excerpted from Based on a True Life: A Memoir in Flashes (work in perpetual progress)
Home during Christmas break from college in 1968, I go with my mother to see her father, Charlie Popowsky, in East New York (Brooklyn). We climb the wooden stairs in the musty tenement, old people’s hallways. A door on the third floor peeps open for an instant as eyes behind chains check out who is approaching. My mother smiles, and the door closes.
On the fourth floor my mother knocks. “Pa, it’s me.”
“Nu?” my grandfather says as he opens the door. My mother once told me it means “So?” and when I said that sounded rude, she explained, “No, it’s ‘So what’s going on?’”
She gives him a peck on the cheek, and I follow with a handshake, his loose grip, craftman's hands. Until a few years ago, he had a shoe repair store not far from where we used to live. I’d go there sometimes after school, making sure to peek into the back workspace, where he always had a “girlie calendar” on the wall from some supplier.
After we moved to Lynbrook in 1955, Grandpa Popowsky accompanied my mother and me to the Green Acres mall, where I shopped for my first baseball glove. I picked one with Hank Aaron’s printed autograph (they didn’t have Willie Mays). He looked over the stitching, easing his fingers across the leather. “It’s good,” he declared, and my mother bought it.
He lives with Leah, who won the competition among the widows of the neighborhood to take care of him after my grandmother died. And he did need taking care of: once, my mother walked in on him as he was struggling to open a can of tuna fish, a task he had never had to do.
Over the mantle is a village of old photographs: children dressed like adults for formal portraits, couples in wedding clothes, vacation candids at a lake.
“Who are they?” I ask my mother, and my grandfather walks out of the living room.
“They’re Leah’s relatives, all were killed in the camps,” my mother says softly and leads me to the kitchen, where my grandfather serves tea in glasses.
My grandfather is impressed that I am in college. “What do you want to do with your education?”
“Lawyer. Anti-poverty, civil rights.”
He smiles, impressed. “Lawyer, that’s good. I don’t know why, but that is good. Maybe you’ll be famous.”
A year later, I call home and my father answers the phone, which he only does if my mother isn’t there. “Where’s mommy?”
“I was going to call you," he says, barely above a whisper. "She’s in Brooklyn. Your grandfather passed away today. Heart attack.”
Many years later, I learn some details of Charlie Popowsky’s early life. In 1914 Warsaw, Charlie, age 26 with a wife and a baby daughter (my aunt Ethel), was conscripted into the Russian Army. Jews were being sent to the front line, and few would come back. If he perished, these stories would never have begun.
Charlie Popowsky decided to risk his life by deserting; at least he would have a non-fighting chance. The plan was to get to America, establish himself, and send for his family. Somehow he made his way to Paris, where he lingered for six months until he could arrange passage to America. Six years later, his wife and daughter joined him, and my mother was born.
I squandered any opportunity to talk to him about this—and so much else—when I had the chance; opportunity is wasted on the young. He was just my immigrant grandfather, so easily impressed by the word lawyer; the word callow comes to mind.
The stories in this collection are “based on a true life,” but what follows has no basis in truth, only in my wish for it to be so:
One day in 1914, Guillaume Apollinaire—wearing English wool and a too-small hat, with an unlit pipe in his mouth—comes across a young man huddled in a corner of the Galerie Choiseul. A handwritten sign says, Chaussures reparees ou construites. Apollinaire’s soles are wearing thin, and the stranger with the Polish accent, who speaks very limited French, fixes his shoes with care and grace. His name is Charlie, and Apollinaire can tell that he has not been eating well, so he invites him to lunch. “My friends might even ask you to make shoes for them.”
Apollinaire introduces Charlie to Pablo Picasso and Max Jacob and says, “I wish Atget could have photographed him fixing my shoes." They are all charmed by Charlie Popowsky’s cherubic sincerity, his deep longing for his family, and his passion for shoes.
Charlie says he wants to see the Mona Lisa. At the mention of the painting, Picasso, Apollinaire, and Jacob exchange looks, then burst out laughing. Apollinaire explains that the Mona Lisa was stolen three years ago on August 21, and he was arrested in connection with the theft, spending five days in jail before being exonerated. At the mention of the date, Charlie feels a strange chill, and an intense reinforcement of his desire to get to America. Perhaps it’s a premonition that the writer of these stories will be born on an August 21.
Max Jacob walks with Charlie back to the Galerie Choiseul, talking in French about his struggles with Judaism and his visions of Christ. Charlie Popowsky tries to pick up what he can, but all he can say in response is: “Nu?”
Max, thinking he said “New,” smiles and says, “Oui oui! Moderniste!”
A few days later, Apollinaire, Pablo, and Max show Charlie Popowsky around the city. Charlie keeps looking at their feet, determining where they each need support, sketching new shoes in his mind.
They all order a pair and are delighted with Charlie's work. Their payments get Charlie closer to a ticket across the ocean.
Charlie Popowsky will make it to America (his wife and daughter will follow and my mother will be born), Apollinaire will die in the influenza epidemic of 1918, Max will convert to Catholicism (with Picasso standing up for him) but still die at the hands of the Nazis in 1944 because you can’t convert blood, Picasso will go on and on. And for all of them, there will be many times during the shortages of the Great War that someone will say to them, “Belles chaussures!”
(Coming next Thursday, a portfolio of short prose featuring Erin Morgenstern, Dylan Nice, Valerie O’Riordan, Max Ritvo, and Lauren Spohrer.)
This is so lovely, Alan. When I got to the part about Grandpa Charlie meeting Apollinaire on the street in Paris, I teared up and stayed that way until the end. What a great idea! Memoir that tells not only what happened, but what might have happened, could have happened, should have happened. You have given me a much needed shot in the arm. Maybe my "hovering memoir" that I mentioned on Day 1 this week will start flying again. Not using your technique, mind you, just flying in its own universe. Thanks for the jolt. Best, Lisa
Posted by: lisavihos | September 18, 2014 at 07:23 AM