“The world would be forever mixed; now Germany had some India and more Ashkenazi Jew in it.” In a stunning, probing essay at The Kenyon Review, Diane Mehta examines the unknowns surrounding her birth, and her parents’ trajectories and family history. Mehta digs into who her parents were — especially her mother, a Jewish American woman living in postwar Germany — while also exploring what it means for pieces of paper to control our lives and seal our fates.
I’m a fill-in-the-blanks sort of person, so I believe that each of the boxes on the FS-240 embodies all the possibilities of circumstance, pleasure, and menace that as an infant I did not know until they happened to me. Perhaps this is my first clue that I have no control over being, and limited control over the rhythm of my days in this world. There is not only Frankfurt, where I lived for six months, but other borders and cities in me. I can keep filling in the blanks with constructed narratives, to explain the accidents that others call fate; I do not believe in it any more than I believe in astrology or magnetism or the Year of the Tiger. I do believe in habit and imagination, and out of that you can burn your way into any narrative you choose.
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