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

by 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 vil
lains, 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

  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 person who comes from the far side of Europe. I cannot fathom how Jews got to such an inhospitable part of the world in the first place, why they stayed, and, most importantly, what they have to do with me. Might I
become the unthinkable, a refugee living in reduced circumstances, missing parts of my family, trying to hide the marks that indicated I am among the numbered who had been sorted for living and dying? I have many unarticulated questions and little help in seeking the answers to them.

  I am twelve and answers to my questions remain illusive. My first girl-friend has invited me to attend the Broadway movie premiere of The Diary of Anne Frank along with her mother and older sister. Although Beth is physically more mature and sophisticated, we had enjoyed 102 n jonathan g. silin

  each other’s company that summer, enjoyed being one of the camp couples. Once home, however, I had not enjoyed my brother’s inces-sant teasing or my parents’ intrusive curiosity, which was piqued by Beth’s Park Avenue address and her mother’s reputation as a successful art gallery owner.

  It’s a miserable winter night, but the torrential rains do not come close to the waves of anticipatory emotion sweeping over me. Much to my embarrassment, my father insists on dropping me off at Beth’s house in a taxi, a trip that under ordinary circumstances I would make on my own. Beth and her family are downstairs waiting, and to my relief it is agreed that they will take me home at the end of the evening.

  I enter the theatre that night preoccupied with the logistics of a first date—arrivals and departures, demonstrations of affection and restraint, talk and silences—and am confronted on the screen with the logistics of survival—securing safe shelter, storing up food, avoiding the enemy. Undoubtedly the numbing impact of the movie is heightened by my total lack of preparation for what I am to see. But the black-and-white bleakness of those Amsterdam street scenes, the anxious fear of discovery once the Frank family goes into hiding, and, above all, the stabbing sirens of the SS police cars, become an immediate part of my world, familiar reference points that mark my understanding of the Holocaust. For an adolescent, emerging from a childhood spent listening for strange sounds under the bed and possessing parents who have deep suspicions of anyone outside our close-knit family, The Diary of Anne Frank matches every fear from within with a fear from without. I imagine that Beth and her sister may have cried during the movie, but all that remains for me of that night is our stunned silence when the theatre lights finally come on.