‘There was an assembly today, Mummy, and it was about people like me.’
I was in the middle of making tea, so not listening as attentively as I would have liked.
‘There were these people, lots, and they were killed, and they were Jewish...’
And I retreated from the peas and sweetcorn and crumbs of breaded fish to confirm that, yes, my five-year-old daughter was telling me about the Holocaust.
It was in the bath that the question finally came.
‘But why do I have to be Jewish?’
‘You’re Jewish because Mummy and Daddy are Jewish, because our mummies and daddies are Jewish, and theirs were Jewish, too. And theirs, and theirs, and theirs.’
When my pregnancy was announced, there was a collective gasp. Then came the clothes.
‘Take it,’ friends and relatives cried, hauling bin bag after bin bag from their boot. ‘Take it all.’
Fast forward a few months, and those very same friends would invite us over at weekends for tea and biscuits, the careful socialising of new parents, nothing too heartfelt or controversial; a tacit acknowledgement that right now all passion was very much spent.
Which is why I noticed when, confronted by my daughter wearing a particular cardigan, dress, or tiny socks, our hosts would crumple, actually crumple, with emotion.
‘That’s ours,’ they would say, and it became apparent that their old clothes had become time machines wrought of polyester, cotton and wool. Eyes would flick between their child and our baby, marvelling at who their girl once was, and who she had become.
Poppering my daughter into her old–new wardrobe, memories of my own would resurface, of beloved corduroy, an underskirt scattered with embroidered flowers.
On Sunday afternoons, we would load up the car, drive to our childhood homes, and while Grandma and Grandpa held the actual, current baby, my husband and I examined old photo albums with forensic interest. Yes! There they were: the printed tunic; the smocked blouse.
The past was what had led us to the albums; the outfits, our young parents, the gravy tint of the Eighties décor. But if we came for the clothes, it was for the faces that we stayed.
‘It’s her,’ we’d say, awestruck, looking at a particular snapshot of my six-week-old self.
Who knew, back then, that our daughter was already, somehow, present? Or, more miraculous still, there in the face of my grandmother, sepia no barrier to her toddler seriousness, balanced upon some distant relative’s knee?
It’s more than just faces, it’s expressions, too. The slightly bashful quality to my husband’s smile, even as a one-year-old. What appears to be aloofness in the interplay between the curve of my grandmother’s nose and her heavily lidded eyes – something my daughter and I share, too – which is really a kind of masked nerviness, a prolonged intake of breath.
These faces are partly so compelling because we know, at least to an extent, what it is to inhabit them; they are our most personal furniture. Which inevitably makes me consider whether it’s not just features and mannerisms that have been passed down, but the emotions that drive them. My grandmother was anxious. My mum is the same, and I, too, wrestle almost minute by minute with an internal octopus of imagined doom.
Last night, my daughter padded down the stairs to tell me that she couldn’t sleep, and I recalled all the nights I spent as a child, listening to the fade of traffic, the slow quieting of the rooms below as my heart rate increased, aware that soon I would be the only person left awake in the house, in the world, and I said, and meant, more than she could yet understand, ‘I know.’
The bath water is beginning to cool as I say to my daughter, ‘You are lots of things, and being Jewish is just one of them. You can learn about it, if you want. And then you can choose what it means.’
It’s a messy business, memory, legacy, whatever you want to call it. The anxiety that plagues me now may well have been the driving force that led my great grandparents to abandon their lives in Poland and Russia back in the early 1900s and come to the UK, without which, the likelihood is, I would not be here.
The best thing I can do is to carry it, all of it, everything I have been given and saddled with and gifted, and learn how to sift through it. To teach my children as best I can, to take what we need for this season, while it fits and the weather is still chilly. To know that as my children grow stronger, taller and more sure of themselves, I may weaken, but we all have so much of what we will need, there, waiting, ready. Not all of it will be right, or even helpful, but it’s ours.
‘OK,’ says my daughter, nodding thoughtfully beneath her crown of bubbles, and it’s her living, right here and right now, that answers my unspoken question about inheritance, all the shouldn’ts and shoulds, the arms that lift us up, along with the burdens sometimes too great to bear.
See, I say silently, to all those who would have us wiped from memory. Look, this, here is my victory. It’s life. Our life.
And it goes on.
(This is an edited extract from Marianne Levy's book of essays: Don't Forget to Scream: Unspoken Truths about Motherhood, published by Phoenix)