You Should Write About My Life
When Brooke Randel was in her early 20s, her grandmother, Golda Indig, AKA Bubbie, called her with a request. “You should write about my life,” Golda told her. “What happened in the war…You know, a young girl in the camps. How she survived. You could sell it.”
Randel was shocked by her grandmother’s injunction, especially since it was repeated each time they spoke. When she was growing up no one in her family had said much about the Holocaust and it seemed that Bubbie’s life was firmly rooted in the here, now, and immediate future—whether that meant the next meal, the next visit, or the next holiday celebration. Their biweekly phone calls lasted just long enough for a quick description of the weather and a perfunctory assurance that everything was fine. The war never came up.
But the more Randel thought about Bubbie’s request, the more it intrigued her, and she scheduled a visit to Florida to begin interviewing her grandmother about what she had been through. The result, Also Here (Tortoise Books, $18.99.), reflects a nine-year effort to unravel the facts of Bubbie’s life, a task that was complicated by Bubbie’s illiteracy, often-faulty memory, distractibility, and desire to sidestep the most painful details of her wartime experience.
Randel started by learning as much as she could about her grandmother’s birthplace, Sighet, a tiny town near the Carpathian mountains that was sometimes claimed by Romania and sometimes claimed by Hungary. Jews had long been part of the town’s fabric, at least until 1944 when the entire Jewish population was deported. Bubbie was 13. Her destination: Auschwitz.
Bubbie recalls not only the cramped train car but also the extreme hunger and parching thirst she and the other packed-in evacuees endured. Her recollection is chilling: “Who go left goes to the crematorium. They didn’t say it, but we smelled it later,” she told Randel. She : Unlike her parents and younger siblings, she and her older sister, age 15, went to the right. “We had to shower and they gave us one grey dress, that’s all we ever had. And then they cut everybody’s hair off.”
It’s a horrifyingly familiar litany of evil, but what makes Also Here so compelling is the author’s inclusion of herself in the story, and her confusion, frustration, sadness and fury over the multiple traumas Bubbie was subjected to. At the same time, Randel’s difficulties in piecing together a clear outline of Bubbie’s life are apparent throughout the book. In the end, she weaves select personal anecdotes into a fact-based narrative. This blend makes the book as much a dissection of her own writing, editing, and research process as it is a carefully constructed Holocaust memoir. Additionally, since Randel has an enormous stake in the telling of the tale, her relationship with Bubbie—and her recognition of Bubbie as a sometimes unreliable narrator—takes center stage. What’s more, her acknowledgment of Bubbie’s profound memory gaps and the limits of information retrieval 80 years on, serves as a potent reminder that if we are going to get these stories out, we need to act quickly.
Indeed, Randel’s sense of urgency over the writing and researching of Also Here must compete with a full-time job, a feat that included deep dives into history, philosophy, and psychology. And, while she took small comfort from earlier writers who noted that remembering and forgetting typically intertwine, when Bubbie conflates facts, falters, or leaves out essential details, Randel worries that she is not doing justice to her family story.
“Forgetting is scary to a granddaughter of a genocide survivor,” she writes. “Scary in a world that contains denial and algorithms that promote it, ideas of supremacy and division, pouring in from the shadows.”
Yes. But in telling as much of Bubbie’s story as she could unearth, Randel has created a unique, moving, and intense look at the personal and political aftermath of cruelty, intolerance, and horrific repression. It’s a poignant tribute to a fierce, feisty, and complicated woman—a survivor—caught in world events meant to destroy her, her family, and her entire community.
Eleanor J. Bader is a freelance writer specializing in domestic social issues.
