The Material of the Matriline

By Aliza Yona Abusch-Magder

My grandmother, my Oma, has hands I have come to know as a symbol: that feeling of being a ripening fruit on an oakheavy heritage. Her hands wrinkle looser and looser; yet my plumskin is pressed, taught with my senseofself forming, fibrous. That is what her hands mean to me— miraculous glory that is nature existing forever in cycles of tense, condensed, at the root of some sense.

She loved the loom— was perennially present at its foot like Penelope— tied to home— tethered by fear-grief of homelessness. For us, she wanted nothing more than wings. So she restored the wings of her childhood folktales, and the pattern was an oral history, so it was imprecise, and she spent thirty years collecting heritage-tree leaf-feathers spread by the wind of time ever-lapsing. And at my bat mitzvah, I received wings of down, sea hay, and horse hair, glued by the blood of the generation that could never become a namesake— fixed dry by death. It took three generations until the blood was viscous, could be made use of, to restore the privileged wings that allow integration without assimilation, so that we may fly home to diaspora. 

In this rupture pools blood of my pen— the inky pigment dyes the garment of my lifehood. I color the wool that Oma sews towards a Tallis. Looming. Weaving. One of the Pale of Settlement bitches. A girl wrote me a poem saying we would have shared stale bread in the ghetto— a token of the care kinship comradery of sapphic embrace. In the pantry of her soul, I saw no love in a starved life. My legacy is not loitering in pain. I am not cold, stale— I am warm, beating, keeping-alive. 

My namesake, doubly maternal great grandmother, was wartime glamor like Rosie, though her body was the flesh front line and symbol of strength at home. She was starved, and in her red leather purse, next to her matte red lipstick, she kept two cyanide tablets— the other for her infant, my Oma. Living with death made her all the more irresistible because men liked how she needed to be saved and she was pretty enough to be worth saving. But she knew she only ever had herself, both the damsel and the knight. And thus, at twenty-two, she took the reins of her budding life in the winter of fascism. Stories turn cruelty into thread, later woven into fabric, later fashioned into garments of tradition.