PARTISAN REVIEW
507
said there was only one place for a man like him, and it wasn't in
Heaven. He's vanished, but not exactly without trace, for he still has
five surviving daughters, one son, and thirteen grandchildren. Since
I can't light candles for him, I write words, and though he mav
have been a real bastard (and undoubtedly was, from all I've
heard ) he was my grandfather on my mother's side.
I recently saw him in a dream. I was in it, too, and we were
inside a large wooden barnlike building somewhere in the country–
side. I found a piece of new woud which it seemed I had just split
from a bannister rail. I had twisted it off as if by some gigantic force.
It was satisfying to pick at its fresh-splintered surface, though thi s
required much strength from my fingers. I showed it to Burton:
"You see how vigorous and alive the wood is?"
" Yes," he answered, "but it's rotten. Look at it. "
And staring close I saw that, just under the surface of the
wood, it was pullulating with tiny winged insects and maggots.
"Well," I told him, "David will be able to examine them under
his microscope. I've just bought him a new one."
David is my son, and one of his great grandfathers was a cantor
in a synagogue in Buko\'ina. Burton's face was smiling at the sight
of David coming toward us.
The main person in a dream is always oneself, no matter who
it is. David was me as a child in this dream, and also himself as he
IS
now.
It is a pity that one can't have one's grandparents all one's life
- though if this were so one wouldn't then have them to look back
on, and childhood would not haye been what it was. But of all those
now dead of my family, Burton is the one whom I would like to
know that I had become a writer, the une I would like to read my
novels and stories to.
And yet I want to stop writing solely about Burtun because I
do not want in any way to becume him ur even like him..\s it is,
I feel myself being partly
enca p~ula teJ
by his spirit. He was too
real a person fur me, and since 1 a l:
1
not writing a noye\ I have to be:
("reful and pull away from him .
If
I were writing a novel I would
haw to become him in order
to
"ritl' about him. That would be
possible, a nd necessa ry, and I woulJ
i't-e1
entirely easy in it, because
in writing a nO\'c\ I would feel no danger whatsoe\'e r of staying like
