Agamemnon, My Mother, and Me: Reflections on Life and Translation

Abstract

This time I really thought we’d make it through a visit without the stories. It was our last evening with my family. My sister was outside barbequing, and we were inside waiting for supper. Suddenly, my mother began to talk about the camps. “Mom died of malaria in Kcechimöv,” she says. I interrupt. “I thought she died of dysentery.” “No. She died of malaria. Dad died of dysentery.” Joe, my husband, tries to get the time line straight. “Was that in ’41 or ’42?” I know now that it was early 1945, but it took me years to figure that out. I’d heard the stories too often, in no particular order. She corrects him. Then she begins to talk about the camp in Warsaw where they were set to cleaning up rubble and rebuilding roads. She says, “It was heavy work. Many older people would stumble or fall. Then the guards would come and kick them and grab them by the hair and bounce their head off the road. They were maybe seventy or so. Many of them died from that.”2 Her own head is white now. She is eighty-one years old. She has always been small—about five feet. Now she is smaller than that, and her back is crooked with osteoporosis. I can’t stand it. I leave the house to walk around outside and untie the familiar knot in my stomach. I leave Joe to hear the rest. But most of the time, for most of my life, I have listened. My mother, Irma Rossol (her maiden name), was born in 1929 in Rybitwy, Poland, a village near Płońsk. She lived on a farm with her parents and siblings, her grandmother, an aunt and uncle, and some cousins. They were Polish citizens of German nationality.