Much later, I would try to give my students a sense of the connectedness of past and present, pointing out that my own grandparents, their generation, born a year before the American Civil War, were grandchildren to the Romantics, and children to the Victorians. Through these grandparents, whom I never knew, but can see gazing out over the railing on their imagined porch, I've been given the sense that I am part of a process for which I can have no memories and no sensations but which comes to me nevertheless as palabably as memory itself, and is as poignant as sensation.
I know little about my grandparents, almost nothing about my grandmother. I know that my grandfather loved Caruso whom he listened to on an early phonograph that played cylinders, that he was a tailor who made the first copies of dresses for designers in New York, that during the Depression he lost all his money, that he had a large work-table in the basement where my mother learned to be a consummate seamstress, and that he was mild-mannered. Of my grandmother I have no memories except one that my father has given me of his first meeting with her: she is sitting on the front porch of her house, an elderly lady; my father has come to New Jersey looking for a cousin, and when he asks if she knows the cousin, she replies in Yiddish, she doesn't but he should come back after 5 p.m. because in this house there are pretty girls. She is playful but serious, a mother with three unmarried daughters.
But I do have this one photograph of my grandmother taken shortly before she died, while for my grandfather, I have my mother's description of the beard like a Kentucky Colonel but no graven images. But these other images of my grandparents, the stories told to me, are engraved in my memory nevertheless, as though they were my own. In the old faculty psychology of the middle ages and Renaissance, memory is simply a respository for images formed in the imagination. And clearly this is true, true to our experience, for what I have been given to imagine, these have become my memories, and like all memories they are without edges or borders, those very things that art has always struggled to achieve-- to create a frame, a proscenium, a beginning and an end. Uncritical belief in the success of this effort, that, I like to think, is what the God of my grandparents felt it necessary to warn us about, though his injunction is so all-encompassing that just thinking about it leaves me feeling bereft and abandoned.