During my father’s courtship of Lisa and in the first year of their marriage, we spent a lot of time with Myra. Every night before our bath, Myra would line the three of us up—my sister, our aunt Judy, and me—to wipe our vaginas clean with a rough dry cloth. I still recall the feeling of the toilet where Myra made us sit. It was one of those fancy ones, with a wide mouth, the kind that a child might fall into if she didn’t clutch the edge of the seat. Myra pushed hard, as if this part of our bodies required extra effort and strength to cleanse. I remember the dizzyingly bright lights of the room, the tiny white tiles on the floor. I am not sure why Myra felt the need to clean out our vaginas before our baths, but she did.
Our new mother, Lisa, desperately wanted to be a grown-up, and my father desperately wanted someone to help take care of his newly motherless girls. With the encouragement of my grandmother and Lisa’s mother, my father married the charismatic Lisa, imagining that his problems were solved.
Soon Lisa had two children of her own. But Lisa’s desire to mother my sister and me was erratic. If you pleased her, she made you feel like the daughter of a queen. If you disagreed with her, her affection waned. Six years later, Lisa and my father divorced. My sister and I remained with Lisa for nearly two years, while my father lived on his own. Children need their mother, he said when I asked him why he left us with Lisa during that period. But Lisa had not adopted us. When she decided to start a new family with a new, younger husband, she asked my father to take my sister and me back into his household. Still, we continued our regular visits with Lisa and our half sisters, and it was there, in the evening, that the rapist entered what had once been our home.
After the rape, Lisa rose to the occasion. Calamity brought out the best in her. She took us in and nursed us back to life, as best she could.
Upon reading part of the file in 1994, I learned that my father had informed the police that my sister and I “seemed to have forgotten it” four months after the rape. I also learned that the police had concluded that my sister and I were lying when we insisted that we did not know the perpetrator, and that my father did not defend us against this claim. Nor did he insist that the police continue to investigate the crime. There was no evidence in the file that Lisa had spoken to the police at any point after the rape itself.
In the spring of 1994, soon after seeing the file for the first time, I wrote my father a letter asking him why he had remained in Norway.
My father sent me an e-mail from his MIT e-mail account. His response was organized, with Q’s and A’s clearly specified. He explained that he had been told that we were receiving medical and police attention. Lisa was taking care of us, and he was scheduled to return in three days in any case, he said. He was laying the groundwork, he said, for a decade-long collaboration between Lincoln Laboratory, where he worked, and similar labs in Norway and France.
He seemed to assume that once I knew his reasons for remaining in Norway, I would understand and approve of his sensible decision.
Despite this e-mail exchange, I managed to forget, for a second time, that my father did not come home right away, and I am shocked, for a third time, when I reread the file.
In spring 2007, I ask my father to read the description that I wrote for the police, at their insistence, immediately after the rape. I tell him that I would like to interview him for a book about my rape.
He comes to my apartment, glumly, determinedly, dutifully. He has done his homework—he has read the description of the rape and the draft of the previous chapter.
Within a few minutes of my father’s arrival, my worldview begins to blur, as if the very erectness of his posture makes me question the correctness of my own. His right angles are at odds with mine. And yet, there is softness to his eyes. He has the posture of a soldier with the soft brown eyes of a deer.
I discipline myself to take note of his looks. So handsome, my father is. I am surprised, as I am every time I see him, that a seventy-nine-year-old man could be this muscled. He stands erect, dominating the room, even in his present dejected mood. He is wearing jeans, a no-iron shirt, an old Harris tweed sport coat, military posture. Everything faded but neat. Athlete’s watch. Gray hair, beard, chiseled features. We make pleasantries. He picks up the Times, as if he doesn’t know that I know him well enough to know that he has already read it at first light.
I am having trouble with my tape recorder. I cannot get it to work, though it worked when I tested it just before my father’s arrival.
He takes the machine out of my hands; he is the engineer, and I am the daughter.
“You see, you don’t stick it in like that; you stick it in like this,” he says. It is unclear to whom he is speaking—perhaps to me, perhaps to himself, perhaps to the machine. He pushes the tape back in, just the way it was before he took the machine out of my hands. He asks about the batteries. I tell him they are new. He points to a flashing red light. I bring a large box of new double As—the same box from which I took two batteries twenty minutes before. I tell myself that with his engineer’s eye, he will choose more reliable ones.
I notice that a calm descends between us. We’ve done this many times before. My father, at ease in the physical world, delighting in fixing some thing for his daughter. And I am delighted to be fixed. I wait, becalmed by the familiar role, in the knowledge that my powerful father can make all things right. Children and dogs obey his orders, which are mostly issued in a calming baritone. If they don’t obey the first time, they learn.
The material world becomes more orderly in my father’s capable hands. When we were children and there were suddenly too many of us, he built beds in the laundry room. When we needed more rooms, he erected walls. He was still climbing Mount Washington into his eighties. When I moved into the apartment where I am writing these words, he measured the walls and drew up blueprints, wanting to ensure that my pictures were centered and straight. But I am living on the second floor of an old house. The floors slant rebelliously. Despite the careful measuring and drawing, the pictures did not submit to my father’s will. Undaunted, my father started again, this time with a level. The pictures succumbed.
But this time, although he’s tried all angles, the machine refuses to work. He diagnoses the problem: the mechanism isn’t working properly. It’s old, I say. A cheap machine.
I bring him a cup of tea, and we settle into the task at hand: I will type as fast as I can, which is very fast indeed, while my father answers my questions.
“What are you most proud of in your life?” I ask.
“It changes with age. Now I am proudest of my children because they are extensions of me into the future,” he says.
“Do you believe they are a good extension of you into the future?”
“Yes,” he says. “They exhibit qualities I admire. They are independent. They have taken possession of their lives. And what they do, by and large, are things I admire.
“It’s the lives they’re living that I’m proud of. Sara has realized herself. She wants to sing, and she sings. She is a successful mother, a successful wife, and a successful professional. It’s the life she leads.
“It’s the same with Arabelle. I admire that she found a vocation for herself. I admire that she has the perseverance and ability to fashion a life for herself and be successful at it.
“Same thing is true with Genevieve.”
He has started with the second-eldest and ended with the youngest. I am the eldest. Of course I wonder if or how he will find a way to say that he is proud of me, even though I am presently his interrogator.
“Same thing with you,” he says, at last. “You are your own person. And the most important role a parent has is to help children achieve that status.”
“How did you do it?” I ask, genuinely curious, hoping I will learn something that will help me raise my son.
“I don’t know. By letting children struggle rather than jumping in. Helping them only when necessary. Encouraging them to take responsibility for themselves
as soon as they were able. To the extent that I could, helping them gain an education that prepared them for life.”
I watch my father pausing to reflect. I can see that he is determined do his duty—to get this right. I take great comfort from my father’s integrity, even though I know that his desire to stick to the truth might sometimes hurt me.
“This is too narrow,” he corrects himself. “I’m proud of your music. I’m proud of your achievements. Actually, I’m not proud—I admire the way you play the piano; I admire your achievements. I admire your writing ability,” he says, giving me the opening to talk about the description of my rape.
Even though he has given me an opening, it feels as if I am breaking through ice.
I broach the topic: “Were you surprised by what you read? Did you know what happened when we were raped?”
“No,” he says, answering only my second question.
“I didn’t know about it,” he continues. “After reading your tract of your rape, I notice that you have not made up your mind to put that horrible experience behind you and move on to the future as I did. Usually a person who is preoccupied with the past becomes basically dysfunctional in life. But you’re able to be preoccupied and yet to function very well. I’m proud of that.”
Is this really a compliment? I wonder.
I tell him that I’m deliberately going back over this material because of the book I’m writing.
(Vaguely, I am aware of a familiar defensiveness in my voice that happens when my father expresses disapproval of me.)
I start out slowly, a technique I have learned from talking to terrorists for so many years. Never with small talk; that would feel too manipulative. But I skirt the topic we both want so much to avoid.
This time, however, it is not only my interviewee whom I want to put at ease, but also myself.
“When have you been afraid in your life?” I ask him.
“I was very much afraid from the time I was six until I was almost ten,” he says. My father is prepared to be brutally honest, even, or perhaps especially, at his own expense. But he answers me with little feeling, as if fear were something he once read about in a newspaper, but never actually experienced in his own body.
“What was your first experience of fear?” I ask.
“I had heard about my uncle Solomon being carted off to a concentration camp and then dying within three months. Nineteen thirty-three. He was a person who sort of made jokes. He saw some men pulling up metal fencing, and he joked that they were doing it to use the metal for weapons. He made a joke about it. He was standing next to a workman. My mother’s brother-in-law. And they carted him away.
“Shortly thereafter I was playing doctor with a neighbor’s girl,” my father continues. “The idea was to discover what her crotch looked like. We were just playing. Afterward the town gendarme said he’d had a complaint about me; that I was defiling an Aryan girl. He told me that if that ever happened again, my whole family and I would be sent to a concentration camp.” All this my father says plainly, in a kind of monotone, as if dutifully reporting the details of an experiment that didn’t go as planned.
I don’t know what my father saw in my face. Perhaps I sucked in my breath.
“That scared me,” he explains.
“Was your mother there when the gendarme approached you?” I ask, shocked by this story, which I am hearing for the first time.
“I was alone,” he says.
As I read these notes now, months later, this seems like a good summary of my sense of my father’s life experience: “I was alone.” It has nothing to do with my father’s actual life. My father has always been surrounded by people. Seven siblings. Countless cousins, despite the reduction in their numbers by the Nazis. Three wives. Seven children. Eight grandchildren. Nonetheless, I am compelled, once more, by a recursive thought: I don’t want my father to die alone. I want us to be able to sit together, talking or not talking, whatever he wants. I want for him what I want for myself, to know that he is loved for who he truly is, including the pain he has felt and the pain he imposed on others, without denial. Isn’t that what we all long for?
“Did you tell your mother?” I ask.
“I don’t think so…. I doubt it. I’m not certain. I suppose I assumed that you’re not supposed to do things like that, play doctor with girls, especially when the girl’s father is a Nazi.”
My father is still speaking in the detached tone he reserves for distastefully emotional subjects. I try not to distract him with my own emotion. But I have never heard any of this before, and I am nearly paralyzed with terror.
“You thought you had done something really wrong?” I ask, quietly, as if trying not to frighten the little boy in this story.
“Well, maybe not terribly wrong, but something that endangered my family and me.”
I don’t know how, in my paralysis, I summoned up the courage to push the question further.
“So your first sexual experience was connected with danger—with the threat of death,” I say.
Reading these notes now, I can no longer grasp that my father and I managed to allow these words actually to exist between us, to be uttered aloud, these terrible truths that were not to be captured by words.
“I’m not sure I phrased it that way to myself,” he says. “We were little. I was curious.”
“So you discovered that your curiosity could be dangerous,” I say, bravely.
How alike my father and I are, I realize now. My curiosity compels me. My curiosity is dangerous, too. My curiosity propels me on, even in this interview, the most dangerous and difficult one of my life thus far.
“I thought I was being persecuted because I was Jewish,” he says, sticking with the facts.
I have come to believe that my father’s trick, his whole life, has been to convert the sensation of fear, which makes him feel ashamed, into dominance. When my father is afraid of something or some powerful emotion he fears he cannot control, he finds a way to dominate himself and others. This is why some men go to war, I think to myself, and then brush the thought out of my mind. Too pat.
There is an aphorism that comes unbidden to my mind like a mantra whenever something truly bad happens: When the going gets tough, the tough get going. This is my father’s recipe for resilience. This philosophy has often served me well. It makes me tough. But sometimes, I am ashamed to say, it makes me cruel—to myself and to others. Sitting here now, reading this interview, I recall with a nauseating shame my cruelty to an aunt who was going through a terrible divorce. She had recently discovered that her husband had gambled away much of their life savings, and she felt utterly lost. Although she was trained as a lawyer, she had never really worked, and now she was on her own. “Get a job!” I told her, sensibly, as if channeling my father’s eminently sensible approach to life. I apologized when I realized what I had done, but I’m not sure that she will ever be able to forgive me.
“Did you think that being Jewish was bad?” I ask.
“I was going to public school then, and the first year all the little boys were put into the Hitlerjugend shirts. I wanted to do the same thing—it looked very desirable. But I knew I couldn’t join because I was Jewish.”
My father has a stronger accent now, his syntax slightly awkward.
“The second year a Nazi functionary was put in place as the principal. And this new principal came into our classroom and made all the Jewish boys and girls stand up—”
“How many of you were there?” I ask, trying, like my father, to stick to the facts of the story. Trying not to feel, or anyway, not feeling.
“About two or three of us. And then he said that Jews were the source of all the problems in Germany—he said they were enemies of the people. He reiterated the caricatures of Jews,” my father says.
“What were these caricatures?” I ask.
“Money grabbing. They will steal your belongings, they’ve been stealing from the country and individuals…. I didn’t listen that clos
ely…. I didn’t believe it…because I knew my own family.”
I think to myself, moneygrubbing, but don’t correct my father.
“What did being Jewish mean to you when you were a kid?” I ask.
For the second time he doesn’t answer my question, but continues with his story.
“And he then told all the boys in the class that it was patriotic to beat up all the Jewish boys and make them go away…. They chased me and caught me and whipped me with these flexible sticks.”
“What do you mean by flexible sticks? Branches?” I ask. My heart is beating hard.
“They were used in Germany to whip—”
“You mean switches?” I ask.
“Yes, that is the term,” he says.
I am not aware of feeling emotion, except that something as simple as finding the right word has brought us both relief.
“Every time school got out from that day forward, I had to make myself disappear so as not to get beaten up. I thought I was succeeding pretty well. But one day I met one boy who was one of my tormentors, and I attacked him and beat him up. Again the gendarme came around and said that if I laid a hand on another Aryan youth, my family and I would be sent to a concentration camp.
“The Nazis would have beaten me up and sent me off without discussion. But he was the town gendarme. He knew me, he knew my family. Nevertheless it scared me very much.
“When school was out, a person from the Joint Organization, a Jewish organization, traveled through Wetter [the town where my father lived] and was talking to the Jewish families, and when she came to our house, my mother described what had been happening to me at school. The lady asked to see my back. My back was so full of welts. She suggested a Jewish school in Marburg, and I should be sent away from home and sent to a Jewish camp in Frankfurt for the summer. And I did that.”
“What was the camp like?” I ask.
“I don’t remember the camp. I just existed there,” he says.
I have never heard about this camp before. My father has not talked about his childhood in Germany very much. When I’ve asked, he has told me about having to leave his kitten behind. And also his cousin, who was eventually killed by Mengele.
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