My great-grandfather, Henoch Zuckerkandel, must have been doing well as a kosher butcher in Kozlow, a shtetl in the Tarnopol district then Austria-Hungary. He must have done well while a bachelor, too, because he presented his betrothed, Pesia Seife, a local girl he’d probably known all his life, with a diamond ring.

Diamond may be a generous term. The cloudy stone was barely bigger than a pin head, held into place by miniscule gold prongs and a gold band. Even stone may be a misrepresentation. It could have been glass. Yochanan Petrovsky-Stern, a Jewish studies scholar who specializes in shtetl life, told me through email that salesmen traveled from town to town selling jewelry. Or, perhaps, Henoch traveled to Tarnopol city to buy it.

I found the ring, which came into my father’s possession at some point, in an old Dutch Masters cigar box in the playroom of my parents’ house in 1991. The ring must have been about a century old by then. I had a habit of spending weekends as a newly single mom of a lively toddler at my parents. Once there, I rummaged through drawers and cabinets to find remnants of my ancestors—my grandfather’s knotted silk sock that held a laminated photo of a sister left behind in Russia, my father’s 1946 address book, my mother’s junior high autograph book with her parents’ handwriting. And now here was a gold band hiding in plain view in a junk drawer. I inspected it. The ring bore a three-letter inscription: פּסל. Pesl in Hebrew characters. Not confident in my knowledge then of either Hebrew or Yiddish, I verified it with more expert people.

I asked my father, “Where did this come from?” He said he had it locked in his supermarket safe and brought it home when he retired in the mid-1980s. He didn’t mention when the ring entered the safe, and I didn’t ask. He kept the ring safe—but lost the memory with no interest in dredging any memory up.

How my grandmother came to be in possession of the ring is also a mystery. I imagined a few possible scenarios. First, perhaps great-grandmother Pesia gave it to Eva, the eldest of a brood of eight children, when Eva left Kozlow in 1913 for America at age twenty-one. For Eva, this must have been quite a cherished memento of Mama and the shtetl where she was related to practically everyone through her mother’s family. But she wouldn’t see Kozlow or her mother again. The second possibility is that a sibling sent it to her when Pesia died in 1936. It makes sense that an engagement ring would be left to the eldest daughter just as my eldest sister inherited my mother’s exquisite four-carat diamond ring. Perhaps a third possibility, although slight, is that Eva’s youngest brother, Chaim Leib or Leo, brought it to America when he immigrated in 1951, only months before Eva’s death. I say slight possibility because it seems most unlikely that Leo would have been able to hold onto the ring after the Soviet invasion of Kozlow, his arrest, and deportation to a Soviet labor camp in Siberia. After the war, he then spent several more years in at least two Displaced Persons camps, including Föhrenwald in the American sector of Germany. 

I took the ring and wore it proudly. It made me feel like I was connected to this line of my family, that I was meant to find it, meant to wear it. I thought about how the ring rested on Pesia’s finger, a rather large finger given the ring size. Perhaps after her marriage she put it away for safekeeping, replacing it on her finger with a thick gold wedding band. To be sure, if she had worn it often, that inscription would not have been intact when I found it. The inscription eroded quickly, maybe just a few years after I started wearing it. And now I can’t find the ring at all—even after searching my jewelry box and little velvet jewelry pouches I scatter in weird places to thwart burglars.

I found another ring in one of the round tins my mother kept in the kitchen cabinet above the princess phone on our secondary line. This ring, made of either silver, white gold, or platinum, had no stone. My mother said this was the setting of Grandma Eva’s engagement ring. I wanted this ring. I wanted something of her. I wanted her spirit to know that even a granddaughter who never knew her in the flesh, knew she had lived and loved. The ring, to me, was evidence of my grandfather’s promise to provide for her, even though Grandma Eva would likely think and perhaps say that she could take care of herself well enough. I wanted to replace the stone, not with a diamond but perhaps a sapphire, my birth stone. But my mother insisted the ring should go to my middle sister, who was named for Eva. I think she put topaz in the setting. Given my track record of losing family heirlooms. I’m just not to be trusted. All these years, I’m imagining the ring in my sister’s jewelry box. But she’s lost it too, or at least the memory of it ever having been in her possession.  

Losing family heirlooms is apparently one of our unique skills. Poet Elizabeth Bishop once wrote in her iconic poem, “One Art”: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” I have mastered it. I have even prayed to St. Francis—is he the patron of lost things?—not knowing if his spirit would honor a request from a Jew. Bishop encourages us to lose faster and that’s exactly what I’ve done. I can still recall those thorny prongs like the cheap ones we used in arts and crafts at summer camp. The quality of that stone, so poor. But its meaning and memory, so rich. If only I had photographed or just left it alone.

How much I want to understand this woman who didn’t live long enough to know me. Her spirit crawls into my mind, into my fingers as I type. She wants, I tell myself, to be found, to be remembered. We’ve all lost so much. 

Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and a PhD in Holocaust & Genocide Studies from Gratz College, where she teaches in the graduate programs. A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared in more than sixty literary journals, including Jewish Literary Journal, Jewish Fiction, Jewish Writing Project, Minyan, Vita Poetica, and elsewhere. She lives in New Jersey.