My Three Ugly Sisters

My sister Cesia died 10 days ago. She was the last of my three sisters to die. Most of my life, I called them the three ugly sisters. They did not mind I think because they were, each of them in their own way, beautiful, though I am not sure that I ever told them how beautiful I thought they were. Hinda was the eldest. She was 19 years older than me Cesia was 17 years older than me and Rita was 6 years older.

I am loathe to rank them in any sort of order of beautiful—this might be getting me into dangerous territory—but Cesia, was movie star beautiful. I could imagine her playing opposite Marcello Mastroianni in one of those Fellini movies that best made sense if you were high.

They raised me, these three ugly sisters which is not to say that they were replacement mothers for our mother who died when I was 11 years old. But each in different ways, looked after me. And loved me, not quite like a mother would have loved me, not quite as unconditionally, but close enough for me to feel something like being mothered—the pain and joy of that ―but without the guilt that apparently is inevitable between a parent and a child.

My three ugly sisters. They are buried not far from each other in a cemetery of memories. Yes, I know, memories of them will fade and there will be days and weeks and even months, when I will not think much about them, having grown used to being limbless—that’s how it feels I think, losing siblings, as if limbs have been cut off. But I am comforted by the fact that in some indefinable but fundamental way, their lives changed and helped shape the universe not only of those like me who they loved and who loved them, but that they are there—will always be there―in the place where they lived, this place I mean, the streets and suburbs where they spent their days and nights, the city with which they grew comfortably and even affectionately familiar. This country that was a mystery to them when they first arrived from the displaced persons camp of Holocaust survivors in Austria but that, by the time they died, was their true and only home, geographically speaking and I have come to believe that nothing is more defining of my home than geography.

Cesia was 93 and not as clear minded as she once had been― though she was still formidably and touchingly unselfconscious― when she sat in the front row of seats in the crowded bookshop on October 5, 2023, for the launch of my book, My Life As a Jew. She never got the chance to read the book, but I thought I could see, when she was told the title, that she had no need to read it because she knew every sentence, every thought, every evasion I had written.

Cesia sat in the front row, a small bundle of a woman, and when my children were preparing to sing a couple of Yiddish songs, she half stood, leaning against her walking stick I think—if it was not like that it doesn’t matter, it’s how I will remember it—and began to sing, the Yiddish songs of my childhood and that were now the songs of my children’s childhood and she did not stop even when my children began to sing and she sang with them, louder than they did and she did not sing in harmony with them but with the angels of her long vanished past, when she was a child, the angels that were annihilated when they were still children.

And then I think she said something like `Michael, you know I am proud of him, very proud,’ not to me but to the crowd of people, proclaiming it, claiming credit for what I had become and there was joy in the room and laughter and I felt as if we had grown old, both of us, Cesia and I, but that I was still her little treasured brother and she was the screen goddess of Fellini’s dreams.

Two days later came the massacres and hostage taking of October 7. I do not think we ever talked about it, Cesia and I, not just because she was less sharp than she had once been, but because there was no way for her to live with the shock of knowing what had happened. We did not ever talk about it. By the time she died, what she remembered with clarity were those Yiddish songs she had sung at the book launch with my children and which she sang with them every time they visited her, sang with what always felt to me like defiance, as if time did not exist.

My three ugly sisters are all dead. I feel as if I have lost three limbs, though I will not, not here, not at this time, try and write about grief—and anyway, there has been a lot of writing about grief, much of it ordinary and self -indulgent, but nor, I hope, is this a lachrymose eulogy for a life of many contradictions.

I want to say that I will remember my sisters and that my memories of them will fade and that despite the limitations of memory, their living, their lives live in me in ways I cannot know and that after everything, they died in the suburb and the city and the country of their true home and that their journey home was Homeric, epic in some inexplicable and indescribable way.

In this new state of limb-lessness, I remember them my ugly sisters, Cesia most vividly, back then when I was a child and she was like a movie star. Time does not stop and memories become unreliable but the journey of a life through time, Cesia’s life in this case, changes the universe.