Not Me (3 page)

I gave it up because I didn’t want to come home on weekends anymore. I had a girl. I was in love. Plus I had given up on philosophy, and switched over to psych. And also, I now recalled, I was so proficient at it, I really didn’t need to take the kind of college courses they offered. I could read just about anything in German, so long as I had a dictionary nearby.

Huh! I thought, that afternoon driving back from the nursing home, maybe he’s right. Maybe I can read those journals.

Funny how I had forgotten how much I knew. It was almost as if I wanted to blot out those days, and deny how close to him I had been.

I went back to the apartment determined to read them. And yet when I went into the closet to retrieve them, I felt too tired and hungry. I told myself I’d do it tomorrow, when I had more energy.

I have to preface what happened next by explaining that my father, Heshel Rosenheim, was one of the kindest, most warmhearted and generous people on the face of the earth. I do not say these things lightly or sanctimoniously. He was a genuinely good guy. He won awards from just about everyone: from the B’nai B’rith, from the Anti-Defamation League, from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, from the Zionist Organization of America, from AIPAC, from the Jewish Federation, the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Community Relations Council, from Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus, from the Holocaust Museum in Dallas, and the ones in Los Angeles and New York, too, from Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, from the Jewish Oral History Project, from Israel Bonds, from the Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs (Conservative Movement), from Young Israel (Orthodox), from Hebrew Union College (Reform)—not to mention from the Christian-Jewish Interfaith Council, the Council on Human Affairs, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Habitat for Humanity, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and the Sierra Club. It wasn’t that he gave them so much money—how could he? we lived on a shoestring—what he gave, and in amazing abundance, was time. He volunteered like nobody else. He organized phone banks. He chaired committees. He raised money. He served meals to the homeless. He sold Israel Bonds door to door. In ’63 he marched on Washington with Martin Luther King. In ’67 he coordinated a blood drive for Israel. In ’69 he joined the Nuclear Freeze and spoke to kindergarten classes. In the seventies he fought apartheid, and even met Nelson Mandela (the photo of them shaking hands was somewhere in a pile in his bedroom). In the eighties he worked to free Soviet Jews, and chained himself to the Soviet consulate in San Francisco (on one ill-fated visit to Ella and me). And in the nineties he got old, everyone he knew died, people stopped calling, and he settled for writing letters to the editor. He also enjoyed, in his lucid periods, guilt-tripping me into giving every extra penny I earned “to the Jews,” as he put it.

He was, in short, always busy.

I suppose I could have said that is why I never really got to know him, and why those German lessons were so important to me. In fact, it was only during those German lessons, uttering the diphthongs and fricatives he hated above all the sounds of the universe, that I glimpsed who he really was. He seemed different somehow, rolling his
r
’s and thickening his voice with soft aspirates and glottal stops. The lilting music of his English voice turned harder, more precise, more like a fugue—definitely not the Yiddish lullaby I was used to. As I huddled with my father on those weekend afternoons, struggling to write my papers on Schopenhauer or Heidegger, there emerged through his native tongue an imprint at least of who my father might have been. More boyish, more brash, more easy with a joke, more likely to slap me on the back. It was like unearthing a relic of what he must have been before.
Before.
With survivors there is always a before. And it is always some halcyon, half-imagined paradise—painted in the rich and shining colors of youth. The before is always remembered with a sigh. I had known quite a few survivors in my own childhood—my father belonged to several groups, and later worked on projects to document the Holocaust—and they all had the before. When they spoke of it, their eyes softened as the vision of the mother or father, the baby brother, the sweet-smelling challah, the white tablecloths, the favorite toy came into view, rising from their broken hearts like fragrant smoke. They would smile, they would coo, even. And then, they would sigh, and the veil would fall and they would once again become the
after
. But my father was the kind who never talked about any of it. Never spoke of the before. Never compared it to the after. Never spoke of the during. In fact, as far as I was concerned, my father had no existence before he met and married my mother. In our family it was well known that he had declined to testify at Eichmann’s trial. It’s true, my mother would say, they called, they asked, but he said no. Yet I remember him watching the trial on television. He could not take his eyes away. He seemed to study Eichmann as if trying to find in the movement of his head, or some mole on his cheek, the secret of how such a mild-mannered nebbish could be the conduit of so much evil. But through it all, my father never said a word, never discussed it at the dinner table, never even shook his head in disgust. The very sight of the man must have crushed his vocal cords, as in a nightmare, when you open your mouth to scream, and cannot make a sound.

As I sat there, now, years later, in Florida, I knew that once I opened these journals all that had been hidden would be revealed. He had written it for my eyes only, in our secret language, the language of his youth and perhaps of his truest self—his before.

The Cheez Whiz box now sat on the floor next to Dad’s La-ZBoy chair in which I had plopped myself. This throne of old age and weakening mind stood in a corner of what they called the Florida room—what we used to call in New Jersey the sun parlor—a little enclosed addition just off the living room, with floor-to-ceiling windows through which I could see the morning’s first golfers make their way down the green that ran alongside my parents’ building. Across from the La-Z-Boy was the TV, which in his last years was turned on much more than in the past, though I doubt he was really following. Books on Jewish themes were everywhere, many of them with bookmarks in them, indicating he had not finished reading them, had lost interest, couldn’t remember what he had just read. A shofar, covered with dust, was stuck between Ben-Gurion’s
Israel: A Personal History
and Moshe Dayan’s
Diary of the Sinai Campaign
. If he had been so single-minded in business, I thought…but he wasn’t, and that was really that.

Each of the journals was dated in large penned script on the cover. I set them out on the floor until I found the oldest one, dated June 1978. I knew immediately why he had begun to write. That was my before, too.

I put the other volumes back in the box, arranged my paperback
Cassell’s English-German Dictionary
on the table beside me, reclined the La-Z-Boy into a comfortable position, and opened the dry, powdery, cheap leather cover of Journal #1.

I already guessed how it would begin.

We buried Karen today, in the plot I had purchased for myself and Lily. She was 18 years old. 18 years old. Who buys a plot for an 18 year old? Lulled. I was lulled into thinking everything would be all right. I thought, oh yes! we do have a future! But oh! How I have cursed this family!!!!

As soon as I read these words, the scene came rushing back to me. Speeding home from NYU to find my mother at Karen’s hospital bedside, weeping, too late. She was gone. So was my father. He wasn’t there. I held my mother as best I could. It was awkward, somehow, to do it. It was a reversal of roles, a role I had yet to learn, one that gave me no pleasure, and only distanced me from my own feelings. I had always protected my sister as a kid. She hung out with us older guys, even dated some of my friends in my last year of high school. She was only two years behind us, and she was beautiful and smart and funny. We smoked a little dope together, too. If you want to know the truth, she was funnier than me. I mean, I could make people laugh—but she could just cross her eyes and everyone would crack up. When she died, I think it made me funnier. I stole her style. Not on purpose. It just came over me, and every so often I’d notice—hey, that’s how Karen would do it.

I recalled now that my father had disappeared from the scene, emerging only late that night from the attic where he had gone to be alone with his collection of stamps—he collected Israeli stamps—and quietly made his way downstairs to drink a cup of tea. A lot of people had shown up that day, but they were all gone now. Mom was asleep with a Miltown the doctor had given her. I was sitting in the sun parlor, wondering what was next, and I saw him steal down the stairs in the darkness and put on the kettle without turning on the kitchen light. It was really at that moment that I knew everything had changed, that I had not been dreaming all this, that Karen would never be coming home, and that I had lost something irretrievable, something even beyond the loss of my sister. In fact, now that I thought about it, I recalled that we didn’t stop the lessons because of Ella, or because I changed majors. It was because there was no one to come home to. I remembered trying to start them up again a few weeks after the funeral. He just looked at me with a mixture of pity and contempt, patted my shoulder and said, not today. Maybe next week. But next week never seemed to come. And then I stopped trying. And then, only then, did I switch my major to psych.

From that moment on my father seemed to slip further away from me, drowning himself, as I saw it, in good works for the Jews. For my part, I began to have a physical reaction against Jews and anything Jewish. I quit Hillel, I ate bread on Passover, I had bacon in my refrigerator, and if it weren’t for the fact that I was in love with a Jewish girl, I would have gone out of my way to date Gentiles. I even put up a Christmas tree my senior year, but when I brought one home that first year to Ella’s, she actually threw it out the window. It was only one of those little desktop acrylic things with all the ornaments already attached and it made hardly a sound as it landed in the snow, but well into spring and summer you could still find tinsel here and there in the courtyard, stuck between cracks in the pavement, or hanging from the droopy arm of a crocus.

Sure, I’d go home for the High Holidays, for the Jewish New Year and the Day of Atonement—the Days of Awe—of
Awe,
my father would intone pointedly. When I was little he would look down at me and say, “You know what ‘awe’ is? It’s the feeling you get when your mother walks in the room carrying a brisket!”—and then he’d laugh and scruff up my hair with his knuckles. But when I returned to that synagogue, either alone or later with Ella and once or twice even with Josh—a synagogue I had known all my life (I knew every detail of the stained-glass windows, every name on the memorial plaques; I knew that the Abramses sat to our right, and the Glassmans to our left)—I writhed in discomfort, especially when they came to the part where they recited every possible sin a person could do—
just in case,
as my father would say; just in case what? And the thing was, you knew you
had
committed almost every single one of them.
For the sin we have sinned with impure thoughts. For the sin we have sinned by wanton looks. For the sin we have sinned by telling lies.
And here was my favorite:
For the sin we have sinned by folly of the mouth.
That was my vocation, for gosh sakes. That’s what I was going to do for a living. I was guilty! Guilty!
For the sin we have sinned by stealing someone else’s material. For the sin we have sinned by screwing up the timing.
And worse:
For the sin we have sinned by following Ella after she left the library to see if she was still sleeping with Larry Pressman!
And there I was, beating my chest with the rest of them, hating every minute of it, unable to stop. I would touch the fringes of my tallis and adjust my skullcap and wonder, who is this person I am pretending to be?

On some level I found the whole thing funny. I used a lot of it in my early stand-up routines, which I did first at a little club for NYU students, and then at open mikes around the city. My life at that time apparently was hilarious. I began to have success. The only people who didn’t find me all that amusing were my parents. But what could be funny to them? After you lose a child, what’s funny?

I went back to reading my father’s journal, though with renewed trepidation. I reminded myself that I didn’t want to know what his secrets were. And I certainly didn’t want to revisit certain events in my own life. I hadn’t thought seriously about my sister in years. Karen equaled:
“You have any brothers or sisters?” “Yes, but my sister died when I was twenty.”
Karen was just a name, a time marker in
my
story, a closed case, an answer at a cocktail party.
“Oh, I’m sorry,”
they’d say. But reading even just the first paragraphs of my father’s diary—or whatever this was going to turn out to be—had created turmoil inside my heart. She had risen from the dead, as if, as they say, at the end of days God breathes life into the bones of the righteous, and they walk the earth once more. That’s what it was beginning to feel like. The end of days.

Dad did not write very much more about Karen though. Apparently she was not the real subject matter, or maybe it was just too painful for him.

I now know,
he wrote,
that I can run away no longer. Like Jonah, trying to escape the will of God, I have caused the storm to rise, and like him, must be thrown overboard, lest all around me die on my account. One cannot hide from God’s wrath, no more than from His grace. He will find you! And all your works are naught! Is my great love for the Jewish People not enough? Of course not enough! Never enough! Just vanity! Why should He care for my feeble gestures? Why should He care about my feelings? They count for nothing in His eyes, and rightly so.

I had to put it down. This was ridiculous. It didn’t sound quite as bad in German as it does in English, because German tends to be high flown and fanciful, but my God! All that biblical crap. All that hair pulling. All that rending of clothes. Jonah? Please! I mean, I understood he was upset because of Karen, and even somewhat hysterical, sure, of course, but twenty-four volumes of this?

I skipped down several paragraphs until I saw my own name. What would he have said to me? I wondered. We who never talked about it—about Karen—about his life in the camps—about anything except the fact that he didn’t want me to go into show business and the fact that I was a
shonda
—a shame—for denying my Jewish heritage. I remember telling him, being born something is just an accident, but how you live your life is your choice. And I don’t choose to be Jewish! I had said that in my mother’s presence I now recalled, and even then I was ashamed, because her face grew red, yet she said nothing, and did not allow herself to cry. My father as usual stormed out of the room and called me a Nazi. When I looked over to my mother, she had her back to me, clearing off the table, but I could see that her hands were shaking. I went off and watched TV.