You Whispered through Your Death Certificate

by Barbara Krasner (Somerset, NJ)

You might have been coughing up a storm from your pneumonia. Nobody knew that you were ninety-seven. You’d been lying about your age for years. Why should the census enumerators know the truth? Was it their business? No. This doctor attended you for more than a week. His office was at 200 Fairmount and you were living with Bessie and her Adele at 240 Fairmount along South Orange Ave. He was not a Jewish doctor, but he was convenient, and maybe all the neighborhood went to him. It’s likely Meyer came from the Oranges and Max, your Mendel, came from across the river to see you. They probably visited every day. How did you get to live so long, more than twenty years beyond Mottel? You might have been in bed, immobile, for quite some time, because my research says your hypostatic pneumonia afflicts those who are elderly and bedridden. You must have known your end was coming.

Your death certificate says a contributing factor was senility. You’d earned your right to that after emigrating at sixty, three of four daughters predeceasing you, one other child you never talked about other than telling an enumerator you were the mother of seven but we only know about six: Doba, Malka, Hillel Meyer, Chaike, Mendel, and Hesia. 

What secrets, I wonder, were caught up in your phlegm. Did anyone notice Bessie was never pregnant and then one day showed up with a red-haired daughter? You loved that little girl as if she were gripped from the loins of your own daughter. Maybe because she was needed. Maybe because you all thought Bessie’s marriage might improve with a baby, that Paul wouldn’t drink so much. I cannot imagine the other secrets, but there must have been plenty. Anyone who could keep the sheitl tradition as long as you did is a good candidate for confidences and secret-keeping. I only wish your mother’s maiden name was here. When Meyer served as informant, I’m sure he wasn’t thinking about making the family history complete on this document. After all, he knew Michla. And did his grandmother’s maiden name matter? It does to me. Because what Meyer took for granted no longer has documented proof.

Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a PhD in Holocaust & Genocide Studies (HGS) from Gratz College, where she teaches in the HGS graduate programs. The author of two poetry chapbooks and three novels in verse, her work has appeared in Jewish Literary Journal, Tiferet, Minyan, Jewishfiction.net, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She serves as Director, Mercer County (NJ) Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Education Center.