‘Pish on the stick!’ Elise Esther Hearst on the Holocaust’s echo and black comedy for Millennials
Her fiance was lying naked on a massage table overseas and her Holocaust-survivor grandma was pushing her to use a pregnancy test. So Elise Esther Hearst got creative.
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I was with my grandmother when I found out I was pregnant with my first child.
At the time, both my then-fiance and my parents were overseas (not together – my husband-to-be was a professional cyclist competing in China, and my parents were on holiday on top of a mountain somewhere).
On my way to my grandmother’s I’d asked if she needed anything. “Toothpaste,” she’d said. I waded through a sea of bright pink and yellow stickers in the discount pharmacy. I left with a tube of Sensodyne and a First Response pregnancy test. Despite being told explicitly by my wedding-dress maker not to fall pregnant before the wedding, my then-fiance and I had thrown caution to the wind, and I suspected the wind had other ideas.
When I arrived at the aged-care facility, I handed her the toothpaste and showed her the pregnancy test. “What’s this?” she’d asked, eyebrows raised, nostrils flared. My grandmother was suspicious of most things presented to her from the pharmacy. She was also fiercely loving, wonderfully hilarious, and would casually threaten to kill herself if my hair didn’t look the way she liked it to. “I might be pregnant. Should I take the test?” She’d practically leapt out of her skin and yelled at me to pish on the stick as soon as humanly possible. So I did. And together we waited.
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There is no greater privilege than being a grandchild. In my experience, I was the recipient of all my grandmother’s love without much of the angst. Because most of the angst she wouldn’t or couldn’t speak about and yet would funnel in acts of passive aggression towards my mother and uncle. And she had a lot to feel angst over. A Polish Jew, she and her immediate family fled for fear of persecution when she was nineteen years old. They left many loved ones behind, including her own Jewish grandmother who was murdered in the bed she slept in. My grandmother survived the Holocaust only to find that disaster followed her here to Australia, with the death of her seven-year-old son who was tragically hit by a car.
I owed my grandmother all the happiness I could muster. How momentous it would be to share with her the moment she would discover that she would, for the fourth time, become a great-grandmother. And how incredible would it be, now, to share with her the news of my first novel being published. Always an avid reader (she had read all the books in the library at the home where she lived out her final years), books were a true joy in her life. And likely a vital and necessary escape.
It was no coincidence that a few weeks after her death at age ninety-nine, I began writing my novel. I hadn’t intended to write a book about her, rather simply to write. And in my great grief, as I began writing, she was breathing down my neck, sitting on my shoulder, rolling her eyes and telling me to stop wallowing in my tears as life was pressing, urgent, and I had it, and she did not. I pressed on, and soon enough found I had a novel featuring, among others, a very forceful yet loving grandmother.
Would my grandmother like my book, One Day We’re All Going to Die? No. A blackly humorous millennial coming-of-age novel, it is laden with all the most visceral and ugly aspects of life, sex and death. It explores the impact of Holocaust survivor experiences on subsequent generations, and grapples with inherited trauma and tragedy – all the things she spent her life avoiding talking about. Would she be proud of the book? Undoubtedly. Or at least, I hope so.
After the requisite time had passed, I presented her with the urine-soaked stick. It featured two blue lines, another generation of the living. Together we jumped, clutched at each other, eyes wet, cheeks and breath pressing and releasing. We called my parents on whatever mountain they were on, we called my fiance who was naked and on a massage table after a long day of racing. We sat on her couch and held hands and dreamt up names and futures. And I left her there, telling her to tell no-one, knowing she would tell everyone.
One Day We’re All Going to Die by Elise Esther Hearst is on sale now, published by HQ Fiction. Tell us what you‘re reading at the Sunday Book Club on Facebook.
And check out our Book Of Month: The Visitors, by Jane Harrison. You can get it for 30 per cent off the RRP with the code VISITORS at Booktopia. T & Cs: Ends 30-Sep-2023. Only on ISBN 9781460761984. Not with any other offer.
Originally published as ‘Pish on the stick!’ Elise Esther Hearst on the Holocaust’s echo and black comedy for Millennials
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