at home, for whom you choose life?” I wrote. “What comes after freedom from suffering?”
The next morning I dug out an old journal, the one I had last kept, and tried to write. I tried to get the tumble of emotions and thoughts I was experiencing to come together: my mother’s revelation, which she may have chosen to make to me now because she knew she was dying. My strangely euphoric sense of renewal on finishing the book. The choices I might now make.
I knew I did not want to see my father, not right away. Instead, after writing out more of the flood that was pushing through me, crossing words out, rearranging sentences and paragraphs, I went to find Ernesto Guadalquivir. Ernesto and I had gone through architecture school together in the late sixties but had not spoken much since those days, now long past. Two or three times I’d been to openings at a print shop he owned in San Justo where he had broadsides and limited-edition books he’d published on display. He also had a small list of trade books, many of them about the culture of the Guaraní Indians. He was Marxist-Leninist when we first knew each other but, to judge from what he had published, his views had softened over time. He had apparently given up strident accusations for accommodation.
I wanted to share with Ernesto what I had written. For the first time since I had put away my journals I felt as if I had thrown off the fever of a jungle disease, that I was now able to make a coherent and even penetrating statement. My words were not punctuated with anger or built up on abstractions. They opened out onto possibilities that were strikingly new to me. I was not at all sure about the courses now possible, my thoughts still so compelled by Frankl’s genius; but I felt I might realize again in conversation with Ernesto the beliefs and emotions of my early years, find a politics now that did not paralyze me with wrath, and that could lead to a statement as vital and unambiguous as the monument to the steelworkers at Homestead.
Like me, Ernesto understood how much thinking had to go into the design of a building that stood strong but lithe. It was the same process that once opened the walls of the French cathedrals to the passage of light. With the newly discovered flying buttress in place to take the weight of the roof, the once solid walls could frame expanses of glass. The dark caves of the eleventh
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