Authors: Michel Laub
My great-grandfather never forgave my grandmother. My great-grandmother stopped talking to her too. My grandmother had an older sister, who married a farmer in the interior of Rio Grande do Sul, and a younger brother who was studying to be a diplomat, and not one of them is alive today: my great-grandfather died from a heart attack, my great-grandmother in a car accident, my grandmother’s sister of tuberculosis, her brother from complications following appendicitis.
Everyone on my grandfather’s side died in Auschwitz, and there isn’t a single line about them in the
notebooks. There isn’t a line about the camp itself, how long my grandfather spent there, how he managed to survive or what he felt when he was freed, and I can imagine my father’s reaction when he read those notebooks six months or a year after my grandfather’s death and noticed these omissions.
My grandfather wrote nothing about Judaism. He made no comment about my grandmother’s conversion. Nor any account of her attempts to understand the religion after she had converted, the books she read, her visits to the synagogue unaccompanied by him, the questions she asked and to which he gave only the briefest of answers. It’s possible that my father never heard him say anything on the subject when he was a child or indeed before the age of fourteen, some explanation of or potential clue to an identity that marked him out from the world around him, from his neighbors, his classmates, his teachers, from the radio announcers, characters in films, the people my father used to see from the window of the bus walking back and forth and who never gave the matter a second’s thought.
My father began to take an interest in all this because of the death of my grandfather, which is perfectly understandable in the circumstances, because religion isn’t something you think about when you’re fourteen, even if that religion has the historical and cultural weight of Judaism, and even if my father had known that my grandfather’s refusal to deal with the subject was not a mere whim, a personal choice made by a grown man, but the symptom of something that was doubtless apparent in the way he lived his life and the way he treated his wife and son and everyone.
Wife — person who takes charge of all the domestic tasks, ensuring that the most rigorous standards of hygiene are employed in the house and that during the day her husband remains undisturbed whenever he wishes to be alone
.
I don’t know when my grandfather began writing the notebooks, but it’s likely that it was decades after the events he describes, at a time when it became his main
aim in life to remain shut up in his study drafting these encyclopedic entries. Because the text doesn’t change greatly as it progresses, as if it had been written in one go, and the pattern is set pretty much right from the start, with my grandfather talking about my grandmother and the sewing machine business that was so successful he was able to open a small shop in Porto Alegre shortly after my father was born.
My father started working when he was fourteen, immediately after the death of my grandfather. Initially, my grandmother took over the running of the business, and I don’t know if she helped him get his bearings then or not, because at fourteen there isn’t much a boy can do in a shop apart from stocktaking or helping at the till or receiving orders or pretending that he’s older than he is so as to be able to write out receipts, but I think the hustle and bustle and the customers’ chatter and the visits to a tea shop two blocks away to eat cheesecake helped him get through those first few years and thus escape the grim prospect of having to come home from school and spend the evenings among furniture and objects that served only to remind him of my grandfather.
In time, all this ceased to be pure therapy. My father came to enjoy the day-to-day life in the shop, and when he was eighteen or nineteen my grandmother left him in sole charge, and a few years later he opened another branch, then a second, then a third, and in each one he changed the merchandise. From sewing machines he moved on to fabrics, then to clothes, then to furniture and car parts, which meant that, by the time I was born, I was the heir to what had become a miniature empire.
My father met my mother when he was nineteen, at a dance at the Jewish club. In those days, men still wore ties and women waited to be invited to take the floor, and it’s always tempting to think about what might have been if something had gone wrong on that night, if something had interrupted the sequence of chance events that led to my birth. It’s always tempting to imagine what my father felt when I was born, how he communicated those feelings to my mother and whether or not this determined the way in which he related to me over the years. What child hasn’t felt the same curiosity? And then I imagine the impact my
grandfather’s notebooks must have had on my father: it’s possible there to retrace a similar path, with my grandfather describing my grandmother’s pregnancy, what he referred to as
the pregnant wife
, the entry in which he writes that the wife should tell her husband about the pregnancy so that the husband can immediately take
the necessary decision
.
It’s tempting to say that my father’s reaction to the notebooks influenced the way in which he dealt not only with Judaism but with everything else: his memory of my grandfather, his marriage to my mother, his way of relating to me at home, and since I never got to know another side to him, because he never showed me another side, it’s clear that I, too, became caught up in that story.
For me, everything begins when I was thirteen, at João’s birthday party, when I let him fall. The head teacher summoned the parents of the boys who had been involved. The incident had occurred outside of school, but the staff–student coordinator nevertheless
felt that it was within her jurisdiction. When my father asked me about it, he already knew that the other boys involved had told the coordinator it had been an accident, that we often played such pranks on each other and, up until then, no one had been hurt. My father was unconvinced by this explanation, he certainly didn’t treat the matter as a mere childish prank, nor did he speak to me in a jokey, confiding way or tell me about something similar that had happened to him in the past, and he made me promise never to allow such a thing to happen again, but after that he said no more about it. In the months that followed, he showed no more interest than usual in school, my behavior, my friends or João.
At the time, he and João rarely met. In the afternoons, I would be left alone apart from the maid. João would arrive after lunch, it was exam month, and he was behind with his studies because of all the time he had spent recuperating. I helped him with Portuguese, maths and science, and although this required work and effort on my part, I continued to copy out my notes for him, to talk about the books we had to read
at home, to repeat what we had been taught in class, because otherwise it would be impossible for him to do the exercises.
At around four or five, the maid would bring us our afternoon snack. I usually had a toasted banana sandwich and a milkshake, and we would stop for a rest. Unlike my other classmates, João didn’t play video games. He had never used a videocassette player. He had never been in a house like mine, where, as soon as summer began, we could turn on the air conditioning, my room like an island where day by day, subject by subject, we worked our way through the study schedule, until the light changed and the temperature cooled and we could finally free ourselves from our textbooks and end the afternoon by the swimming pool.
João did not belong to the same club as me, and had never jumped from a diving board like the one we had at my house, a wall that we would scale, putting our feet in the gaps between the bricks, and from which you had to jump, clearing the lawn and the plants and the stones and the tiles around the edge of the
swimming pool, a jump I found relatively easy, but which it took João a while to screw up the necessary courage to make: the almost two-meter-high wall, the sun going down on the other side, the wind and the mosquitoes and the smell of cut grass after a long hot day, and me saying come on, it’s not that tricky, and him crouched, concentrated, eyes wide, calf muscles tensed, a leap into space as if there were no gravity and a fall into the void, taking care not to breathe out.
Some people open their eyes underwater, others prefer not to, and I don’t know that it makes much difference when you’re plunging down to the bottom and you have to wait patiently until the impetus slows and you stop in the middle of all the bubbles and allow buoyancy to carry you back to the surface. You propel your body upward using long movements of the arms, and you’re very conscious of your legs and your stomach, and when you emerge into the light you look at the edge of the pool, and the colors have never seemed so bright, you’re intensely aware of the reflections on the water that shines and laps against the tiles and the slap of the waves and the taste of chlorine in your nose, and then the fear you’d been feeling all
afternoon and all the previous afternoons ever since the day of the fall at the birthday party vanishes as if you had been born again.
It would be hard to say why I became João’s friend. These things don’t happen because you feel sorry for someone, or because you’ve spent months tormented by the idea that you almost destroyed that person, although it might help to begin with, at least as an impulse when you first decide to approach him. If it wasn’t for that initial awkwardness, I wouldn’t have offered to help him with his studies. If it weren’t for those afternoons at my house, we wouldn’t have spent so much time together. And if we hadn’t done that, which happened in parallel with the whole recovery process, with his physiotherapy sessions, the exercises he did to strengthen his muscles, the press-ups and sit-ups and weight lifting, which he started doing almost obsessively, I wouldn’t have come to see what had previously seemed idiotic in João’s personality as a quality.
At the time, I spoke very little to my father. He would arrive home from work at night, exhausted, and by
then I would have had my supper and would usually already be in bed asleep. If I were to calculate the amount of time we spent together each week, it would only be a few hours, and since included in those hours were his speeches about the Jews who died in the 1972 Olympics, the Jews who died in PLO attacks, the Jews who would continue to die because of the neo-Nazis in Europe and the Soviet alliance with the Arabs and the ineffectual stance taken by the UN and the media’s negative attitude toward Israel, it’s possible that more than half the conversations he had with me turned on that one topic.
As a child, I used to dream about those stories, the swastikas and the Cossack torches outside the window, as if someone in the street were about to put me in a pair of pajamas with a star on them and shove me onto a train headed for the chimneys, but this changed over the years. I realized that the stories kept being repeated, my father told them all in the same way, with the same intonation, and even today I can quote examples that would often cause his voice to break, the young girl who was imprisoned, the two brothers who were separated, the doctor and the teacher and
the postman and the pregnant woman who crossed the whole of Poland only to be caught in an ambush in the forest. Something happens when you see your father repeating the same thing once, twice, five hundred times, and suddenly you can no longer sympathize or feel affected by something which, gradually, when you get to be thirteen, in Porto Alegre, living in a house with a swimming pool and having shown yourself capable of allowing a classmate to fall to the floor on his back at his birthday party — gradually, you realize that those stories bear very little relation to your own life.
After I became friends with João, I started looking at my other friends, unable to understand why they had done that, and how they had managed to co-opt me as well, and I began to feel ashamed that I had ever shouted
son-of-a-bitch goy
, and this became mixed up with my growing feelings of discomfort around my father, a rejection of the performance he gave whenever he spoke of anti-Semitism, because I had nothing in common with the people he talked about apart from having been born Jewish, and I knew nothing about those people apart from the fact that they were
Jews, and even though so many had died in the concentration camps it made no sense to be reminded of this every day.
It made no sense that I had nearly left a classmate crippled because of that or because I had in some way been influenced by it — my father’s speeches like a prayer before each meal, solidarity with the world’s Jews and a promise that their suffering would never be repeated, when what I had been witnessing for months was the exact opposite: João alone against the mob, ignoring the humiliations, never giving the slightest indication of defeat when he was buried in the sand, and because of that memory and my awareness that he was not the coward, but rather the ten or fifteen of us boys surrounding him, because of that sense of shame that would cling to me forever unless I did something about it, I decided to change schools at the end of the year.
There are various ways of interpreting my grandfather’s notebooks. One is to assume that he could not possibly have spent years devoting himself to the task, compiling a kind of treatise on how the world should be, with his interminable entries on the ideal city, the ideal marriage, the ideal wife, the wife’s pregnancy
accompanied with diligence and love
by the husband, and never once mention the most important event of his life.
I read just a small part of the notebooks, and I was the only person to do so apart from my father. He had them translated after my grandfather died and never told my grandmother. I can even understand his reasons and even understand that this embarrassed him in a way, but right from the start, the effect they had on me was quite different.