A writer asks: "Who saw my great-grandmother Frieda Polak, taken out of her house, put on a wagon, and driven to Auschwitz?"

I started out as a writer by being a listener. "Now that reminds me," my grandmother would say, "of the trip I made to come to this country."  Or: "You know how good this tastes?  Good as what my mother used to make.  She would take a little bit of dough in one hand, sprinkle a little sugar, a little cinnamon on it, and turn her head to ask: 'Who will open now the oven door?'  Who will open?  From everywhere in the house the six of us girls would come running, just to help out our dear mother!"

My grandmother's stories were magic to me when my brothers and I were growing up in suburban Cleveland during the 1950s and '60s.  A natural storyteller, Anna Weiss told stories with her hands and heart as much as with her words.  Her face was mobile, her laughter rich with self-surprise, but her silences were something else. Their power came from what they held back.  They were, all at once, the door that closed on the rest of the story.

I was the child who listened for what was not said.  When in the midst of a tale of great adventure, Nonny suddenly stilled, falling back into her own thoughts, I paid attention.  From early on, I think that I understood that behind that closed door with her was something too loud, and too enormous.  She didn't know how to pat it into workable shape.  She was not able to carry it forward to us in a matter of words.

"But what happened to your mother and your sisters back in Hungary, Nonny?  If they stayed back there after you came to America, where are they now?  What about Papa's family, they stayed at home, too, right?"

One day, she managed to give us a reply.  She raised her chin and her pale eyes held fire.  Her voice trembled with the anger of a terrible restraint: "Hitler got them."

That, and no more.

One sentence, the extent of her knowledge.

Given such silence, how could I not recall the story of Lot's Wife and try to keep her face before me?  A nameless woman, the Wife is infamous for having made a costly mistake.  As she and her family were fleeing from destruction to safety, they were warned to keep their eyes on the path lying straight ahead.  But unable to resist a parting glance the Wife stopped, casting her gaze backward.  The very instant she turned to take in the fire and darkness consuming the valley behind her, she went rigid.  The Bible tells us that she was changed, body and soul, into a pillar of salt.  I've always interpreted this to mean that the Wife was turned to a pillar of grief.  A pillar of tears.  Having glimpsed in a split-second the destruction raining down on her home and neighbors, indeed on all  she must have considered her familiar world, she could not again turn away.  Eyes open and emptying, pain and grief flowed over her.  Tears consumed her.  Locked in place, she was powerless to move forward to save herself.   Nor could she to return to a land riven by horrors and soon lost to the past.

Even children recall the story of Lot's Wife.  She remains especially vivid amid the many more illustrious figures in the Bible because her tale is cautionary in a deep, almost primal sense: if you are fleeing, you must not pause to look back.  This is  true whether you are leaving much-loved home filled with the sweetness of life, or a wicked and immoral nation where devastation claims all.

Although my grandmother when I knew her had both feet firmly planted on America, she still felt flames lashing at her heels.  She could not forget that her dear ones, unable to escape Hungary and Czechoslovakia, had been overtaken and murdered in the long, horribly lit night of the Nazis' advance.

But I, Anna Weiss's granddaughter born in 1951, had nothing to flee.  As an American and as a Jew, I was safe.  I lived at a secure remove from the earlier, mid-century terrors.  There was no need for a path of escape, nor was there a prohibition about where one might look.  If I wanted to look back at the burnt valley, it would be because I loved my grandmother, and because I, too, was bereft, cut in particular and in a wider sense from my full family.  But even if in looking back, my eyes flooded, the grief I'd feel would be checked by my own time.  Safer, in nearly every way.  For, unlike those still in flight, I did not risk being caught and going dead-still--my body, breath, and vision lost inside a Wife's silence.

I am sure Nonny understood this in some measure.   Sometimes after telling us children a story—the one where she and Papa saved enough from working in New York City's sweatshops to buy a dry goods store in Cleveland, let's say, or the one where, exhausted by a difficult labor the she first saw her newborn daughter Phyllis—our mother--wearing the big floppy ribbon the nurses had fastened in her infant dark hair, or the one where she opened the telegram, signed falsely with her mother's name, demanding money be sent to save her in Auschwitz—after finishing one of those tales, she'd lean back with a sigh. "Oh," she'd say, "if only I could write a book--!  If only I could--!"   And then she would smile and shake her head, all the while just looking at me.  That moment we shared, smiling sadly at one another in companionable silence, I stored away.  For a long time all I understood about the memory is that I treasured it.

Until one day, years later, when I was in my mid-thirties, and had written three increasingly ambitious but unpublished novels, and had gone through the struggles that come with claiming life as an adult, did I understand that with "If only" my grandmother had been granting me entrance.  More than anything in near mid-life, I wanted to open the door which had always seemed closed to me.  If only--?  But, yes, I could.  I felt ready to write the stories my grandmother couldn't tell me. They'd begun to be mine as soon as I'd leaned close, a safe little American girl needing to hear them.

In relation to the present and the past, I chose to turn.

Of course it is a myth that writers write what they know.  We write what it is that we need to know.  What keeps me sitting at my desk, hour after hour, year after year, is that I do not know something, and I must write to find my way to an understanding.  Writing is deep thinking, organized thinking.  The questions that drive me as a writer, the demands that I try to answer, are not born of some smart idea, but of a finally--and freely--acknowledged inner need.

The question that I tried to answer in what became in 1991, Tales of the Master Race, my first published novel, was this: Who saw my great-grandmother Frieda Polak, taken out of her house, put on a wagon, and driven to Auschwitz?

As my grandmother’s granddaughter, I turned and wrote.  I had to see.

_____

Marcie Hershman is the author of the novels Tales of the Master Race and Safe in America and the memoir Speak to Me: Grief, Love and What Endures; she lives near Boston and teaches writing at Tufts University.

A link via Amazon to the three books:  http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_8?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=marcie+hershman&sprefix=marcie+h%2Cstripbooks%2C166&rh=n%3A283155%2Ck%3Amarcie+hershman