No 3: BLOODLINES

IMAGE BY LUCIA AUERBACH

REBECCA KOPELMAN

Sidney has nothing to say to me. He doesn’t know me–he doesn’t know that his kid brother Milt has had three children, two boys and a girl. He doesn’t know that his little sister will marry twice, that his mother will die bitterly. He is handsome, or at the very least, he is young. Nearly twenty-five, maybe. I can’t be sure. His eyes are blue, probably, his hair red like my father’s. There’s a slightly whimsical, self-aware cast to his smile, his posture, and it must make him look supremely awkward with a rifle on his shoulder. 

When he gets back from overseas, from Germany, he is going to figure it all out. Life is all relegated to the horizon, for now. He maintains one or two steady girlfriends, since marriage seems so far off. “Now don’t for a moment think that I feel that I won’t be back,” he wrote in November, 1943. “I know that I shall–but it will take time. Maybe a year–or two. Who can say. Only God knows.” Only God knows. Sidney rakes through his hair with a miniature comb he has fished from his breast pocket. “For awhile here,” he wrote on the back of a grim group photo later in the year, “it looked as if the war was going to last forever.”

Sidney and I share some minute amount of blood. His parents are my great-grandparents, if that means absolutely anything. Probably not–he is too smart to care about that sort of thing. He doesn’t think of the future in such boring, genealogical terms. Great Uncle Sidney, I would call him if he were alive, or maybe Uncle Sid. Maybe I’d ask about Paris, where he’d seen the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame, where he’d accepted perfume samples from beautiful blonde women and bought the perfumes only if the girls seemed interested. Maybe I’d ask about God–the God who knows. Who only knows.

“I am gradually but so surely becoming religious” Sidney might say, as he did in a letter to Milt. “It’s not that I wasn’t religious before; it’s that I’ve never thought much about it. Having things so wonderful and never knowing tragedy, I was apart from it. The change has not come about because of a fear of combat or death; it has come because I’ve had long hours on guard and thought in that time of these things. This religion of mine is one that does not require a go between–between God and myself. I refer to a church or a ceremony. I feel that I can be close to God wherever I am–by praying–by believing. And I finally believe that there is a God–and I have and I do pray. And I feel better for it.” 

Then, maybe Rabbi Ernst M. Lorge, Chaplain (Capt, USA.) might say to him, as he wrote to Mr. and Mrs. Kopelman after Sidney was struck by a car in Germany, when the war was already over: “I know the greatness of your loss, all the more tragic as it occured after cessation of hostilities…You know that the only source of lasting consolation can be found in faith and trust in our Heavenly Father.” Lorge is solemn, I imagine, with thin, suffering lips. He is German, a German Jew.

A month after Sidney was struck, his brother, my grandfather, was drafted. “We have had experiences during the shooting phases of the war,” wrote Samuel J. Kopetzky, Colonel, MC, to the elder Mr. Kopelman, “where it has been difficult because more than one son was injured or perhaps killed, and yet the processing of another son had to go on…Believe me, you have my most heartfelt sympathy in the bereavement you have suffered in the loss of your one boy who has paid the utmost in devotion to the causes for which this country has fought.” He signed the letter like this:

Again expressing my sympathy, I am,

Sincerely yours,

Samuel J. Kopetzky, Colonel, MC

Medical Division

Kopetzky never met Sidney, obviously, and so he speaks to his character, his supposed devotion with rote descriptors. The man–the boy–before him is nobody. He is a stranger. Kopetzky may look at Sidney, may try to place him. He looks like every other young man he’s met: a blur of lopsided optimism and swarthy brows. Jewish, he can tell by the nose, but otherwise profoundly unspecial. Sidney smiles a bit under Kopetzky’s scrutiny, but has to avert his eyes. The older man makes him nervous.

I don’t know what sort of void I am placing these interactions in. Something like heaven, maybe, but more bureaucratic. I picture myself in a waiting room, an ante room to death, surrounded by mounds of letters and files, birth and death certificates. I am surrounded by dead men whom I’ve never met and never will meet. Sidney might wonder what he has in common with me, with Kopetzky (who is, sincerely ours), with Rabbi Lorge. All of them outlived him–Kopetzky died in 1950, Lorge in 1990, and even Sidney’s brother, Milt, died in 2018. Incomprehensible names, incomprehensible numbers. 

On guard in a strange country, maybe these things occurred to Sidney in flashes: “you only think of the past,” Sidney wrote Milt in his beautiful old woman’s slant, “and make plans and have dreams for the future. You try to forget the present as much as you possibly can.” Could he see that fatal truck backing into the road as he left breakfast? The hospice bed upon which his only brother gasped? The basement suite in which his only sister now watches television?

I am, sincerely yours, Sidney, and you don’t even know it. We share some abstract thing between us, and I think of it as a thread or a rope, but really it is far more tenuous than that. You are a young man, I am a distantly related woman who found your letters in a binder, so neatly organized, and do you know how much your brother loved you? Your photos, of the bodies at Dachau and of the girls who were in love with you, he kept them in a cigar box. I hope you know. God knows, at the very least. 

All he does is know.