The Mathematician’s Shiva by Stuart Rojstaczer Page B

Way ahead of his time.”
    “So you say. Man wakes up as a cockroach. This is brilliant? A stupid joke, really. Dora Diamant? She could have had anything she wanted. She was beautiful, she was smart, from a good family. And what happened? She fell in love with a sick man who for amusement told stories about insects that people take seriously. The joke is on us.”
    “Did you really know her?”
    “Know? Idiot, I was supposed to be married to her, is the truth. My father and her father got together. I was eighteen. She was fourteen. It was planned in advance. Sixteen years old and she runs off to Prague to be with that little
mamzer
.”
    “So you and Kafka were in a love triangle.”
    “Love triangle. What kind of dreck are you telling me, Sashaleh? She was supposed to marry me. It had nothing to do with love. A triangle needs three vertices. There was no triangle.”
    “So you had to find someone else?”
    “No, my father had to find someone else. He found your grandmother. My father’s brother’s daughter.”
    “You were cousins?”
    “Yeah, cousins. Dora made a mess of the whole thing. My stock as a potential husband was down. My father did what he could to find a suitable match.”
    “We’re like rednecks then
, zaydeh
.”
    “What are you talking about? I was educated well. I know six languages. I manage the family investment portfolio. Your mother and father are both professors. Your mother is brilliant. We are not rednecks, anything but.”
    “But you married a first cousin.”
    “That was done in Poland. Royalty did such things, too. Dukes, duchesses, princes, princesses. It was a custom. We aren’t rednecks. We’re European. Big difference.”
    “You ever meet her again? After the war?”
    “You’ve got to be kidding. What would we talk about? It’s been fifty years. What did you find out about her, anyway? She ever marry and have children?”
    “Never married. She had one child. Died in England, I think.”
    “See. That
mamzer
screwed her up for life with his stupid stories. You writing stories about turning into a cockroach?”
    “No. Different stuff.”
    “A ladybug maybe? A tuna fish?”
    “
Zaydeh
, don’t tease me. It’s hard to write. It’s hard to find the right words.”
    “Good. You don’t have it in you, to tell you the truth. I wrote some nonsense too when I was your age. You’ll get over it. You’ll be a mathematician or something. But a scribbler? You have an
ayzene kepl
, not something full of craziness.”
    Maybe this is the kind of stuff you’d expect to think about when your mother has just died and you glance at a photo of your mother and grandfather that you have neglected to cover up for the shiva. I knew the photo on the desk in my old room was a reunion portrait taken in Forest Hills, Queens, in 1952. My grandfather’s war story differed from my mother’s once Stalin “liberated” all Polish citizens from the work camps in 1941. He was conscripted into the Russian army—leaving my mother with a refugee family also from Vladimir-Volynski—and sent to oversee missile production near Samarkand. When the war ended, he went west, back to Vladimir-Volynski briefly, and upon hearing the stories of the mass murder there, continued into Poland, certain that his son was dead and that the family that kept his daughter would travel to the West just like he was doing. After all, it was the most logical step. But he was mistaken in this assumption. It was one of the few times my grandfather ever made a truly bad guess. His daughter was in Moscow studying. The family that took care of her during the war, not nearly as resourceful as my grandfather, could not manage to cross the border into Poland and lived a precarious existence in Kiev.
    My grandfather emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1949, two years before my mother defected. The presence of my grandfather in the West, something she discovered in 1948, made it somewhat less surprising that my mother