My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents (15 page)

Needless to say, when I dropped out of Harvard in the early 1960s and was in serious doubt about my own commitment to scholarship, my parents were deeply troubled. This was the time, when I was on the cusp of adulthood, that my father spoke most vividly about his own father. The talks were infused with the significance of intellectual projects for Jews who lived a transient existence, subject to dev-astating pogroms, and always at risk for imminent exile. Perhaps too recent and too overwhelming, the Holocaust itself was never mentioned. I was reassured that the life of the mind could not be con-fiscated and would travel well if necessary. Underpinning this history lesson, but mostly unspoken, was the middle-class assumption that degrees in the pocket—postgraduate work a necessity—had the power to provide financial security and social status.

Despite my father’s reluctantly offered lectures on anti-Semitism during these years, and the emphasis on expressing feelings and fears in my younger days, like most of my peers, I grew up in a household filled with silences. Later, as a young adult, I was determined to break through these silences, writing a master’s essay on the place of death education in the classroom. Then, as a gay man and HIV/AIDS educator during the 1980s, I became an advocate for socially relevant curriculum for even the youngest children. With these consuming m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 93

passions, I fell prey to a particular form of amnesia about the secrets that framed my childhood.

Then one chilly fall night in 1999, on my way home from my parents’ apartment, I found myself on the northeast corner of Eighty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue and noticed that a work shed had grown up around the ornate limestone and red-brick mansion that had long stood on the southeast corner. Seeing the shed, I recalled a short article in the
New York Times
announcing that the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the building’s last occupant, was moving to a modern facility in Chelsea where it would join forces with another archive of Jewish history. It was a time of cultural mergers as well as corporate takeovers. Drained by my efforts to shore up my parents’

own sagging prospects, I saw that the massive metal and glass front doors of the once grand but always graceless building were boarded over with plywood, a harsh fluorescent bulb was giving off an eerie light on the first floor, and the tall French windows on the second floor had been carelessly left open.

A preservationist with a deep longing for the city of the 1940s in which I grew up, distressed by the disappearance of familiar structures, even those of no particular architectural value, I viewed the gutting of the former YIVO Institute with a mixture of dread and relief. For while it reminded me of a disquieting childhood visit to this former repository of Jewish memory, it also suggested the possibility of deconstructing that visit, which has haunted my adult life.

It is 1954. I am ten years old, and unlike many of my friends from liberal and well-assimilated homes, I attend Hebrew school with great enthusiasm. Engaged by the challenge of learning a second language and enjoying instruction in ritual practices, I am considered by the teachers to be a model student despite my poor reading skills and total ignorance of the rules of English grammar. On this particular Sunday morning, we are taking a field trip, the only one in all my years of attendance at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism. I can’t recall either a prior announcement of the trip nor any discussion of 94 n jonathan g. silin

what we were to see before crowding onto the city bus that would take us directly across the park to the YIVO.

It’s all slightly shabby; those large, high-ceilinged rooms with elaborate wood paneling and heavy, faded red draperies to shield the display cases from direct sunlight were expensive to maintain even then, I suppose. Here is memorabilia from shtetl life and the thriving Yiddish culture of eastern Europe: diaries and letters, Torahs and tallisim, Kiddush cups and prayer books. Like the upstairs rooms, the basement exhibit areas are cool and dark, but the space has low ceil-ings and is cramped. It feels completely utilitarian. And in these display cases are the infamous bars of soap made from the ash of concentration camp crematoria, the lampshades made from the stretched skin of inmates, and the photographs of emaciated children and adults with shaven heads, bare feet, and striped pajamas either too big or too small for even these skeletal bodies. We move from case to case, our small group of eight or nine huddled together, understanding and not understanding all at the same time. Our teacher, a tall, attractive, middle-aged Sabra, whose son is in the Israeli army and who becomes anxious with the news of every border skirmish, is beside us. I don’t know what she is thinking. She isn’t saying anything, at least anything I can recall.

I remember that morning as a profoundly disturbing introduction to the methodical and mundane practices of the Third Reich. The collections of wedding rings, gold fillings, and eyeglasses tell me that attention was paid to the very last detail. The pictures of German soldiers and SS officers, the former in long woolen army coats and the latter in black leather, rounding up civilians in city streets, tell me that there was little chance of escape. Other photographs, of people clutching suitcases and children, anxiously waiting to be transported or arriving at final destinations, lined up sometimes clothed and sometimes totally naked, make the abstract and unimaginable graphically real. Trying to regulate the impact of these images, I neither look directly at them nor turn completely away. I don’t understand my relationship to these people who appear so different from me and oc-m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 95

cupy such bleak, threatening landscapes. Beyond the identifying label, Jew, what can we possibly have in common? Surely I will not share the same fate. I am frightened into a silence that makes it impossible, even today, to find the right words to describe my confusing emotions. Can there be right words? How can something that is such a muddle be so important?

At times I wonder if my memories of the YIVO are to be trusted.

They are powerful and unsettling. They are hazy and lack detail. Perhaps I have imbued this early experience with images and feelings acquired later. Perhaps the dreams in which I am on my own, hiding in strange apartments, running through ominous city streets, seeking anonymity in large, open train sheds, and waking up just moments before capture by the Gestapo, are the result of too many war movies, not my YIVO visit. Perhaps they date from a trip to Munich at age eighteen when I was overwhelmed by the sounds of the German language coming from loudspeakers on busy train platforms and read every face for indications of anti-Semitism. Can the YIVO be only an emblem, a container into which I have poured emotions and images collected in other places, at other times? The murky pool of memories that I draw on gives rise to strong emotions but few explanations.

Eventually the YIVO building was transformed into the elegant Neue Galerie Museum for German and Austrian Art. Unspoken during my adolescence was another connection to the YIVO, with its origins in Vilna circa 1925, its governing board that included Sigmund Freud, and its relocation to New York during World War II. Vilna, then part of Lithuania, had a thriving intellectual life and was the very same city from which my father’s father had immigrated decades before. Now in New York, my family had found itself just two blocks from a venerable Jewish archive with its roots in the same physical and cultural geography.

As I wait on the corner that night looking at the former YIVO building, reexperiencing that troubling Sunday morning visit, I also realize how, over the years, I have watched my parents’ participation in Jew-96 n jonathan g. silin

ish life decline. Recently, every suggestion that they visit a neighboring synagogue has been gently but firmly rebuffed. Neither of my parents will be seen in a wheelchair. This reflects a self-defeating pride as well as fear of drawing attention to themselves. My mother’s resistance is not surprising, as her Jewish commitments have clearly always revolved around home and family, holidays and celebrations, rather than the synagogue. Memories of my father, however, tell another story of a fuller religious life, a life that I hoped would offer some succor in these last difficult years.

As a young man my father was observant, rising early every morning to say prayers, bound in tefillin, the small phylacteries containing sacred texts. When his mother died he went to shul each morning for an entire year, as traditional practice demands. I was six at the time and remember seeing him return to the 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 ’ s k e e p e r n 99