Volumes and volumes of Jewish folktales line my shelves. I imagine my great-grandparents, who I never knew, chanting them in foreign tongues. In my imagination, they add details, constructed from memory, that make me believe their stories are true, but also that they were somehow created just for me.

I, however, was raised on a singular folktale.

In the beginning, there was a beautiful angel who rose from the waters in flowing robes with a magnificent crown. She held an eternal light that reached to the clouds.

But in order to see her the people first had to shed their shtetl skins. So they cast them away into the river, like sins.

The angel then devoured names, story, syntax, and syllables until all that remained was the language that they did not yet know.

They crawled onto the shore, skinless, wobbly legged, and wordless. They tried on names and customs, settling on ones that never seemed to fit.

Then as they gazed upwards towards the heavens, she appeared before them. They promised her that this was the story they would tell their children and their children’s children.

My father’s parents saw this angel with their own eyes or so he told me, but they were buried before I was old enough to ask questions. My mother’s parents saw her too and talked about her often.

My grandmother was Persian, but she barely remembered that. She only recalled that she didn’t know the Yiddish that sometimes slipped out of my grandfather’s mouth when he was angry.

“Really, tell me what language you spoke before.” I pleaded.

“None.”

“Where were you born?”

“Ellis Island,” they would reply.

I protested until I was finally forced to accept this to be true.

“Fine, but then tell me, where were your parents born?”

“Ellis Island, too.”

And I grew to understand that it wasn’t a lie because, to them, it was the beginning of everything and this was the story that would save them and their children and their children’s children.

“You really want the whole story?” asked my grandfather born Yitzhak later named Issac then Isadore then Edward and finally just plain Ed.

“Long, long ago the Jewish people were chased from the Promised Land. But we’re the lucky ones. We found our way to a new promised land on a distant shore,” he said.

So it wasn’t that they didn’t believe in anything. They, of course, believed in the angel and they believed in a promised land. They lauded the public school system and its ability to teach English while continuing to insist that they knew no other language before. They believed that in America anything was possible even for Jews so long as long as we waved our flags and made ourselves look and sound like ‘real Americans’. They believed that this is what would keep them safe.

It was a bargain that they happily accepted long ago. Mostly. They hedged their bets.

They kept a version of Passover from the Holy book, the Maxwell House Haggadah, and they also still gave us Hebrew names. These names were separate from who we were, souvenirs from a forgotten world.

Esther, my name, both Jewish and Persian, felt akin to the name Elana that my Spanish teacher assigned to me in the seventh grade. Because what’s a name detached from meaning or story?

My name, Erica though that came from a daytime soap opera and you don’t get more American than that. I knew my origin story.

But then my cousin became ill. From the whispers around me, I knew that it was unlikely that he would survive. And because we were a family sewn together by secrets, it only accidentally slipped out that my father and uncle had gone to synagogue to have my cousin’s name changed.

“Change the name, the true name, the Hebrew name, of the gravely ill and the Angel of Death can perhaps be deceived. When the Angel comes to collect their soul, the person by that name will be but a memory. Then the Angel of Death may be fooled into failing to reap his reward.”

“Old World mishegas. Meaningless,” my father said later.

And even though it didn’t work and my cousin passed away, I knew my father was wrong.

It wasn’t meaningless. It was proof that worlds of stories were once written for me. And even though they believed that the angel in the New York Harbor demanded that they throw them overboard, they were already imprinted on their souls and maybe faintly on mine too.

So I bring my children to the Statue of Liberty.

“Your great-grandparents were born here,” I tell them as I gaze up at Lady Liberty. “Floating around us are all the stories of you and of me.”

I look back and whisper to my ancestors and pray that the angel’s mouth will open and their lost tales will spill out. Perhaps next time.

Until then I borrow folktales and origin stories: Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Talmudic, Tanakhic. I collect them. I rewrite them. And I continue to hope that one day I will find the story that will make me remember.

 

Erica Lyons is an award winning children’s book author, based in Hong Kong, whose focus is on writing stories found in the footnotes of Jewish history books. She is the founder of PJ Library Hong Kong and the chair of the Hong Kong Jewish Historical Society. Her most recent books, to be published in September 2024, are Mixed-Up Mooncakes (HarperCollins) and On a Chariot of Fire – The Story of India’s Bene Israel (Levine Querido). She is represented by Caryn Wiseman of the Andrea Brown Literary Agency.