The Replacements
My twin and I were the promise of a new life. Unfortunately, the old world kept coming back to haunt me.
(This section is part of my memoir in progress, that for now I’m dubbing The Synagogue at the End of the World. It follows my research into my grandmother’s story, the legacy of the Holocaust on descendants and what it will mean for the next generation.)
“I never really wanted kids,” my mother told me when I was young. “I only did it for your grandmother.”
That line wounded me at the time but over the years, I’ve softened my position. Relationships operated differently in the chaotic apartment building we all lived in when I was growing up, a shtelt we recreated in a mid-town Toronto high rise on the outskirts of government housing. It was a unique mix of broken English, Hungarian, Slovak, Yiddish and hand gestures. Food was its own language. As a child, I thought we lived in a microcosm of the larger world. I learned later we were living in the shadow of an extinct one.
Three generations of family members lived at 3636, the apartment building’s address and the name we called it. Even the number appeared holy, 36 being a lucky number in Judaism. It was as if my family picked this apartment to avoid future disasters.
The older generation, including my grandparents on both sides as well as a great aunt and her husband, were all Holocaust survivors. They treated groceries and dried goods as if were still wartime and items were scarce. Nothing was ever wasted. Every plastic bag was cleaned and re-used (a habit I keep until this day).
The middle generation were refugees, my mother from Hungary in 1956 when she was just a child and my father from the former Czechoslovakia in 1968, when he was already in his 20s.
I used to joke (with myself because who else would get it?) that two Soviet invasions brought my parents together in Toronto, as if their story were one of the Harlequin romances my mother used to devour. But there was little romance in our home, there was no time. I never saw them kiss, except as a joke; I never heard them say I love you.
I imagined, like other immigrant families, all their energies were deployed on “getting ahead.” I never knew exactly what that meant, but I suspected it meant things like owning your home and going on vacations that didn’t include tents. Even with more money, I didn’t know how we would ever fit in, their accents and jarring turns-of-phrase threatening to unmask them as refugees at anytime.
One of my favourite sayings that my dad often repeated went something like this:
“When they (people) give (something), take. When they (people) beat you, run.”
I wondered if the axiom made more sense in Slovak. Still, I could never get it out of my head and as I grew older, I realized its wisdom. So many people don’t take the gifts they were given and many more don’t know how to run away from pain. I’m not sure I know how.
The younger generations was us, the kids. Miracles, all of us, with names piled on high to commemorate those that were lost. We were the replacements, evidence that life goes on but scrutinized for signs of the past. My grandmother called me her “gift” and it made being a replacement more palatable. Who doesn’t want to be a gift?
Luckily, I had my twin, a co-conspirator who could see both worlds with me — our almost shtetl and the new one we tried to enter. Or so I hoped.
As kids, we’d make forts with the furniture in the basement of the split-level home we eventually moved to in the north end of the city, the room wallpapered to look like a forest. We were Hansel and Gretel, fighting an invisible witch. I though of that wallpaper as I spotted my brother recently at a gravesite, after a close family member died. I tried to recall that feeling I had where I vowed to protect him at any cost, but I couldn’t summon it as we both returned to our cars to drive away.
It’s been three years since we last spoke and I wonder if we will ever speak again.
Over the last three years, I’ve thought a lot about why we don’t speak. I’ve read up on twin alienation and even wrote about it. I’ve thought about how we were raised by traumatized parents and grandparents. I wonder if all the worry we had for each other over the years simply turned into resentment.
At six, my brother would wake up in his room crying, concerned about how he’ll need to support me when I’m older. Then at nine, when a stranger approached my brother, asking if he’d trade me for a chocolate bar, I looked on in distress as he mulled the offer.
Admittedly, I loved and hated him, too. He was a sickly kid, often picked on, and I worried about him incessantly. I did his homework then broke his trophies; gave him my dinner, then pushed him down the stairs.
Even when we grew up, found partners, and each had our own kids, I still believed in our specialness. I secretly kept his name on my company insurance policy. His number was my emergency contact.
But our fights as adults were shocking to outsiders and every time we argued I couldn’t shake the feeling that my need for oxygen was getting in his way. I didn’t recognize who he had become. His voice changed into someone perpetually angry, he swore a lot. He became someone without a past, another white guy in a Tesla.
In retrospect, I wonder if my assumption about both of us being replacements was wrong. If my mother wasn’t saying that she had me for my grandmother. I was the replacement. He was encouraged to move forward, be that third generation that forgets his past while I’m stuck remembering it for everyone. I’m not complaining, I do go to bed in my lovely home near the Annex, but in those few moments when I wake up early (like my grandmother always did) part of me is still there, at 3636. I represent something he wants to forget. And I can’t forget.
Not long after that day at the gravesite, I received a text. “Look, life’s too short. Don’t you think we should end this?” I haven’t replied but part of me wonders how it feels for him to be free of me, and our history. Do any of our old stories still haunt him?
Maybe one day I’ll ask him and find out.
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The Village at the End of the World
Loved this. Looking forward to reading the whole memoir when it's ready.
The line between personal memory and inherited trauma is razor-thin here, and you walk it with such clarity and care. “We were the replacements” — yes. That strange pressure to justify existence by continuing what was interrupted. That haunting need to remember for others, even when no one asked us to. You’ve named something that so many descendants of survivors feel but rarely articulate.
Your twin’s transformation — from shared childhood mythology to estrangement — is gutting. But so real. And your restraint in the telling makes it even more powerful.
You’ve written something sacred here. And I’ll be thinking about 3636 — as both a place and a metaphor — for a long time.
Thank you.
—Anton
Permission to be Powerful