My daughter is running through the store, trying on hats and vamping it up. She's modeling for me and charming everyone who is watching her. What a delicious sight she is. Afterwards, I drop her at ballet class. Before I make my exit, I peek through the curtain at her small, lithesome body, and I watch her face, serious and intent as she plies. She sees me. I disappear.

Sitting at the counter at a coffee shop on the Upper West Side, when I look at my watch I remember where I am. Ten minutes late for my therapy session, there she is again my fantasy daughter is holding me up while she delights my brain.

"Are you longing for your childhood?" my therapist asks when I tell her how I stare at children in the street, hug them with my eyes, and cleave to the sound of their froggy voices. Do I want to be their mom, I wonder as I pull myself away to do the next grown up thing I've got scheduled for my day, or do I want to crawl inside their skin and become them? It's hard to know.

I return to Jesse, my make-believe daughter for clues. Almost always she's my all-American girl. I never tell her that her grandparents are Holocaust survivors. I wrap her in gauze and shield her in a protective cocoon. She'll never watch black and white film clips of skeletal bodies, learn of the deaths of my father's four brothers, or see the look of helplessness that begs forth from my mother's eyes. I don't want my daughter to know the pain of being asked to complete another person's life and the futility of failing at such an impossible task.

Other times Jesse's the bridge between my parents and myself, my peace offering. A generation apart with me as buffer, Jesse gives my mother the attention she so hungrily craves and takes in the good stuff that our cultural differences bear. My mother woos her granddaughter with her Hungarian accent and her Zsa Zsa-like charms. She tells her my favorite childhood story, The Chadala Babala, something like the old woman who lived in a shoe, and she bumps fists with her as they play etzem petzem picolara, one potato two. My mother's on good behavior. I've allowed her into Jesse's life, but only under the condition that she never tell her about the Holocaust. She loves her granddaughter passionately, and she knows I mean business. She obeys.

As a single woman with no children the winding down of my biological clock has lowered the final curtain on a wish I've held since young adulthood to raise a child untouched by the scars of the Holocaust. A fantasy child is frozen in my mind at the age of seven. She has long brown curly hair, an agile body, and a curiosity that pushes her beyond all hesitation. Like me, she is American born. Unlike me, she isn't first generation. This is my gift to her a history unencumbered by differences, a present that isn't laced with pain. It is the most profound way in which I define myself as different from my mother. Yet my wish to connect with my mother is like a shadow that has framed my entire life.

Years ago, before her arthritic bones and unsteady heart rhythm caused her and my father to move to Florida, while she was still skirting the fringes of her prime, I'd walk in the street and sometimes hear the thick accent so reminiscent of her falling from the lips of other ladies. They were fancy ladies Hungarian, with rich black hair or golden blonde, trilling their 'r's, speaking animatedly. I'd stand up close, inhaling their Chanel and become filled with longing. Later, heart in hand, I'd stand by the telephone wanting to call my mother, wondering which mom will I get the one whose sadness blankets me, or the good mom, the one Jesse knows?

She'd read my mind and call me first. "Simala," she'd breathe into the phone, my Hebrew name, little Sima. "It's mommy. I vanted to hear your woice." My heart would catch as my feelings tilted like a see saw.

Unlike many Holocaust survivors who'd told their children little about the camps or their pre-war lives, my mother wove endless stories to me while I was growing up. She'd told me of the brutality of the SS who tore into the female inmates searching for hidden wealth in the most intimate places, the line-ups where she stood with her sisters while the SS made their selections, and her loneliness for her mother who'd died one year before the family was taken. Her mourning was interrupted, and she'd buried it in a place inside herself where it remained stuck in time, emerging years later as an inability to tolerate any kind of separation.

My father spoke seldom about the war, although his parents and four brothers were murdered. At times he appeared to be like a wounded sparrow, and whenever I caught a glimpse of him from the back I was reminded of his pain. Beneath his left shoulder blade is a 6" x 3" banana-shaped scar, the result of a bullet wound he received while serving as a paratrooper in the Czechoslovakian army. Every evening the scar announced itself to me as he leaned bare-chested into the Yiddish newspapers, his shoulders hunched in a self-effacing repose.

In my late-twenties I'd entered therapy to explore the breakdown of my five-year marriage. My mother's phone calls had cracked through the tender fiber of my relationship with my husband like static, and I'd struggled to understand to whom to give my loyalty. Taught to be a balabatish wife, wholesome and adept at the ways of the home, bearing babies who would fill the emptiness in my parent's lives, I'd remained as close to them as before I'd married. Unconsciously, I'd chosen a man whose tie to his own parents was flimsy.

Maybe I believed he wouldn't threaten my own familial tie, or perhaps I saw a sense of freedom in him that I couldn't find within myself. But my ambivalence kept me in a state of limbo, unable to break away.

When my marriage ended I was filled with guilt over its dissolution, but my relationship with my husband received little attention during my therapy sessions. I hadn't yet learned how deeply my father's quiet had affected me. So it was the content of my mother's conversations that ate up my first six months on the analytic couch. They filled my therapist's office with a ghostlike echo, so that I'd hear her voice the way I'd heard it when I was three years old, singing, "Que sera, sera, what will be will be," as she dusted and mopped or pushed a brush through my thick curls. Memories of the bittersweet lilting of her voice wrapped around me as I talked to my therapist, and I'd feel the imprint of her head resting on my shoulder, recall my fingers tapping her on the back the way she'd taught me. Soft touches, like rat a tat tat. "My little Goldilocks," she'd say when she lifted her head from my shoulder. "Simala, you are my reason."

"I made a mistake," my mother would respond at times, when I'd tell her how she'd overwhelmed me when I was a child. "I shouldn't have told you about the camps." Other times she couldn't understand my refusal to listen. Orphaned by the time she was fifteen, her longing for her mother was so deep, she'd created a memory of her that was of heroic proportion. "As long as your mother is around...," she'd trail off, shaking her fist, unable to grasp how I no longer felt as she did, that a mother's life was everything.

After my divorce I chose a life the total opposite of the one I'd been raised for or perhaps it chose me single, childless, a life that would feed only myself. My mother's stories lessened as I pulled away, but her sadness still leaked into me. Her loneliness lived in her voice which was wavy with anxiety. In therapy I'd tried to learn how to distance emotionally from my mother's voice. But where therapy was a successful microscope, it was a very weak weapon. I failed abysmally where it really counted making that separation.

When she telephoned me, my skin would tighten across my chest as I braced myself to hear something painful. If she said she was depressed or sad, it could destroy my happiness for the next week. 'Should I go to her?' I'd wonder on my way to meet friends for a movie or dinner. Sometimes I'd slip away and call to see how she was doing. When I did, I'd later become consumed with anger. If I didn't I was filled with guilt.

"Don't call me so much," I'd beg.

"Vat did I do wrong?" she would ask.

Three weeks would go by without a word. Life felt normal, even keel. I was like my peers, able to think about myself and move my own life forward. Then one of us would buckle. "Ve miss you," my mother would say, and my heart would cave because I missed them, too.

Sometimes the phone call would be fleeting, a hello or fragments of thoughts about "touchy" subjects. Was I dating anyone special? Did I have enough money? When was I coming for a visit?

"Yes, yes, and I don't know," I'd offer. Careful not to mention anything that would induce attention, like I had a scratchy throat or something in my apartment was broken, sometimes I'd slip and say I had to get to the supermarket before it closed.

"What do you need?" she'd ask.

"Just a few things soda, tuna, milk."

"Should Daddy bring it?"

"Daddy?" My skin would prickle. "The store is on the corner." Before moving to Florida, my parents lived a forty-minute drive away, yet my father once called to say he wanted to come over to bring me a TV Guide because he accidentally bought two. It could break my father's heart to withhold a way for him to fix my life. A TV Guide, milk, even a nickel, could do it.

A week later, a case of Seven-up would arrive at my door with twenty cans of tuna fish pulled off the shelves of their pantry. A nightgown, six pairs of panty hose and a brown, vinyl change purse with a twenty would be thrown in. On top was always the same note, written phonetically, in thin, harsh pen strokes Ve luv yu. Buy yurself somting. I'd look through the hallway and down the stairwell if she remembered I needed milk, surely there was a cow somewhere.

Sometimes the packages were more discreet. I'd come home from work and find in my mail, jiffy bags stuffed so full they were torn and the gray stuffing was falling out. The packages appeared frail and desperate, and shtetl life appeared before my eyes. I'd stand in front of the incinerator late at night, dropping lipsticks that weren't my color, and nightgowns in little-girl styles down the chute. Occasionally there'd be a dress or knick knack that I loved, and I was stumped. Keeping it felt like I was in cahoots with thieves who were trying to steal my life. Throwing it away meant robbing myself of the good stuff. My hand would hover over the chute dangling a dress, distraught, maniacal.

To my friends it was funny, even poignant. Palms outstretched, they'd offer to take what I didn't want. But the gifts didn't mean the same to them. When they saw the penmanship, like a childlike scrawl, they didn't feel their lives being pulled, or see my parents in their mind's eye, moving rapidly through their kitchen shelves with such purpose, as if they'd waited all day for something to do.

Finally I thought of a way to change my mother's tempo. I remembered the ladies on the street wrapped in mink and perfume, and I became one of them.

"Avichka," I'd say loudly into the phone, her Hungarian name, mimicking her accent as I strung together the few Hungarian words I knew into a sentence.

"Yes, darling," she'd sing, the need evaporating from her voice. We'd talk about shopping and make-up, gossip about friends and relatives, and we'd laugh like crazy. Maybe it was a relief to be freed from the confines of the mother/daughter roles we'd been dealt. Had we been two strangers who'd just met we could have been friends. Today, my mother holds court at her condo with all the daughters who fly down to visit their parents.

Two of these daughters have called me when they've come to New York and were stunned to learn that my relationship with my mother is so fraught with conflict. "She's the most beautiful woman I've ever met," one said to me. "I talk to her for hours. She's my other mother."

My mother sits on the beach, her tanned skin glistening with ban de soleil, reading Louise Hay's books on personal growth. As she walks in the shallow part of the ocean with these borrowed daughters, she tells them how she's trying to heal her life. It can be mesmerizing to listen to her, to look at her face, eyes shining with tears always at the ready. A radiant survivor with a light in her eyes and a sorrow in her smile, she's an attention grabber Zsa Zsa Gabor with an edge. She has a tragic past that no one can fault her for, except, shamefully, her own daughter.

If I'd been a mother, could I have raised my daughter outside the circle of my own pain? Many children of Holocaust survivors grew up not knowing the intimate details of their parents' experiences, and feel excluded from their legacy. Maybe my daughter would have pointed a finger demanding to know who I really am. Or would she have thanked me for stepping aside and giving her the room in which to grow? If so, I wonder if that would have felt like a coup or the painful stirring of an old wound.

I often felt pale and insignificant next to my mother. My blue jeans, Brooklyn accent and bangs that swept my eyes horrified her. She'd survived a childhood of poverty, the early deaths of her parents, and Auschwitz, yet my American ways threatened to do her in. What could she have seen when she looked at me? Memories of her own teenage years walking barefoot in the snow, or a multitude of possibilities she needed to control because she knew how low the outside world could go?

My mother sent in the troops to get my love. But I could never repay her for giving me the things I didn't want. My only way out felt like turning my life back in time, fulfilling what would have been my most profound success, delivering a grandchild to her door. It wasn't that I didn't want to get married again and have a baby for me. I just didn't have the energy to make it happen, except for in my fantasies, the land where what I wished for could come true.

Flying my make-believe daughter to Florida, I watch as my mother basks in her presence. Symbol of the blood that Hitler couldn't suck, Jesse's like a dagger in his heart. For this alone she receives the royal treatment. She lounges poolside on a beach chair while my mother gives her a manicure and pedicure, pink polish in her palm, humming a song. Like the Pied Piper, my mother is surrounded by other women's children. She's in heaven with these beings who accept her love, winking at Jesse letting her know that she's her special girl. Before bedtime my father goes out to buy her a chocolate frappe, while my mother does her hair up in a French braid.

Armed with instructions as to what they cannot discuss, they protect Jesse from their history. Maybe she will learn about the Holocaust in school, a few steps removed in the way textbooks generally are. Perhaps she'll learn about it in Hebrew school. It hasn't quite been determined what her Jewish education will be. What is for certain is this she will be a psychologically healthy child. Not afraid to make waves. Not afraid to stand up to me. Not afraid.

At the eleventh hour my maternal cravings are leaping out at me. I want a child. A chance to do it different. Or do I want to recreate myself?

My biological clock sounds its final wake-up cry. I hear it, but still I sleep. And dream.

Brooklyn, NY

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