Liliane Richman - The Bones of Time

Now I was alone with her and did not know what to do. She let me take her small hand and led us to La Capranie, her home, protesting all the while that I walked too fast for her short legs. I tried to slow down. I had no idea how to communicate with such a young child. Fortunately, she took the initiative and started talking

Liliane Richman brings her artistic genius to the familial separation and life-altering hardships thrust on Europeans during WWIImost vividly in the account of her fathers first grasp.

Deborah Reardon,

Amazon best-selling author of Blue Suede Shoes

Copyright 2016 Liliane Richman

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Cover and Interior design by Ted Ruybal

Manufactured in the United States of America

For more information, please contact:

Wisdom House Books

www.wisdomhousebooks.com

Paperback ISBN 13: 978-0-9966356-0-8

LCCN: 2016902144

HIS016000 HISTORY / Historiography

HIS043000 HISTORY / Holocaust

HIS022000 HISTORY / Jewish

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

www.thebonesoftime.com

In the heart of my childhood

in the forest of ferns

so long ago a village mine

there is a place

the iris of my. eye

Inside the grandmother reads

the Three Musketeers

with a magnifying glass

while her daughter beats the garden path

left and right watching out for snakes

Her husband who loves carpentry better than his own job

fashions chairs wheelbarrows

tables and clogs

then pedals his bicycle to work

sitting straight back

a king on his throne

When he comes home

he gazes at trees

as if they were the sea

what does he see?

I ask

can I come back when Im old?

say twenty-three with my babies?

he smiles

Silly, you wont want to when youre 23

Now theyre all gone

the grandmother the father the mother

I search their house the garage the garden

with summer geraniums

theres no one

least of all me

their adopted child

in the ferns that keep on growing

I t was my brother Fred who gave me the incentive to write this story, not in so many words, but by an osmosis through which we communicated at times. Indeed, Fred and I shared a meta-language related to our mostly unspoken but close awareness of each other, of our childhood shadowed by war, the effects of which we carry in our bones.

Fred, his wife Jeanette, and I were traveling from Paris to Annecy to visit their son Alex and his family. Jeanette and I had been chatting, catching up on events, as people do when they live far apart and reunite again.

From the corner of my eye I observed Fred quietly pulling a book out of his luggage. Always interested in what anyone reads, I glanced at the title and was surprised.

Grimms Fairy Tales? I exclaimed. Strange reading them at your age!

Not so strange, Fred replied. There was this kid I met at school when we lived in Sabres who spoke about the Brothers Grimms fairy tales all the time. He said they were spooky and sometimes bloody; they gave him nightmares, but he loved them anyway. Of course, he was an ordinary boy living with two parents, secure in his home in the village of his birth. I was too busy with my own nightmares to read scary tales.

Fear can be thrilling when you feel safe.

Yes, but why this sudden interest in fairy tales? I asked.

Curiosity, to see what they are about. And look, Ive found an interesting one. Its a tale about a father and his four sons, one of whom meets a tailor. I think you could write something about that.

Of course I caught his drift; our father was a tailor. It seemed an odd request, but it flattered me that my brother believed in my writing. I answered, Perhaps, and forgot all about it until the day I lost Fred forever.

Shortly thereafter, and still aggrieved over Freds untimely passing, I remembered the Annecy voyage and his suggestion. Now I was eager to write a memoir about our family, to preserve our experiences and extraordinary survival during a chaotic period of history.

A poor man had four sons. When they were grown, he sent them out into the world to acquire a profession. The fourth son met a tailor. How would you like to be my apprentice? he asked the young man. And when the young mans training was completed, his master gave him a needle. With this needle, he said, there will be nothing in the world you wont know how to sew or repair.

-From the Grimm tale of The Four Brothers

W hen my father, Eugne, was a boy, Hungary was a backward country. Life in a metropolis like Budapest might well be transformed by the arrival of modern amenities such as electricity, running water, and movie theaters. No such improvements reached the slumbering village of Tyukod. The children talked constantly about automobiles, radios, and airplanes, though they had never seen any of these wonders. They rather believed them to be fairy tales, fantasies much like the unicorns and dragons of the past.