We Find Each Other

A poignant melody line in Anne Michaels' "Fugitive Pieces" weeps through the novel, appearing again and again like a strain from the Moonlight Sonata. The young protagonist lives his life with a recurring tender memory, his sister Bella's fingers as she played the Moonlight Sonata. As a child, he had hidden in a closet and watched the Nazi's kill his parents and carry off his sister Bella. Did she survive? Would he ever find her again? He lives this question into his adulthood. The novel ends and we never find out. The game of Jewish Geography, that enchants and compels us all, is our search for Bella: the sister that may or may not have survived, the relatives we never reconnected with, when one branch of the family went to Toronto, one branch to Uruguay, one to Israel, and the rest hid in forests or were sheltered by The Righteous of the Nations. (We say Righteous Gentiles in English, but the Hebrew expression is this, Chassiday Umot HaOlam, the righteous of the nations. We are now on facebook with the family that sheltered our relatives during the war.) This past Sunday we had a delightful visit with the always inspiring Frania Goldhar, who survived Auschwitz and and then raised lambs in Yokneam, Israel. She still lives today on the same land where she first settled in 1948. We were having one of those familiar conversations about all the crazy coincidental meetings of people who turn out to be long lost relatives. In our family we have an incredible talent for finding each other, or a recurrent streak of improbable luck, or a heaping spoonful of morphic resonance. I commented that I think we have a sense that detects relatives. "A nose", my cousin Yossi clarified. Much later, over dessert, lovely 88 year old Frania was talking about the 300 sheep they were raising. All of the ewes gave birth at the same time, and when they would come back from pasture to their baby lambs, each mother found her own baby. Frania remembered marvelling at the mothers' ability to find their own babies. Suddenly we all saw the connection. We do find family. It is a sense, like so many, that we cover over with intellect, but never lose. *************************************************************************************