“There are many things we don’t remember, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t inside us”

I

t's a Chanukah like she remembers. Tatte lighting the brass menorah. The smell of applesauce and latkes wafting in from the kitchen. The single flame — first night — dancing by the window. Tatte’s slightly hoarse voice singing Maoz Tzur.

For a moment, her heart lurches. Maoz Tzur—Ernst’s intricate harmonies as Felix steadily sings the melody. She misses it. But then she looks around and Mama catches her eye and the glow on her mother’s wrinkled face is as bright as the flame flickering in the menorah.

They finished eating and telling stories and laughing and Emmy, suddenly restless, prowls the room. She picks up a small, framed picture. The three little girls. Becca, as a baby, in Hannah’s arms. Hannah, a year before she met Ernst. And Perla, sitting beside them on a stool.

“Who is that, Mama?” She picks up the picture and examines it. She turns. “Bubbe?”

Her mother hurries over. “Do you remember that, Zeide?” she says. “It was taken by a professional photographer, you know.”

“Really?”

“He came to town for one of the weddings — it must have been the Schreibers, no one else had money for such a thing.” She turns to her father. “Remember the Schreiber chasunahs?”

Zeide smiles. “Who could forget the Schreiber chasunahs? Each guest got an eighth of a chicken. A whole eighth.”

Mama shakes her head. “The men remember the food. That kallah, she had a wedding gown made of silk brought in from…” The location eludes her.

“From Prague, Bubbe? Or maybe from Warsaw?”

She nods her head suddenly. “Yes, yes, that’s it, Warsaw. And a professional photographer.”

“And the photographer, in the few hours before the wedding, went from house to house, drumming up business.”

“Do you remember, Zalmy?”

“Of course, how could I not?”

“We had no money to pay him, but we gave him an embroidered tablecloth which caught his eye. And a few months later, the postman brought this picture.”

Emmy holds the photo closer. It is a sepia print: Instead of grays, the photographer has used tinted browns, which makes them look like they are part of a lost world. They may have lived two hundred years ago.