+5 
By the age of 30 my mother’s father, Misha, had had four surnames, lived in six countries and spoke nine languages. By 35 he had settled in London and become British, his third nationality. He died when I was a child. I barely remember him.
§
There were many stories about Misha and his family. Not told by my mother but by my father, who loved mythologising dead members of the family. When I was young these stories were the truth. As I grew older they receded behind the veil of the horrors of mid twentieth century Europe and the toxic end to the colonisation of the middle east. Now I no longer know what is true and what is myth.
In summer 2022 I had to clear my mother’s house as she succumbed to dementia and went to live in a care home. What was left of my grandfather’s life had turned into objects to be dealt with. Some documents and photos could be kept, a few items could be sold, but most of the things were waste with no value.
§
Clearing the house became a pilgrimage into my mother’s family’s past; a Grand Tour through the inanimate. They told a different story to the ones I heard as a child.
I had few aids to navigation: a photo album; a small brown wallet containing formal documents gathered on Misha’s travels; an airmail from the US, pale blue with condolences from his oldest friend; a box of books chosen on looks and not content.
§
The photo album showed more wealth than I had imagined – how else could a large Russian/Polish Jewish family travel from St Petersburg to the spas of Europe before the first world war? And escape the Russian revolution unscathed?
I saw hope in the photos of 1920s Palestine, even a pioneer spirit, as Misha enthusiastically became part of British Mandatory Palestine and the end of the Ottoman Empire.
But in the end there was only disappointment, and even fear, etched on the faces of my grandparents, and my child mother, as they navigated life in London as World War Two approached.
§
[Cultivation]
Language was given to us to conceal our thoughts
so what is the use of history?
Begin, at the beginning
and, at the end, stop.
§
I thought about finding Misha by navigating to the places in the photo album.
Pinsk | Bad Kolberg | Cannes | Karslbad | Merano | London | Bad Elster | Petrograd | Kracow | Warsaw | Cambridge | Naples | Amalfi | Warsaw | Acre | Sebastia (Samaria) | Jerusalem | Jaffa | Aden | Bagdhad | Ur of the Chaldees | Angora (Ankara) | Tel-Mond, | Anatolia | Houlgate | Damascus | Zahle (Syria) | La Zoute | Bagdhad | Forte dei Marmi | Kuznica
But as I only speak English I knew I would remain a tourist and fail to find a direction.
§
[We]
spoke a kindred language
divided into zones like a map
and in our geographical sense
dreamt in many languages.
§
[They]
held to the treasures of literature
followed the language-boundary
clung more tightly to the language
found strangeness always a misery.
§
I think the only place my mother’s small family was happy was Kuźnica, the family holiday home on what is now the Poland/Belarus border. Each summer the extended family gathered there. Their last trip was in August 1939. On 31 August they left in a hurry and dashed back to London as the borders shut behind them. No one else they were on holiday with survived the Nazis. I do not know their names.
In autumn 2021 Kuźnica became a place of terror once again when the Belarussian authorities dumped desperate Iraqi refugees there in the run up to the Ukraine war.
§
[Arrival/Departure]
Green lanes and black lines on the edge of the leaden beyond
low and flat, a long row of anything, everything.
The sky a quarrel of angry red lines, spiders’ webs of coarse air
writhing from the ditches. On the east wind
a bitter sleet rattling on to the open marshes.
A few faces hurried to glowing, a hunt against us
through gates and dykes and spare grass.
We phantoms cried and vanished again.
§
Walking through Russell Square one lunchtime I noticed that the Wiener Holocaust Library had an exhibition of pre-1939 Jewish family photos. There were collections from many families so similar to mine.
I had obviously arrived at the end of a lecture because there were a number of Chinese students in the exhibition space as well. I overheard a member of staff tell another that she had had to start from scratch in that morning’s lecture as none of them knew anything about the Holocaust.
§
The biggest impact Misha has had on me is the language I speak. When I was a baby he discouraged my parents from speaking to me in languages other than English because it would mean I would learn to speak later. I suppose they believed him because he was so fluent in so many. The outcome was that each generation in my family spoke a different language: my grandparents spoke French to each other; my parents Italian and my sister and I English.
I was eight before I realised that in other families everyone spoke the same language, I still remember the moment of revelation.
§
[English]
A first difficulty was to say who.
There was a language, in it lay the test.
It was the tongue of these areas
the language of families.
§
In Economy of the Unlost Anne Carson explores the concept of sprachgitter in the context of the poetry of Paul Celan’s – another Jew who spoke nine languages. She translates the German compound word as referring to language (sprach) and mesh or lattice (gitter).
§
[Sprachgitter]
language | mesh
language | lattice
language | grate
language | net
language | snare
language | bars
§
[Mesh]
Patriotism was warped to a
common language, in it
lay a prize-ring, a master-key
and the key of imagination.
§
[Searching]
The message which reached us
through three languages was unintelligible.
The stars were shifting
we were steering wrong.
§
Eventually I chose a selection of Misha’s books in English as my guide to the poetic tour of the life I wanted to write. When I opened them I found comfort in the familiar ex-libris labels and the few annotations and press cuttings tucked inside the front covers. I read aloud the first sentences of each book. I found echoes: but while there were beginnings there was no way to reach a conclusion.
§
My next act was to mine the books for language. Only Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence was available online and had sufficient mentions of the word to give me a framework for poetry. The presence of the book on my mother’s shelves had always bemused me. But I did not have to search long to find out that Lawrence played both the Zionists and the Arabs for the British. It is likely that Misha would have met him.
I used my pre-PC Olivetti that I found in my mother’s loft to type out my found poem on the reverse of the image plates from another of my selection: Carpets of Persia by Creasey Tattersall. The keys felt the same as they ever did.
§
My selection of books made little dent in the total. No one wants old books now. Even book clearance companies require detailed forms to be filled in before they will agree to take them. The books I did not take home would be recycled and turned to pulp. Only the paper had use, the words did not. Although the number of words written in the world has grown, who knows how many are read and how many wasted?
§
In Economy of the Unlost Anne Carson describes how the poet Simonides of Keos (556 – 467 BCE) had lived at a time when the market for words also changed radically. The gift economy was overtaken by coinage and he became the first poet to charge for his writing. It leads her to ask of the process of writing:
What exactly is lost when words are wasted? And where is the human store to which such goods are gathered?
§
Disposing of cultural items that no longer have the same resonance as they once did is not a new problem. In the aftermath of World War Two the spoils from the colonial excavation of Egyptian, Greek and Roman remains across the middle East no longer seemed relevant to many museums in the UK and the US. In Post-War Object Habits (1945-1969) Alice Stevenson describes how Brown University’s Jenks Museum in Rhode Island, USA hauled ninety-two truckloads of specimens to the University’s landfill site in 1945.
§
I still needed to deal with the rest in my mother’s small suburban house. Waste management has changed but the recycling companies I paid to dispose of the contents of my mother’s house filled 5 trucks with the remains of my parents’ and grandparents’ lives. The only books with any value raised £212 at auction.
§
I still have one box of books which I will give to a friend who will turn them into artworks. Otherwise only the photo album and the tattered brown wallet remain in my sister’s attic. The Wiener Holocaust Library can have them when we die, leaving others to make memorials.
§
[I]
my notebooks were full of abstract words.
Intimacy seemed shameful
unless the other could make the perfect reply
in the same language.
