Ancestral Memory

How does ancestral memory live in us?

Through song and ritual, food and speech patterns. Through names and story, beliefs and superstitions. Through fears and traditions alike.

You know that feeling, where you remember something, but you don't know if it's because you really remember or that you've heard the story so many times, or seen the photo, that maybe your mind thinks it remembers but doesn't really?

What is "real" memory and what is imprinted on us by exposure or repetition?

My daughter was leaving the house yesterday. As she was passing through the kitchen, I stood to go give her a hug. I stopped short when I reached her, taking in a long look at her face. She looked stunning to me, her beauty timeless. For a moment, I saw so much of my father's side, and in the very same instant, my mother's side. It felt uncanny.

But it's not uncanny. It's DNA. It's what genes do, or rather, one of the many things genes can do.

On this anniversary of Kristallnacht, I've been thinking all day about memory. How can we possibly remember what we did not experience firsthand? It does not make sense from a logical standpoint. But I believe in my bones, quite literally, that it's real.

I remember the Holocaust and the Inquisition just as I remember lighting Shabbat candles at a table in Romania, in Macedonia, in Poland, just as I remember that I, too, was a slave in Egypt.

I remember nursing babies in the red tent, long days of walking. I remember running through the forest barefoot in terror.

I remember the smell of soup on the stove and challah in the oven. I remember weddings, the drinking, and how the girls were not allowed to daven (pray).

I remember fathers teaching daughters and daughters screaming as fathers were hauled away, so many fathers, and brothers, sons.

I remember. I remember the sound of glass shattering, I remember huddling, I remember waiting it out, holding our breath, afraid of every floorboard, every footstep.

I remember the songs and the spices of Saturday at sundown, wishing each other a sweet week, a week of peace, even after, even then.

I remember it all.

But was I really there? You tell me.