My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents by Jonathan Silin (free novels .txt) 📗

house on weekdays when I was just getting up for breakfast. On some weekend mornings I accompanied him to the imposing sanctuary where a small group of men were gathered to fulfill their commitments. Most vivid were the Friday nights when I was called to the front of the shul to participate in one ceremony or another. Gripped by fear, pushed forward by my father, I had no idea what was expected of me or why I was being singled out.

The honor for the father was only an anxious moment for the son.

After the official year of mourning was over, my father would attend services on holidays and occasionally on weekends. Despite his limited formal participation in synagogue life, he was recognized within our larger family circle not only for his ability to chant the Hebrew prayers with speed and authority but also for the confidence with which he knew his away around the prayer book.

I wonder what happened to my father’s religious feelings during his last years. Has he lost faith, become cynical? Or, like many modern Jews, are his primary commitments to a particular culture and historical identity? Were public practices always secondary to privately held beliefs?

Although my father is more tied to traditional rituals than is my mother, perhaps the core of his religious life is not so different. This is m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 97

to say that he too experiences religion mainly as a vehicle for affirm-ing family ties. The ever-dutiful son, the year of mourning is homage to his mother, to doing the right thing. With her death, my father becomes the emotional and practical center of life among his five siblings. Some call nightly and some less regularly. During his seventies and well into his eighties he is the primary caregiver to his youngest and eldest sisters through prolonged illnesses. I imagine that there may well be a reparative quality to this caregiving, a way that my father can make up for his desertion of the family as a young man when he married my mother and moved to New York.

My father is ruled by an overbearing superego; his ability to forgive others, although never himself, helps to explain why so many seem to rely on him. He is an empathetic listener, and before dementia sets in, his responses are seldom ego driven. A realist who allows people to assess their options, my father is seldom critical of actions already taken by others. Intentions rather than outcomes dominate his thinking and assessments of behavior. His ultimate concerns are ethical rather than spiritual.

The trip to the YIVO in 1954 does not dampen my enthusiasm for Hebrew school or make me doubt that I am Jewish. It does, however, complicate matters. I am less clear about what being Jewish means. I wonder what “their” terrible history in eastern Europe has to do with my present. Why does such a catastrophe occur? Can it happen here?

Most important, there are no further opportunities to make sense out of the fragments of information we managed to glean that day.

Before the YIVO, we children of middle-class Jewry know with varying degrees of certainty that something terrible happened in Germany during the war. But the emphasis is on the war itself, the Americans and other Allies against the Germans. Like the Japanese, the Germans are villains, but, because they are also Caucasians, they are not dehumanized in quite the same way. The “yellow peril” is always an external threat, so “other” that it can never be inside of us.

But German aggression is all the more scary because they are like us, 98 n jonathan g. silin

can be us, or we can be them. Indeed, my nurse, who worked for various family members over the years, is German, a source of considerable confusion when I am young. I cannot understand the possibility of being German, the enemy, and Jewish at the same time. Later, studying the Israeli struggle for independence, identifying the enemy continues to be a difficult task. It is incomprehensible that an American ally, the mild-mannered English who speak the same language, are now to be despised, the target of our own Jewish aggression.

After the YIVO, there are only infrequent and disconnected references to the fate of the Jews in Europe, but all this lacks the coher-ence of what is now referred to as the Holocaust. Then there were discrete nouns—concentration camp, ghetto, gas chamber—but no verbs with which to connect them into a meaningful narrative. A label, a story with beginning, middle, and end, offers a handle on events, and this is an event still too hot to be handled, a fire burning so brightly you can’t look directly into it.

Above all, my parents want to see themselves as modern and forward thinking. Our apartment is filled with 1930s clean-lined furniture of their own design, George Jensen silverware, and gray Russell Wright dishes that match the walls. My mother’s social work training encourages a hypersensitivity to psychological states and my father’s undergraduate career at Harvard has put him in touch with a world far larger than that of the small, western Pennsylvania town into which he was born. When they marry there is no question but that my parents will live in New York City and raise a family away from the potential anti-Semitic slurs that so painfully punctuated my father’s early life. The anonymity of urban life is what my mother knows and my father craves.

As do other parents of their era, my mother and father practice protectiveness toward their children with respect to talking about tough topics such as race, poverty, or war. The silence is cultural as well as embedded in the scientific research about childhood. My mother reads Sigmund Freud as part of her education in the 1930s, although it is not for another decade that she will have access to Anna m y fat h e r