Emily Greenspan

Ashland MFA Candidate

THE POST OFFICE

I’d never been so grateful to see a post office.

My shoulder brushed against my mom’s as we stood under a warm spring sun opposite the miracle of a building. A rural post office, still there. We didn’t hold hands, but we may as well have – even though I was twenty-five at the time, I never grew out of holding my mother’s hand in public. 

“Oh my gawd, oh my gawd!” my mom said in her thick New York accent. “This is it! This is the house!” 

Her smile burst open in an elated disbelief. She clutched the print-out screenshot of the post office from Google Maps, hands shaking slightly. We had arrived at my grandmother’s childhood home in a small village nestled in the lush Carpathian mountains of Maramures county, Romania. 

It was solidly there, real, right in front of us: a tall, pale yellow building with dark wood finishings. It looked more or less like it did in both pictures we had – the one from Google Maps and the one from grandma. She’d visited in the 70s, decades after the Holocaust, to find that the family home, once owned by her grandparents, occupied by her parents and five siblings, had become a post office. The photograph itself is a relic of the past: only a few inches wide, printed on textured photo paper, browned. In it, grandma stands with her back to the house, facing the camera. Her hair is well-coiffed, short and brown, and she wears a stylish double-breasted brown trench coat, a small leather satchel in one hand, a khaki trench coat (probably grandpa’s) draped over her other arm. She stands by the wide front door, propped open and marked with the red Soviet flag, which seems to be floating in the door’s glass panel. Above the door, there is a sign marked “POSTA” in large letters, with “TELEGRAF-TELEFON-RADIO” printed underneath in smaller letters. 

Compared to the very tall home, grandma is tiny. And because the photograph is so small, her face is really tiny – half the size of a lemon seed. When I squint, hold the photo close to my eyes, grandma’s eyes, too, seem to be squinting. Maybe because of the bright sunlight. It’s harder to see her mouth. Is there a slight smile on her face? Was she happy she’d found the house, that it was still standing? Proud she’d once lived in such a stately home? 

Grandma would not live in such a grand house in adulthood, but she never complained about what she’d lost and rarely talked about the past. She lived in a few homes after moving to the United States and managed to make each one cozy and joyful. I grew up making regular visits with my mom and sister to grandpa and grandma’s Floridian retirement apartment whose white front door was an invitation into a bold love. My most powerful memories of my grandmother take place at that door, that frontier between the outside world where Bad Things could happen, and my grandparents’ inside space, meticulously kept, always warm and clean and soaked in light. 

After touching down in Fort Lauderdale, grandpa picked us up from the airport, leaving grandma at home. He was also a Romanian Holocaust survivor, a real gentleman, a Scrabble expert, and the kind of jolly person who loved to make silly faces at his grandchildren to make us laugh. But due to his hearing difficulty and socialized gender differences, my connection with grandma was undoubtedly stronger. That’s why I was always so impatient to get to the front door when we pulled up at the apartment complex. I stabbed button “22” in the elevator, toes tingling as it shot skyward, and rushed out when the door pinged and slid open so I could be the first to knock on the front door. Grandma responded immediately. She had been eagerly awaiting this sound. Slippers rapidly shuffled over textured tile on the other side.

After a hurried unlocking, the door swung open. Outstretched arms and the widest, warmest, Revlon red smile greeted us. Her perfectly straight teeth (well, dentures) shone through parted lips, her eyebrows elevated with delight. She had been newly crowned with a fresh beauty parlor pouf. Carefully styled and dyed short reddish brown curls added verticality to her small stature. She enveloped me in a tight squeeze and firmly stamped lipstick marks onto my cheeks. Though she was farther from my age than any other adult in my life, she was much closer to my height, which made me feel even closer to her.

She pulled back to get a good look at me again. “Oyyy, how I’ve missed you! Shayna maidele!”

She repeated this almost aggressively loving embrace with my sister and mother and then retreated to allow us in.

Her makeup and hair would have had her ready for a dinner party, yet she wore her most informal outfit: a floor-length, vibrant red button-down housecoat she called a shamatte (which means ragged garment in Yiddish, although it was not at all ragged or dirty). Green stripes ran down her neckline, and light blue flowers exploded up and down her body. The excitement of the shmatte matched the excitement of its wearer. 

Grandma grabbed a small valise from my mom and rolled it inside. 

“Tell me, how was the flight? You must be exhausted.” Her eyebrows flicked upward as her eyes darted toward the kitchen table. “Are you hungry? There’s fresh pound cake and milk.”

After unpacking, we would sit round the kitchen table, eyelids heavy, consuming her carby, sugary delights. I hardly remember her actually making any baked goods – they were just always there, perpetually ready to be eaten. She got the baking out of the way before we arrived, so she’d have time to prepare nightly multi-course dinners – dill-flecked matzo ball soup, melt-in-your-mouth brisket, oniony paprika roast potatoes. 

In the week that followed that first door-opening, when not eating or cuddling with mom and grandma or playing Scrabble with grandpa, my sister and I rode up and down the building’s one glass elevator for fun, occupied the apartment complex’s entire pool with our synchronized swimming routines, and spat off the 22nd floor balcony to see where the little flying gobs would land. Only now do I realize that these rambunctious days were not so different from those of grandma’s rascally childhood. Grandma had been a tomboy engaging in all sorts of shenanigans on the family dairy farm we imagine existed in the hills behind the post office house. She chased after her older brother and his friends, avoided studying at all costs, and played tricks on her siblings and cousins, even her mother, who was a strict parent. Grandma was close with her father and with her mom’s parents – she sometimes even slept at the foot of her grandparents’ bed. 

Though grandma and grandpa didn’t really tell us what happened to them, what happened to their parents and grandparents, I was perceptive enough to know they had certain sensitivity, that they carried a certain weight I’d never understand. And they were so kind and sweet to us. So I avoided being too naughty. I tried not to splash water onto grandma’s poofed hairdo as she bobbed alongside her friends on pool noodles. I did not protest when she kissed my eyelids or too close to my ear canal. I tried not to make too much noise with my sister as we got ready for bed on the air mattresses in the parlor outside of grandma and grandpa’s bedroom door. 

They never made a peep, not that I could hear. They were happy, engaged, active people in the daytime, so I considered that they might be sleeping soundly. But I doubted this, because the aura of my beautiful, loving grandparents held a twinge of mystery. I always wondered: what did they think about, talk about, dream about behind the closed door? I wouldn’t dare to open it, so I wouldn’t know. 

Years later, I watched grandma’s interview tape conducted by a member of Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation in the 90s about her experience during the war. She said that every day, she thought about her family members who were killed. She said that she had nightmares every night.

Maybe in that little photograph, grandma was just smiling for the camera, because that’s what you’re supposed to do in pictures. Maybe she didn’t know how else to pose in front of the home she’d only left behind because, at nineteen, her vibrant village community had been all but wiped away. There was nothing left for grandma there except ghosts, many of them dead. Unlike grandpa, grandma had been lucky in that her immediate family was more alive than dead. Her father’s and three of her siblings’ hearts remained pumping after the war. But I think something must have died in them after enduring what they did.  

Perhaps grandma’s smile concealed indignation. 

This building which had nested her warm and loving family remained behind her, timber and clay and stone, more or less the same as it had been when she was born. It remained unscathed when my great grandfather had been ordered to open the general store (which we believe may have been in the home) on Shabbat – and was forced to close when he refused. It remained intact as Hungarian military officers demanded to occupy a few rooms in the house before they expelled my family from it. The house remained as my warm and loving family was rounded up by the Hungarians, ghettoized in a nearby village and then thrust upon Auschwitz-bound cattle cars. 

Perhaps, standing in front of the post office, grandma forced her smile. Smile through, smile through. No room for anger here. No room for Jewishness here. Certainly no room for an angry Jewish woman here.

Forty years later, this would remain true of the post office.

When my mom and I visited Romania in 2019, grandma had been gone from this realm for seven years. We couldn’t ask her anything, not anymore. 

Still holding the pictures of the house, we entered the building, which was clearly a post office. A big brown desk, dotted with government-issued signage, occupied the middle of the room. Three patrons waited in line, clutching packages and letters. A very blond woman walked in with her small son, both smartly dressed in modern sweaters and jeans. 

We were accompanied by a guide, Alexandra, who was an atypical Romanian, because she was obsessed with Jews, even though she was not Jewish herself. However, she told us she had been raised with a menorah in her house, which her grandfather had brought to Romania from Ukraine around the time of the Jewish pogroms. He’d spoken little of his mysterious past. 

We became fast friends with Alexandra, who’d driven us to the village from our hotel in the neighboring city, Sighet. It was hard not to love this short-haired, constantly-smiling woman whose passion for helping Jewish families like ours made us feel welcome in this strange yet familiar place. 

At the post office, Alexandra served as our interpreter. She deferentially approached the manager, a sandy-haired woman who looked to be in her mid-forties, to explain who we were and to request a short tour of the building. From the moment Alexandra began speaking, the woman appeared stone cold.

I wasn’t hopeful, watching their unfriendly interaction. Alexandra translated the woman’s words: “You cannot come in any further. It is forbidden.” 

I nodded as I stared at the tile floor. I felt dizzy, but just briefly. What I really felt was numbness, like I was severed from the place I’d found myself in. I had to be, to follow the woman’s rules.

So we did what we could in the area where the postal customers waited. We peered around, and Alexandra explained what might have been in each room when my family lived there. “The kitchen would have been back there,” she pointed through a small window cutout in the wall, toward a “forbidden” back room. “The dining table would have been here,” she gestured underneath our feet. “I know because it’s near the window that faces the street. That’s where the family would have had their big Shabbat dinners with any guests that came by. And you see that beautiful molding in the corner? That looks original. This house is so well-preserved. It’s really remarkable.”

Visiting the post office was like touring a museum with a docent, but it was so hard to imagine what once was. I couldn’t picture my family’s life there. I couldn’t smell the mamaliga or the cheesy potato soup. I couldn’t see the lacquered black bookshelf that housed the Hebrew books. I couldn’t hear the sounds of my grandmother and her siblings shuffling about and giggling as they played pranks on each other. 

I didn’t allow myself anger, didn’t fully indulge in my aching curiosity, because I’d buried those feelings so far inside. Because they were not allowed here. Because I was used to not knowing things about the past. The lady said we couldn’t explore the house, so we couldn’t explore the house. Nothing to be done about it.

Was this how grandma felt when she went, too? I can’t imagine that she introduced herself to the Soviet-controlled post office as the home’s former Jewish occupant. I can’t imagine she felt fully safe there. Fully herself.

When my mom and I left the post office, Alexandra explained that it was common for Romanians to become wary when Jewish people with Romanian ancestry visited. The Romanians worried that these visitors would try to take their homes away from them, to reclaim what was lost. Yet, this practically never happened. 

Generally speaking, these days, Eastern Europe is not the safest place for openly Jewish people or places. Weeks before our visit, the home of Elie Wiesel, a famous Holocaust survivor and scholar from Sighet, had been vandalized with a swastika. 

I plan to return to Romania, but I don’t want to move there. I just want to see what was there, before. 

I just want to know what life was like on the other side of that door.

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EMILY GREENSPAN (SHE/HER) IS CURRENTLY PURSUING AN MFA IN CREATIVE NONFICTION AT ASHLAND UNIVERSITY WHERE SHE IS WORKING ON A BOOK-LENGTH MEMOIR ABOUT HOW SCUBA DIVING BECAME A BALM FOR HER ANXIETY. SHE ALSO WRITES ABOUT HER IDENTITY AS A THIRD-GENERATION HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR AND LIVING WITH HYPERMOBILE EHLERS DANLOS SYNDROME. EMILY SHARES HER THOUGHTS AND UNDERWATER PHOTOGRAPHY ON HER INSTAGRAM, @EMMYGEE123.