By Amit Epstein | 05/09/2010
Sometimes we can define a vacancy, or even notice it, only when we face a concrete substance, or an object. It happened to me just last weekend, unexpectedly. I was invited for a dinner at the house of a friend, who is a descendent of a German-Jewish family, on her mother's side. Generally, I know her family story – a well-rooted family, who's been settled in Germany since generations, and fled just on time to Switzerland. The German past of the family was sealed, mentally and physically, in a seven drawer's chest which was placed in her room.
photo: Amit Epstein
She describes her childhood-room as a place which influenced her a lot; a sweet, well equipped, 60's style girl's room, with a mystery in the shape of seven drawers, hanging in the middle of one wall, like a concealed wound. She dared not to open it until many years have passed. It happened so, that the city from which her family fled, but lived there for over a century, has a Jewish museum, and someone there is interested in making an exhibition about the family. These drawers hid a fortune of documents; the history of a German-Jewish family through the nineteen- and the twenty centuries in photos, authorizations, letters and diaries. In addition there were cases containing silver cutlery (separate for milk and for meat), painted wedding portraits, art pieces and others relics of the former life and life-style which the family locked within those boxes and never looked back. They were alive and busy in restarting and giving routes up the safe hills.
All of that I knew, but as I was visiting her and we were served with that silver cutlery, and the portrait painting of her great-grandmother and her great- grandfather was hanging on the wall, I felt a pinch.
Since apart for me the other guest was a cousin of her, at a certain point came out an ancient photo album, and some envelopes with photo portraits from 1850, 1870, 1910 and the 20's. Her great-grandmother wearing German folklore outfits, her grandparents' parents and grandparents, from childhood through all important stations of their lives – she held their faces, she knew their names, she could tell their stories; who they were, what they believed in, what they did – how they succeeded. The seven drawers were a wound in her childhood's landscape, but once opened they filled a hole with vivid memories and clear lines of life and energy. I was touched to see the photos, I was moved by her stories and the impact they had on her, on who she became. But above all, I'm ashamed to say I was thinking of my own family, which starts, or ends, with my grandparents, maybe a few siblings, but that's it.
The oldest object I hold is my grandfather's hand-watch, my grandmother's umbrella. It is as if they were written on a white paper, an erased sheet.
Not long ago I had to go through my packed luggage at my grandmother's house. In the course of the reorganization, my mother and I came across a photo of my grandmother as a child, with her siblings, in Rumania. It took us some time to recognize it is really her, that 3 or 4 years old child. That moment brought tears to my eyes, and even now just writing about it again, as it was the first time I grasped the spectrum of what I do not know and will never know. That feeling grew stronger as I've watched the treasures out of the seven drawers' chest with envy which I could barely restrain, with longing, yearning and craving eyes for those pieces of memories, the roots of the uprooted.
