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to me then to mourn my mother’s lost career as a performer. I never let her guide my practice on the piano back home, which I balked and avoided. My increasingly detailed assignments, including the awful Hanon exercises, became more and more tedious to me.
    Instead, I waited for the times when my mother would make her own music come to life. I sat below her, watching her delicate, small feet on the pedals create gorgeous diapasons of weeping notes that soared and reverberated until the world disappeared and all that existed was the world’s one great soul, yearning. Safe under the keyboard of the heavy old Knabe, I felt my eyes fill with welcome tears. I felt rich, full, and satisfied, surrounded with jewel-like tones that matched my glistening, teary, rainbowized world, sounds that never ended but were sustained by her pedaling. There was no place I felt happier as a child than by the feet of my soft, pretty, and talented mother, the quintessence of all that was fruitful and giving and female. I felt all of the best of Europe there, the fairy-tale palaces, the delicate cakes I had sampled at the bakery, with names like Linzer, and Sacher, Black Forest and Napoleon. Something in the old wood of this piano, something in the yellow Schirmer book of Chopin, something in the language of music itself hinted at these lost but not forgotten worlds.
     
     
    My mother’s hands smelled of Camay soap, and the cameo etched into the bars looked like her, as did the bonneted, bonny lady on the Sun-Maid raisin box, joyous in her native vineyard. In the kitchen, however, Gita took on the savory soul of onions, potatoes, bay leaves, and dill. She would sit at the round table with her mother, humming as she pared, peeled, and chopped. Sometimes, she would take a heavy, metal meat grinder and send beef out in curling pink ribbons, which she formed into her klops and her galuptzie. From early morning, pots would clang as she dragged them out, a cacophony of metal, from under and over the sink.
    On weekends, my mother would cook enough for an entire week, boiling chickens and chopping liver, hacking iceberg lettuce and tomatoes into sturdy wedges. She would make great vats of chicken soup, of which she jarred large portions for her housebound neighbor Mrs. Shroodel. My grandmother might be shelling peas alongside, and if I went into the kitchen, one or the other of them would offer me some arbeslach.
    “Vilst du doch essen?” So, do you want to eat?
    I was a mouth to be fed for the both of them. If I said “no,” they often looked stricken, and one or the other might say:
    “Someone’s life could have been saved from such good food.”
    “But she doesn’t eat it.” They often talked like this, to each other, over my head, about me. Shelling the peas, shaking their heads, philosophical, disappointed.
    “Spoiled.”
    They saw that my father thought I was special, perhaps too special to be part of the kitchen crew. They saw how he favored and selected me, the little dark latecomer, over my older brother and them.
    “You give her something so good, and she turns her face from it.”
    When they talked about saving lives from starvation, they were not referring to the proverbial, oft-imagined, starving children in India or Africa. They meant real people, people they knew and remembered, perhaps even my own dying blood relatives. They had seen children like me starving during the war. The least I could do was be grateful.
    So they persisted, holding a handful of hard peas or a juicy slice of tomato to my mouth, and eventually I’d share in the game by accepting the life-saving food, nibbling it from their palms like a small rooting animal.

Veal in Love
     
    I N MY EARLIEST YEARS I was raised like a condemned veal calf: restricted activity, sunless in my crate, muscles kept weak, tender, and white. But there actually were times that I got out of the house. The problem was that I got out with my grandmother, who was so afraid I’d run