There must have been a whisper of something. Some intangible condemnation of cowardice and passivity and always doing what you’re told. I like to think that. In the fall of 1907, Celia Sved must have tasted something in the air, the desire for freedom swirling around her like great motes of dust in the streets of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There had to be some quality. Some yearning, or thirst, or nimbly-refined teenage angst beating in my great, great grandmother’s breast, bruising the inside of her sixteen-year-old rib cage, leaving its marks black and vibrant blue all over her soul. She absolutely had something inside of her, burning its way through her veins like pure night. I know it.
I know because seven years before the world ended in great, bottomless pits of teargas and the mangled bodies of shoeless boys who will always be too young to be men, she ran away from home. She ran away from the town of her aristocratic lifestyle and old-fashioned family. Ran away from the easy, pre-made life of parties and pleasantries and marriage to a man more than twice her age. She didn’t know that the parties wouldn’t last or that pleasantries would be abandoned in favor of survival or that any husband, old or otherwise, would most likely be offered up on the altar of honor to serve the empire in a war it would surely lose. No. All she knew was that she was young and smart and, as something in the air must have told her, brave.
My great, great grandmother, who spoke eight languages and told the most gorgeous stories, boarded the steerage section of a ship from the port of Pola and never again returned to the only home she had ever known. It was there, I think, that she decided. In a jam-packed room the length of the stained wooden vessel whose walls were lined with cheap, flimsy beds, nailed to the floor. Enclosed and entrapped by the great skeletal underbelly of a boat that was originally built to harbor livestock. Pushed into a corner by the crush of unwashed bodies on a bed that creaked with the collective weight of a thousand hopes. I think that’s when she knew that she made the right choice. And so she decided to survive. She squished and squeezed and kept herself going on a four-week journey across one of the widest bodies of water in the world. She floated away from the place she had once called home on the waves of the Atlantic, stealing away into the stark, incipient horizons of a new life to roads paved in gleaming gold and garbage. To New York. It was her fortunate fate (and mine). She ran towards something new.
When I was small my mother used to tell me tales of Gaga, as Celia Sved eventually came to be known. With my head cradled in the crook of her elbow, she would recount my great, great grandmother’s victories in hushed tones. Most nights (when I begged, that is) I was allowed to let my eyes flutter closed to the gentle rocking of the ship on tides of the Atlantic Ocean as the sound of my mother’s voice imbued this woman’s life with magic better than a fairytale. She was an incredible woman, your great, great grandmother. She did incredible things and she did them all on the strength of her character. When she finally reached the shores of the new world and cleared the perils of Ellis Island, she got a job as an upstairs maid in lower Manhattan. It was her duty to make the beds and light the fires in the evenings. That was her official job. That’s what she earned her very small salary for, that is. What she really did, what she loved to do, was tell stories. At heart she was a storyteller. That’s why everyone loved her. She was charismatic. She would stay up late into the night telling tales to all the maids and not one of them ever resented her for making them look bad with her hard work. Her stories were that good.
There’s one story of hers that I remember. My grandmother told it to me when I was maybe ten and I remember it because it scared me. I didn’t understand it. I don’t think my grandmother expected me to, really. She didn’t think my mind was formed enough to grasp the beauty or the sadness, but she wanted me to feel the power of words passed through generations. Words passed through blood. And I do. Remember, that is. And all these years later, I like to think I understand.
There once was a girl who had the most beautiful voice in her village. She sang songs like frothy waterfalls of poetry with no beginnings or endings, just streams of music that wound so deep into your soul you couldn’t see the ends. They were songs no one had ever heard before, songs that no one could ever imagine alone even if with infinite time. People asked her where she got the songs. They asked and asked but were never really satisfied with her answers.
Sometimes she would say the music came from inside of her. That it flowed from the hollow triangle at the base of her collarbone like silk ribbon. Other times she said she heard it through the soles of her feet, every step feeling a little more of the harmony seep in through the pores of her work-calloused skin until she was sure that the inside of her body was filled with light like fields of wheat. Still other times she would tell how she could see the music pouring out like cream through the seams of every living thing while she drank her fill, foregoing polite, dainty sips altogether.
There was a boy who lived in the village who wanted to know the truth more than anyone. He had a hunger deep inside him and a fear of not knowing that trickled down through his blood. One day he followed her to a field and watched as she sat down at the edge by a copse of trees. He watched as hundreds of birds came to surround her. They sang to her and as the music reached him he swore that sound was the very life he was breathing. That he could live forever without even one more gasp of oxygen. There was no need for air with such music.
He came back every day for a week, following the girl to her secret spot, and every day he became more and more greedy for the music. He wanted it to be his and his alone. He wanted it like death. The next day he came to the field before the girl. He meant to steal the music, lock it up, and make it his own. As he approached the trees he reached into his pocket, pulled out a small wooden ball that was smooth as glass, and took it in both of his hands. When the boy twisted the sphere great nets made of thin black string like spiders’ silk emerged from the hollow space inside.
As the music began to swell from the breasts of the small creatures, he hurled the nets over them so as not to lose a single second of its beauty. But as soon as the thin black twine touched them, every bird froze. They shrunk down and flattened into reams and reams of paper that coated the forest floor. Sheet music is just birds. They’re trapped forever. That’s why they sing.
After my grandmother told me that story I refused to go to my piano lessons for a month and sometimes at night I would think I could hear the tiny mournful harmonies of the thousands of notes that covered the pages of my music lesson books. I stuffed them into the piano bench and piled my older sister’s weighty psychology textbooks on top of them like bricks, but it didn’t help. I’d already learned the power of stories.
It was with tales like this, my mother told me, that Gaga won her future husband’s heart. His name was Yitzak Frank and he was her cousin’s husband’s cousin or something to that effect. They met, quite scandalously, because they were both staying in the same small apartment in Brooklyn with their respective cousins, but it was the 1900s and she was sixteen and had nowhere to go. At parties, family mythology says, Yitzak was so aloof that women would fall at his feet and he would just step over them. I saw a crinkled, blue corduroy suit of his once and his legs were very long and thin so this must have been quite a sight to behold. He was a dance instructor and a communist and in later years when their daughters were young he would sing them to sleep with songs from the communist movement. Lullabies for the workers to unite.
Stand up, damned of the Earth…
There are no supreme saviors…let us save ourselves
Decree the common salvation
So that the thief expires
So that the spirit be pulled from its prison,
Enslaved masses, stand up, stand up…
We are nothing, let us be all
In the end it was she who always told him to stand up. She who worked and suffered and saved for those she loved. She who wrapped herself in the words of the song and found salvation in action. It was she who stood up so tall that eventually she owned the hotel whose floors she spent numberless nights scrubbing so fiercely they gleamed. The site of The Roseland Hotel remains proof of her will to stand.
But for Yitzak, no song seemed to be enough. He liked to sing. And dance and gamble and drink. And he loved their daughters. And he loved her. But he died young and in the enduring present that family lore has set in my imagination, he died because he never felt he was enough.
Once when I was small I overheard my mother talking to her grandmother, Elsie. She used to stay with us sometimes, my great grandmother, and when she did my mother and she would sit at the kitchen table late into the night, talking and eating tiny cookies covered in fine, powdered sugar from large, white plates. When they talked the air tasted sweet.
I used to sneak out of my bed and sit in the hallway next to the kitchen and just feel their voices wash over me as I rested my head on the blonde wood panels of the floor. That night they were talking about Gaga, about when Elsie was young. About The Roseland and communist lullabies and I’ve never forgotten this one thing Elsie said.
I know from my mother’s stories that my great grandmother unquestionably had Gaga’s spark. Elsie loved and was loved easily. She produced two beautiful daughters and had a calm, loving husband until the day she died. She used to memorize winding streams of poetry as she did the dishes every night. And she was good at cards. But when she spoke to my mother that night she said that her whole life she’d felt like she wasn’t meant to be successful. She felt that she was unambitious. That she was unworthy. She felt like Gaga would forever possess whatever quantity of ambition there was in the universe and there was nothing to be done. Like her mother, who had died years before, who I’d never even had the chance to meet, had soaked it smoothly into her being. No one blamed Gaga for taking it, there just wasn’t anything left for the small, grasping hands of her fair-haired, second daughter.
I wonder sometimes how things like that trickle down. If Elsie then tried to make herself small to spare her daughters. If by doing that she paid the entrance fees to their own successes and somehow mine as well.
That was the last night I snuck out of my bed to eavesdrop on their conversations. From then on I didn’t ask my mother to tell me stories about Elsie. I asked about Gaga or Yitzak or how they survived the Great Depression because Gaga was somehow able to get free appartments for all her children and their families. I felt like every story my mother had was tinted an odd shade of copper-green if Elsie was involved. I liked happy endings (I still do), and I thought at the time that I already knew Elsie’s inevitable finish. That I knew how her tale really ended even if it wasn’t how that night’s story came to a close.
In the beginning though, before daughters or lullabies or lost ambitions were even thought of, Gaga and Yitzak built a life on her stories and her determination. She worked hard as an upstairs maid six days a week and on the seventh day, according to Jewish law she rested. That is, she did seamstress work by window light in her cousin’s one-bedroom apartment as opposed to endlessly cleaning hotel rooms. I saw something that she had made once. Just a small handkerchief. Most of her work was scattered across the city. Dresses and shawls, and delicate gloves for people slightly better off than she, at least in terms of monetary wealth. The small piece of linen was covered over with intricate black swirls that crossed and twined around delicately wrought gold letters. Her initials and Yitzak’s.
Only when the daylight finally winked away did she truly slacken the taut posture of her spine. Only then would she tell the stories that everyone who knew her so begged for every minute.
There was once a girl who had the entire universe in her head. She lived and died without ever knowing it was there, but other people saw it in her. Other people knew.