Textual Healing

My maternal grandmother, Stefanie Zimmermann, would have turned 100 today. Born into an affluent Jewish family on the day after Christmas in 1922 in Bucharest, Romania, she experienced a world war, the Holocaust, rabid anti-semitism, the loss of family property and wealth, two marriages, eastern bloc communism, motherhood, and two immigrations, all before the age of 45. 

She was a professional dancer and a teacher, a wife, a mother, a sister, a daughter, a fiercely devoted and loyal friend, a lover of ice skating and laughter, a voracious eater, a speaker of three or four languages. She was also a talented seamstress, knitter, and crocheter; an avid, gleeful driver; one of the sole fans of the ill-fated 1980s culinary horror that was the McDonald’s McRib sandwich; and a serviceable but surprisingly unremarkable cook where the main meal was concerned but the best maker of soups and salads I have ever known.

She had a deep appreciation for dramatic style, and because she loved a bargain even more than high fashion, if you complimented what she was wearing, rather than saying “thank you,” her first response was to name the designer and then the miniscule price at which she had managed to score the item at the flea market. 

PHOTO CAPTION: My grandmother in her youth, demonstrating something dance-related, circa 1940–44. She practiced and choreographed modern dance, but like all dancers in Eastern Europe of her generation, her early training was based in classical Russian ballet. That foundational knowledge and experience, despite her lack of paperwork documenting her qualifications when our family arrived in the U.S. in 1963, is what eventually garnered her a job teaching dance in New York City. My grandmother spent over two decades teaching at the High School of Performing Arts. colloquially known as “PA,” before she retired from teaching altogether in 1988. For most of that time, PA was located on West 46th Street near Times Square, in a building that today houses the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis High School. In 1984, PA formally merged with its sister school, the High School of Music & Art (known as “M & A”), and then became Fiorello La Guardia, with both schools moving into one new Lincoln Center building. Together, PA and M & A were “the Fame school,” the inspirations for the 1980 film and the 1980s TV series of the same name. While film director Alan Parker was doing early research for the movie, he ended up casting a handful of real-life PA and M & A teachers, including my grandmother and her friend and colleague Penny. According to my grandmother, she got a speaking part in Fame, unlike Penny, because she knew French and could approximate a French/European accent while barking orders to dance students. So in addition to being one of the teachers next to Debbie Allen in the famous Leroy Johnson dance audition scene—she’s the one with the owl glasses and The Look I described above in the photo opening this essay—she got a few scripted lines embedded within a dance studio rehearsal scene, this time without her glasses: She commands her dancers to practice with “More en-ehr-geeeee!” and then murmurs, “much, much better” once her ballet students have added the demanded verve to their steps. I’m estimating based on her haircut that she’s somewhere between 18 and 22 in the photo above. Hard to fathom that this lithe dancer’s body was only 5 feet tall. Photographer unknown.

PHOTO CAPTION: I’m guessing that my grandmother is in her early to mid-20s in this photo. That places her in late 1940s Romania, and she has not yet met my grandfather, who she met after the war. I have no idea who the dashing man to her right is. He could be a friend; a boyfriend; or even her first husband, whose existence she tried to keep secret from me and almost everyone else in her later adult life. The confirmed identity of the mystery man is lost to the winds of time, amidst the piles of unmarked, undated B&W family photos from the 1930s through the early 1970s. My knowledge of the first husband’s existence came sometime when I was a teenager, living with my grandmother after my grandfather had died. We had been talking about my love life, some friction with one boyfriend of mine or another. She was giving me love advice, and as we were chatting, I did the arithmetic in my head and realized that she had already been in her late 20s when she and my grandfather found one another. Old enough for her to have had a romantic and sexual past that predated her marriage to him. I pressed her about it, and she relented: Of course, she’d had boyfriends and sex before meeting my grandfather. When I nudged her again, she admitted to having been engaged to another man when she was younger. She refused to say much more about him, except that he was crazy. I later found out from my mother that “crazy” meant that he had died by suicide, while they were married. Apart from this one conversation, my grandmother never mentioned him to me, she never acknowledged the first marriage, and I never knew her first husband’s name. I had always suspected that, despite Bema’s gregarious, candid personality and dramatic, even explosive manner of expression, she housed many secrets. This conversation about her life before the small family she built with my grandfather was the first confirmation that I was right. Photographer unknown.

PHOTO CAPTIONS: Left: Bucharest, Romania, 1951. My grandmother holding my mother. Right: My grandmother, circa late 1950s, perhaps early 1960s, which means it could be Bucharest or Israel. Because my grandparents and my mom lived in a tiny beach shack in Herzliya from 1961 to 1963, and this backdrop doesn’t resemble that arid Israeli landscape, I’m guessing the photo dates earlier, still in Romania. I don’t have any context for the photo, except that the intense expression captures so much about who my grandmother was all her life, including the 22 years I knew her. Photo credits: George E. Zimmermann.

PHOTO CAPTION: My grandmother and my mother, Bucharest, Romania, circa 1954.

PHOTO CAPTION: Ocean Parkway, The Bronx, circa 1965, from left: my mom at 14, my grandmother at 43, and my grandfather at 46. My mind can’t quite fathom that both my grandparents are younger than I am now in this image. My grandfather was a filmmaker and a photographer. Consequently, even the most casual family snapshots have an element of artistic composition to them, whether they were constructed and posed or were the product of a patient, meticulous eye waiting for the right moment to click the shutter. Because my grandfather was the director of our visual family history, its curator and documentarian, few family group photos include him because he was almost always behind the camera. Photographer unknown.

PHOTO CAPTION: My grandmother in NewYork City, circa 1968. “Do you see this Givenchy blouse? FIFTY cents!” Photo credit: George E. Zimmermann.

And yes, my grandmother was just that—a grandparent, a word that doesn’t begin to encompass who she was to me. I called her Bema and my grandfather Bempa, pronounced “bee-mah” and “beem-pah,” respectively, my early childhood garble of Grandma and Grandpa. While I was growing up in upper Washington Heights, they lived less than 10 minutes away, and they were also both teachers who had the summers off. So I saw them at least once a week all year round, and in June and July and August, I traveled with them when they went off on their summer adventures. To the Berkshires; to Lake Winnepesaukee and Squam Lake near Laconia, New Hampshire; to Israel; to Portugal, Spain, and through the Pyrénées into the south of France on their last big trip to Europe.

Bempa died in bed of a heart attack on a Tuesday night in late February 1987. He was 69. Shortly after, my parents and brother moved to the Boston suburbs, and I moved in with Bema, living with her in her two-family house in Inwood so I could finish high school in New York City. I was a moody teenager, and she was a grieving widow with severe asthma that had forced her into retirement. She had energy to burn with too few places to put it, and I was as fierce in my sense of independence as she was in her attentiveness. We fought a lot, especially that first year of living together, and nearly killed each other on more than one occasion. Living in the same house for three years, just the two of us, came with its own intimacies and discoveries, the daily mundane habits and idiosyncrasies, individual and interpersonal, that no one else sees. 

Bema died in April 1995, after fighting her second bout of cancer for nearly three years, more than twice as long as the survival prognosis she’d been given. She had turned 72 the December before she died, 24 days after I turned 22. That is only a year older than my mother is now. Medical progress in the decades since has been rapid and extensive enough that today, we’d say Bema died young. At the time, however, that life span seemed neither short nor lengthy.

PHOTO CAPTION: Bema and me, in her living room in Inwood, New York City, circa 1977. This Polaroid must have been taken shortly after she and my grandfather bought this two-family house and left their rented apartment at 31 Nagle Avenue, next door to 25 Nagle Avenue, where my mother and I lived until I was four years old. The Inwood house is located on the only street in Manhattan that has free-standing houses, mostly two-family residences, rather than either the six-story pre-war apartment buildings than dominated the neighborhood or the three- or four-story brownstones that dotted more affluent neighborhoods farther downtown. After they bought the Inwood house, my grandparents lived upstairs, renting the downstairs apartment and two of the three parking places behind the house to tenants. The basement housed the washer-dryer and my grandfather’s self-constructed photography darkroom. The attic, my favorite childhood hideout, and later where I perched myself as a teen, hanging out the tiny window to smoke cigarettes, was used for storage, mostly art and old books. I lived in that house with my grandmother for most of high school in the late 1980s after my grandfather died. After I graduated from college, my grandmother was without a tenant, and she was also sick with her second bout of cancer, so I rented the downstairs apartment in November 1994 and moved in with a roommate. I was living there when Bema died in April 1995, and I remained in that space until I moved to Brooklyn in November 1997. My mother rented out both apartments for the three years that followed, until she and my dad returned to New York in 2001, after nearly 15 years in the Boston area; at that point, they took up residence upstairs, where they remain today, again continuing to rent the lower floor to tenants. So three generations of the family have now resided in that house over the course of 45 years, just not in chronological order. Photo credit: George E. Zimmermann.

PHOTO CAPTION: My grandmother in what looks to be a dark moment of contemplation in the living room of the Inwood house. The furniture and my grandmother’s appearance place the date of the photo anywhere between 1977 and 1981. It’s impossible to know one way or the other, but perhaps because of the stony gravity of Bema’s expression here, I suspect the image was snapped in 1980 or 1981, after she’d survived the mastectomy, and after my grandfather had survived his first heart attack, pulling through the quadruple bypass surgery that saved and extended his life for another seven years. Photo credit: George E. Zimmermann.

PHOTO CAPTION: Me and Bema in summertime, circa 1978. Possibly Orchard Beach or City Island. I am six, she is 56. She has dragged her knitting to the beach, and I have brought along my beloved Snoopy stuffed animal. She has not yet had breast cancer. I haven’t yet broken my nose for the first time. I am still an only child and will remain one until March 1980. Her older brother Nelu has been dead for a number of years, another family death by suicide, and she has been estranged from her younger sister Puica, who lived in Brazil with her husband Max, for even longer than that. She has recently acquired one of several pairs of gigantic, round glasses that will dominate her face for most of the 1980s. I don’t yet need eyeglasses for nearsightedness—my long-standing identity as a Girl With Glasses emerges about a year later, when I fail a math test off the blackboard at school for the first and only time because I keep mistaking 4s, 7s, and 9s for one another. Photo credit: George E. Zimmermann.

PHOTO CAPTION: My brother Jacob, me, and Bema, North Truro, Massachusetts, Summer 1991. Jacob is 11, I am 18, and Bema is 68. Photo credit: Tom Okada.

Upon closer examination, it’s clear Bema had been cheating death nearly my entire life. In 1979, she had fought breast cancer for the first time. Her predicted chances at survival were very low, and she spent part of that December at Mount Sinai Hospital, getting a mastectomy. By all accounts she was supposed to have died then, the month I turned 7 and she turned 57, when my mother was 28 and 6 months pregnant with my brother. We got another 15 years and 4 months together, 13 of them during which Bema was cancer-free and mostly healthy.

PHOTO CAPTION: Me and Bema, Carleton College graduation, Northfield, Minnesota, June 1994. Graduation snapshots are special milestones in families for many common reasons. I was a first-generation college graduate on that side of my family, and that alone made the occasion momentous—but the true emotional current powering this photo is the miracle of its existence. During the previous spring in 1993, at the end of my junior year at Carleton, my deepest wish during that stressful finals week was not about grades or classes. It was about racing through my exams so I could fly home to see Bema once more. Her health had been in a rapid downward spiral throughout April, May, and June, with her life hanging by a thread. She was supposed to die; the doctors had more or less said her body could give out at any moment. The panic that inhabited my body that spring, like a flu I couldn’t shake, wasn’t that that dire physicians’ prediction would come to pass, but rather that it would happen before I could get home to say goodbye. Bema survived that spring, and I came home. By the time of my graduation a year later, Bema’s health remained precarious. My mother had to convince her to risk making the journey from the East Coast to Minnesota. She did, and though the trip took a hard, physical toll on her, she was alive to witness this rite of passage, a gateway into my adulthood, and celebrate with me. Photo credit: Tom Okada.

Still, Bema remained very much herself, even when her body betrayed her again in the early 1990s, succumbing to cancer for the second time, bit by bit. In sickness and in health, she loved to drive—and drive she did. Like a New York cabbie, including an over-reliance on the horn and a rapid-fire stream of expletives in multiple languages. We knew the cancer was taking its toll on her when she asked my father to accompany her during the 192-mile ride from New York City to the Boston suburb where he and my mom lived. He was even more surprised that she asked him to take the wheel for the bulk of Connecticut, with no comment on his speed or on the misguided choices of others cruising the interstate that day. She had him return to the shotgun seat after they crossed the Massachusetts state line. Somewhere along the Mass Pike, amidst the sea of chronic tailgaters and other proud Massholes, a sedan cut her off, and her righteous cabbie self re-emerged. I can still picture her as my dad described it, leaning in toward the dash as though to compensate for her short stature, her right hand gripping the wheel, her left hand clenched and gesticulating in the air with righteous indignation, as she shouted, to no one, to everyone, “Fuck you today, tomorrow—and the rest of your life!”

Bema has now been gone more than half my life, a passage of time that’s incongruous with her impact and influence, including her steady, continued presence in my day-to-day existence, not only her memory but also her unmistakable voice. I think of her, hear her, feel her, all the time, which only seems notable when I recall she has been a physical absence for close to 28 years. She lived to see only the merest glimpses of my adulthood, meeting almost none of the people who make up my grown-up chosen family, including my partner—and yet few individuals have had as big an effect on shaping me, my choices, and who I have become. Even now, the ripple of her life extends over the ripple of mine, its tide and currents fanning outward, like an open, expanding universe populated by stars whose starlight still reaches us even though they themselves have been long dead.

PHOTO CAPTION: Me and Bema, Fort Tryon Park, New York City, circa 1975–76. Photo credit: George E. Zimmermann.

Because my grandfather was a professional photographer, as is my father, we don’t lack for images of the family’s history, however slippery and elusive the accompanying narrative might be. My brother and I are blessed with a treasure trove of family photographs, far more than most immigrant families, including many that depict moments of the lives our kin led in the old country. Of the hundreds of photographic images I have seen of Bema, spanning more than a half-century of a lived life, this playground photograph from my early childhood may be the one that means the most to me. At first glance, it looks like and is a portrait of me. Bema is off to one side and out of focus. Only a family member would be able to recognize it’s her. I’m young and small, too little to be able to achieve that high, much-desired level of swing height on my own, so she must be the one pushing me, with enough force that the swooshing pendulum of my upswing defies gravity and lifts me an inch out of my metal swing seat, my body almost but not quite airborne, approximating flight as I imagine it to be.

I was a serious and private child. While my moments of delight and joy were as plentiful and intense as my fears and sorrows, it was rare for a photograph to capture this gleeful side of me unfettered. Something akin to what people mean when they say “the innocence of childhood,” a phrase I never understood because I didn’t have much familiarity with the carefree state it attempts to describe. In that regard, this portrait of me is a rarity. My exuberance on the playground swings is unrestrained. As far as the camera lens knows, I haven’t experienced even a millisecond of sadness, loneliness, anxiety, outrage, confusion, or fright.

The reason I regard it as a portrait of Bema as well as one of me: Despite the blurriness of Bema’s entire figure, the one detail the viewer can glean is that her expression mirrors mine. Her delight at my delight. Her pleasure at my pleasure. The unconditionality of her attention on and her devotion to me.

No one photograph can capture every aspect of a complicated relationship between two people who love each other, and this one is no different in its limitations. It does not and cannot say everything about who we were to one another. Bema was complex, which meant she was many things to different people—passionate, generous, and witty, and also manipulative, secretive, and possessive, sometimes all at once. Similar paradoxes could be observed about me. As a teenager and then an adult, I came to know Bema didn’t or couldn’t always do the right thing. Moreover, when she did do the right thing, as she did often, she didn’t always do it solely for the right reasons. I was the beneficiary of many of Bema’s choices from that latter category. Her motives where I was concerned were often a murky and seductive elixir—authentic wishes for whatever electric dreams and brightly colored doors would most enrich my life and ensure my happiness, but also spiked with equally deep dashes of competitiveness with and aggressive jabs at my mother. One of the most peculiar pieces of knowledge I carry is the certainty that her sketchy motivations didn’t dilute the positive effects of the countless decisions Bema made on my behalf—to support me and cultivate my joy and a happy future full of possibility—even one iota. Children thrive when the adults in their lives center their decisions on their growth, full stop. The impulses underlying those decisions, noble, ulterior, or otherwise, are irrelevant from the child’s perspective.

The best of how Bema’s love nourished me is on its fullest display in this mid-1970s playground, like a flourish of blossoming peonies in May. The photo shows, in an instant and without question, that for the 22 years she was part of my life, Bema was my grandmother, my third and fourth parent, my anchoring planet in a swirling and volatile solar system, my confidante, my playmate, and above all, my fiercest protector.

A dear friend asked me earlier today if I felt very sad. In the early 2000s, on 14th Street off Seventh Avenue, there used to be a tiny kiosk junk store, one of a million near-identical New York City storefronts that hawked the same goods those places still sell, for cash only. Cheap sunglasses, batteries, umbrellas, winter hats and scarves, earphones, silver hoop earrings. The only memorable detail about the one on West 14th Street was the store name on the soot-stained and tattered yellow awning above it, a legacy of the previous business: Funny Cry Happy Gift. No punctuation between any of the words.

That’s how I feel today.

—December 26, 2022, Brooklyn, New York