Becoming Sacred

An excerpt from Peter Himmelman’s new book, “Suspended by No String: A songwriter’s Reflections on Faith, Aliveness, and Wonder.”

The saddest song I ever heard was the one I learned from my Grandma Rose. Never was there a Delta blues or an Irish lament more melancholy, more genuinely haunting than that Yiddish folk song. The song was composed, if that’s even the right word, by a young mother, a neighbor of Grandma Rose, who for half a loaf of bread and a pear hired her to watch over her ailing child while she prepared the simple lentil stew that she would later sell in the marketplace of the small shtetl. The young mother’s husband had died of tuberculosis only days before. And now the infant daughter lay in a small wooden cradle, the tiny girl herself just days or hours from death at the hand of the same sickness. 

Grandma Rose was nine years old at the time, listening as the young mother sang the mournful tune. The song never had an actual title. We all just called it “Einschlafe, Mein Kindt,” after its first words.

Einschlafe, mein kindt, deine eigilach un schluf… (Sleep, my child, close your eyes and sleep…).

That tragic relic of a long-forgotten Romanian shtetl was likely the first song I ever knew. It was what Grandma Rose would sing to me and my three siblings before bed, while bathing us, and in all manner of quiet moments. 

Grandma Rose came to America on an aging merchant steamship at the age of 12 with her brother, my great-uncle Sol, who was ten. For those of us who soar across continents while watching first-run movies and sipping Chardonnay in the comfort and safety of a modern airliner, the enormity of that perilous trip is impossible to comprehend. Sailing alone for weeks on end surely left terrible scars on those two dirt-poor siblings from the western shores of the Black Sea. 

Perhaps that’s why Grandma Rose never ventured far from her extended family or from her small circle of Yiddish-speaking friends. And although she’d lived in America for more than 70 years and spoke English reasonably well, I never once heard her tell a story that didn’t contain at least some Yiddish. The story I remember most vividly was the gruesome one — the one about the people who took ill and died aboard that steamship, a speck of steel and smoke traversing the Atlantic. The crew would wrap the newly dead in canvas — mostly old people who had succumbed to the rigors of the trip, but sometimes young children, too — then Grandma Rose would watch them lift the bodies off the deck and heave them over the side.

It’s 1974. My jeans and ski jacket are bulging. I’ve just stolen six feet of plastic tubing and some Pyrex beakers from the eighth-grade chemistry lab, hoping to create the world’s most elaborate hookah pipe. On my way downstairs to my bedroom, I pass Grandma Rose in the kitchen as she sits upright at the table chopping vegetables into tiny pieces — green and red peppers, eggplant, and Spanish onion. “Are you hungry, mein tier’e kindt? I’m making potli’jel,” she calls out. 

“No thanks, Grandma,” I say. “I’m going downstairs for a while; I’ve got a lot of homework to do.” Stopping to eat Romanian eggplant with my grandma is the last thing on my mind.

I place a copy of Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush” on the turntable and set to work on my monster pipe. After it meets my meager standard of excellence, I reach up into my closet, move some of the sweaters from the top shelf, and pop loose the ceiling tile that I use to conceal my ever-dwindling stash of Minnesota green. I open the window above my bed, fire up the hookah, and let the smoke drift out into the backyard. Twenty minutes of water-cooled splendor later, I get high—unusually high—and I drift back upstairs to find Grandma Rose still busy, chopping her vegetables and humming quietly to herself.

I wait in the kitchen, staring at her now, the sun streaming through the back door and casting light on her busy hands. I’m struck by how old she looks. I notice her hair first, whitish-gray and sparse, then the deep creases on her cheeks. I’m suddenly aware that someone I love very much will one day, and likely very soon, pass on to the world of spirits. 

I stand back where she can’t see me and watch as if seeing her for the first time. I feel something of the chain of generations working its way up from the shadowy reaches of my subconscious, a chain to which I belong and that stretches far into the past, even as far back as biblical times. Grandma Rose is no longer the old woman who shows up at our home speaking words I don’t understand and preparing foods I don’t especially care for. She is the beautiful, lively daughter of the Romanian shtetl, the birthplace of my people. She is the beloved and tender child of a man and a woman I’ve never met, and they are in turn the children of people I’ve never met — and the chain goes back and back. I, too, am part of that chain. I feel that now. 

Though I live in a place called Saint Louis Park, Minnesota, a place that never had a whisper of meaning to me beyond the fact that my friends live close by, all the things I’ve taken for granted until now have been abruptly transformed. The crab apple trees outside our window, just beyond where Grandma Rose is now, their branches heavy with tiny tart apples, reach upward and outward like men in prayer. The passenger jets that fly directly above our small house are no longer the product of science and engineering; they are soaring projections of the human imagination. Nothing about our kitchen is normal; nothing about my shoes or my clothing is normal; nothing about the Volkswagen parked in our driveway is normal. And at the table, Grandma Rose, who by her very presence has set this strange new reality ablaze, continues to chop her vegetables and hum to herself. Surely she must know all this. Surely she must have once had these same conflicting feelings — of being part of something and yet exquisitely lonely, of being at home and yet frighteningly lost. Grandma Rose, whom I’d never paid nearly enough attention, does indeed know these things. 

When she asks, “Peter, vilst du a bissel potli’jel mit coilige?” (Peter, do you want a little eggplant on a piece of challah?) I experience an overwhelming sensation of compassion and sadness. “No, thanks,” I say. And as easily as I take my next breath, I hear the Yiddish song coming from who knows where. I had neither heard it nor thought about it even once in many years. It’s a fragment of a childhood dream, but distinct now, like a sense memory from the time when I first waded into the warm, still shallows of Lake Calhoun. 

“Grandma,” I ask, “can you…would you sing me that song again? The Yiddish one that you always used to sing?” Her face brightens. She puts down her paring knife and begins to sing the song several times over in her soft, wavering soprano. I grab a pen and paper to capture the moment with a transcription of the song’s lyrics, hurrying to preserve this precious piece of my past. 

When the singing ends, Grandma Rose looks pleased. She leaves the table and goes to the phone to call her brother Sol. The conversation is entirely in Yiddish, and yet somehow I’m able to understand each word. I take the paper with the words to the Yiddish song in both my hands. I hold it up to the beam of sunlight where Grandma Rose had just been sitting. It feels as if it were a page taken from the Torah itself. Sacred words, sacred past — sacred light.

I take the paper with the words to the Yiddish song in both my hands. I hold it up to the beam of sunlight where Grandma Rose had just been sitting. It feels as if it were a page taken from the Torah itself. Sacred words, sacred past—sacred light.

Not long after that afternoon, Grandma Rose began to lapse into senility. My mother would often call on me to sing “Einschlafe” to her, as if to pull her back from wherever it was that her ageless spirit was moving toward. Hearing me sing it made her sit up slightly, made her eyes seem less dim. 

Sometimes, she even mouthed the words. 

Einschlafe, mein kindt, deine eigilach un schluf… (Sleep, my child, close your eyes and sleep…).