My mother came to this country from Russia when she was three years old. There had been trauma before she arrived, tragedies I knew nothing about except by growing up in the force field of her fears. I pieced a narrative together from scraps I overheard when the adults sat around telling stories. This flash is an archeological remnant then, passed down to me from my immigrant grandmother and mother.
Mama told us about her Russian uncle who ran away from the Cossacks during a pogrom in Kishinev, fleeing over rooftops, fleeing finally to America, where he lived to be ninety-nine. She told us about her other uncle, who was not as lucky that night and so never came to America.
Mama told us about her baby brother who died of influenza and so also never came to America. She told us how the officer at Ellis Island asked “How many children?” and her mother had wept and couldn’t speak and so Mama, afraid he would be angry and send them back to the Cossacks, pointed to her four-year-old self, at her fast-beating heart, and said in Russian, loudly, “Me. Only me!” and her mother slapped her and was sorry after and Mama was sorry, too.
Mama told us about her uncles, the one who escaped the Cossacks and lived and the one who did not and her dead baby brother who had been handsome and so much sweeter and better than Mama and as she told her stories her voice rang hollow and her words sounded foreign as if spoken in a language we would never be old enough to understand.