A Gift from the Heavens by Karen Bromberg

When I was two years old and heard music coming either from the TV or the radio, the most natural thing in the world for me to do was to toddle over to the piano and play it. It didn’t matter where we were; we could be at our home or Grandma and Grandpa’s or we could even be at a neighbor’s house. As long as there was a piano I could play on, I was a happy camper.

According to Mom and Dad, I could reproduce a piece of music so well it sounded as if I’d been practicing it for hours, only I hadn’t.

“If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I never would’ve believed it,” Mom would say. “There you’d be, this little slip of a thing, tickling the ivories as if you were a professional musician, only a professional musician would have had sheet music in front of her and would have had years of training. You had neither.”

I have only a vague recollection of that. What I do remember is standing at Grandma and Grandpa’s piano when I was four; Mom and Dad, Grandpa and Grandma, Aunt Katrina and Uncle Gustav sitting in the living room. I’d hear these melodies in my head and, before I knew it, my fingers would be moving. Out would come these weird, atonal tunes that easily could’ve rivaled Philip Glass.

I could always count on my family to enjoy whatever I was playing. I’d see them out of the corner of my eye, smiling as they tapped their fingers or moved their heads in time to my music. They’d applaud when I was finished. Mom and Aunt Katrina would come over and hug me while Grandma would bring over a plate of her warm cinnamon-apple strudel with slightly melted vanilla ice cream alongside it. Better pay no one ever got.

But creating music wasn’t the only thing I did when I was little. I also wrote stories, creating these elaborate tales about witches, goblins and demons so creepy that they kept Mom “up all night.” I also drew, playing “artist” when I wasn’t playing “composer” or “author.” I’d draw Grandma standing at her stove or Grandpa sleeping in his easy chair. I’d draw Dad seated on the couch, watching TV, but my favorite was drawing Mom when she was out in the backyard, tending to her garden. As I recall, being with her flowers was the only time she ever truly looked happy.

Mom’s younger sister, my Aunt Katrina, always seemed happy. She’d joke and laugh, telling me the funniest stories from when she and Mom were girls back in Austria in the ’30s. Sometimes, she’d laugh so hard that her eyes would squint up, and tears would stream down her face.

She’d tell me about Wilhelm and his sister, Pia, the kids down the street, and about Leon and his older brother, Christoph. They lived around the corner.

“It was so hard leaving them,” Aunt Katrina said one day, “but what choice did we have? When Mama and Papa said, ‘We have to flee,’ we fled.”

It was the first time Aunt Katrina ever said anything about the family having to leave Austria. Mom was usually the one to tell me those stories. There was the one about how they quietly slipped out of their house in the middle of the night, leaving “almost everything we had,” and the one about how they got themselves to France to catch their boat to America. Of course, there were the ones about them “down in steerage. How we survived,” Mom would go on, “I have no idea. I guess you just do what you have to.” There were the ones about them moving in with Grandma’s sister, Josephine, when they first arrived in New York, and the ones about Grandpa’s first job as a junk peddler when they moved up to Connecticut a few years later.

Mom told these stories so many times that as soon as she started I’d tune it out. It was only when she started telling me about Klara, the five-year-old girl who lived upstairs from them that I knew I had to listen. It meant that Mom was depressed. It meant that I had to do something, say something, yet again, to try and coax her out of it.

“You remind me so much of her,” Mom would say, a faraway look in her eyes. “That girl could do everything, draw, play the piano and with no lessons or sheet music. It was as if she was born to them, just like you. She also wrote stories, but her stories had to do with running away to distant, exotic islands. Reading them made me cry.

“I told Klara that talent like hers was special, that it was a gift from the Heavens and should never be wasted,” Mom would go on, twisting her mouth, looking away, waving her hand in disgust. “Last I heard, the Nazis had taken her and her family.”

Though I wasn’t quite sure what Mom was saying, I knew that she and Aunt Katrina felt it was important for me to draw, write, and play the piano. It wasn’t until I turned thirteen, right around my Bat Mitzvah, that I began understanding why.

Around the time I turned twelve, Aunt Katrina began asking me what I’d recently “done with my creativity.” Before I could answer, Mom would jump in, saying, “Not a thing,” then the two of them would start “reminiscing” about “how beautifully Klara would play the piano” and “how wonderful her drawings and stories were.”

I had already stopped doing any of those things by that time. Hanging out with my friends and talking on the phone had become far more important, but the way Mom and Aunt Katrina were talking, it sound like they wanted Klara around more than they wanted me.  Klara was so great. Klara was so perfect. It made me mad. It made me want to scream, which I did a week after my Bat Mitzvah: “If she was so great,” I yelled, stomping my feet, looking straight at Mom, after Aunt Katrina had me asked the same question, after Mom had given her the same answer, after the two of them started reminiscing about Klara again, “then why didn’t you just take her with you when you left Austria?”

It was the last time either of them tried getting me to do anything using Klara’s name.

It wasn’t until I learned in school what had happened in Europe in the 1930s and ’40s that I began understanding why Mom and Aunt Katrina had talked so much about Klara and, perhaps more importantly, why they had felt it was so important for me to draw, write and play the piano. Prior to what I learned, the only things I knew about the Holocaust was what my family had told me. Hearing what had happened in Austria, from my teacher, made me realize that Klara, in fact, might be dead.

I immediately put that thought out of my head. Thinking that someone could’ve killed Klara felt way too scary and far too sad for me to bear. So, I started wondering instead if she ever married or had any children. I also wondered if she felt about her gifts from the Heavens the way I felt about mine, that they were no big deal.

I thought about asking Mom about Klara, but was reluctant to. I didn’t want to bring up anything that might make Mom sadder. So, I asked Aunt Katrina instead.

“I have no idea what became of her,” Aunt Katrina said as we sat on the living room sofa at her and Uncle Gustav’s house after I had gone by after school one day.  “I’ve often wondered, though. I just assumed she didn’t survive.”

My breath hitched. It was the only time I remember Aunt Katrina looking sad.

“It was such a joy to listen to her music,” Aunt Katrina continued. “There are times when I can still hear those melodies in my head.”

My immediate response, when Aunt Katrina told me that, was to write a story or draw a picture or compose a piece of music in honor of Klara. It just felt like the right thing to do. I knew I could do something that would even have made Klara proud, despite my not having done any of those things in years. But the more I thought about it, the less I wanted to. Drawing, writing, and playing the piano might have been special to Mom, Aunt Katrina, and maybe even to Klara, but the more I pondered it, the more I realized they simply weren’t to me.