I am a coward. That is the first thing you must know. I am a coward because I ran from the past. It took less courage to become a new person than to face the failings of the person I once was. I am a coward because I chose to lose myself in this new life.
If you went to Paris, you know by now that I am a Picard. That is my family. I was raised in a progressive Jewish home. My father was a doctor. My mother was a Polish immigrant whose parents ran a bakery, just like you do now. I had two sisters and three brothers. They all perished. All of them. I have come to terms with that, but I blame myself for not saving them. That blame is with me every day.
There is also a man you must know about, a man named Jacob Levy. I have not spoken that name since 1949, the year your grandfather returned to tell me that Jacob had died at Auschwitz. Every day since then, I have searched the sky for him. But I cannot find him.
Jacob, my dear Hope, was the love of my life. I loved your grandfather too; I do not want you to doubt that for a moment. But in life, I believe we can have but one great love, and Jacob was mine. Most people do not find even that. And I have realized, as I have gotten older, that by closing my own heart off, I have perhaps taken away your chance at finding that kind of love, as I took from your mother her chance. If one isn’t taught how to love, it’s hard to find the way on one’s own. Do not let that be my legacy to you.
I know I did everything wrong. I closed my heart after I learned Jacob was gone, and I did not know how to open it again. Perhaps I did not want to. But because of that, I did not love your mother the right way, and that changed the course of her life, and the course of yours. I can never fully tell you how sorry I am for that. I failed both of you. I only hope that it is not too late for you to correct those mistakes in your own life.
Jacob died before he had a chance to meet your mother or you or Annie, and in that, I believe we were all cheated by fate. Your mother, you see, was his daughter. You are his granddaughter. Ted, who you always knew as your grandfather, knew this all along and raised both of you as his own. He knew already when he met me that he could never have children of his own, because of an injury he had sustained in the war. He gave me a new life, and I gave him a family. It was a trade we both knew we were making, and I have never regretted it. He was a wonderful man, a better man than I ever deserved. Please do not let this revelation make him mean any less to you, because if that is the result, I will have failed at my last important task. He was, and will always be, your grandpa.
I did not know for sure until 1949 that Jacob had died, although I had been told by many people, before I married your grandfather, that he had been killed at Auschwitz. Still, I did not believe it. I refused to believe it. I believed I would have known in my soul, and I did not. So, you may wonder, how could I have married your grandfather, if I believed Jacob would still come back?
It is the cruelest thing I have ever done. Your grandfather never knew that Jacob and I had been married in secret, just months before I left Paris. He never knew that your mother had been conceived on our wedding night. When your grandfather asked me to marry him, he did not understand that if Jacob had returned, it would annul our marriage. I was prepared to do that to him, to your grandfather, and that is something I must always live with. I would have left him in a heartbeat if Jacob had come back, and that, of course, was terribly unfair to him. But marrying Ted before I gave birth to your mother meant that she would be born an American. She would have freedom. No one could take her away to a concentration camp. And this, above all else, was my greatest responsibility. I did not have the luxury to say no to a proposal from an American. I had to save your mother, both because she was my child, and because she was the last piece of Jacob I had left.
Your grandfather and I had a good life together, and I loved him deeply, although in a different way than I loved Jacob. I loved him most of all for the kind of father he was to Josephine, and later, for the kind of grandfather he was to you. He showed both of you the kind of love I was incapable of. I believe that my heart would have broken each time I saw him with you, had my heart not frozen solid so many years ago. Without meaning to, I withheld my love from him, and from your mother, and from you, and from Annie.
And that, I am afraid, is the legacy I will leave behind—that of a cold heart.
I know that is the only way you have ever known me. But I want you to know that I was not always that way. There was once a time when I was happy and free, a time when I loved without reservation, because I didn’t know how much love could hurt. I wish you had known me then. And I wish you had known Jacob, for he would have loved you with that sort of depth too. He would be very proud of you. Instead, I made all the mistakes I could have made, and in the end, I leave this world with nothing.