Stepping on Toes

Today, I think it finally realized how different my grandmother and I are. 

Being here for 3 months was worrisome for many reasons… The first being that the work is tough and there is not really a wrong or right way to do it.  The second was family. Three months is a long time, and they haven’t had to put up with me for this long in 10 years, and my poor aunt has never had to live with me!!!!! As I invade my family’s life for 3 months, my main goal is to not step on toes.  I’m trying to be helpful, neat, optimistic, available, and invisible all at the same time.  I love being here, but at the same time I have to realize that I just catapulted in into my entire family’s daily routines and we have taken over every aspect of my aunts life.  There is nothing I love more than my family, but at the same time, I want to be able to leave in August with them still wanting to see us the next time we come. This involves not over doing it and making sure that we get to see everyone without unintentionally making some feel unimportant and ignored..…  

I don’t think I realized how much I avoid stepping on people’s toes until I started reading Oma’s letters.  Now, here is a woman who doesn’t seem to care how the others reacted to what she was writing.  I am by no means saying that she wasn’t a caring person, because she definitely was not.  But the way she handled situations has truly amazed me.  When someone wouldn’t write her back for months, she would write some really threatening letters… She would sign with her usual “much love” and at the end she would write “notice I didn’t say much love. That is how mad I am that you haven’t written me.”  In this way, everyone knew how much they meant to her, but they also knew how upset she would be if they didn’t write.  I am the complete opposite, if I don’t hear from people, I take that as a hint and instead of instigating anything, I keep quiet and avoid conflicts at all cost.  Whatever Oma thought, you knew.  I think it’s an admirable quality, and I think Maia got some of this from her.  Oma was willing to step on any toes, and I always admired her for it, even though when they were my toes, it killed me because sometimes I rather not hear the truth!

Anyhow… Now that I got that little fun fact out of the way, I’ll let you in on what I’ve been reading these past few days… It’s been A LOT!  I have read the folder of:  Pilar, Fani, Julio, Clarita, Erika, Moses and Sofi, Inge, Tante Lotte’s, and now I am looking at Ulla’s.  These people are friends and relatives of all sorts.   And the best way to describe the amount is with one of Oma’s lines in a letter to her friend Hanne in Berlin.  (2001)

“I have a whole big bag full of letters from all our old families, back and forth through time I see them ... a tragedy ... oh well”

I don’t know if she is referring to the same tragedy I am reading, and my translation is truly pitiful… But reading and witnessing the disappearances of these families is inexplicable.  One day her uncle Moses is writing from Israel about how Sofi is sick, and then the next day Sofi writes to say that Moses has died.  And this specific death happened naturally (or due to poverty) way after the Nazis…. The cause doesn’t make it any less sad, and for some reason just like in the other instances, the letters with the families always stop with one of my Oma’s letters inquiring about the other.  After a death is announces, a response seldom comes after, and that is the saddest part.   Well not really, because then come paragraphs like this one that my grandmother writes on Sept 21, 1946 about Edith (Hanna’s mother)

 “She is the only one of our loved ones from Germany who survived. My grandmother died in the street from a heart attack, but at least she was spared of the worst.  Aunt Frieda and little Tali were both deported.  One heard no more from them.  We get mail sometimes from uncle Heine in Shanghai, he is a cook in a concentration camp/ghetto there.  We are looking to bring him to Montevideo, but it is very hard.  Wish us luck. ”

The letters today haven’t been very uplifting, and the material isn’t new, but slowly the names and events are making sense.  Maia started to make family boards with pictures and the faces make the information even harder to swallow, but it is fascinating how much these letters have to tell!