Sometimes serendipity brought Effi and me together at Grandpa Yosef’s. Like a pair of lemmings, we dropping everything — university, marriage — to answer the call of our species and come to Grandpa Yosef. We convened with him to debate the problems of life, offer advice, comments, slight derisions and sometimes encouragement. We never left Grandpa Yosef without playing a game of “Categories.” It was good to lose, as we had done in our childhood. Grandpa Yosef showed no mercy when it came to Categories. He became a vengeful warrior. His arms thickened. His voice turned crude. In the interest of fairness, we made him come up with two terms instead of one to gain any points. Grandpa Yosef obeyed, but in return, we agreed that he could play his beloved double turns — once as Grandpa Yosef, once as Feiga. He placed two pieces of paper in front of him, one with his own name, and on the other he wrote tenderly, “Feiga.”
Feiga was the winner. Always. Grandpa Yosef left himself the common terms and decorated Feiga’s page with the best of exotica. An animal with “Z” was “zebra” for himself and “zebu” for Feiga. A vegetable with “T” was “tomato,” destined to battle our own identical choices, leaving Feiga as the lead with “turnip.” If the letter H was called out, Grandpa Yosef would blink, his Adam’s apple bobbing, bits of thought dripping down his temples. He would write down “Honduras” or “Holland” for himself, and for Feiga, “Hungary.” A very mediocre stroke of genius, connected to the as-of-yet-unexplained escape by Feiga and her family from Bochnia to Hungary one fine day before the Aktionen and the Holocaust horrors. The insult was not yet digested, Grandpa Yosef still did not dare take a first bite out of the affair: one moment the two of them were in the ghetto, engaged, and the next — Feiga was gone.
After the games he would make sure to pad into Feiga’s room and announce, “You won!” Pleased with his achievement, he would pamper himself with a piece of pickled herring or some lox or a pickle spear. Happiness radiated from his stubble, from the wrinkles on his face. He happily sipped a cup of weak tea right in front of our eyes, restoring in himself the powers dissipated by victory.
Every time we visited, we asked about the doctorate. Grandpa Yosef was secretive. “Grandpa Yosef, let us read it,” we would beg, but our attempts were met with raised eyebrows and waves of the hand. He would grumpily complain: there was progress, but not the progress he wanted. Something…something was missing. Something to give life…validity. He was waiting for an omen, a sign from above. As if engaged not in scientific research but in a kind of religious purification.
“Maybe if you wrote about Jewish cowardice in the Middle Ages you’d have more ideas,” Effi says, annoying Grandpa Yosef. Jewish cowardice. Not funny at all.
Angrily, he responds, “I knew a man in the camps…Adler…nu.” And falls silent. As if he has touched a thought not yet fully molded. He suspends our fruit bowl rights by taking the bowl into the kitchen to preoccupy himself, to hide his anger, leaving us with a hankering for grapes. The hasty reference to “Adler” gives rise to a common thought: Grandpa Yosef had managed to successfully ford our childhood without telling us much about his Shoah. A series of Morse code was all we ever had, event-event-occurrence, that’s it.
There are moments when Grandpa Yosef lobs a confession attempt in our direction. “The things I saw…the people I recall…in the Lord’s name! Sometimes I sit here in my chair and think: I am alive. And I think about them, so many years have passed since they too hoped to live, to survive the camps. I sit here and tremble, children, I sit and tremble…”
As if he wants us to sit and listen as he talks, but there is no one to talk to. We look back at the years during which we chased down the questions of the Holocaust. Caged years that began with ordinary days, when we were ten, and ended with Levertov’s betrayal and our banishment from childhood. We did not find answers to our questions, and it seems we stopped seeking them.
Grandpa Yosef’s dissertation was to continue at a painfully slow rate, and in fact is still not complete today. But during the lucid days of 1985 we imagined it was just within his reach. Every meeting with him opened with the question, “How’s it going?” and with the answer, “Still not…still not,” with a grumbling sigh. If we had focused our attention correctly, the delay would have revealed to us the secret of the stagnation that had befallen the world around us. We should have taken the hint. The neighborhood had come to a standstill. Everything had frozen. The world does not change.
We would run into the neighborhood residents and find them identical to the characters of our childhood, unchanged, not a comma or a wrinkle different. Continuing to survive. Magical people. Day after day, experts at survival. Forces of nature pushed them into the neighborhood (volcanoes disguised as historical dates; raging fires known as Auschwitz, Belzec, Bergen-Belsen; thunder storms on train tracks; the thick fog of transports; sub-zero temperatures — the locals’ indifference) and now they sit in the depths of their compensation payments — the only support they have, a flow of coins from Germany. Only the Germans are left to atone, to compensate them every month for their suffering, for families lost and lives unblossomed. There are no professors among them, no big-time merchants, statesmen, legislators. Their lives have been diverted to this neighborhood, to this wasteland. Their lives are unlived. They came here as a torrent of refugees after the war, to the heat waves and the rationing, to a place with no trees and no snow. They were forced to live other people’s lives, chosen from a pile like clothes in the camps without trying them on, no exchanges allowed — pause too long and the whip will crack. They took tattered lives, lives that fit no one, and lived them complacently. They married. Had children. Listened to the radio. There were holidays — Rosh Hashanah, Passover. But what could compare to the Passover Seder at home in Sosnowitz, where Father blessed the matzo with Elijah’s trembling cup of wine on the table? Where were their lives? The continuity? Things begun during the first year of studies at the Polytechnikum or a renowned yeshiva? In a successful business inherited from Father, full of ideas to double and triple the profits? Where were those lives?
They sit. They sigh. Sometimes a thought creeps in, a certain sacred relief: We are not to blame. Our lives have been nothing, but it is not our fault. The Shoah. The war. We were saved, and more than that we could not do. We were absolved from a life that demands successes, accomplishments, proof. Not like our children, who grew up here and were given everything — and what do they have? Nothing. We are here, surviving.
We looked at them with wonderment, amazed and alarmed — they did not change. The years passed us by like a cat’s scratches. We could feel each one of them. Those later years were not as easy as our childhood had been. Life surged around us and we clung to our seats trying not to drift away. We were abandoned, weak, in need of Grandpa Yosef. We came to him: Go on, Grandpa Yosef, pull us along, you are the strongest sleigh dog. We sat with him to catch our breath. To rest. To check in — was the world changing? Not changing? And us? What about us?