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| The Appearance of the Artist's Family by Marc Chagall |
"Mama, why do I have to pull my ear when I sneeze?”
“It’s to protect you from you from something bad happening! That’s why I always say ‘tzu langehmazaldikker yohrn,’ which means ‘to long, lucky years’ every time someone sneezes.
When Ann was growing up in Long Island in the 1950s and 60s, her mother was very superstitious. Both her mother’s parents were Askenazi Jews who immigrated to the U.S. from the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement, and they had many traditional beliefs that they passed on to Ann’s mother. So even before she heard the story of how her grandfather died, Ann was haunted by the story of grandmother, Anna.
"Mama, who is that lady in that picture?
"That’s your other bubbe—your father’s mother. Her name was Anna, like your name Ann. You were named after her. And you both have the same Hebrew name, Chana."
“But if she’s my bubbe, how come I don’t know her?”
“Well, she passed away when she was only thirty, which was a long time ago. Daddy was still a child then, so that’s why you never even met her.”
The portrait of her grandmother was in the dining room, and it was so big that her grandma in the portrait was the same size as a real person. And the picture was so lifelike! Her family called it a “painting,” but really it looked like a black and white photograph with only some parts of it in beautiful colors. So, it was almost like her grandmother was still there—still a part of the family even though she died when Ann’s father was only eight.
And as Ann grew older, the family began to say that Ann was the “spitting image” of her grandmother Anna, not just because she, too, was small with blond hair, but also, as they could say, “you have the same face.” Ann’s father would frequently sigh, saying how much Ann resembled his mother, especially when she was dressed up for family events like weddings and bar mitzvahs.
While that might have seemed like a compliment—her grandmother looked lovely in the portrait, in her beautiful silk dress with a pearl necklace and jet earrings—hearing that she physically resembled her grandmother made Ann feel cursed. She feared that sharing both her grandmother’s name and her features would mean that she, too, would share her tragic fate. And the presence of the grandmother’s portrait in the dining room made sure Ann never forgot what might be awaiting her. It was like her grandmother became a ghost who haunted their whole house even though she never left the dining room.
There was more tragedy in her grandmother’s life than just dying when she was so young, Ann learned. When Anna was only eight and living with her parents in the old country, she was walking in her village with her father, holding his hand, when a group of strangers surged through the streets on a mission to kill Jews and destroy their property. And Anna watched as one of the strangers killed her father with a bayonet. Later, when she was only 15, Anna had to leave the rest of her family behind when her Uncle Charlie—her mother’s brother—brought her to the U.S. to live with him. She then married Louis, Ann’s grandfather, when she was only 20, only to die of cancer while she was still young.
For the whole family, those terrible, sad stories about Anna were like those small grey clouds that follow sad cartoon characters, raining on them wherever they went, even on days that were beautiful and sunny for everyone else. Her parents taught Ann and her two brothers to distrust everyone outside of the family—because you never really knew. And they reacted to news of any kind, good or bad, with an unrelenting pessimism, saying “A mensch tract un Got lacht” (Man plans and God laughs). But it was even worse for Ann because her grandmother’s story—the one she had been named after and who everyone said she resembled—felt like a noose around her neck. So, whenever Ann was reminded of her grandmother, she would recite a silent prayer:
"Please let me live past thirty, please let me live past thirty, please let me live past thirty.”
And every year on her birthday, she would count the years left until her 31st because she believed if she could make it past 30, she would be safe from the curse of being named after Anna.
When Ann became a teenager, her mother’s superstitions started weighing on her.
"Mom, do you really believe that saying ‘pu pu pu’ when something bad happens will ward off the evil eye?”
“What’s the problem with spitting after something bad has happened?” her mother laughed. “Who knows, it might help—if not, no harm done.”
The superstitions did feel harmful to Ann, though, especially the one where if you left home and realized you had forgotten something, you couldn’t go back for it because if you did, something bad would surely happen. She tried her best to ignore this irrational belief, and when she realized she had forgotten something, she would go back to get it. But for days afterward she would be filled with feelings of dread that were very hard to shake.
Around this time, Ann’s father told her how his father, Louis, had died. According to the family lore, a couple of years after Anna died, Louis had been thinking about marrying again. He had a distant cousin who was a widow with a son the same age as Ann’s father, Ted, and Louis thought a marriage of convenience would be beneficial for all of them. But Anna’s Uncle Charlie was very much against this marriage because it seemed to him that it was still too soon after his niece had died for Louis to be thinking of marrying again. Then Uncle Charlie had a dream in which Anna came to him and told him not to worry because she had come with prophecy:
“There will be no wedding. Louis will be coming with me to Olam Ha-Ba.”
And that very night—or soon after—Louis had died in his sleep. This story fascinated Ann because until then she had not known that the spirit of someone who died (an ibur) could visit someone living by appearing in their dreams with prophecies or messages from beyond.
But the death of his father so soon after his mother had been devastating for Anna’s father, Ted. He had not only become an orphan by the age of 12, but the couple who took him in—his father’s sister and her husband—didn’t treat him the same way as they treated their own children. When he told Ann about it, he simply said,
“I had no family.”
Even after he was married with three children of his own, Ted never completely recovered from his grief over the death of his parents. He became obsessed with keeping his parents alive in his memory, speaking Yiddish with his wife even though they were both was born in the U.S., observing all the Jewish holidays with the traditional rituals, and displaying the life-sized portrait of his mother on the dining room wall the rest of his life. And, on his deathbed, Ted spoke of reuniting with his parents in Olam Ha-Ba, the hereafter, hoping he would fulfill the expectations that they had for their only son.
Ann eventually began to resent the dark storm clouds that continued to hang over her family’s heads. Yes, being isolated and distrustful kept the family safe, but Ann yearned for more—for freedom, for adventure, for light. So, she did her best to be more positive than the rest of her family—to trust people outside her family and to be more optimistic about the future. But try as she might, she couldn’t banish the feeling of being cursed because she shared her grandmother’s name and features.
Then, on the morning of her 31st birthday, her relief at having made it through her 30th year was so profound that she was finally able to let go of the feelings of dread that had been plaguing her as long as she could remember. Her life had turned out so differently than her grandmother’s—Ann’s family had stayed intact, she had graduated from college, she had a career as a chiropractor. So, she finally realized that having both the features and name of her grandmother was not a curse, just a strange twist of fate that brought helped her father stay connected to the mother he had lost.
She also worked on reducing other superstitious feelings that she acquired from her upbringing by using a calming mantra to counteract those negative thought patterns. When she noticed fear or dread arising after she went home for something she forgot, for example, she would recite:
“This is the legacy, but I don’t have to carry it.”
Besides her grandmother Anna, Ann another spirit in her life, that of her Rose, her other mother’s mother. Unlike Anna, Rose had been an integral part of Ann’s daily life. A very loving woman who enjoyed doting on her grandchildren, Rose taught Ann to sew, to play cards, and to cook, even instructing her in the art of making the dough and fillings for varenikis, the small fried dumplings, that Ann’s whole family loved. She also taught Ann some Yiddish, including words like chutzpah, which you needed a joke about a man who murdered his parents to understand, and schlemiel and schlimazel, which you could only learn through a story about a schlemiel spilling soup on a schlimazel. Sometimes when Rose struggled to the right words in English to convey the full meaning of the many Yiddish words she used in her everyday life, like mishigas (craziness, foolishness, wackiness), verklempt (overwhelmed with emotion), and kvetch (someone who complains habitually), she would laugh and say,
“One word doesn’t do it!”
After Rose died, it was her spirit, not Anna’s, who visited Ann in her dreams. In her dreams, Rose was her forties, the way she looked when Ann was small, with dark hair and radiant skin, and she was laughing. In her dreams, Ann would smell the comforting, homey smell of Rose’s apartment, and she would hear Rose’s distinctive voice with her strong Yiddish accent. And in her dreams, the conversations that Ann had with Rose were always good ones—no sad prophecies, just friendly visits where Rose share her loving thoughts:
“I’m so happy you inherited my favorite necklace. Trog gezunterhait—wear it in good health!”
And when Ann was pregnant with her second child, she went to bed one night hoping her grandmother Rose would visit her in her dreams. She needed Rose’s help in choosing a name for the boy. So, as she lay in bed she spoke to her grandmother, telling her that she wanted to name the boy after her but couldn’t come up with the right name. Then she fell asleep and dreamed that a voice said this:
“Take her name and change the vowel and you will have his name.”
After hearing those words, Ann suddenly awoke, instantly realizing that if she changed the “o” in Rose to “ee” she could name her son Reese. Reese is a young adult now and is happy with the story of how he got this name. You see, Ann created a new family legacy for Reese, one that was not based on sorrow. Instead, she now celebrates her heritage for its rich and colorful language, beautiful rituals, delicious and soulful cooking, and a family that you can count on to show up for you when you are celebrating, mourning, in need of help, and sometimes even in your dreams.
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