It crackles as I lift it out of a box I’d forgotten I had, and I’ve no idea what is inside that makes the crinkly sounds. The box, it turns out, holds some of my father’s old papers, essays mostly, diaries, notes for an unwritten novel – things I’ve been intending to read ever since his sudden death half a century ago. This is the first time in years I’ve looked into the box. On the back of the envelope, in his difficult Austrian schoolboy cursive, almost illegible except to him, “Given to me by a neighbor in Vienna in 1938 for good luck.” I open it. Inside is another envelope, of torn and discolored glassine, and inside that are a few dry and broken stalks of hay or grass. Suddenly the memory comes, Vati our Austrian daddy telling his three sons about December 1938. How his friend and university classmate came to be working in the Nazi propaganda ministry. How that man whispered to him, “Verschwinde. Dein Name ist auf der Liste” (Get out. Your name is on the list.) How he hid in a hayloft until that particular “Jew-hunt” was done. The family consultation. How he and his youngest sister got to Zagreb, then Trieste, then Genova. How they found a freighter bound for New York. How his parents and other sister followed in Spring. How none of them wanted to leave, so cut it almost too close.
But what of the straw stalks in the envelope? Were they from the loft where he’d hidden? Did the neighbor grab a handful of the straw that had concealed him, and say, “Hier, Hals und Beinbruch”? What are the lessons of history? Do they come as a surprise in a glassine envelope? It has been at least fifty years since anyone has even thought of it – where was it all that time? Did it exist at all, without someone to perceive it? What is it to me, now, this straw in glassine? It is older than I am. It was handled by my father. It recalls his history which is also mine. It tethers me to all who have gone before me. To all I never knew, all those who died, were murdered, or survived, as he did. So I will keep this handful of straw, this envelope full of history, and pass it on to generations of family.
