THE ANCIENT SONG

 "Deep in our bones resides an ancient singing couple who just won't

give up making their beautiful wild noise.  The world won't end if we can find them."

Martin Prachtell

Years ago I heard voices singing in a dream.  I climbed down wooden stairs in a house,  until I was outside, balanced on  a winding set of stone steps, a zigzag  DNAshaped stairwell leading into vast space. At the end of the steps were my father’s parents at a table praying.  I descended slowly.  I could hear them  always at a distance.

The steps had no foundation. They were floating in a sky  below.  There they were, the ancient couple restoring the world, in the shape of my grandma Ida and her husband Dave. No matter how many dinners, visits to the Bronx, and high holy days when they took the train to Brooklyn, I never knew them.  They existed like characters in a fairytale serving as archetypal elders from another world.   My grandmother’s English was guttural, without grammar. She mostly spoke Yiddish or Polish.  My grandfather seemed to hardly make a sound. He sat in the living room on a chair in the middle of the room, wearing pin-striped woolen pants held up by suspenders, a suit  in all seasons, watching phony wrestling on television.  My brother, cousins and I were preoccupied with games in the guest roo.   Or racing up and down the grassy mound outside their kitchen window chasing fireflies.

Their world had disappeared, slipped away across an ocean.  The stories of their history were  untold except for a few details.    I don’t remember complaints or conversations. Only, Ida cooking and she and my grandpa whispering in the hall way beside the porcelain painted rooster that I wished was my own.   But in my dream they were the ones who sang the last fragments of a song that existed at the end of the  known world.  I would like to go back into the dream  and hear them again.  The image of the table and their voices remains vivid. 

My friend Muriel and I were twice a traveling Jewish storytelling festival in Poland. Once we had an evening concert in a library in the small city of Lumza where my grandmother was born.  We had no expectations of an audience after seeing a few hand written signs with our names posted on lamp posts and in store windows.  Up until the moment we arrived at the outer gates of the Library we were certain that there might only be a few people other than the librarian who had met us earlier in the day -  given us postcards of the city printed before World War II,  and told us where to find the Jewish Cemetery. It was already growing dark when the large doors were opened into a courtyard where the storytelling would take place.  I could make out round tables because each table had a long lit candle in the center. But,  as we walked toward our translator who waited by a microphone,  our audience became visible and audible.  Two hundred people stood up and began to applaud.  A girl with blonde hair wearing a traditional costume, approached me. She pressed a large bouquet of flowers in my arms.  The librarian said, “She is welcoming you back to your grandmother’s city.” 

      We told stories slowly leaving space for our translator and guide Michal to  repeating what we said in Polish. The night grew darker. The candles burned down.  Stars lit up the sky, I told my last story. It was about my grandmother Ida and her small recollections of Lumza. It was  something  she had told me happened to her as a child with her grandmother behind their house beside a river, a house on stilts so the animals had a place to sleep when it rained.

     It was the only story about Ida.  I created it pieced together by memory, imagination and longing for a history.  I told it half in English, half in Yiddish.  The courtyard felt drenched in uncanny silence.   When it ended, a woman stood up. She wore a flowered dress and had long braids tied back behind her round face. She sang a song acapella in Yiddish.

      The storytelling took  an hour, perhaps less.   Afterwards, we sat at a table for a much longer time. One by one or in small groups people came to meet me;  to tell me about Jewish families they knew, who had saved whom, who was sorry they did not save whom and why. They asked  would I return and live  in Lumza?  An old man took out  a wrinkled paper from the Yad Veshem naming his father as a holy man for saving Jews.  Muriel, Michal and I  followed the librarian to her office when our audience departed. We ate cookies and I drank two glasses of vodka.  I was unable to speak.   Until I looked up to see the woman who had sung.  “Come Michal,” I said, “please ask her if she will come with us tomorrow to Lublin. If she will sing while I tell the story of my grandmother.”   I learned she was not Jewish. She had learned the song from her grandmother.  She traveled with us for three days. Each time I told the story of my grandma Ida and her diamond earrings, she sang.  Slowly her voice and my voice found our places at a table in a great space at the end of a stairway leading no where.   

   I had the dream before I went to Poland.  I forgot about it for years. I suspect  it was not about Poland but about the before the beginning of time when the first songs were dreamed. It was all our history. In Lumza  before driving to Lublin, we wiped  dirt from old tombstones. Revealing all the no longer visible names that had been rubbed off.  In the late morning,  we went in  search of folk art, jewelry we might find in antique stores, and the synagogue that  we learned had been burned during the war.

     By the river, on the outskirts of the city, we saw houses on stilts like the ones in my grandmother’s story. I have always been searching for something that is under the surface, at the edge of an abyss, pulling me closer to remembering  what we have  forgotten. 

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