The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,1

I have a sense of something calling to me from those forgotten poems. But what nonsense! I chide myself. An old woman’s sentimentality. I close the folder and put it in the wicker basket of things I want to look over before releasing them to Josh for the archive. Not that I have any intention of giving him the poems. I plan to “misplace” them.

After the surprise of finding the poetry, I’m wary when Josh returns to the dining room carrying two department store boxes—though the boxes themselves set off no warning bell, no frisson of alarm.

“Where did those come from?” I ask.

“Closet shelf, way in the back. There’s a stack of ’em.”

“Maybe they’re things of Ronnie’s.” My office used to be my son’s room. I expect moth-eaten camp clothes or a comic-book collection.

“No, they’re full of papers.”

Josh puts the top box—it’s from Buffum’s—between us and lifts the lid, and now the memory stirs: of my younger sisters and me cleaning out our mother’s apartment after she died. That was more than thirty years ago, and what an ordeal it was. In the clean-lined apartment in West Los Angeles to which we moved Mama after Papa died, she had re-created the overstuffed claustrophobia of our house in Boyle Heights. Mama’s death, ten years after Papa’s (he’d had a stroke), was a shock. Still vigorous at seventy-six, she was out taking her daily walk, and a drunk driver ran her down. Going through her apartment in a blur of grief, Audrey, Harriet, and I came across two—four? a dozen?—boxes from now-defunct department stores in which Mama kept papers, and who knew what else. None of us could bear to go through them at the time.

I have no memory of doing it, but we must have thrown the boxes into my car, and somehow they ended up in my son’s closet.

“Hey, is this Hebrew?” Josh holds out a letter he’s unfolded and tries to hand me a pair of white gloves. It doesn’t matter how often I tell him I have the right to touch my own things; he brings a second pair of gloves every time.

I scan the Hebrew letters. “Yiddish. It must be from my mother’s family in Romania.”

“You can read Yiddish?”

I discover I still can.

“What’s it about?”

“Family news—somebody got married, somebody else had a child.” Typical of what we heard from our Romanian relatives in the 1920s. During the thirties, their letters became anguished pleas for us to get at least the young ones out. We succeeded with my cousin Ivan; my family sponsored him to come to Los Angeles. And after the war, two cousins made it to Palestine, and three others went to our relatives in Chicago. But the rest were gone.

“Well, these are definitely keepers.” An acquisitive gleam in his eyes, Josh holds a stack of letters, all neatly saved in their original envelopes. He reaches for one of the plastic bags he uses for items to place in the archive.

“Wait, I want to read them!” I doubt I’ll have time to do more than glance through the letters. But this is my family, my history. Mine and Harriet’s. Of the four of us, the Greenstein girls, she and I are the only ones left. I don’t know if Harriet ever learned any Yiddish, but I need to share the letters with her, to let her at least touch these things Mama cherished, before they become source material for someone’s dissertation.

“Sure, of course.” Josh slips the letters into the bag, labels it, and hands it to me. “Just keep them in here when you’re not reading them.”

Along with the letters, the box contains stray notes, receipts, and newspaper and magazine clippings that have no obvious reason for being saved. “Someone was a pack rat,” Josh says happily, but even he consigns much of the contents of the box to the recycling container at his side.

We move on to the second box, this one from May Company. It’s a treasure trove. Mama dedicated this box to us, her daughters. I discover report cards, school papers, crayon drawings. Here’s my letter of acceptance from USC, with the promise of a full scholarship. And here, neatly saved in a manila envelope, my articles from the school newspaper and the letters to editors I wrote with Danny, pleas for America to respond to the plight of Jews in Europe. Yes, of course, I tell Josh, I’ll give him the articles and letters after I’m done with them; and after I’ve