Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

to speak, became a lot more important. We didn’t watch straight through—​is four minutes of a family in a park more interesting than one minute? (the answer is yes, it is, but only if you’re trying to get closer to the subjects; if you’re just watching to see what happens, then no)—​but we did watch most of it, a good couple of hours, delighted.

My father, in the leather recliner, feet up, looking much more grandfatherly and patriarchal than usual, was greatly enjoying himself. His childhood knowledge was suddenly useful and interesting. He rarely lets himself indulge in nostalgia; I think he thinks it’s impractical, pointless, unproductive (something, perhaps, inherited from his parents, this disciplined focus on the present and future). That night, though, surrounded by his wife of more than forty years and his six children and whichever of his thirteen grandchildren had been allowed to stay up, watching his childhood literally projected onto the wall—​even the most unsentimental man would go soft. He was endearingly embarrassed, wistful. He groaned and shook his head at what he and everyone else used to look like, at the attention his parents lavished on his younger sister, at his engagement party, more than forty years ago, at his bar mitzvah, almost fifty years ago. My siblings and I watched the videos and simultaneously watched my father watching the videos.

My father exclaimed: That’s Blue Paradise, we used to go there in the summers. That was the day before Hershel’s wedding in Israel. That must have been a going-away party before we moved to Toronto. On the screen the men danced in a circle and one by one my father identified them. That’s Mr. Mermelstein, that’s Mr. Zolty, that’s Mr. Levy. That’s Harry Ostry, my father said, my father saved him in the camps. What? I said, I’ve never heard that—​what happened? I don’t know, my father said, I don’t know any details. Did you ever know the details? I don’t think so, my father said, I just always kind of knew it, it was a story we always knew. That’s Shloimie, that’s Max! Oh my god, it’s Alan.

We watched my grandfather make havdalah, the ritual that closes out Shabbos with a flame and wine and something pungent to smell. He added a custom we’d never seen before. After extinguishing the flame and drinking the wine, he dipped his fingers into the saucer, picking up drops of wine, and dabbed the corner of his eyes, three times; and then re-dipped his fingers into the saucer and put drops in his front pockets, also three times. We were mystified. Not by the act itself—​we were well accustomed to varieties of ritual—​but by its absence in our family, that the tradition had apparently been dropped. My father couldn’t explain it. “I remember my father did it,” he said. “I don’t know why I don’t.” He said he’d start doing it again, there was no reason not to, if it’s what his father did it meant it’s what his father had done, and so on.

The next morning I was with my father in the car, waiting for my mother. My father was wearing white shorts, a baseball cap, and clip-on sunglasses, looking again like his handsome, successful, focused-on-the-present, sixty-three-year-old self. Usually when forced to wait he gets impatient. Usually in this scenario he’d ask, Where is she, I don’t understand, we said we’d leave at nine so why isn’t she ready at nine? But today he was quiet and reflective. “I have to tell you,” he said, “watching those videos, seeing all that, it was very depressing. I woke up feeling very depressed.”

“I’m surprised,” I said. “You seemed to be really enjoying.”

“It didn’t hit me until later. When I was trying to fall asleep. When I woke up.” Overnight the experience had turned sour.

“Is it because of your parents? Because you miss your parents?”

No, my father shook his head. It was more than that. “Everyone’s dead,” he said. “All those people in the video—​they’re all dead.”

A week after Passover it was my grandfather’s yahrtzeit, and I went to Toronto to be with my father for the weekend, he’d asked me to come. My mother was out of town, none of my siblings live in Toronto, it’d be just us two.

Friday night, my father and I had Shabbos dinner at my aunt’s. A couple of my cousins and their spouses were there too. There was, inevitably, an argument—​or rather the entire conversation was knitted from mini-arguments, and one argument happened to stick and fester. I don’t remember what it was about—​political correctness, abortion, Trump, it could’ve been anything. It wasn’t even particularly heated, but I felt outnumbered, ganged up on, and in the argument’s wake I grew quiet, sullen, sulky.

After dinner my father and I walked the couple of blocks home quickly and in silence, a silence that got more pronounced once we got inside; it’s a large house and it was empty. In the dining room my father and I took off our suit jackets, draped them over a couple of chairs. My father then took off his white button-down shirt, draped it over another chair—​a habit he has when my mother’s not home—​and stood before me in his undershirt and tzitzis. Can I ask you something, he said. He was upset. His voice was hard and low.

“Yeah?” My voice was also hard and low.

“Why are you so interested in my father?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m just trying to understand—​what is it about him that interests you so much? That all of a sudden you’re so obsessed?”

“I don’t understand what you’re asking.”

“Because this is not what he would have cared about.”

I don’t remember how I responded—​I was upset but not confrontational—​or how the argument ended; certainly we didn’t reach a resolution. At some point we went quiet, went to sleep, and the matter did not come up the next day. But for a long time his comment ate at me. It was, I thought, unfair, ungenerous. What I