The Mozart Season Read Online Free PDF Page B

each other on New Year’s Day every single year and talk for a long time. Alice still lives in Kansas. My mother can cook both Kansas food and Jewish food. She makes Kansas corn cakes and eggplant pudding, and she also makes latkes and pecan haroset the way Bubbe Raisa taught her.
    The reason why Bro David got to go to New York was that Bubbe Raisa gave him that trip because my parents weren’t giving him a bar mitzvah. She thought it was a shame he wouldn’t have any ceremony of his Jewishness for his thirteenth birthday, she said. And she sent him the airplane tickets. My parents were surprised but there wasn’t anything they could do when he had the tickets in his hand except let him go. Besides the eleven museums, they went to see the Yankees play and he got to eat anything he wanted. He came back wanting latkes and blintzes all the time.
    We had to do family trees last year at school. John Muir Middle School in Portland, Oregon. Jessica’s tree had to reach from Chicago to Hong Kong, and she couldn’t find the slavery parts. Maybe her father’s ancestors weren’t even slaves. It’s a whole unknown part of her. You had to say something about yourself when you did your oral presentation of your family tree, and Jessica did hers with mirrors. She told everybody the day before that they had to have mirrors for her presentation. So she had us look in the mirrors we’d brought from home, and she had us imagine a place several generations back, to see ourselves in some place completely different. Her point was that maybe a great-grandparent who looked a little bit like us, maybe in the jaw structure or around the eyes, looked out on a river or lived near a mountain or maybe drove a horse and carriage. She explained that she knows about the Chinese side of her family—they came from Hunan—but her black side is a mystery before her father’s grandparents.
    Sarah’s family tree went all the way back to when Leningrad was called St. Petersburg, in Russia. Sarah said Russia was where she got the beginnings of her dancing, even though she’s never been there and it was six generations back that somebody was a dancer. She said she dances for all the dead people in her past. Some kids thought that was stupid. It made Sarah feel terrible.
    Mine was three countries. Poland and Finland and the United States. I was supposed to include everything I could find, every name and every date in my family history. I’d always seen the girl with the goose and the broom in the dining room, but there was something that made me not ask questions about her. For school I had to ask.
    â€œIt’s when. That’s part of it,” my father said. We were at the dinner table. Dinner was over, and I had my notebook and pencil out. “I can’t tell you when she died. Somewhere in Poland, sometime after 1939. Isn’t that enough?”
    I remember the way Daddy looked at the pencil in my hand and then away from me. He was making a miniature pile of crumbs on the tablecloth with his thumbnails.
    â€œBut was it one of the death camps?” I asked.
    He looked at the pile of crumbs on the tablecloth, little brown fragments of bread on white cloth, then up at me and then back down at the pile. “Yes.” He got up and left the table.
    My mother said, very softly, “T-R-E-B-L-I-N-K-A. And her husband’s name was Herschel.” I wrote down the words.
    That was what had made me never ask before. The way my father turned away from the pencil in my hand.
    When I did my oral presentation I said I was half Jewish and half Gentile, and that has advantages and disadvantages. One, if you’re half-and-half, you’re lucky because each kind has some really good things about it. Gentiles are good at building things, cathedrals and huge barns and things. Jews have courage, to wander all around the world getting abused and killed and still go on having the Torah. It must be