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and I think I did my Dad justice—about our family life, my mother’s success in nourishing us all, and my father’s dependability in providing for us. I carefully and intentionally omitted any reference to his mother. Still, there’s a part of me that worries that I added to his eternal grief by having him buried in non-sanctified Jewish ground—that I undermined the Jewish identity that he tried so hard to maintain despite his mother’s edict. Maybe by deciding to bury him away from his mother, I was deciding on a revenge strategy for him. I think, though, that if there is any revenge to be taken on my grandmother, it is I who need to take it. So I don’t feel bad about my decision. I didn’t cause him to dishonor that commandment: “Thou Shalt Honor Thy…” I liberated him. And in doing so, I think I set myself free as well. Free to take my own path. I never consulted with him when I chose to “become” Jewish. I simply saw my path, began following it, and then informed him. Since he couldn’t consult me about how I wanted to be raised, maybe he saw no problem with being left out of the later loop of my religious/ethnic change. Haunted as I am now by dreams and memories, as a little boy in Sunday School, I was supposed to memorize The Ten Commandments. I don’t know how hard I tried, but I never did learn them all. However, one commandment stuck out for me— this fifth one--for whenever I heard it, I heard my father’s voice, admonishing me for not following it. Not that I wasn’t honoring him and my mother, but because I was not honoring his, or rather, not honoring him for honoring her. It’s his voice I hear even now: “ …Father and Thy Mother.” And I don’t know if this voice is my memory of him, my dream of him, or my fear of disappointing him, of angering him, of not following him. During the last ten years of his life, I did follow my father to temple whenever I came home. I know he was pleased, even though I didn’t particularly care for or appreciate the service. In my mind, I was trying to connect with him, to fulfill him. And in my mind, I continued following him as we fasted on Yom Kippur, ate matzoh toasted with grape jelly during Passover, and visited the gravesites of all his family on their birthdays.
In my memory, my father never once declared that he wasn’t a Jew. And in my memory, my grandmother, at moments of her own convenience, knew he was a Jew, as evidenced by that one Passover Sunday at her apartment. My Aunt Carole brought over a definitely leavened pizza with mushrooms and anchovies instead of partaking in the salami and matzoh sandwich that the other Jews were eating. My grandmother took one look at the pizza, then at her daughter, and then declared to my father, “Alvin, you and I are the only true Jews here.” My grandmother taketh away and my grandmother…. Made him a “true Jew” again? Did those words sustain him until he actually died? Maybe. But maybe they only confirmed what he already knew about himself, and about his mother, too.
My Father’s Pain
W
hen my mother told me of my father’s ritual death, I was too stunned to speak. I’m often slow to ask the questions that flood my mind. It’s like I can’t get the words out, can’t fit them into any coherent order. But this time I knew that no question would do justice to my confusion, to what I believed was my father’s pain. Yet there they were, the questions of his life: How did my Dad look when he told my mother of his “death?” What exactly did he say? What was his tone, and how long did this story take to tell? Was he apologetic? Sad? Ashamed? Uncompromising? What did my mother think then? How did it feel to be the cause of this familial, Jewish rift? How did it feel to know that because of who she was, she ritually killed her future husband—that she would be marrying a dead man? Why did she go through with the marriage at that point? Was it because she was only nineteen, and fairly rebellious? Too stubborn to turn back? Did she simply love him that much? At nineteen, can you possibly love someone that much? Did she really know then what love was? I haven’t asked my mother these questions. I am not a valiant man. Nor have I asked until now what
impact this traumatic episode had on my father’s view of his family, of his future wife? Of himself? If your mother says you can’t be a Jew anymore, do you listen to her? Obey her? Ignore her? Can you still be a Jew if you want to be? Can you ever forgive this woman, or forget her words even if you still go to temple? Do you wonder for the rest of your life if you’re a “true Jew?” The thing is, my father never wondered any of this. I don’t know if he even thought about it. He could be oblivious to the emotional needs of his family, and once I even counseled him to do something different for his anniversary instead of giving my mother a similar piece of gold jewelry. She once showed me that he had given her basically the same gold pendant three years in a row. “So Dad,” I said one late August evening as we were driving home from work, “why don’t you and Mom go somewhere for your anniversary this year? You could take her back to New Orleans. That’s where you spent your honeymoon, right?” He thought for a moment, then replied, “Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.” Then he turned the radio up because it was news time in that election year of 1976. I thought I had planted the germ, but the virus never carried. That October on their anniversary, they stayed home, and Dad bought Mom a set of gold earrings. I never tried to intervene in his personal business again. He never told me stories of his courtship, engagement, or wedding. And as far as I know, his pre-dating life never existed. About his religious beliefs, all he told me was that he went to Sunday School as a boy and was confirmed in the temple since, back, then, Reform Jews didn’t Bar Mitzvah their young. If Dad was troubled about being or not being a live Jew, he never said to me, and he didn’t lose sleep over it. His snores at night seemed untroubled anyway. He loved his mother until her death, and my mother until his. He never seemed to suspect that the woman he loved and married resented his mother, or if he did, he repressed it all. I, however, have thought about it fairly constantly for the past thirty years, hearing my mother’s complaints, fearing that she might get up enough gumption one day to leave him. My mother has