The Pale of Settlement Read Online Free PDF

parents’ dinner table while her grandfather told stories Susan had never heard before about the First World War and fighting the Italians at Monte Grappa in the Dolomites. Her grandfather grew animated, sketching diagrams and maps on scraps of paper and waving his hands. When Susan got up to clear the dishes, she heard her ex-boyfriend laugh and her grandfather say, Ah, you understand me exactly!
    When she asked her grandfather why he’d never told her the stories before, he said, Because you never asked.
    Susan went to buy a gift for her ex-boyfriend’s baby. As she stood in the plush Amsterdam Avenue shop, fingering the Steiff bunnies and satin-edged blankets and tiny crocheted booties, the door jingled and her ex-boyfriend’s college roommate walked in. She hid the booties behind her back, as if she’d been caught in the act of doing something shameful.
    The college roommate kissed her on the cheek. I was over in Berlin last month, he said, and I’m telling you, this woman is a piece of work. She just wanted to catch herself an American.
    Susan noticed that his hair had thinned, leaving a round patch on the top of his scalp, like a yarmulke. He worked for the U.S. attorney’s office, prosecuting white-collar crime. In the old days, the three of them had hung out together in dive bars on the Lower East Side.
    He sure made a mistake not marrying you, the college roommate said, touching Susan’s arm, even though he knew perfectly well that she was the one who’d done the breaking up.
    Susan’s ex-boyfriend was, in fact, half-Jewish. His father’s relatives came from Dresden by way of Brooklyn; the cowboys and Ivy Leaguers were all on his mother’s side. Her ex-boyfriend’s family celebrated Christmas and Easter, though not in a religious way. His brother, however, was a Scientologist. He believed in a tone scale of emotion and the traumatic residue of past lives. Susan’s mother considered this a bad sign, just as, although she didn’t say anything directly, she felt that Susan’s ex-boyfriend didn’t count as a real Jew.
    That’s what happens, she said when Susan told her about the brother, when you don’t have real roots.
    The summer between their two years of journalism school, Susan and her ex-boyfriend went to Poland. Wolfgang, who was in Warsaw doing research, took them around. It was their first time behind the Iron Curtain.
    Wolfie drove his beat-up Volkswagen Golf at high rates of speed along rutted country roads, swerving around bicycles and horsedrawncarts piled high with hay. An orange sun hovered low in the sky. A haze of burning coal clouded the air.
    On the way from Warsaw to Krakow, they stopped at Auschwitz. It was late afternoon and the klieg lights above the double—barbed wire fence had come on, casting shadows on the ground. Above the gate, the sign remained:
Arbeit Macht Frei
. Rows of cypresses lined the paths like sentries. There was hardly anyone there. Susan’s ex-boyfriend shot a roll of black-and-white film. Wolfgang stuffed his hands into his pockets and looked at his feet. Nobody said much.
    Susan wandered around thinking about her grandmother’s cousin and her lost child, wondering what had become of him. She thought about her grandmother’s sister—the prettier, cleverer, unluckier one—after whom she had been named. The fact that she’d probably died here in this place felt as unreal as any other family story.
    They climbed back into Wolfie’s Volkswagen and continued on to Krakow. After checking into the hotel, Susan and her ex-boyfriend made love on the narrow Soviet-style bed.
    Ibusz
, he crooned as he kissed her breasts. It was the name of the Polish state travel agency, but they’d decided it sounded like a term of endearment. He put on a fake accent and addressed her nipple. You are my leetle Polish radish, he said. Then they went out for dinner.
    Her ex-boyfriend proposed to