Most of those stories get cleared away as well. They're forgotten along with whatever we ate or watched later on TV but some stories last to be told again and again, even argued over.
"You're wrong!" my sister-in-law, Nori tells my wife, "It was Marcey who got you to drink that Javex not me. Besides, you were five years old. You should have known it wasn't a milkshake."
Family stories don't follow the rules of accurate reporting. Facts are shaky, essential details left out, everyone has a different version and every version changes.
Even so, I thought I was safe with the story of my first childhood memory. I remember it vividly. I was a toddler visiting my grandparents who had a general store in Kamsack, Saskatchewan. I had somehow found a fluorescent tube and was balancing it in my arms. I remember heading shakily to the stairs - I remember the brightness at the bottom and the sense of weightlessness as I fell, the tilt of stairs, the soft pop as the tube became an instant blizzard of glass.
It was natural to tell it one Friday night when my mother was over for supper.
"That never happened!" she said.
"What didn't?"
"You falling and that business with the florescent. None of it happened. I should know."
I was shocked.
Was it some fantasy that turned into a pseudo recollection? A false memory syndrome? Or some Freudian metaphor of my fall from toddler innocence?
I was trying to sort out my early history when my Uncle Max phoned. Max was a sad eyed, pear shaped man who always wore rumpled suits. Yet, at the same time, he was a very sharp fellow for while Max never seemed to care about anything, nothing ever got past him.
Uncle Max been left behind as an infant during the Russian conflicts, before the First World War. My grandma was a nurse on one front and my grandfather was a soldier on another. Max did not meet his parents until he was five.
After the family immigrated to Canada, Max's chore was to sleep in their general store at night with a German Shepard named Lucifer. The family lived near a Doukabour colony and whenever the colony became filled with the spirit of the Lord they started burning things - generally their own furniture, curtains, extra blankets and sometimes their houses but on especially pious occasions they torched the local schoolhouse. When the spirit carried them even further, they came after my grandparents' store. So Max had to bunk behind the counter with Lucifer to ward them off.
All this resulted in Max developing a rather independent attitude. He tended to wander and by twelve his wandering became a permanent vocation. He joined the circus, trained as a carnie and later kept travelling on his own, buying and selling, swapping and gambling, yet circling back often enough to remain part of the family. My mother referred to Max as "a salesman who had a lot of things going on the side". Everything moved sideways with Max. He was not a forward man. He was not a backward man. Max was sideways sort of man.
You could see this in everything he did, even his telephone calls which came completely out of the blue. Max's protocol for telephones did not require either a greeting or a farewell. I'd lift the receiver to hear him mutter, "I'm having lunch at Oscar's Deli. Twelve o'clock." He'd pause just long enough for me to give an excuse but not long enough to make up one. If I couldn't think fast enough, he'd hang up. Then I'd have to drive across town to meet him for lunch.
He seemed completely indifferent to my life and my interests and would tell me nothing about his own. Instead he'd inform me about local real estate values and the failure or success of various major businesses. He'd then go through the list of our family members, restating who was doing fine, who was having tough luck and who was a complete loser and could not be trusted. After this we would share ten minutes of silence, staring out the window.
However, on certain unpredictable occassions, just as I got up to leave, he'd slip me a wad of bills, as if completing a drug deal. "There's a fifty bucks," he'd say. "Better count it." Sometimes when I counted it there would be eleven five dollar bills instead of ten and I'd say, "Max, there's too much here." There'd be a slight movement in the corner of his mouth, the closest he ever came to a smile. "That's okay," he'd say. "Keep it."
Max also left dimes around his apartment to test if the cleaning lady was stealing.
This time when I met Max for lunch, I tried to get him talking about what I was like as a child but apparantly he hadn't noticed me until lately. So I asked him instead about our family history, about the pogrom that killed many of our relatives.
My grandparents were born in Russia and they lived along with my greatgrandparents who had a farm and flour mill outside Odessa before fleeing to Canada and settling in Kamsack Saskatchewan. One day, during the troubles leading up to the revolution, a band of Cossacks killed twelve of the fourteen children. My grandmother survived because she had blond hair and she convinced them that she was a Ukrainian servant.
"It never happened," Max said.
"But Mom said they were massacred."
"She wasn't even born then."
"But Baba told her..."
"You don't know what Baba meant, anyway Baba was getting mixed up near the end. Or maybe your mother didn't get it straight. It was another family they killed - a neighbour. When the Cossacks got to us they searched the house. They tied up my zaida and the older sons. They wanted gold but there was no gold. They didn't believe us so they rode off with Uncle Moishe - he was twelve. They said they'd shoot him unless they got the gold. But there was no gold. Anyway, three days later, they let Moishe go. No one got hurt. They burned the barn that's all."
I couldn't check with Baba. She was dead. Now Max is dead so I'll never know which version is true.
No more than I will know which pocket watch belonged to my grandfather. Max gave me my grandfather's gold watch. In fact he gave my grandfather's watch to a number of relatives. When Max died we found a cigar box full of watches.
"Max was a great poker player," my mom said. "He was especially good at bluffing."
By fifteen I was telling family tales to my pals. The rules of male adolescence dictated that you only speak of your family to prove that they were more bizarre than anyone else's. I won hands down. My Uncle David, for example, was a fruititarian, a hypochondriac and a Hassid who collected for charity then disappeared to health spas around the world. My only picture of him was in his Jewish orthodox garb peddling a bike through Montreal in a gas mask. I got it from the newspaper. It ran with the header Hassidic Bicyclist Battles Traffic. As if he was a Yiddish Don Quixote.
The family also had a gambler, a bootlegger, a pool shark, a psychic, a politician, a visual artist, a literary artist and a few con artists, too. Three brothers were weightlifting champs. My grandmother, Big Baba pumped iron right beside them, while my quiet Little Zaida ran Obee's Steam Bath on MacGregor.
You bet I had stories. So late Saturday night with no party worth crashing, my pals and I would sit on car hoods in Winnipeg's North End Salisbury House parking lot and I'd get to spin a tale - like about Cousin Simma, (Uncle David's daughter) who was artistic and brilliant but hyperdramatic - a sort of Barbara Streisand but on the wrong medication.
Simma had watched The Jolson Story 23 times and she could cry real tears on cue. Baba would shout out, "Simma! Cry something!"
Simma would start the water works.
"You see!" Baba would shout. "Now that's talent!"
Simma once found the down payment for a car, a little two tone pink and blue job. It was an Amphicar, a car boat with two propellers in the back.
Simma drove it straight to Big Baba and Little Zaida's to show it off. She got them inside along with an aunt and a few of the kids to boot. Off they sped at fifty miles an hour with Simma gabbing even faster, raving about all its incredible, unbelievable features. But no one was listening because in that family no one ever listened and if anyone ever did decide to listen, it wouldn't be to Simma.
So it was a rare moment when everyone in the car fell silent and paid very special attention to Simma as she drove off the road and down a hill towards the river. Their silence was as delicate and short lived as a soap bubble.
Then Baba screamed and the kids shouted and Simma sputtered back, "But It's not a car! It's a car that's a boat!" As she drove into the river.
More screaming. More shouting.
Soon Simma was crying - real tears. Because nobody understood her. Nobody appreciated.
Only my zaida remained silent. After all, what's the point? We're either going to drown or we're not.
There went the family in that little pink and blue carboat, the blue by this point completely submerged as Cousin Simma drove down them down the Red River.
When I finished telling that story to the guys in the parking lot they all had a good laugh. Then one of them gave me an elbow in the ribs and said, "What a crock!"
"Obie," said another, "You're such a BS'er." Everyone agreed.
I was stunned. It was tough to think my first memory didn't happen. It was even tougher thinking that my family tragedy might or it might not have happened. Still, I knew my story about Simma was true, absolutely true yet no one believed me.
I've tried to figure this out for a long time. I've now decided that family stories should not be judged in terms of facts like news reports or history or legal documents. They serve a different purpose. Family stories are more like art or mythology. They serve the family and each member in mysterious ways. Events are remembered and sorted and shaped into stories in order to address the great themes of the family - love and loyalty.
Did I fall down those stairs? Certainly, because that memory has shaped my reality. I live in a world where a child, especially a child in my family, can easily pick up a long tube of glass and tumble into oblivion.
Did my family suffer a tragedy? Yes, because I have mourned that tragedy so often, it belongs to me.
Did Simma drive my family down the river? Of course. And I will keep telling that story in the grandiose Hollywood style that befits a great and talented star like Cousin Simma.
Did they also not happen?
Of course, none of them happened. You see, I also live and work in a world quite outside my family, as do we all; where such events do not happen, have no business happening. It's a rather cold and lonely world, at times, but I manoeuvre through it as best I can. Until I return to those I love and we can share another story.
THE END
Sheldon Oberman
822 DOrchester Ave
Winnipeg R3M 0R7
204 478 1644
I told it like a story. It sounded like fiction. And the wildest kind of fiction - farce. In fact, my family is too absurd to be real and when it came time to use my life material in a book - This Business With Elijah - I had to tone it down or else the book would have become a farce. Some times life is too unbelievale for fiction.
It's taken me years to understand the nature of a story -
It doesn't matter what the facts are
turning the event into a story changes the reality of those events
the rules of fact are not the rules of fiction.
The rules of reality are not the rules of art
The rules of the event are not the rules of the story.
But family stories are even more complex than that becauser the true audience is not a readership at all. It's the family
My family stories are all true. Everyone's version is true
If it serves the family.
The family story does not serve the artist, or the social worker, or the historian or the lawyer.
The family story serves the family.
SPEECH OPENING FOR FAMILY TALES
I write about families both in my adult stories and my children's. I do workshops on family storytelling. I tell my own family tales. But now I'm talking to social workers and I've been flustered for a week
I'm feeling caught between the world of the writer and the world of the social worker. And while there is a tremendous sympathy between us, there are also differences - I know - I'm married to one.
And there is also a difference between a family story and
a work of fiction - As there is between how a story is told in the family and how it is told to a counsellor.