It’s a chilly Sunday afternoon, already snowing, the wind blowing with impressive strength.  Things are expected to get significantly worse, with predictions of up to two feet of snow for New York City.  Just in time to re-bury the cars that were only recently dug out from our last storm.  All as Mother Nature demands, and the human manipulations of climate encourage, our vociferous denials notwithstanding.

Stormy Sundays are good for cooking at home, and eating in.  For catching up on reading, TV watching, and cleaning.  And dare I say, for writing.  Today’s inspiration–or prompt–for this post comes from an opera my husband and I saw just last night.  It was a staging of a story I read in book form more than two decades ago, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.  As with most books I read, I recalled the basic outline, but not the details of how the story evolved, so there was nothing repetitive about my seeing the book brought to life on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.  And as someone deeply invested in supporting Jewish stories, art, and so on, especially in the aftermath of October 7th, with its endless series of cultural and even thought boycotts, I was determined to support this opera with my presence.

We had nosebleed seats in the Family Circle, but thanks to the digital titles offered at each seat, I could follow the story without strain, the only effort being to read. listen, and watch as simultaneously as I could manage.  It was well worth the effort.  The staging of the opera was impressive–ingenious, even–and the performances compelling.  I would not offer an informed critique of the singing with my tin ear, but I found it well done.  And with a full orchestra in support, wow, just wow.  But…

As is often the case, the post-intermission portion of a performance is a bit of a let down.  True in this case as well.  Something about the arc of the story dipped in ways I found distracting.  Not because I found the story unfaithful to the book; I honestly didn’t recall enough of the details to claim that, but because what was a painful–excruciating, really–story of two young Jewish men trying to create an imaginative pathway through a world set on fire with the genocidal Jew hatred of World War II and the Holocaust, became intertwined with another story of otherness.  It’s not that that story didn’t matter; it just mattered differently in a moment of enormous existential peril for the Jews of Europe.  In trying to respond to that urgency, these men created comic book heroes who could swoop in and rescue those in peril, providing safety, hope and redemption for the abandoned, the suffering, the lost.

During intermission, something strange happened.  I began, for reasons I cannot explain, to calculate the years from the war’s end to my birth.  It turned out to be a span of 18 years.  Then it occurred to me that my daughter was born when I was 36.  I was born chai; my daughter, double chai.  That very belated discovery hit me hard.  I am the daughter of a Holocaust survivor father, Z”L, and his entire life was marked by death.  Yet I was born LIFE.  Of course, every child is life.  But my life began in the shadow of excruciating loss, setting down a kind of marker for how a brutally broken chain can be–if only partially–rebuilt.

Matters are complicated by my being the middle child, so the rebuilding of the chain did not begin with me.  I’m not sure how to think about that other than to consider that perhaps my older sister’s birth was the initial step forward into the future, and my birth was the exclamation point after that first step, a kind of announcement to the universe:  “We began by adding one life.  Now comes another.  We spoke to the future first in a whisper.  Now we add a shout.  Future children will add a louder shout.  And so on and so on and so on.”

As for my daughter, it makes sense to me that she would be the carrier of double chai, because she is our family’s memory keeper, our historian, the one who intentionally builds a chain of knowledge, faith, and understanding with our family’s traumatic past.  Not because anyone asked her to, but because she feels that history as an intimate part of who she is, and of who she needs to be.  Her eldest brother embodies so much of his grandfather’s stoicism and strength; her next brother, being disabled, is a living example of who a first victim of Nazi cruelty would have been, and a reminder of the endless need by the most vulnerable among us for protection from evil and harm of all kinds.

I thought as I watched and listened at the opera how much pain flows through Jewish stories, how rarely in the arc of human history things turn out truly well for us.  It is an appalling truth to be reminded of, at an opera, no less.  And I thought this even more as a traditional Jewish affirmation of faith and belief in the coming of the Messiah–Ani Ma’amin–was hauntingly sung not once, but twice, during the course of the evening.  I had two thoughts as I heard it–“Wow, probably a first for many in the audience” and “How devastating that this is the Hebrew we hear here.”

My husband and I left the theater grateful for having been at this performance, but feeling the weight of the story, of a grief with no end, really.  Art can tell stories, but it cannot erase agony, or memory, or revive the dead, or assuage guilt.  Art can channel feelings, as can books turned into opera.  But at the end of the day, the dead remain dead, the loss unbearable, the future forever foreshortened, fractured, and incomplete.  Which is why, I think, when I stumbled across two numeric signs of chai linking me to my father, and my daughter to us both, I felt something deeper even than the imaginative depths and heights to which Kavalier and Clay drew the audience.  I felt something both rooted and winged, tethered to the past, but affirmatively looking toward the future, carrying it all forward, re-framed, re-made, and re-born.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)