Reflections on Lives Past

Fredric Lown

During the autumn of 1994, I was a full-time ACLS fellow immersed in studies of Shakespearean tragedy, the Harlem Renaissance, and poetry. It was, however, the life and work of Langston Hughes that was and still is my major study of interest.

Although a familiar name to me in August, Langston Hughes was still a stranger. By January he had become a close acquaintance. As I read about his childhood in Missouri, Kansas, and Ohio, I thought about my own. As I read his accounts of his grandmother and the influence she had on him, I reflected on my own grandmother and the imprint she had made on my psyche. As I read his poetry, I began to write my own. A by-product of my studies of Langston Hughes has been an exploration of my own roots.

My paternal grandparents and father immigrated to this country in the mid-1930s from Lithuania. My grandparents were in their early forties when they left everybody and everything but for their immediate family and a few personal belongings. Almost everyone they left was murdered by the Nazis or by Lithuanian fascists. My grandparents were married for sixty-five years until my grandfather’s death in 1885. My grandmother lived for another seven years in grace and dignity. “Sestina for a Grande Dame” is dedicated to her memory.

Sestina for a Grande Dame

She was always the Grande Dame of our family realm,
  ruling from the regal heights of a former world.
  It was vanishing, she feared, so she tried to focus
  our mundane visions on allegories and stories,
  (of her uncle from Berlin who bought her trousseau),
  giving power
  to her claims that she was a voice in our lives.

We knew her in our life, not the many lives
  she had already lived with her family
  in cities and villages and towns where the power
  resided in an affluent language our world
  does not speak and will not learn so stories
  remain buried beneath layers of lenses out of focus.

She commanded through her presence that the present focus
  on the past, that her children’s children’s lives
  remember their heritage through her stories
  about a time when sacrifice secured family
  values of unity and spirituality in a world
  that was losing its center through its abuse of power.

We understood that her source of power
  was in her uncanny ability to focus
  our sights, if only fleetingly, into her world
  of backs bent over books and female hands with lives
  of their own encircling candles that gave light to family
  memory collectively created to pass on her stories.

She never forgot a detail as she sifted stories
  like sand through hands that had once held power
  in a Polish shtetl on the German border where her family
  life centered around her holy father whose prayers focused
  on searching eyes imprisoned in gaunt bodies and tattered lives,
  but his attentions rested on her. He was her world.

We were humbled by her blend of the simple with her world
  wiseness that yielded recipes for stories
  so rich in taste that our own lives
  became bland, not by her design, by our loss of power
  in a culture committed to sound-bites of unfocused
  rage compelling us to seek solace in our family.

She regaled us with fables of her old world family
  but pierced our souls with poignant stories focusing
  her breath on her second life and giving power to our lives.

Fredric Lown                

Fredric Lown has taught English, Drama, and Social Studies for over 20 years in the Randolph and Brookline, MA, public schools. With poet Judith Steinbergh, he is co-authoring a two-volume text/anthology on teaching poetry to youth, to be published in the spring of 1996 by J. Weston Walch of Portland, ME. He was a 1994–95 ACLS fellow.