A Field Guide To Getting Lost. Rebecca Solnit
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recited names I knew and names I didn’t. The photograph that made the greatest impression on me was of my grandmother and her two younger brothers at Ellis Island or from about the time they came through that great portal of immigration in New York Harbor. They were lined up in an overlapping row according to height and the conventions of the era’s portrait photography. Their heads had been shaved, perhaps for lice or ringworm, and they had the hollow-eyed, haunted look of so many immigrants of the time, these three children in their matching white sailor suits who had got themselves all the way across Europe and the Atlantic and would cross another continent alone.
When I asked about the photographs long afterward, my aunt said that the box of images didn’t exist and I must have imagined the whole thing. A few years later, I asked again, and she acknowledged the box’s existence but said it had vanished. Photographs, which are supposed to serve as the anchors of an objective past, are as unstable as everything else that constitutes my paternal family history. My father and aunt are gone now, their parents gone long before, and there is no one to repeat or contradict the few scattered stories they told. Each story came as a surprise, an utterance not to be questioned, elicited, repeated, and they had the enigmatic brevity of oracles and newspaper filler items. In some ways this paternal family history resembles the place it came from, in which countries were devoured and regurgitated by empires, borders fluctuated in disregard of language and culture, in which communism suppressed the past with the airbrushed photograph as its famous adjunct, so that images kept pace with the times and those who disappeared from the world also disappeared from pictures of it. The three children with the shaved heads had emigrated from Bialystok, which had long ago been in Lithuania, then Poland, then Prussia, was once held by Napoleon’s troops, was Russia during the time of their emigrations, a much-bombed war zone between Germany and Russia in the first world war, occupied again in the next world war by the Germans who would make the Jews disappear.
It may be too that truth was not a fixed quantity for my family, poured as it was back and forth from the various languages they spoke, just as emigration didn’t constitute the same kind of displacement for people whose diaspora had begun so long before. At home they spoke neither Russian nor Polish but Yiddish, a medieval German dialect, though they weren’t German either but heirs of the diaspora that had begun in Israel almost two millennia before (if not, as the blue eyes and blond hair among us testified, pure descendants). Nothing of that tongue survived into my generation but a few insults: Yiddish can describe defects of character with the precision that Inuit describes ice or Japanese rain. Another language, Hebrew, was preserved for other uses, and an indelible image of a then imaginary homeland kept those speakers from melting into their surroundings. I wonder sometimes about the merit of that miraculous tenacity, that adherence to a lost landscape and a senescent language. A case could be made that they would have been better off melting into the landscape as no doubt many now forgotten did, adopting native tongues, stories, places to love, ceasing to be exiles by ceasing to remember the country they were exiled from so that they could wholly embrace the country they were in. Only by losing that past would they lose the condition of exile, for the place they were exiled from no longer existed, and they were no longer the people who had left it. Perhaps that willful forgetting, that refusal to tell tales, came from the wish that we could become native to the New World as they never did, never could, to the Old.
Everyone who survived the Holocaust survived it because they had left behind this hostile interim homeland, and only one woman went back. She had been saved by love, her daughter told me long afterward in Los Angeles. She had fallen in love with a Russian her family urged her not to marry, followed her heart into Russia anyway, and survived there during the Second World War that took her husband when she was pregnant with her younger child, a son. After the war this widow went back to join her family in Poland, but every one of them had been exterminated. She stayed on alone with her children until tuberculosis took her when they were still small. They were consigned to an orphanage run by anti-Semitic nuns and then, when their ethnicity was discovered, shipped off to Israel. The son as far as I know lives there still, but the daughter went to France to study and later came to the United States. She had lived with bedouins in the Negev desert, with royalty in Kashmir, with architects in Arizona. On the table in her bedroom were small glasses of soil, beautiful powders in ochers and reds and even lavender she had gathered in deserts around the world, and it was as though through being uprooted so many times this was all the homeland that was left to her, this collection of earths like the jars of rouge and powder another woman might have on her vanity. Since then we have lost touch. But she was related to my grandfather, not my grandmother.
My grandmother’s mother disappeared too, or so I was told. As often happened, her father left first, then sent for his wife when he had established himself in the New World, in Los Angeles, and earned passage money for her. Later, he sent for the children, who had been lodged with relatives after their parents had departed. Or that’s what I was once told, when I was told that my great-grandmother disappeared somewhere between Eastern Europe and the West Coast of the United States. I used to imagine all the things that could have happened between the two places, picture her getting off a train somewhere on the prairie, getting lost and staying lost, starting up an unimaginable new life unlike the one allotted to her by her family and her ethnicity, stepping out of the noisy compression of an Isaac Bashevis Singer story into the expansive calm of a Willa Cather novel. The vast spaces of the American West, so little known to its immigrants even now, have always invited travelers to lose their past like so much luggage and reinvent themselves.
I realize now that it was my own desire to step out of the train, the car, the conversation, the obligation, into the landscape that I gave this imagined ancestor. I grew up with landscape as recourse, with the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit. Vast open spaces speak best to this craving, the spaces I myself first found in the desert and then in the western grasslands. Such spaces are not as easy to enter as might be imagined; they are often the private land one passes on the way to the public lands of trees and steepness, private both because prizing nothingness is harder than prizing something and because when they aren’t the utter blankness of desert-dry lake beds they are useful for growing or grazing.
One Independence Day a few years ago, I was at a picnic at a huge cattle ranch in northeastern New Mexico, a stranger to the people there except the friends who brought me. In this the monsoon season, the grass was a green carpet patterned with small burrows, stubby cacti, and with wildflowers from which bright insects leapt at my approach. It rolled on uninterrupted to the blue mountains a day’s walk or more away, an expanse in which it seemed you’d never have to stop or would have become transformed by the time you’d traversed that whole distance. With excuses to the party I went into it, walking until the cluster of cottonwoods and elms, sole trees in all that vastness, had grown small long after the people beneath them had vanished. Summer breezes caressed me, my legs stepped forward as though possessed of their own appetites, and the mountains kept promising. I stopped before the trees were gone, not ready that day to disappear entirely into the vastness. Perhaps these spaces are the best corollary I have found to truth, to clarity, to independence.
“Emptiness is the track on which the centered per-Lost son moves,” said a Tibetan sage six hundred years ago, and the book where I found this edict followed it with an explanation of the word “track” in Tibetan: shul, “a mark that remains after that which made it has passed by—a footprint, for example. In other contexts, shul is used to describe the scarred hollow in the ground where a house once stood, the channel worn through rock where a river runs in flood, the indentation in the grass where an animal slept last night. All of these are shul: the impression of something that used to be there. A path is a shul because it is an impression in the ground left by the regular tread of feet, which has kept it clear of obstructions and maintained it for the use of others. As a shul, emptiness can be compared to the impression of something that used to be there. In this case, such an impression is formed by the indentations, hollows, marks, and scars left by the turbulence of selfish craving.” In Yiddish, shul means a synagogue, but I was trying to send this missing ancestor not to temple but to a path through an uninhabited expanse where heaven seems to come all the way down to your feet.
For a long time I imagined that she was the woman in Lewis Hine’s 1905 photograph “Young Russian