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

Freud and Dorothy Burlingham’s groundbreaking clinical work with war orphans in England to bolster her natural reserve. While calling attention to the fears and anxieties aroused by real deprivations and losses, Freud and Burlingham suggest that most young children are more damaged than helped by too close an examination of the aggression expressed in adult life. That is, real hostilities in the outside world are often interpreted in terms of imagined conflicts in the child’s inner world. The child’s inability to sort out fantasy and reality can lead to unhealthy outcomes. Because young children are vulnerable to such confusions, they need protection from the potentially disturbing knowledge of the violence practiced by individuals and nations.

When I question my parents, then in their eighties, they deny knowing very much about what was happening in Germany. The news was spotty and vague. To them, the defining historical event of their lives is not the Holocaust but the Depression and the more immediate threat it posed to survival. During the war they are absorbed by the demands of raising a young family. Afterward, like so many other Jews, my parents want to put the past behind them. And if they have questions about how to address recent events, they receive little guidance from their synagogue. For here they will only find the general admonition never to forget, along with the injunction never to become the victim again.

In Hebrew school we read stories of resistance such as that of Han-nah Senesh, the teenage freedom fighter of the Warsaw ghetto. The focus is always forward, on nurturing the young if very fragile state of Israel, on the new life that had been born from the terrible destruc-tion of the war. We save our nickels and dimes to buy trees in Israel so we can be part of this great miracle, literally making the desert bloom.

From the synagogue pulpit the rabbi regularly lectures about the ethics of living in the Diaspora, a word that I hear over and over again but never understand. Even today, so strong are my childhood associ-ations with this mysterious word that, despite its omnipresence in postcolonial theory, I continue to believe that it only applies to the 100 n jonathan g. silin

Jews. The rabbi works hard to balance the intense emotional and practical investment in the state of Israel that is expected of us—

every service ends with the singing of the national anthem of Israel

—with the safe and prosperous life we enjoy in America. Perhaps his sermons speak to the ambivalence of the adults, but as child I am left on my own to reconcile what I know of the history learned at the YIVO, the fledgling country that is to redeem it, and my daily experience of home and school.

Within my own family the silence about the “Holocaust” is almost complete. The fear of the stranger, even when Jewish, is so strong that we are not introduced to the idea of “survivors,” let alone children of survivors. What we know about are refugees whom we are taught to feel very sorry for. The large apartment across the hall from our own functions as a rooming house for elderly if respectable-looking men and women from Germany and eastern Europe. Although I have no interest in the political and personal struggles that bring them to our West End Avenue building, I am intrigued by their domestic arrangements, which are so clearly different from our own. When the front door is ajar, I can see just far enough inside to determine that the large foyer has been turned into a dining area with cream-colored carpet-ing. A vaguely oriental vase sits atop a stately oval table of dark ma-hogany. As the residents come and go, they greet each other with what I recognize as profusely polite but totally unintelligible phrases.

Later, in the privacy of my own room, I spend hours shamelessly imitating these strange guttural languages.

Far more forbidding are the inhabitants of the ground-floor apartment facing the street, a location that I instinctively recognize to be déclassé. While the three generations of nearly indistinguishable women dressed entirely in black clearly compose a family, they seem far more foreign than our seventh-floor neighbors. Are they in per-petual mourning? Why are there no men? Occasionally I catch a glimpse of a girl my own age or slightly younger as she enters or leaves the building, but I never hear any of the severe and forbidding adults say a word. In our comfortably middle-class world these particular m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 101

refugees seem to be doubly displaced persons, persons in transit, unable or unwilling to make accommodation to this temporary stopping point.

Mostly I remember the kindly older couple who own the modest candy shop that is a favorite childhood haunt. They patiently endure my twice-weekly visits that always include an exhaustive inventory of their stock. Although very small, the shop’s floor-to-ceiling shelves are filled with boxes of elegantly wrapped imported chocolates. The display cases are similarly overloaded with containers of candied fruits, assorted nuts, and trays of freshly baked cookies. Enticing as all these are, irrevocably influenced by my German nurse, I am inevitably drawn to the displays of marzipan, artfully crafted to resemble fruits, vegetables, sandwiches, and my favorite—a hot dog in a bun. Just as inevitable too is the day that I notice the row of numbers and letters tattooed on the forearm of one of the owners. Is it revealed as the husband stretches for the blue and white tin of Swiss chocolates on a shelf too high for my mother to reach? Or is it the hot summer day when his wife abandons the long-sleeved blouse and sweater she usually wears for a sleeveless dress?

I don’t talk with my parents about this observation, but I eventually realize that disfigurement is part of being a refugee, an unlucky