When she was five, she saw a kosher chicken on my grandmother’s chopping block and ran to her room with her hands on her eyes. This was the last day of the Six-Day War, and her dad was slaying enemies in the Golan. When he got home the next morning, my mom still hadn’t taken her hands down, and when he came into her bedroom, she would not hug him until he agreed to blindfold her. He used his belt and she wore it on her face all day.
By dinner it was no longer cute, and my grandfather tossed falafels at her head. She said, “Stop it,” and he said, “Who are you speaking to, Tamar? What would you like that person to stop?” She said, “Aba, stop throwing food at me,” and he said, “Take off the idiot blindfold,” and she said, “I need to protect my eyes.” He tossed more falafel at her head. “You need to protect your head,” he told her. She didn’t say anything to that, and he tossed falafel until there was no more falafel and he started tossing kibbeh.
The kibbeh was heavier, and it was not as funny as the falafel, but my mother was willful, and kibbeh — no matter how much heavier or less funny than falafel; no matter how hard anyone tossed it at her head — would not convince her to remove the belt from her eyes, and my grandmother knew that, and my grandmother yelled at my grandfather, and my mom started crying, and eye-shaped tearstains seaped through the fibers of my grandfather’s canvas belt.
“Your blindness is bad for us,” my grandfather told my mom. “Hairy chicken is bad!” she shouted. “So stay away from hairy chicken,” he said. “Buy me goggles,” she said. He said, “Goggles will make you look crazy. Are you crazy? Maybe you’re crazy, blindfolded and screaming about chicken.” My mother swiped fried grains from her hair and her forehead. My grandfather said, “You can’t protect yourself without sight.” “I can’t protect myself at all,” said my mother. And my grandfather made her an offer: “If you stop your craziness,” he said, “I will teach you how to kill with that belt.”
My mother consented, and was able to avoid raw kosher chicken until she was twenty-seven. My grandmother warned her away whenever chicken was on the chopping block, and my grandfather combat-trained her so well that when she left home for the IDF his special forces team made sure that none of her two years of compulsory service were wasted off-mission, which meant no boot-camp, and so no kitchen-duty.
After she finished serving in Lebanon, she came to Chicago for school and gave up religion til I was born. All the chicken she cooked during college was traif, and all the chicken she cooked during graduate school was traif until she fell in love with my dad, who brought her to Shabbos at the house of his Lebuvitcher parents.
A couple years earlier, my dad had gone to Brooklyn to best-man the wedding of Yuval Forem. Rebbe Menachem Schneerson performed the ceremony. Traditionally, the bride and groom are the last to approach the chupa, but a lot of people believed Schneerson was the messiah, and a few still do, even though he’s dead now, so he’s who came out last. When the rebbe saw my father standing on the platform, he halted the ceremony and took him aside to whisper in his ear.
Although my paternal grandparents were close to Yuval Forem, they had caught the flu together before his wedding, and were unable to fly to New York. The day after the wedding, Yuval and his bride Rochel moved across the world, to a young West Bank settlement without phone service, so the first my grandparents heard of the Rebbe’s weird behavior toward my father was in the postscript of a letter from Yuval that I keep in my DOCUMENTS lockbox. “P.S. The vision or dream Rebbe Schneerson had about your Yehudah must have been of the very utmost importance to merit such a taking-aside-to-whisper,” wrote Yuval, “and so I didn’t worry the delay. Still, I would be thrilled to know what was said between them. Yehudah left the reception before I had the chance to ask.”
Within days of his return from Brooklyn, my father, who would not tell his parents or anyone else what the rebbe had said to him, dropped out of yeshiva to attend law school, and offered no one an explanation. So by the time they met my mom, my paternal grandparents had already been worried about my father’s future for two years. That is what my grandfather told me, right before he died.
My grandfather died three days after my grandmother, when I was six and they were sixty-five. We were never close to my grandparents, even though they lived just six blocks away, and by the second evening of my grandma’s shiva, my grandpa knew he was dying. How I know he knew was that he began our last conversation by saying, “It is nothing short of tragic, Gurion, that this is the only important conversation I will ever get to have with you. It is tragic that the only important conversation I will ever get to have with you will be about a rift. This rift, though, was about you, always about you, the most important person in the world, at least to me — the rift was about who you would become, and I need to know that you understand that, and I know that your father won’t explain it to you properly, if at all. My son is not the explaining type, and he won’t explain how important it is to his father that you continue to become the person I see you becoming, the scholar you are miraculously turning into despite your upbringing. In becoming who you are becoming, Gurion, you heal a rift by mocking it. You prove all the worries that your grandmother and I suffered to have been unnecessary. All we ever wanted was what every nice Jewish couple wants: for their children to raise Jewish children. By the time we met your mother, we had already been worried for a couple years about the path your father was embarking on. It was not we were racists,” he said, “not that. But what she did with that Shabbos chicken, your mother…” He trailed off and backtracked then, explaining how they’d worried that by the time I’d be born, my dad, “who had not only traded, for that of Louis Brandeis and Benjamin Cardozo, the work of Rashi and Rambam the local rabbis all swore he was destined to elaborate, but had lately begun to obsessively clip the stragglers in his beard and — just a few days earlier — been witnessed leaning over the counter in a diner on Lawrence by our neighbor Zippy Kaplan who, yes, it’s true, she had glaucoma, Zippy, yet nonetheless she swore that the substance in the glass Yehuda sipped from looked milky beside his hamburger,” would become entirely secular, which would lead to secular children, and likely very few of them.
That my mother’s lost-tribesmanship might mean she wasn’t an Israelite, or that being dark-skinned would make her marriage to my father uncomfortable for certain Yeckies at shul, never crossed my grandparents’ minds. The worry was that there would be no shul at all. My grandparents worried that, because my father was in love with a woman who wasn’t observant, let alone Lebuvitcher, he would leave behind his entire religion, just as he had left behind his career as a scholar. They were a little bit right and a little bit wrong, my grandparents.
My father was moving away from religion, and would continue to do so, but it had almost nothing to do with my mother. He told me himself that he’d made the decision to leave yeshiva even before Yuval’s wedding, that he’d begun longing to affect the world in a more direct way than he believed he was able to as a Torah scholar (a half-truth), and that that was why, a full six months before going to Brooklyn, he had secretly applied to law school. For a long time, that was all he told me. I learned the rest on my eighth Passover, mostly because Yuval Forem had too much wine.
Yuval’s parents’ house was a block west of ours, on California, and even though, like most others in the neighborhood, the elder Forems avoided us, Yuval — having brought his wife and six children from Israel for the holiday — wielded his authority and made sure we were invited. He and my father had been friends since grammar school, and roommates at yeshiva, so if Yuval hadn’t moved away, or if we had moved to Israel, we’d have done Passover with his family every year. That was how he started.