My mother was a teacher.
She believed in lessons.
I remember one time on a family picnic she found a grasshopper and quickly scooped it up in her hands. “Come around, kids,” she said to us, “and take a look.” It was not enough to point it out, to simply look, you see? You had to look with focus, through her eyes – the eyes of discovery – or you would miss the lesson.
Sometime in the early 1950s, she told me, years after Vilna and the Letz ghetto where her father had been born were wiped from the face of the earth during the war, an amazing document emerged. One of the few official items that survived the attack and the burning, it was put on display at a museum in New York. This was a ledgerbook that turned out to be a census of the town taken just before the end. It was a list of all the inhabitants of that section of Vilna just before they escaped or came to America or, most likely, were carted off the camps. You know the camps I mean and they weren't for summer; I won’t repeat their names here.
My mother got a copy of that list and thought, of course, to turn it into a classroom exercise. She had each kid in her 6th grade class take on one of those names and create a background story about the person…what they looked like, what they liked to eat, what they did to make ends meet, and so on. This, of course, was ages before the web when you could just look it up; it was an exercise of the imagination to make history real, to bring the past up to now, to connect across the gaping generations.
When one of the students, on her own, folded a piece of paper into a star, my mother thought to include that in the plan. She knew the tale of the thousand origami cranes and how folding that many would make a person’s wish come true. That was pure fancy. Here she told her students to each make a folded star for their subject, in order to commemorate the life they were reconstructing. In other words, thirty stars tops.
But somehow in the sitting and the creasing and the folding and the showing, something new took hold. Something unexpected. The children were telling each other their stories, these fabricated lives based on a list of old names in some crumbling ledger. Then the stories began to intersect and interweave and the kids made more stars and more connections and soon they had hundreds of paper stars, not just for those few names they had selected but for many more names on the list, for the entire ghetto in fact.
And this continued and even, you might say, got a bit out of hand. Soon there were many hundreds of stars for the whole town and concocted stories to match. The butcher named Polius married the widow Shrebnetz and they had a fight with the Finkleberg family over the plot of land near the river and then old Mordecai got involved and put his foot in his mouth as usual and they had to appeal to the council to which Alechim Pinkus, no friend of Polius, had just been elected…
You see?
It was the power of the story, certainly, taking over; but it was also the sitting together and the folding and the talking like some kind of ritual of unruly gossip. The pile of stars was building and building until there were – how many – thousands? And the lives of those who were lost sparked again even if only in the giddy imaginations of ten-year olds in a classroom in Brooklyn, worlds away.
Yes and when there are millions of stars the stories of everyone in the whole country would intersect, there would be no separation you see, and it was entirely possible that they would fight off the Nazis and not let the camps happen and Vilna would survive. And when there will be billions, all our tales might intersect and that would be the end, and good riddance to it, of our eternal cruelty to each other through the ages. And when there are zillions we would be so intertwined that we would see others as reflections of ourselves and refuse to let suffering determine our combined fate.
And then one day, when there will be more stars than souls in this jampacked universe, we might just see the glimmer of our humanity, the best in us, winking at the edge of time, the harmony of everything that beats from heart to star.
I don’t know.
Maybe there was only just this one paper star. But perhaps that is good enough. Perhaps that is all we need to start.
Ready?
Take out your piece of paper…
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