Searching for breadcrumbs
Once again, I am channelling Hansel and Gretel, trying to find my way to a forgotten story. I hope my predecessors left clues.
Follow me as I return to the Synagogue at the End of the World. I’ll be travelling to Budapest and from there, to the eastern villages near the Ukrainian border as I research a derelict synagogue and my family’s life before the war.
I used to imagine that my twin brother was Hansel and I was Gretel, and we needed to leave a trail of breadcrumbs to find our way home.
It wasn’t such a stretch. The basement in the split-level bungalow we lived in while we were young had walls printed to look like the menacing forest in the fairytale. Black and white trees stood from floor to ceiling; in the distance, a gingerbread house, with smoke billowing from a chimney. You couldn’t see a witch, but she was there, somewhere, hidden from view.
Forty years later, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m still searching for breadcrumbs as I write this memoir. I wake up before dawn every morning terrified that I’ll miss one and get lost, that I will never find my way back, that I’ll never be able to connect all the dots.
I tell myself to trust the process: that I possess the insight to spot the breadcrumbs that will lead me to the answers to my story. I must believe that I can find the trail and put it all together.
“Should ve check for crumbs?”
My grandmother is half listening in. She finds my angst-ridden moments a bore. Your life is so good, she keeps telling me, but here I am not only writing about a topic she wanted me to leave behind, the Holocaust, but questioning if I even can.
She shuffles through her kitchen and lights a candle. I can see that it’s the night before Passover wherever she is and she’s checking for crumbs, as we do every year.
“We don’t have to do that,” I struggle to say, but I know that she’s already hidden packets of chametz in foil paper throughout the apartment and is waiting for me to move her sofa. I do, as she kneels down and carefully collects the first stash.
I secretly believed she always found this exercise a bit of a joke so I’m curious why she’s still doing it in the afterlife. My grandmother was a compulsive cleaner. You could eat off her floor under her fridge. Not that she’d let you. The door to her apartment served as the great divider between the unclean and the clean. The world outside was dirty. Even as a child, I knew the extreme lengths she went to to keep order was indicative of her mental state.
But now I see that my grandmother finds the process meditative, and by finding the crumbs and burning them, she exhales, opening her home to holiness.
I stare at the tapes that sit on my desk. It would be so easy to press play and hear her voice — her live voice, not the ghostly one. Still, I can’t bring myself to do it. Later today, I’ll travel across the world, back to her village to learn what I can, rather than force myself to do something this simple.
“Vy do you make your life so hard?” she asks.
I shrug. Taking the most difficult route has always been my way.
For example, I managed to watch an interview with her cousin, Jolan Klein, conducted for the Shoah Foundation. It was recorded around the same time I interviewed my grandmother. I watch the interview in 3-5 minute bursts so the 40 minutes has taken me almost 8 months. Jolan grew up with my grandmother in Beregdaroc. They were deported to the ghetto together, and survived Auschwitz, together.
Last week, I heard Jolan describe the day before the deportation to the ghetto in Beregszasz (formerly Hungary, now Ukraine.)
“It was Passover. We didn’t even start baking the bread (matza) when there was a knock on the door and one of our neighbours said (to my father) ‘Mr. Grun, I think you should know that tomorrow the Jewish people in the village would be put together at city hall and they will take you somewhere. We don’t know where.’”
I imagine Jolan, like my grandmother, would have just finished looking for breadcrumbs before they were summoned to the building I stood outside just last year. The one I’ll stand outside again this week. I don’t know what breadcrumbs I will find there, but somehow, I’ll find them.
My grandmother moves around in her ghostly apartment inspecting under the ornate liquor cabinet and drawers. It’s getting late.
“What if we don’t find all the packets,” I ask her, concerned that some planted chametz will survive into the holy days.
“Ve vill, my love. Ve will.”
Don’t forget to follow me next week as I return to the Synagogue at the End of the World. Subscribe and share the love.
Other pieces in the Synagogue at the End of the World Series:
Haunting & beautiful, Leah
This is so beautifully written—the connection between the Passover breadcrumbs and your search. Priceless.