more.

I owe you two parts Turkey and three parts Dubai. Don't let me off the hook. Unfortunately, I've got more pressing matters right now...like the mini-biographies I'm working on. Here's another bit:

My paternal grandfather, who never seemed to smile in pictures, kept his German surname when he arrived in America. Lewy. It was an odd and chalky name to American ears. And I grew up not knowing a thing about the name or the man who had so hastily packed it into a suitcase the morning after they came for him and the maids said he had gone out for the night. And as I grew up with his name clumsily attached to my Zeyda’s with a hyphen, everyone by instinct would correct it to Levy.

My grandfather, who had been a wealthy doctor in Berlin, pressed hard to secure safe passage out of Germany for all seven of his sisters as well as his wife’s family. This didn’t make him a rescuer, but a pilot light for the cold chambers where he compulsively followed the news of his former Germany and of friends and family first distant then departed.

There is something sadly poetic about the non-German world who believed my grandfather’s name was a typo. Neither France nor America were home enough to him. Moreover, there wasn’t even a name for what he had endured. It wouldn’t have been quite right to call him a survivor because he never went to the camps. Despite escaping, his life was never returned to him. While it ended in America, it could just as easily have been Bergen-Belsen. His American exile turned out to be a terminal disease, a reckless, failed pursuit at a re-creation of Berlin. And it was a thirst that killed him, slowly, perhaps because my grandfather’s life in America had been as a healthy body in a foreign host instead of the other way around.