The Chimneys in New Jersey

My mother called to tell me that Esther Blitzer died yesterday, on the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. We ran into her when I was eight at the Galaxy Diner in the Catskills, and it was years before I found out she had buried my grandmother's first daughter in the garden behind the ghetto hospital. My grandmother was a nurse there, Esther was a midwife, and they had both seen the transport women throwing their babies through the bars of cattle car windows. Later, Esther rolled my seventy-pound grandmother from the gates of Auschwitz in a wheelbarrow, because she was too weak to run from the Russian soldiers who were raping any women they could find. How could they have greeted each other so normally over rolls and macaroni salad? Some stories are not mine for the telling. Some stories are not humming and breaking with light. They're about chewing with my mouth open, something caught in my teeth. They're about my grandmother harassing the waitress too loudly for more water, then transferring the artificial sweetener from the table to her purse.

My mother said that at the funeral there were chimneys behind the Rabbi's head while he gave the eulogy. I can't think of the word, she said. The chimneys—you know. Industrial. You mean smokestacks? I said. Right, she said. It was like a poem—bitter cold out and the smokestacks in New Jersey like Auschwitz. Esther was ninety, was history scattered like so much heartwrench and bone. My grandmother is ninety-two, and when she tells me to get married already so I can dance on your wedding, her w's sound like v's. A Jewish wedding is like dancing on Hitler's grave. She tells me about the card-game regular who was taken to the hospital. No one can say for what, but the poker game broke up and this week my grandmother watches CNN alone in her living room. When I call there's always a moment when she has to get up and turn it down—the receiver clicking on a table, the blare of someone else's disaster, the shuffle and slap of her house slippers across shag carpet and back before she picks up again to say, Yest, darling.