Wednesday, February 13, 1943. Terrible things are happening outside.

Anne Frank's Diary, written in 1943.

Jan. 8. Granma Mary Rommely has a pretty carved box that her great grandfather made in Austria over a hundred years ago. She has a black dress and white petticoat and shoes and stockings in it. They are her burying clothes as she doesn't want to be buried in a shroud. Uncle Willie Flittman said he wants to be cremated and his ashes scattered from the Statue of Liberty. He thinks he'll be a bird in the next life and he wants a good start. Aunt Evy said he's a bird already, a cuckoo. Mama scolded me for laughing. Is cremation better than burying? I wonder.

Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, written in 1943 but taking place in 1913.

It's a 'hard no' on cats?

Rebecca to Jack in This Is Us, 2018 but supposed to be in the mid-1970s

That picture the AI drew for me isn't quite accurate. Miss Lindquist's piano was what she called a church upright: it wasn't nearly as tall as the old Victorian uprights. I'm familiar with the kind in the photo, though: I've played many a one, from church basements across half a continent to the farmhouse parlours of my relatives to school classrooms to, memorably, the little storefront church I played for as an 11-year-old. Victorian uprights are cool.

Miss Lindquist did have wallpaper with oversized flowers on it, though. She had old prints on her wall and an overstuffed horsehair sofa. She was the only person I ever knew who owned (and used) a horsehair sofa. I used to sit on it once a week and read, usually with a lapful of cat (Biddy, or later Dominick, both of whom weighed about 30 pounds thanks to Miss Lindquist, who cooked them fresh fish). In the meantime, I'd listen with one ear to Sis's piano lesson (I'd already had mine) and with the other to loud purring.

Horsehair sofas are hard.

Miss Lindquist was born in 1888. Her folks came from Sweden to New York City when she was about three. Later, they moved to Pittsburgh. They built the house where the piano and horsehair sofa were. It was a wonderful house. It had buttons to turn the lights on and off. You pushed them in. That's how original that house was, the house where I learned to play Schumann and Schubert and how to pronounce words like 'andächtig' and 'schön' and heard stories and jokes from a time as gone as the horses whose hair filled that sofa and whose hoofbeats were only a distant memory.

I'm reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. Ms Smith's book is real. It's authentic. She was there. She knows about the poverty and the horrible schools and what it was like to be a child in that world where children had to grow up way too fast and see way too much of the tragedy of life before they were ready for it.

I know Betty Smith's book is real because Miss Lindquist took me there in my mind, in between repetitions of 'Kleiner Morgenwanderer' and her rendition of 'Where do you work-a, John? On the Delaware Lackawann'. What do you do-a, John? I poosh, I poosh, I poosh!'

Miss Lindquist told me how the children played at 'concert', pretending to be great musical artists about to embark on a grand performance: bowing elaborately, making a great show of sitting down to the piano, cracking their knuckles, etc, and then playing, with one finger, the tune called 'Paddy Fell Over the Dump'. She told me how scared she was at three years old when her parents sent her out to the shops with a note and some pennies – how the giant buildings terrified her, how she got lost, how a nice policeman brought her home.

Betty Smith recreates that world. And I remember Miss Lindquist. And I'm mad at the world all over again.

Anne Frank was there in the Netherlands, in the Annex. Her memories are uncoloured by subsequent experience, alas. Because she didn't live to see the end of the war. Her diary has to speak for her. Her diary tells it the way it was.

I'm also watching a television series called This Is Us. It's a very good television series. The actors do a superb job. The writing is amazing. The stories are beautifully structured. The narrative leaps back and forth from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s. . . the people come alive for you, but. . .

. . . they get things wrong. No, not big things: they remember when the Vietnam War ended and what Franco Harris did in that Superbowl. Their continuity is amazing, considering that a large cast of very fine actors have to play out the characters' life stories out-of-sequence for six whole seasons.

It's the little things. Like Becca saying to Jack, on their first date, 'So that's a 'hard no' about cats?' Nobody in the mid-1970s ever heard that phrase, which showed up in the early 2000s. I have a sharp ear for things like that. I understand: it's almost impossible for people to sort out when they first heard an expression. The arguments can be endless about where they came from. If dialogue writers are going to slip up, that's usually where it happens.

I don't blame them, but it brings me to my point: the past is a different country. Or, more accurately, there are many pasts, many different countries. It is possible for us to be well-travelled in them, but we need to be careful about our tour guides. Your informant needs to have been there – or to have paid careful attention to those who were.

Far too many people today seem to have got a funny notion about the past. They think that because nobody they know was there, they can just make it up to suit the fashion of the moment. Vikings were like this, the Wild West was a romantic time when 'men were men', the 1910s were full of happy-happy people on bicycles singing 'Daisy, Daisy'. They don't want you knowing that the 'Wild West' was a fiction invented to sell newspapers, that the 1910s was a period of extreme poverty for a lot of people, and that nobody in medieval Scandinavia wore cow horns on their heads. And no, you can't just make it up.

You can't just make it up because it's rude to your whatever-great-grandparents. They deserve better. You can't make it up because it's unfair to your grandkids. They can't build a better world on lies about the past. More important, if you deprive yourself of the knowledge of human experience from the past, you may doom yourself to make the same mistakes they did. Give them a chance to help the future. Be more critical of what people are telling you about the past.

And take every chance you can get to get your information from eyewitnesses. Read an old book. And, dare I suggest this? Talk to some old people.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

26.02.24 Front Page

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