A remembrance

the following is the prepared text from which I spoke at my grandmother’s memorial on May 16, 2010.

Last November, I flew to California to have Thanksgiving with my family, and stole away of an afternoon to spend an hour with Grandma. In the course of our conversation which spanned, as I recall, such subjects as Brooklyn Heights, Obama’s Health Care Plan, and my goings-on as a musician in New York, I asked about dad’s recent return to the Santa Rosa Symphony to perform Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto.

         “It must have been thrilling to hear him play that piece again, huh?” I said.

         “No, not really,” said Grandma. “Everyone went crazy, but it’s a little overwrought and romantic for my taste.”

In that anecdote is contained what might be the most distilled essence of my beloved grandmother: a clear-eyed, often drily hilarious, relentlessly pragmatic, and totally unsentimental orientation toward life. 

Yet I don’t want to suggest that her aversion to sentimentality was synonymous with being cold or cold-hearted; on the contrary, expressions of love and affection by my grandmother were made all the more palpable and powerful because they were situated in such an unsentimental and sensible frame.

         In 1994, I was 13 years old and had been cast in a production of an opera by another German émigré, Kurt Weill. This production was to take place in Ludwigshafen, Germany, and it was my grandmother who offered to accompany me on this journey and to act as my guardian. She was of course selfless beyond belief throughout the half dozen weeks that we spent there; when I came down with chicken pox and was quarantined to my hotel room for a week, she would walk what must have been two miles most nights to Angelo’s, the Italian restaurant I’d fallen in love with, in order to bring me dinner. We played game after game of scrabble, and I was fortified by generous plates of breakfast food that she would bring up from the lavish hotel buffet.

         But there was much greater significance to that trip for my grandmother. Lore, as many of you know, left Germany in 1939 escaping first to Cuba, then to New York by way of New Orleans. My grandfather had died in 1993, and our voyage to Germany represented my grandmother’s first visit to Germany since she had been essentially ripped from her home at the age of 17.

Her marriage to my grandfather was anything but simple, and his death witnessed, I believe, the beginning of a lighter chapter in her life, kicked off by our time in Ludwigshafen. This was a pilgrimage for both of us, bearing significance for me at 13 in ways that I wouldn’t be able to appreciate for at least a decade, when I would begin to write music infused , often unwittingly, with the ache of the last German century. And for her it was an opportunity to begin again, to begin what I like to believe would be the happiest time of her life.

With grandma’s death, we mourn her life and her love, but we also witness the passing of our connection to the old world, a connection that I know is of great significance to many of us, in particular my father. And yet, as Tony Kushner writes, in the guise of his wondrous creation, Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz, in the opening of his play Angels in America, that connection lives in us. He writes, of the passing of the protagonist’s grandmother:

She was not a person but a whole kind of person, the ones who crossed the ocean, who brought with us to America the villages of Russia and Lithuania – and how we struggled, and how we fought, for the family, for the Jewish home, so that you would not grow up here, in this strange place, in the melting pot where nothing melted. Descendants of this immigrant woman, you do not grow up in America, you and your children and their children with the goyische names. You do not live in America. No such place exists. Your clay is the clay of some Litvak shtetl, your air the air of the steppes – because she carried the old world on her back across the ocean, in a boat, and she put it down on Grand Concourse Avenue, or in Flatbush, and she worked that earth into your bones, and you pass it to your children, this ancient, ancient culture and home.

You can never make that crossing that she made, for such Great Voyages in this world do not any more exist. But every day of your lives the miles that voyage between that place and this one you cross. Every day. You understand me? In you that journey is.

So… She was the last of the Mohicans, this one was.” 

  And yet those voyages do exist; Grandma and I made that voyage together. We were able, together, to cross the ocean and, I would like to think, look across the expanse and see what had been built on her sacrifice. She was able to see in me the fruits of that sacrifice, standing, some fifty-six years later, on the land that was once her home, and I think perhaps for the first time in fifty-six years, to breathe a sigh of relief. And even if I was unable to comprehend it at the time, I think I intuited or absorbed then the idea that this woman and this land were deeply coded in me.

    My life, the lives of my cousins and sister, and of so many children and grandchildren of émigrés— these are lives of unparalleled freedom and prosperity, lives built on the unimaginable sacrifice made by those who came before us. I feel it to be a moral imperative to honor my grandmother’s memory by squeezing every ounce out of the life that she has afforded us.

         I have no interest in sugar-coating death, yet I truly believe that this last chapter of my grandmother’s life in Northern California, nearly symmetrical in length to her childhood in Germany, was her happiest. If it was the twilight years, they were painted in rich royal blue; she was surrounded by those who loved her deeply, and was busy to the last moment with email, politics, the translation of her adolescent diaries, music, dirty jokes, talk of novels she had reread, keeping up with her grandchildren, and was to the end, most importantly, fiercely independent.

Grandma may have been unsentimental, but it did not prevent her from finding great pleasure in the song that I would like to offer now, an old WWII song, which, the first time grandma heard me play it, compelled her to ask me if I knew that they had played that song often during the Second World War when soldiers would leave the harbor for tours of Europe. She and my grandfather had loved that song, she told me, in their first years in New York: Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal’s, “I’ll Be Seeing You.”

in loving memory of Hannelore Kahane (1921-2010)