The earliest memories belong, of course, to the realm of the visceral, so it’s futile to try to recover them. Circumcision is certainly significant, as are many other childhood scenes, but they reside in the depths of the unconscious, invisible except to the eyes of the imagination.
Later on, however, memories, however vague, emerge, like scenes from an old and blurry movie. I’m three, I think. I live in Passo Fundo, not far from the Jewish settlement in Rio Grande do Sul. I’m three, and I’m standing on a street in Passo Fundo, near my house. I am standing and looking at the sidewalk. And what do I see? Burned matches, cigarette butts, and dry leaves.
I stare at them in despair, with a strong urge to cry. It’s because the weather is threatening to rain – no, it’s already raining, the first thick drops are falling – and these things, these little things that are not things to me, but living creatures endowed with feelings, will soon be swept away by the downpour. They will disappear and die. I feel the desperate need to do something – but what? I look around. Ahead of me is the entrance to the police station, leading to a long and dark corridor. There is no time to waste: I immediately start to move the matchsticks, cigarette butts and dry leaves. At this point, the memory fades and disappears. (The same image appears in the 1937 story In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, by Jewish-American writer Delmore Schwartz. In his story, the narrator evokes his parents’ lives on the imaginary screen of an old movie theater; and when his father proposes marriage to his mother, he cries: “Don’t do it. You can still change your mind. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children of monstrous character.” No one has more simply and poignantly described “the pathos and comic despair of the conflict between Jewish immigrants and their intellectual children” – Irving Howe).
What to make of it, so many years later? There are several ways to interpret this event, if indeed it was an event. I could consider it just a childhood fantasy, at most a precursor to a later fiction. Or I could see it as the kind of anguish that drives doctors, even public health doctors like me. I could turn to old Freud, who would see the fear of separation there; or old Marx, to show that solidarity with the unprotected begins very early. Or Kafka, who always wanted, yet at the same time didn’t want, to gain entry to the law.
And I could think of this evocation as a Jewish memory. Jewish helplessness. The ancestral sense of a strange land, of imminent catastrophe (the storms of history). The eternal search for a protected place, be it a mother’s embrace, a father’s house, or a protective state.
I don’t know. The oldest memories are like that: much too deep, much too visceral.
