Yet, the snapshot reveals my grandmother as much smaller than my mother’s memories. My grandmother wears a black skirt and a shawl around her shoulders and a cloth kerchief tied clumsily beneath her chin. Her face is softly wrinkled, eyes etched with worry. She appears gentle, able to offer the unconditional love I imagine I missed out on, the kind of love they say parents feel for their children’s children.

    I’d gazed upon this picture before receiving the plastic bag of photographs from my cousin. The first time I saw it, perhaps, ten years ago, I sobbed. My mother’s primitive stature—the beige stockings, shapeless drab dress, her face so plain and wanting—hit me with a truth I’d not perceived through her stories.  

    In my mother’s tales Sasfala was magical. Lacking in riches, yes; Sasfala was poor. But, still, to my childhood ears my mother’s home was abundant with a love that made her world sparkle. It was a love I longed to retrieve for her.

    If I had a time machine, I’d insert myself into the driver’s seat. I’d set the dials and compass for Sasfala 1942. I’d tell the young girl who will be my mother, One day you’ll wear a mink coat with your name engraved in the satin lining. You’ll have riches, more than gold. Try to recognize them for all they truly are. 
    She’d reach her moist palm out, sensing the presence of a spirit or a truth. 
    I’d tell her, Your American daughter waits for you. 

     When my mother told me stories, she said that her mama loved her best of all the children. If my mother were here, I would say, Yes, Mom, I see how close to you she sits. To break her heart, to say what I really see—how could I?

      And what I really see is an aging woman holding on to all her children. The older daughters smiling, my mother with a smile that seems hidden, wanting to come out but can’t. She doesn’t know that in three years her mother will die, the family will be deported to concentration camps and the barren farm on which she lives in a tiny village  will for the rest of her life be her remembered paradise.

    
    And what I see, too, is the longing falling from her American daughter’s eyes.

    
    I look back beyond my mother’s childhood into the lives that came before her and wonder if everyone’s life was written before their birth. Maybe there’s a reason, some engraving on a stone, an etching whittled on a tree, that deigned who my mother—who all of us—would become, how deep would be the vision within our souls.

      A carefully conceived plan? It’s possible. Maybe external forces merged my mother and her beloved Sasfala, so that she and her village came into the world as twins.

    In 1908 my maternal grandparents with their two small children—who would become my eldest aunt and uncle—left Europe by steamship and arrived in Philadelphia. My grandfather’s inability to find work and tales of American luxuries had brought his small family to the land to which almost two million Eastern European Jews had arrived between 1882 and 1924.
    Soon after my grandparents arrived, wealthy cousins who had sponsored their journey found my grandfather a job in the garment trade. I’m not sure what he did there, whether he sat hunched at a machine all day in the sweltering summer, dark and cold winters. Or whether he stood all day, pressing trousers and dresses with an iron that weighed twenty pounds.

    I imagine my grandparents settled in South Philadelphia, where 80,000 Jews lived by 1910. Within two years, a child was born there—my aunt Frieda. Shortly thereafter, my grandfather lost his job. I’ve heard three stories that seek to account for my grandfather’s predicament. One is that business owners were fearful the influx of immigrants would mean more businesses opening up, less work coming to them. And so my grandfather was let go.

    Another story is that he and my grandmother were unhappy with the living and working conditions. My grandparents were peasants. They’d lived on farms their whole lives. But here, families were squeezed together in two rooms with poor or no ventilation. There was one bathroom for two families. A workday could last from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.

    A third explanation is that my grandfather was unreliable; he came to work late or didn’t show up. My mother told me he was an alcoholic. She was in her 70s and recovering from triple bypass heart surgery when she told me. She was bitter, using a tone I’d never before heard her use when speaking of her parents. She barely remembered her father; she was passing along a story told to her.

    I don’t know why she told me this so late in her life. I’d grown up believing he’d died of pneumonia. Maybe my mother understood more than she let on about how seriously ill she was. Perhaps she unburdened herself of information that had weighed her down. With my grandfather out of work in Philadelphia, he and his family boarded a train for Manhattan. They became part of the crush of people in the streets, squeezed between pushcarts and horse-drawn carriages on the Lower East Side. My grandfather worked in a garment business again or for a butcher, I can’t recall what I was told. When I asked my cousin Vivian, she told me, “He was in chickens.”

    My uncle Sam was born in 1913; they were then a family of six.  In addition to the crowded and unhealthy conditions, Jewish immigrants were forced to assimilate by working on the Sabbath. The motto was, “Stay out Saturday, don’t come to work Monday.” The poverty my grandparents had hoped to escape was their daily life.

    My grandfather may have lost his job or quit. What I know for certain of my grandparents is that they were unhappy in New York. The family missed Czechoslovakia, and the cousins resented their immigrant relatives with their satchels of belongings and hungry children and guttural Yiddish tongue.

    When I asked my cousin Joan what she knew, she told me that the wealthy cousins had brought the family to America out of responsibility, not joy. And so they put up the funds to pay for my grandparents’ passage across the Atlantic with their children. One in twenty Jewish immigrants returned disenchanted to Europe in 1915. My family was among them.

(continues)