by Raima Evan

I called my grandfather Zayde, but I thought of him as the Cookie Grandpa. The sugar cookies he baked had a hint of cinnamon and melted in my mouth. He sat in the kitchen with my mother and father, Uncle Morris, Aunt Ruth, and Aunt Regina, talking in Yiddish, a language I didn’t understand.

This was in West Hempstead on Long Island in the 1960s. My brother and I played games of danger and escape with the cousins in the backyard by the creek. We were always running and hiding, unlike the grown-ups who sat for hours, eating and talking, moving only from the blessing over the candles to the glass of tea. 

My grandfather’s Hebrew name was Ephraim. Family members called him Froyim. Non-Jews called him Frank. That was the name on his petition of citizenship filed in 1929, nine months after he arrived at Ellis Island. According to the petition, he was born in Czechoslovakia, although at the time of his birth in 1892, in a place called Bishtina in Yiddish, it was the Kingdom of Hungary. The borders, like the backyards I played in, have changed.

*

Half a century after the games of danger and escape, I learned from my mother that when my grandfather was a young man in Satmar in the 1920s, the owner of a tavern and inn, he was conscripted into the Russian army for a term of seven years. He knew it was a death sentence. Keeping the laws of kashrut in the army would mean a diet of starvation, not to mention that he would be sleeping beside men who thought of pogroms as sport. 

Froyim stole out of his barracks on a winter night. He climbed a fence and flung himself into the dark. It was snowing, and he ran into the storm, his footsteps disappearing behind him. He returned to my grandmother Feige and their children at dawn. Luck being something he couldn’t count on twice, he left for America soon after that. 

On the Lower East Side, Froyim worked in a cousin’s shop, finishing ties. Two years later, he was able to send for Feige and the children. My mother was five years old, the only one who didn’t get seasick. When my grandfather met his family at Ellis Island, my mother didn’t recognize him. For some time after that, she wasn’t sure if he was the father she used to have or a different father who somehow showed up in America.

I knew none of this when I was a child, running through my cousins’ backyard. Back then, my grandfather was the man in the kitchen who baked cookies and gave me two gold bracelets, one with my name written in cursive, the other with a faint engraving of vines. I still have them, and sometimes I take them out of their box, wishing I could slip them over my wrists. They are far too small. I can only turn them round and round, trying to remember the feel of them against my skin, tracing their lines before returning them to their box. 

*

In the rec room of my uncle’s house, my cousins, my brother, and I play a game we call slip and slide. In stocking feet, we take a running start and slide as far as we can across the linoleum floor. Shrieking with delight, we compete to see who slides the farthest. My mother appears in a doorway, and we freeze. “Careful,” she says to me. I think this is a translation of what she says to my father in Yiddish when he drives too fast on the trip to my aunt and uncle’s house. As we near my grandfather, Yiddish slides out of my mother’s mouth. 

*

I am sleeping on the sofa in my Aunt Regina’s apartment on the Upper West Side. A light goes on, and I wake up. My grandfather walks down the hallway in his pajamas and bathrobe. A deep, rattling cough shakes him. I want to call out to him, but it is late, and he is sick. I pretend to be asleep, and I watch him through half-closed eyelids. He disappears into the kitchen, and I stare at the empty hallway. My family and my aunt and cousins are sleeping in other rooms, but it feels like my grandfather and I are the only ones in the apartment. I lie awake, listening to him cough. 

*

My parents think my brother and I are too young to attend my grandfather’s funeral, so we are placed in the care of a family friend. She sits us down in front of the television, and we watch The Wizard of Oz for the first time. The tornado tears Dorothy away from Aunt Em and Uncle Henry while my grandfather is being buried. For years after that, I refuse to watch the movie again. 

*

I have a photograph of my grandfather holding me in his arms. Behind us, there is a drift of snow. A sidewalk stretches to the horizon. The trees are bare, and the sky has the blue tint of December. Bundled in a winter coat, I smile at the camera, my face peeking out of my hood. I am four years old. My grandfather does not turn to the camera. A man with a salt and pepper beard and a yarmulke, he can’t take his eyes off me.

I keep this photograph on my desk. I am in my sixties now, the age my grandfather was at the time the photo was taken. I wish I could remember even a fragment of a conversation I had with him, but I can’t. I once baked sugar cookies that tasted somewhat like the ones he baked. They only reminded me of his absence. But sometimes on the verge of sleep, I walk down that hallway with my grandfather. I fall into step beside him. The two of us do not need to speak.

Raima Evan’s nonfiction has been published in Women & Performance and Referential Magazine. Her fiction has been published in Calyx, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Jewishfiction.net, and Southern Humanities Review, among other journals. Find her @RaimaEvan