The day after I had my vision on Mount Carmel (told in “Running with Elijah”), I found myself wanting to call my father, which was strange to me because since he left our family and the Vineyard when I was 15, he had little to do with us, and we with him. I did spend the summer between my junior and senior year in high school living with him at Cocoa Beach, Florida, but I was working in construction at least 12 hours a day 6 days a week, so in essence I was just bunking with him. Here and there that summer we would sit together over a cup of coffee, but there was never a hint of substance in our discussions, and I felt that both of us were relieved at not having to make the effort to rebuild a relationship. Our sitting together was a drawn-out show of forced mutual respect. It laid the foundation for a continued, mostly polite relationship that would hold until his death, the exception to that politeness being summed up in a phone call we had in December of my sophomore year at Wabash College. He called me and without warning began a rant about how I was taking my mother’s side, the craziness of the call amplified by the fact that four years had passed since my parents’ divorce had been finalized, and by the fact that both my father and mother had since remarried with new partners. My father in his cups had a tendency to zaniness and I, when confronted with unexpected zaniness succumb to zaniness myself, and on this occasion, instead of trying to calm him down and telling him to call me after he slept it off, I entered, kicking and sputtering, into an all-out argument with him. It was going full force when my roommates returned, unnoticed by me. I had no idea how long they had been listening, but however long was too long. Had they heard our schoolboy tit for tat?
“You took your mother’s side from the start.”
“I did not!”
“You did.”
“I did not!”
“You did.”
And so on and so forth. I had cursed and berated my father as he had me, and by the looks of my roommates they had never heard a son speak to his father in such a manner. Embarrassed, I said a curt goodbye and to my surprise, after all the yelling, my father returned a gentle and polite goodbye. So I said goodbye again, gently and politely, a zany end to the whole zany enterprise. I regarded my roommates as if nothing had happened, saying to them as I went to my room:
“There’s chicken in the crock-pot.”
That call was a typical check-in by my father. Out of the blue and zany. A year passed. I was in Israel. I had not thought of my father since that phone call at Wabash but, in a big surprise to myself, I could not think of anyone else in my family with whom I wanted to share my decision to convert to Judaism more than with him. As I arranged the fifty or so tokens on the tray of the public phone so that they could be fed quickly into the slot to be plunked down every twenty seconds during the long-distance call, I felt energized with an unexpected awareness that there was a solemn significance to this upcoming conversation, though I could not pinpoint exactly why I felt that way.
He answered.
“Dad?”
His first words to me were immediate and precise, without formalities, as if he had been waiting for this very call:
“Don’t come back.”
I laughed and said, “I’m not planning to. I’m converting to Judaism and staying in Israel.”
He was silent for a few moments.
“Tell me. Bill. Have you been approached by Israeli intelligence?”
My heart fell through my shoes as I realized that a relationship of shared conspiracies, with the CIA chasing him and the Mossad chasing me, was the extent to which we could reestablish a connection. Still in a spiritual high, I had hoped for more. And as quickly as my spirits fell, they revived. Something inside me said: “It’s not nothing,” and I allowed myself to be swept along with his storytelling, as I had as a child. The Mossad. Chasing bad guys. Just like that in my mind I was running through the streets of Marseille or Mosul, dodging bullets, all to the backdrop of gunfire, err, plinks of the phone tokens as they dropped into the receptacle of the public phone at the entrance to the building from which I had emerged, enlightened, just one day earlier.
“Not overtly,” I said. “But a stranger did approach me out of the blue and began talking as if he knew me.”
“Classic Mossad,” he said. “They’re feeling you out.”
“Yes, it’s starting to make sense,” I said. “I was in the supermarket yesterday looking for some sliced cheese when this thin, clean-shaven middle-aged guy said in perfect English:
“There’s so many types of cheese to choose from, aren’t there?”
“Uh-huh,” my father said. “You see what he was doing?”
“No,” I answered.
“Replace the word ‘cheese’ with ‘ideology’.”
“I don’t get it.”
“He was testing your allegiance. He wanted to see if you would stick with your square, bland, American sliced cheese over a more exotic, Chinese Communist type cheese, or worse, French cheese. What did you buy in the end?”
Despite myself, I was insulted that he asked.
“American, of course!”
“That’s my boy!” He said.
At that point the two of us, life-long talkers that we were, found nothing more to say to one another. I watched the tokens advance in the little window before they dropped into the receptacle. I did not feed any more into the slot. I didn’t see the point in doing so. The line dropped and I stood there holding the phone, thinking: What the hell just happened? What had we been talking about? The Mossad? For crying out loud. He had been too sharp and, in a crazy way, reasoned, to have been the sad drunk that I remembered from our last phone conversation. I couldn’t help myself from wondering what had been going through his head for the conversation to take a conspiratorial direction right from the start. I did not have the time to even hint at my other-worldly experience, but he took the end-product of that experience—my decision to convert—in stride and got straight to the point that he wanted to make, which was that what we were dealing with had nothing to do with theology or beliefs. We were dealing in espionage. International. We had to be careful. More than fifteen years would pass before I spoke to him again, and when I did, I was half expecting him to continue our previous conversation from right where we had left off.
I was left wondering what I had been expecting his reaction to be. “Way to go, Bill. I’m rooting for you?” Standing there on Mount Carmel, phone still in hand, I hung my head in sadness with the knowledge that yes, I had been hoping for approval from a father of whom I could not approve, for his having functionally disappeared from the lives of my siblings and myself. Here I was. Then I raised my head at my new reality. I replaced the phone in its holder and walked to a quiet corner overlooking Haifa Bay. I did not know it then, but it would be three long years before my conversion was completed, and for me, my vision of the previous day had signified a passage in my life. It is as if I heard the prophet Elijah shouting on Mount Carmel to the people of Israel: “Those who are with God, come to me!” At my ease on the grassy slope near the dormitories of Haifa University, I now understood that this change entailed a leaving behind of my father’s house, just like the patriarch Abraham. I smiled at my thoughts, wondering what Abraham’s final conversation with his father had been. “Stay away from Sodom and Gomorrah,” Terach might have said, or some such thing. And in a funny way—fitting in the light of the crazy conversations with my father—my father was like Abraham’s father. There was a stop on the way to the Promised Land, Haran, and Abraham’s father did not continue from there. It was as if he understood what drove his son to follow the call of his new God, but he himself did not have the ability to make a final break with the only world he and his forefathers had known. Terach made it halfway and then released his son to follow his vision. It came to me as I sat, that I was fulfilling some half-dream or vision that had been my father’s, somehow. That would explain his pre-emptive reply to any announcement that I may have deemed to make, as if anything that I could say from the farthest reaches of my imagination was already incorporated in his vision. He had been preparing for my call from time immemorial. That last token as it plunked into the receptacle signified my break from my father’s “house.” It was the passing of a baton. He was a mad genius, and in the end, a funny one. He was carrying a story of heroic self-sacrifice, not of a father abandoning his parental responsibilities. In the face of this stupendous example of chutzpa, and despite myself, I smiled as I realized that I did not feel the need to redeem him anymore.
Of course, in the back of my mind I entertained the more likely possibility that his initial utterance sprouted out of a desire to see my mother in the distress that he knew my absence would cause her. No weltanschauung involved, just pure vengefulness. My pronouncing that I was converting to Judaism was icing on the cake, considering my mother’s serious and life-long commitment to Christianity. As soon as this thought occurred to me it jumped from the back of my mind to the forefront, and there these two conflicting accounts, one of a passing of a prophetic torch from one faithful generation to the next, and the other of a cursing, vengeful alcoholic rage poisoning all within range of hearing, sat in opposition to one another, a beatific celestial vision against a cynical drunken dismissal, a perfect example of two ways of seeing the world, carried by all of us, in different measures, all the time: optimism and belief alongside cynicism and despair. Years later, unprompted, my mother gave me a short account of what my conversion meant to her at the time. She was unhappy with the news. As such, and as a good Christian she approached her minister, looking for solace and he had replied, with arms held wide and in a booming voice that echoed throughout the church: “Wonderful!” She dead panned this for me, her own arms spread wide, knowing that I would not be able to hold back and I did indeed burst out laughing, embarrassed out of respect for her until I saw that she had engineered the scene and we both laughed together. In the end she had found her solace in the form of our two daughters, who spent their high school summer vacations on the Vineyard, living with my mother and working in her store in Edgartown, The Gift Shop.
The next encounter with my father was over fifteen years later. One morning, I woke and stared at the ceiling and thought: “Where the hell am I?” I asked myself this question in a spirit of wonder. From there to here, from Martha’s Vineyard to lying in my bed with my wife at my side and four children asleep in their rooms in the Jewish agricultural settlement of Gan Or, smack dab in the middle of the Gaza Strip. Spiritually I knew where I was and how I had arrived, but on a simpler level, on the day-to-day functioning-of-a-life level, I realized that I had been missing a significant part of my own story. It was an existential moment, a moment that carried with it an awareness that the answer to this question was forthcoming. I lay in a sweet certainty that a gift from on high would descend presently. There was a visual component to this vision, though unlike my “Elijah moment” on the Carmel, this time I was wide awake. There he was, in my mind’s eye, my father, sitting outside of my aunt Twinky’s home in a lounge chair, holding a scotch in one hand and secrets to be shared in the other. He was looking off at the distance. I remembered.
It did not come to me as an unfolding plot of a movie. It was there all at once, a revelation that brought with it a conviction that I was observing, in this memory/vision, the opening of the sluice that had diverted the flow of my life. It was the memory of an event that had been forgotten out of childhood embarrassment. Why did it come to me at that time, at that place? I did not know and I do not know. Secrets.
I’ve told this story many times since that morning in Gan Or (the name of our Moshav meant “Garden of Light.”). The Holy Zohar tells us that a heavenly spiritual light suffused the ether of the Garden of Eden. With the Original Sin, this light was shattered into holy sparks that were scattered throughout the Firmament, to return piecemeal in the souls of the newly born, Jew and Gentile alike. The Zohar says that those carrying these sparks will be able to recognize one another and will be drawn together. This is the spiritual aspect of the ingathering of the exiles. On our street alone in Gan Or there were eight homes. There was a couple whose parents came from Yemen, a couple whose parents were from France and Iran, a couple whose parents were from the United States and Iraq, another Yemenite couple, a couple whose parents were from Tunisia, a couple whose parents were from the United States and Canada, a couple whose parents were from Tripoli (never suggest that they are not different from the Tunisians!) and rounding up the group was a couple whose parents came from Morocco. The other streets were just as diverse. In this microcosm of Israeli society one could see before one’s eyes the creative dynamic of a super-enriched gene pool. Much light was being released into the world as our children matured and left home. But this ingathering, foretold by the Hebrew prophets of old, seemed not to pertain to me, unless one of those divine sparks had landed in my soul.
I would tell this story as an answer to the question: “What led to your desire to become a Jew?” Up until that morning, my stock answer to that question was to describe a trip I took shortly after arriving in Israel. I spent five days in Greece and five days in Egypt, before returning through Jordan. A grand tour of the great and extinct civilizations that had stood against the Jewish people. Crossing over the Allenby bridge, I was overwhelmed by a sense of coming home. This was an answer that made sense to a Zionist listener, whether religious or not. This was a love for the Land of Israel, and it was enough of an answer. My religious epiphany remained my hidden secret. My greatest fear from an early stage in my conversion was not to be labeled a religious fanatic, or more simply, as insane. The benefits of such an approach were obvious. I would be accepted as a normative member of a modern Western democracy. I could marry, work, pay taxes, raise a family, live and die. In this artificial readjustment of my internal focus, I lost the living connection with my revelation on the Carmel. I ceased to be faithful to my vision. It is not as if I feared some manic episode propelling me out into the Judean desert for forty days and nights. I was far from any type of “Jerusalem Syndrome.” Still, I had experienced something on the Carmel that demanded attention, attention that was subsequently not given.
So on that morning in Gan Or I received a wake-up call, as if the embers in my soul had been stirred. What I remembered on that morning would usurp my standard reply to the “why become Jewish” question. I remembered a powerful and seminal event, and the wondrous nature of that remembrance was due in no small part to the fact that it had remained hidden from me for so long. It was the single most pertinent event of my childhood on Martha’s Vineyard that created the nexus between me and the Jewish people. Here is the story:
We grew up in the shadow of the hippies. It was a time of flux, a time of iconoclasm. Moral confusion. Good became bad and bad became good. Old was bad, new was good. This reversal of poles was reflected in our childhood playing. Where once the older brothers in our group of friends would naturally assume the role of the US cavalry while our younger brothers would be pressed into playing the Indians, now, things were reversed, and like “Dancing with Wolves,” the desired role became that of the noble savage. In line with this trend, on the days that we played WW II, the desired role became that of the German instead of the American. No more Sergeant Saunders of Combat!, now it was Steiner and Achtung!
One day, my team played as the Germans. My younger brother was with the GI’s. After some hours of play we rounded up our American prisoners to march them back to my house. From far away, before he saw us, I saw my father sitting on the front steps to our house, getting some fresh air. I stiffened my march and shoved my prisoners ahead. I saw it as a perfect opportunity to impress my father. I marched the tired young boys up our front yard to stand at attention off to the side of the stairs where my father was sitting. They were tired, and upset that I had been shoving them, and they were not in the mood to keep obeying my orders. The game was over. I leaned into them. “Stand up straight!” I shouted. My brother was not intimidated. He said simply: “I don’t want to play anymore.” I could see that the other boys agreed with him and that I was about to lose control of the situation before I could properly impress my father. From somewhere deep inside me emerged a noxious mood, and I planted myself in front of my brother and slapped him hard on the cheek, shouting: “Shut up you dirty Jew!” The slap itself was shocking enough for all of us, including myself, but what I had said did not register—it could not have registered—with myself or my friends.
It registered with my father.
His voice cracked the heavens when he shouted a single elongated syllable. “No!” The boys disappeared as my father’s voice echoed all along North William Street. Neighbors came out to their front porches to see the commotion. I stood shriveled, with my back to my father, silently pleading with my body language for him to have mercy on me. He had been angry with me on occasion before this, but I knew that this was something different. I turned to him slowly, displaying perfect contrition, fully expecting that upon seeing my remorse he would take pity upon me and soften his reproof. This day, there was to be no softening.
“Go to your room and stay there.”
As I climbed the porch stairs where he was sitting, I paused for a moment, offering to be hugged, a common gesture between us at such times. It would prove that fatherly love was still there, even if tempered by anger. This time a hug was not forthcoming. My father turned his head sharply away from me and said: “Get moving.”
I remember walking, condemned, across the foyer to the steps that led to the second floor, to my room. I looked at the steps and had no idea how I could possibly climb them. I was empty, I had no strength, no will, nothing, except a sustained level of self-pity. “What did I do?” I asked the universe as I threw one leg up and ahead of the other, pulling myself up with the help of the bannister, and then falling into my bed, emotionally exhausted. I understood that this was not over, that something unknown and terrible was coming my way, and it would be brought by the person whom I loved most in the world.
The normal sequence after being sent to my room was for my father to call me downstairs after a short “cooling-off” period, to explain to me the error of my ways, ask me if I understood what I had done wrong, and after hearing me acknowledge my understanding with a show of contrition, he would send me on my way, and all would be well between us.
The cooling-off period passed without interruption. I lay on my back in my bed staring at the ceiling, my tears now dry in my eye sockets. I anticipated with each passing second that my father would call me, and that he would explain to me just how wrong I had been to hit my brother at all, let alone slap him so hard. Especially in front of his friends. I hadn’t meant to hit him so hard. I was ready to take full responsibility for my actions. That would please my father. What was he waiting for? As the long minutes passed, I found myself in uncharted waters. I entered a vicious internal argument with myself that could have no victor, just an exhausted self. New tears washed away the old dry tears. I could not hold the tension and clutched at the only escape available to me. I fell asleep.
I woke up to the smell of my mother’s meat sauce. She was preparing spaghetti. My spirits were uplifted. My father must have asked her to prepare my favorite, after all that I had gone through. I was starving, for spaghetti and for spiritual solace. This was my father; this was how much he loved me. He was teaching me a hard lesson but would soften the reproof with my favorite meal. I could already taste the meat sauce; I craved the sauce and the end of my punishment. I might even approach my brother and apologize to his face. I wanted to run down the stairs and into the kitchen shouting: “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” And just then, at the height of my excitement, my father called up from the bottom of the stairs.
“Becky, Mark, supper is ready.”
A hollowness descended upon me echoing the hollowness in my stomach. My siblings, also great lovers of spaghetti, ran down the stairs, their feet plunking on the steps. In my mind I followed their footsteps all the way to the kitchen. I heard my brother say: “Oh boy, spaghetti!” loud enough for me to hear, and that little payback of his grated upon me powerfully, even as I had to admit to myself that he had played his cards well. Lying in bed, I heard or imagined I heard every clink of the fork against the dishes, every scraping swirl of the fork gathering the noodles, every slurp from my brother’s mouth. I had never been so hungry in my life. For a long while I still expected to be called down to eat, but eventually I realized that there would be no spaghetti for me. My brother and sister climbed the stairs and entered their rooms and were soon asleep.
Not much later I heard my father climbing the stairs. At that point I would not have been surprised had he continued straight to his room. I wished he would, but he entered my room, pulled my desk chair close to my bed, sat down, and closed the door. We were in darkness. He put his hand to my forehead and traced his fingers through my hair. I was reborn. I remember the relief I felt at the touch of his hand to this day. I launched into a great fit of sobbing. He continued to caress my head and calmed me with soothing utterances. With each pass of his hand through my hair, I resolved to be a better brother. How could I have hit him so hard? I deserved this punishment.
Then my father began to talk, and what he said to me was what I remembered that morning in Gan Or.
“I’m going to tell you something that you must swear to me that you will remember for the rest of your life. You must never forget. Are you ready to swear to that?”
Something rumbled up from inside me and came out of my mouth as “Yes, Daddy.”
“Not so long ago, a man came to power in Germany, a man so evil that the entire concept of evil—the very definition of the word—had to be redefined to include the vastness of the evil he brought into the world. He was able to hypnotize what had been one of the world’s greatest nations. He brought out the worst of his people, and later, the surrounding peoples. Tens of millions were slaughtered, mostly from the war that he began, but many of those millions were exterminated systematically through a series of death factories that he set up. You remember that we learned about Ford’s assembly lines. This evil man set up the same sort of factory with the purpose of disassembly. For disassembling a certain kind of people. To slaughter every last one of them, to erase them from the face of the Earth.”
How did my young mind receive this? I knew about Japs and Krauts. They were the bad guys in WWII. Hitler was the head of the Krauts. So he was bad. But what did my father mean about a disassembly line? I imagined a line of brand-new cars entering a factory and coming out the other end in parts on a conveyor belt dropping into the storage bays of waiting tractor-trailers, which drove away as they were filled. My father had paused, either to collect his thoughts or to give me time to process mine. He continued:
“I am now going to tell you something that you must also never forget. I command you to remember this for the rest of your life.”
By now I was not thinking of my mistreatment of my brother. I understood the gravity of the situation.
“There is a particular people in our world who are separate. Sometimes they can seem strange to us. They are different. They believe in different things. They are proud of who they are and rightfully so. Do you understand what I am saying?”
“I think so.”
“Do you know who I am talking about?”
“I think so.”
I still was not thinking about what I had said when I slapped my brother. I had forgotten that. I also did not remember what he had told me about the Mengele twins when I was six years old. But I did have an idea of who he was talking about. I was thinking, correctly, about the Jews, just in a boy’s way of thinking. I was not even thinking about the Jews that I knew, that went to school with me, the Stillers, the Cronigs, and the Issocsons. The way my father had put it—they were different, they were proud--led me to think about a particular family, who were summer people, and whose backyard almost touched ours. They were the Kappels, and they were different, and I knew that from the start. There were no families with children my age living year-round on the part of North Main Street that was parallel to our house on North William Street. One summer day while playing in our backyard, I heard children. I went to investigate and that was when I saw two brothers playing catch with a baseball. The older brother, Joe, was throwing the ball to his younger brother Robbie softly, while encouraging him. The younger brother was visibly excited. This was odd and strange to me. If it had been me throwing to my younger brother, the only thing coming out of my mouth would have been insults and ridicule. Here was Joe Kappel, obviously a born athlete with his smooth, confident movements, giving sensible tips to his over-excited brother. What was in it for Joe? Nothing, as far as I could see. I had friends who did not mistreat their brothers, but none where there was obvious mutual love between boys with unbalanced gifts. This strangeness carried a symbol like a mark of Cain on both of their heads. They were wearing New York Yankees hats. That is the difference that struck me. Not that they were Jewish, but that they were Yankees fans in Boston Red Sox territory. And, on a more sublime level, they were their brother’s keepers.
My father resumed talking.
“These people are the Jews.”
Even though my young mind had conjured a Jew-like vision embodied by the Kappels and the New York Yankees, this stark pronouncement stunned me. Thoughts of the Kappel’s disappeared and were replaced by the thoughts of the Jews known to me. My classmate Neal Stiller, Gerry Isoccson a year ahead of us, Peter and Steve Cronig. Cronig’s market. I didn’t understand my father. The Jews I knew were just like me. We wore the same clothes, played the same sports, went to the same school, and watched the same TV shows. For me, they were no different than Catholics, except that they went to a church that didn’t have a steeple.
“In all of history, throughout the entire world, wherever the Jews lived became blessed because of them. You will hear differently as you grow up. You must resist the temptation to hate the Jews and blame them for misfortune. That temptation will come. Sometime in your life you will find yourself competing against a Jew, in sports, over a job, in business. Over a girl.”
My father might as well have been speaking in tongues. I was flattered that he saw me as a sports competitor, bench-warming little leaguer that I was, or worthy of competing at all with anyone over a girl.
“It was the Jewish people that Hitler wanted to erase. During WW II his army rounded up Jews wherever they were found and sent them to those factories and killed them all, and then cremated their bodies, trying to erase the evidence.”
My father knew that I had an over-active imagination, and he knew that I was seeing it, that I had put myself in line with the Jews waiting for death. I was horrified. He came to the point.
You just remember this one thing, and you will be OK. When you meet a Jew in your life, be honest and fair with him. You don’t have to love the Jews. Just be fair with them. If you find yourself disliking a Jew, make sure it is for a fair and honest reason, and not just because he is a Jew.”
I took a deep breath, and I heard my father take a deep breath. My mind seeked familiarity and settled again on the Kappels. That “NY” logo on their hats might as well have been a Star of David. I remembered. While the boys had been playing catch, their father had come out and stood across from me, the ball passing between us. He looked at me and must have sensed that I was uneasy or confused. Or maybe he was testing me.
“We’re Jewish, you know,” he said as if making a formal pronouncement. What had he seen in me that led him to say that? I do not know. Secrets. I had not known that they were Jewish until he said that, but always the know-it-all, I replied:
“I know. That’s OK. My family is Christian.”
I heard a cackle from the younger brother:
“Like we didn’t know!”
I laughed with them, looking from brother to brother to see if that was all right. Joe held the ball, looked at me, and invited me to join in. I ran home to get my Carl Yastrzemski glove. I couldn’t find my hat.
“Mom! Have you seen my Red Sox hat? I can’t find it!” That hat was the whole point. It would complete the picture. In my mind I would be representing the entire Christian nation with the big red “B” on my forehead. It could have been a cross.
My mother handed me the hat which had been hanging in its regular place.
“What’s all the excitement?” she asked.
“I’m going to play catch with the Jews. Do you have any gum?”
My mother took it in stride as she handed me a pack of Wrigley’s. “Be back by supper.”
I stood at the edge of our back yard trying to get the gum going in my mouth like tobacco chaw as if I were waiting for the announcer at Fenway Park to pronounce my name for the first time, Billy Luce, just called up from Pawtucket to the big leagues.
Joe saw my hat and laughed.
“Pennant race!”
Those two words ignited a shared imagination between the three of us. We were not throwing a baseball on Upper Main Street in Vineyard Haven. No. It was the bottom of the ninth at Yankee Stadium and Joe Kappel was Joe Pepitone, his brother was Elston Howard, and I was Tony Conigliaro. Through some magic of boyhood that imagined game became the real one.
Remembering this in my bed as a child, under the sheets and my crusted tears, I had learned two things from my father’s words. I was not thinking of Jews being led to the gas chambers—what boy could fathom that—rather, I thought of the Yankees and the Red Sox and knew, like I had known nothing until then, that the reason the Yankees always beat the Red Sox was because the Yankees had Jewish fans. New York had been fair and honest with its Jews, and the Yankees were blessed because of it. What could explain the source of that blessing? In my mind, then, it was simple. The Jews were their brother’s keepers. My mind had created a nexus between my mistreatment of my brother and the world’s mistreatment of the Jews.
This is what passed through my mind, again in a flash, thirty years later, again lying on my back in my bed, this time in Gan Or. It presented itself as a lucid dream answer to my questions: “Where am I? How did I get here? Still, though this memory brought clarity in that it served as a post facto signpost pointing to the direction that my life eventually took, there was no clarity as to how that signpost could ever have existed in the world of my childhood. My father, who had lost his mother at age 10 and his father at age 12, and who had, along with his two siblings, watched his legal guardians fritter away the children’s thirty-million-dollar inheritance, was a blue-blooded Boston Brahmin. He belonged to the social group that did not let Jews join their clubs, and who created and upheld the Jewish quotas at the Ivy League schools. His was not a background that would lead him to considering Jews in a fair and honest manner, let alone solemnly have his son swear to an oath that was the Gentile equivalent to “Never Again.”
In Gan Or that morning I eventually rose and walked to the synagogue for morning prayers. I could barely concentrate, and when prayers were over, I looked up to Heaven in my confusion and said: “What is good in thine eyes, do.” Later after seeing my wife and children off to school, it seemed to me that my prayer had been answered before it had been uttered. That lucid memory had been God’s doing, and as much as I wanted to mull over its meaning with another cup of coffee, I had a full day’s work waiting for me at my greenhouses. Once there, and into the routine of my workday, the question returned. What had drawn my father out of his world of polite antisemitism and turned him into a philo-semite? No explanation jumped out at me as I wandered through my tomato vines. It was only revealed to me, slowly, after I had returned home for lunch.
My parents opened a gift shop on Union Street in Vineyard Haven right up from the ferry shortly after we moved to North William Street, fleeing the ghost of Cromwell Lane. They called it “The Sea Chest,” and it was full of many powerful memories for me but what came to me over lunch was a seemingly minor one. I was surprised that it was dangling in my mind. In the mornings, after my father opened the store and before any customers were out and about, he would cross the street, leaving the store’s front door wide open and step into what was called the “Leather and Silver” shop, and take his morning coffee with his friend Leon Stiller. For me he was Mr. Stiller, the father of my classmate Neal Stiller. Remembering Mr. Stiller in Gan Or brought back snippets of information that had reached me over the years. Such as that Mr. Stiller had been a Holocaust survivor, and that he had survived the death camp of Treblinka, one of only a handful of Jews who had emerged from that hellhole. And there I had it: something must have transpired between this holocaust survivor and my father that brought my father to instill in me a respect for the Jews. I knew my father. He must have heard stories from Mr. Stiller, and it must have affected him to the point that when he encountered a budding antisemitism in his son, he took upon himself to brand into my soul a reverse Mark of Cain. Like the Golem of Prague my soul would bear on its internal forehead the word “Emet.” “Truth.” A truth that I was sworn to remember and because it was branded onto my soul, a truth that I could never forget. I was amused thinking that my father probably did not intend his pedagogical exercise to bloom into his son’s full-fledged love of the Jewish people to the extent that he would join their ranks.
I had my story. And as soon as I had it I had a burning desire to confirm it. I let my mother know that I had some important questions for my father and could she please convey that to my Aunt Twinky, my father’s twin sister who also lived on the Vineyard. She was in contact with my father. Almost a year passed by since that morning in Gan Or, and we made one of our rare trips to visit my mother. Still feeling a need to speak with my father, I had planned on calling him when we arrived but as it turned out he would be visiting Twinky while we were there. This coincidence seemed fitting to the story that had been developing in my mind since that morning in Gan Or. I never asked myself why this story itself was not enough for me. It should have been. What need was there of confirmation of a story so quirky that it could only have significance for the weaver of tales himself, even if confirmed? Looking back from a distance, was it just another expression of a son longing for fatherly love that had disappeared forever, and in the face of that void mythologizing the father, willing him into redemption? Was I constructing an on ramp for a father who had abandoned us when his marriage with my mother went haywire? Had I not left all of that behind?
The day of the meeting arrived. We met at Aunt Twinky’s house. My father seemed to have grasped the importance that this meeting held for me. He sat in a lounge chair on Twinky’s patio, just as he had appeared to me on that morning in Gan Or. He had met me with indifference, and I accepted it with no feeling one way or another. We were out of each other’s lives. It was clear that, whatever view of me he may have held in the past, he now saw me and my Jewish life in the Gaza Strip as totally alien. I realized that he may have thought this all along. In that light, the event that I wanted to quiz him about would have been nothing more than an attempt to educate me as to what type of antisemitism is proper for people of our background. Ours was a polite, understated antisemitism. There could be no “dirty Jew” in our lexicon. I laughed to myself at this thought, as one does when some truth jumps out at you from an unexpected direction. At the same time, it was obvious that this wasn’t the whole story. These thoughts joined the thoughts that I had on Mount Carmel about his wanting to hurt my mother, and together those thoughts stood, an unmixed drink of incompatible types of alcohol, on the counter, waiting to inebriate the fool willing to sip of it. It turns out that I was a gulper, in life as in drink.
To ward off the feeling growing in me that my father was looking at me, Doctor Frankenstein-like, and about to exclaim: “My God! What is this monster I have created?” I began to talk. I told him of that morning in Gan Or when I woke up staring at the ceiling, and of my flash of remembrance and the immediate and final conviction I had that this story explained in an earthly way, as my vision on Mount Carmel explained in a heavenly way, my conversion. I described to him the pride that I had felt in presenting to him my captured prisoners, and the shock of his screaming at me, and the long, lonely wait in my bed until he slowly walked up the stairs, came into my room, sat down, and said to me words that set my future in stone. After I had finished talking, he looked off to the side, towards the creek that ran through Twinky’s yard where it became a small pond before moving along to the next property. That pond was a waystation in the creek, where, as sometimes in life, the flow pauses and the surroundings may be reflected and observed by peering faces, or overheard with a discerning ear, an imprinted, fleeting reflection of the world that upon leaving the pond dissembles into disarray, but a disarray that departs with the rippling and soothing sound of continuance. My father did well to look in that direction, for five years later his ashes would be scattered into that pond, as per his request. But on that day, he turned back to me and asked in wonderment:
“I said that?”
The pride that I heard in his voice overcame any disappointment that I felt with his forgetfulness. And truly, how could I be disappointed with him when I had forgotten the event until that morning in Gan Or? He seemed surprised that at some point in his life he had been capable of such lofty utterances. I looked at him. He sat there with his scotch and water in one hand and a look on his face that said: “Well, what do you know?” He finally looked at me and shrugged.
“Wish I could help, but I just don’t remember any of it.”
And against all logic, I saw his failure to remember as my own failure, a failure at storytelling. With that realization I felt my storytelling powers leaving me and descend towards the pond. Some might still be there, entertaining a frog or two. Instinctively, feeling the loss of my abilities, I obstinately attempted to utilize them one last time. In desperation I said:
“I thought that maybe your friendship with Mr. Stiller had led you to take on the mantle of “’Guardian of the Jews’.”
With the mention of Mr. Stiller’s name, my father became animated.
“Leon? Leon Stiller? No, no. You’ve got it all wrong. He was a friend. We both opened our shops at the same time each morning and had coffee together. Over time, that builds a friendship. My interest in him was not just because he was a Jew, and not just because he survived Treblinka. You need to remember; I have a degree in history. Leon was a primary source. He told me things that I would never be able to learn from a history book. He was a friend.
So, there was nothing wrong with my father’s memory. As he described his relationship with Mr. Stiller, I was drawn in. I remembered that on at least one occasion I had been there with them as they drank their morning coffee. I remembered walking along the display stands, smelling the leather. I shook myself clear of the memory and prepared to leave. I was surprised and pleased when he got up and gave me a polite hug, like the polite “goodbye” of the phone call at Wabash.
Driving back to my mother’s I felt emotionally drained. My attention turned towards the parent who was steadfast in her love for her children when the marriage fell apart. And then I was smiling as I remembered that after the divorce my mother had found a job to support us with an insurance agency that was in that same building. Her desk was precisely one floor up, above the very spot where my father and Mr. Stiller drank their coffee so many years before. Her new husband courted her there. One might say that she rebuilt her life above the ashes of her first marriage and the ashes of stories of Treblinka.
Coming next in Part Two: Roots