An excerpt from Danielle Rosen’s recently defended M.Arch thesis entitled “Still Wandering: Tales from the Diaspora.”
My mom and I walked along the residential streets of the historic square mile and approached the little house with the striped awnings, only a short walk away from the park. I forced my mom to do it; we’d come all this way; it would be pointless not to. I convinced her to walk up the porch stairs with me and knock on the front door. We knocked; there was no answer and no movement from inside. My mom patiently waited, ears craning, newly determined, and knocked again. A friendly sounding, “Hello?” softly floated up the stairs from around the side of the house. As we descended towards the voice, my mom grabbed my arm and whispered to me, “Funny, she always used the side door too.”
We were greeted by a woman, somewhere in her sixties, smiling broadly at us from behind the half-opened screen door. My mom quickly launched into an explanation of why we were there, how the house had been my great-grandmother’s, and her grandmother’s; “My Bubby’s,” she said. “Your Bubby’s?” the woman asked, with a little laugh, the foreign word bouncing around her mouth and off her tongue. My mom responded, “Yes, Bubby—that is how we say grandmother in Yiddish.” I realized her we encompassed more than just the two of us, standing there at the bottom of the driveway.
The woman intently listened to our story, and then generously offered us a tour of the house. We jumped at the opportunity and entered the house through the side door. The woman introduced herself as Denise, “I’m glad I heard you from the side, I never use the front door!” My mom flashed me a knowing smile.
We entered into a recently updated kitchen, and Denise directed us through the room toward the front of the house. There was a dated chandelier hanging above the front hallway, and it quickly caught my mom’s eye. Startled, she said, “I… I think that was my Bubby’s.” Her eyes wandered over to the stairs, and she immediately welled up, “This must have been the original woodwork,” she said as she brushed tears from her cheeks, “I remember running up these steps as a little girl.” She paused, and then said, “I didn’t remember that until just now.”
Continuing through the house, we climbed the stairs to the second floor, my mom slowly running her hands along the railing as we ascended. I quickly peeked into Denise’s bedroom; above her bed was a Christian scripture; it was then that I glanced back at her emblazoned shirt, the phrase seeming familiar. “I’m a born-again Christian,” she said with a polite smile, as she saw me noticing.
At the end of the hall, in the bathroom, my mom recognized a single doorknob of glass—all the others had been replaced—curiously locking a linen closet. (We asked my Zaida about this later; he told us that his mother used to hide money in between her linens.)
We descended the stairs and started into the kitchen, but Denise quickly changed her course, “Oh! I almost forgot!” she said excitedly, as she guided us back again toward the front door, “There may be something else of your Bubby’s here,” the word now comfortable on her tongue. She opened her front door and gestured toward the large white protrusion on the door jamb, “It’s one of those Jewish things.”
Both of our mouths hung open; it was a mezuzah, my great-grandparents’ mezuzah, buried beneath time and house paint. It was an eerie sight. Here was tangible proof, something other than flawed memories and hearsay, that the people that I had been researching, people in my own family, had been here; had dwelled here. My mom silently brought her hand to her lips, and then extended it upward, her fingertips lightly pressing against the mezuzah, the same as her Bubby did, the same as she does every time she leaves our family home.
My mother regained her composure and turned to Denise, and earnestly asked, “If you ever move, or plan on repainting your door, whatever—please let me know; I’d love to come and collect the mezuzah for my father.”
Two days later, a few hours before we were set to leave Cornwall, my mom received an email from Denise letting us know that her son-in-law had managed to pry the mezuzah from the door frame. It was ours to take home.
Contained within every mezuzah casing is a hand-written scroll, scribed with intention and perfection. Every Hebrew letter must be perfectly formed; a single crack, omission or imperfection in the text invalidates the scroll in its entirety. A mezuzah is hung on every doorway in a household, except for bathrooms and other minor rooms, such as a closet. It is dictated that the mezuzah be permanently attached on the right side of the doorpost, on the upper third of the doorway, with its top slanted toward the interior of the room. Placing a mezuzah on the doorpost protects the inhabitants, inside and outside of their homes. In this way, Judaism is not confined to its synagogues, or it’s community dwellings, but instead a faith unrestricted.
The mezuzah was encased in multiple layers of house paint. Rather than submerging it in a paint stripping liquid, for fear of damaging the paper scroll inside and rendering it unkosher, I instead used a paint removal gel, which only sat on the surface of the mezuzah casing. This was ultimately a slower but safer process. For a few hours, I alternated between letting the gel sit on top of the mezuzah, breaking down the paint, and then aggressively scrubbing paint flecks off with a metal bristle brush.
The raised shin of shaddai appeared first.
The elegantly unornamented mezuzah soon emerged in its entirety.
My mom and I presented my Zaida with the mezuzah the following month, at our family Father’s Day celebration. As he opened the box and the gift inside was revealed, he took a sharp breath and immediately began to well up. We had told him of its existence but hadn’t told him that we brought the mezuzah back with us. Now here it was, all of a sudden—this object that his parents had left on that house—reunited with him, sixty years later.
My Zaida playfully admonished me, wiping the tears from his eyes, “Do you know what you’ve done? This is all because of you…”
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