Lies About My Family: A Memoir

My Father Goes Down to Hell

143 my father goes down to hell On Yom Kippur my mother says she wants to go to the yizkor service, but my father says he has no need of it, not because he is an unbeliever, which he is, but because even at his age not a day goes by when he doesn’t think of his parents. He doesn’t need to go to a special service to remember them. My parents now attend my sister Priscilla’s temple for the high holidays, because of a falling out at their former shul. “That rabbi was a nut,” my father says. “A right-winger.” The rabbi had putupamechitzah, acurtainofseparationbetweenthemenand the women, decorated along the top with plastic flowers. The first year it appeared, my father mocked it. “Rabbi,” he called out. “I have a complaint! The mechitzah is too low. I can look over it and see my wife. She will distract me from my prayers!” The next fall, when it showed up again, he objected in earnest . “The family!” he instructed the rabbi. “This is the basis of Jewish observance. I want to sit in shul with my wife and children.” He narrowed his eyes. “In Auschwitz,” he said, “the Nazis sent the men in one direction and the women in another.” “Oh, Sig,” said my mother. “Maybe you don’t belong in this congregation anymore,” said the rabbi. “What!” cried my father. “The memorial plaques for my parents are in the sanctuary!” Little orange bulbs flicker on their yahrzeits, the anniversaries of their deaths. “They are buried in 144 lies about my family the Temple Beth-El cemetery plot!” None of us has ever visited them there—what’s the point? Dead is dead. But it’s reassuring to know where they are: right off Route 3, overlooking the former drive-in movie theater. “I belong in this temple, Rabbi. I donated my father’s Yiddish books to the library. His Yiddish Talmud. Where are his books?” The rabbi shrugged. My father returned to the temple one Sunday to rescue his father’s books and intruded on a Bible study class. The men were discussing the binding of Isaac. Our father Abraham, one offered, was a model of faith and courage for the generations in his willingness to sacrifice his son at God’s whim. “You’re barbarians!” my father exclaimed. Thelibrary,itturnedout,hadbeendismantled,andthebooks thrown with indifference into the basement, in giant plastic bags. My father didn’t have the strength to lift or sort them, and no one from upstairs offered to help. They’re ruined, but he still aims to go back. The appointments never work out. My father says his father would look in the mirror and ask himself, “How did I get to be so old?” He told my father, “Life is an oygnblik”—the blink of an eye. Now, my father says, he asks himself the same question: Who is that old man? Although what exactly my father sees is a mystery—and not only because his Coke-bottle glasses don’t entirely correct his vision. “Amazing how my hair is still so black,” he muses, glancing at himself in the hallway mirror. My mother and I laugh at him. She has always had wonderful hair, naturally wavy, and it went gray with a Sontagian streak down the middle. Now it’s bright white. I so hope mine will do the same, but it will probably be more like my father’s. Steely and growing straight down over my small forehead. “Are you kidding?” my mother says to my father. “You’ve been gray for years. Like me.” 145 my father goes down to hell “Nah.” His poor vision frustrates him—unlike his poor hearing, which he seems to enjoy. It frees him from the obligation to follow the conversations of others. David says, “This is Siggy and Aunt Norma.” He looks to his right: “What? I can’t hear you! Stop mumbling!” He looks to his left: “What? I can’t hear you! Stop mumbling!” My father hates to wear his hearing aids. They’re uncomfortable , no good. “What do you expect from Ears-R-Us,” Becky tells him. “Get some decent ones.” “Nope,” he says. “Too noisy.” My grandmother’s vision became so distorted she couldn’t focus on the Yiddish newspaper, even before the Alzheimer’s. My grandfather read to her. Now, doesn’t this suggest...