And now it was my father. He had already been going for quite a while. Even before Mom died. But now, he had pretty much disappeared. Not every day. Not every moment. But mostly. And it wasn’t just the Alzheimer’s. He’d pretty much stopped eating a couple of weeks before. Nobody had to tell me what that meant. His hat had fallen off, and when it landed in the water he’d be gone for good.
All right, I said to myself, but in his voice—Heshel Rosenheim, you want I should read your diary, I’ll read your goddamned diary.
I have always known that my father was born in Germany and that he spent several unspeakable years in the concentration camps, and that after the war he met my mother in New York and they married after only a few months, having experienced love at first sight. But when I opened the first of the journals I was nevertheless surprised that it was written in German. I knew how much he hated that language, the very sound of it would make him cringe and cover his ears. Still, it was the language of his youth. He had come from an assimilated family, a family of intellectuals—my grandfather had taught philology and German literature—or perhaps it was something else—at a university—I think in Berlin, but possibly somewhere else—I was never clear on this—and my father grew up in a strictly German environment. He always told me how he did not speak Yiddish as a child, but learned it in the camps, where he also, as he put it, learned “the language of Shakespeare” from a friend of his—a device to keep their minds active—and so all his English was peppered with Yiddishisms. When he didn’t want me to understand, he spoke to my mother in Yiddish. Jewish, he called it. But I knew for him it was also the language of suffering, which is why he studied and mastered Hebrew during his first years in America.
I would have lived in Israel, he said many times, nodding sadly, but your mother wouldn’t go.
Instead they visited many times over the years. And gave money. Sometimes I could not understand why they gave so much and then would tell me that they couldn’t afford to buy me a new bicycle, or send me to camp for the summer. I always had to go for two weeks. Everyone else went for four. I began to resent all this Jewish fervor. Though in later years it served me as an endless well to draw from.
Anyway, the first journal I picked up was in German, and I could see how naturally the writing flowed, how elegant, even, was the hand; an old-fashioned Teutonic script, like you see in war documents, in Nazi archives, and I have to say it sent a shudder down my spine. And yet I knew it was my father’s handwriting, because I had seen him write this way when he helped me with my own studies in German. I had decided in college that I wanted to be a philosopher, so I took German. My idea was to read Kant and Hegel in the original. But as you can guess, that never happened. I barely could read Kant in English. And my German never got very far at all. I would never be able to read my father’s journals.
He’s crazy, I said to myself. He’s lost it.
I put the journal back in the box and shoved it into the back of the guest room closet.
I started working on a new routine, about dating for people on Social Security. Some hours later, the phone rang.
“Dad, when are you coming home?” It was Josh.
“Well, I can’t come home right now,” I told him. “I have to take care of Grandpa. He’s sick.”
“I don’t feel well either,” he said.
“How’s school?” I asked him.
I hated these conversations. They went nowhere, and only made the both of us miserable. But if I didn’t call, he’d call. He wouldn’t let more than a day go by. When the phone rang, I knew it had to be he.
But it was okay—I would make him laugh. I can be funny. Actually, most people think I’m hilarious. But here’s the truth about comics: we’re depressed, every last one of us. And in my case also obsessive, neurotic, paranoid, immature, and irresponsible. But depression is the universal. It is trite to say we comics hide behind our humor, or use it as a way to be popular, or to cover up insecurity—and all of that is probably true—but at the heart of every laugh is the inability to get out of bed in the morning, the impossibility of really appreciating anything. Everything must always be turned into something else—does anyone ever wonder why?
What the comic sees is the big nothing. What he sees is emptiness, vacuity, folly. And what is the ultimate folly? To look out into the vastness of the universe and somehow conclude that your life means something, in fact, that anything means anything at all.
So I made Josh laugh by telling him how Grandpa kept talking about Frau Hellman.
“Maybe he just wants some mayonnaise,” Josh said.
He cracked me up.
“Yah,” he went on in a goofy Nazi accent he picked up from my Mel Brooks albums, “und ven you see her, be sure to tell her to brink der Miracle Vip!”
And he’s only twelve, I thought.
“Promise me you’ll never go into comedy,” I said.
“I want to be a doctor,” he reminded me. “You know that.”
I didn’t ask him about his mother, though God knows I wanted to. The one time we had a conversation about her he told me she was dating. That was not a good conversation.
Perhaps it will not surprise you that I had not slept with a woman in three years. Which is virtually impossible to accomplish in San Francisco, as there are so few straight men. All my single friends were going out with twenty-five-year-olds. Good-looking twenty-five-year-olds. But I couldn’t do it. I wanted to do it. I even tried to do it, sort of. But I couldn’t. In a city full of Victorian mansions, I was the only real Victorian. So, when I took Josh home those evenings I picked him up from school, I hung around Ella’s house as long as I could. I never made a pass at her, but I just couldn’t seem to leave. She would always be polite, but eventually even I couldn’t avoid getting the message, and then I’d have to go home. I lived for the moments when she would ask me to stay for dinner. I’d say no. Josh would tug at my sleeve and drag me to the table. That was a taste of heaven.
The next day I went to see Dad as usual. It was in the morning and it was still cool, and they had him sitting on the screened-in porch with a bunch of other old coots. There was a lot of spittle everywhere. And odd noises.
“Dad.”
“Do I know you? Harry? I thought you were in Buenos Aires.”
“It’s me. Michael.”
“You should see the look on your face. I was only kidding. I’m not that gone yet. Maybe tomorrow.”
“I knew you were kidding,” I said.
He smiled. “Did you maybe bring a cigar?”
“Yes.”
I gave it to him. He carefully opened the cellophane, lovingly sniffed the tobacco.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a match, would you?”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Then what’s the point?” he said.
“You know you can’t.”
“What? It’s going to kill me? For Christ’s sake.”
But he didn’t make a big megillah of it. He just ran the cigar along his lips, tasting it, and then stuck it in his mouth.
“I’ll chew,” he said.
“That’s fine,” I replied.
“How’s Ella?” he asked me.
I reminded him we’ve been divorced for three years.
“We should have her for Seder. Discuss it with your mother.”
This time he wasn’t faking. In and out. That’s what it was like. Sleeping, waking. He’s dreaming, I realized, that’s all. His eyes were like glazed doughnuts again.
In a little while he said, “Your father gave you something to read. Did you read it?”
“No,” I said, “it’s in German.”
“I despise German,” he said. “Who would write in German now?”
“You did.”
He did not seem to hear me. He opened the
Miami Herald
and slipped on his reading glasses. He looked so much like my father. Sitting in his favorite chair in the living room, the TV blasting, chewing on his cigar, reading the newspaper, shaking his head at the idiocies of whoever had been elected, going on about a news item no one else had read yet. I sat down beside him and put my hand on his knee. He didn’t look up.
“Yes,” he said, “it’s good to be a Jew.”
I was somewhat taken aback. “Why’d you say that?” I had to ask.
“Deutsch ist die sprache des Todes,”
he said with a wry smile, as if he were repeating something he had just read on the Op Ed page, only in the
Düsseldorf Times
.
And for him nothing could have been more true. German was, and would always be, the language of death.
“Dad? Do you know who I am?” I said.
“Don’t be a nudnik. Of course I know you.”
“You gave me something to read, do you remember?”
He looked at me suspiciously, but I could see he did remember.
“It’s in German. Why?”
He continued to look at me, his eyes trying to go cloudy, but something holding them in check.
“I can’t read German,” I said.
“Oh!” he said, grabbing my shoulder with one of his big, bony hands. “Don’t be such a pessimist. Always shortchanging yourself. Always thinking you’re not good enough. It’s all there in black and white.”
“I don’t know German, Dad.”
“Of course you do!”
“But I don’t.”
He smiled patiently, and then it was his turn to pat me on the knee.
“Talk to your mother about it,” he said, and with that he went back to reading the paper, and in a minute he had fallen asleep.
My relationship to German was not so clear.
It was obvious that I chose to study it out of a perverse desire to stand up to my father. He had a very strong personality, and his constant carping about Germans and anti-Semitism, and the failure of German culture and the communal guilt of the German people (and the Poles, and the Ukrainians, and the Lithuanians, and don’t forget the French—those anti-Semitic bastards—and the Americans who closed their shores, and the goddamned British who tried to abort the birth of Israel), finally all seemed ludicrous to me. Germany was not only about Hitler. What about Beethoven and Bach, Goethe and Schiller, Kant and Wittgenstein?
“All for nothing,” he said.
But how long could he carry the war with him? And why should my generation suffer the same tunnel vision? I didn’t tell him I was taking German until a whole semester had passed. But when I came home to New Jersey for the Christmas holiday, he had my grade report stuck on the refrigerator with a blue-and-white magnet in the shape of the State of Israel.
Neither of us said anything till dinner.
“Your grades are good!” he said at last. Mom gave him a look. But it did not dissuade anybody. “I noticed you have begun your study of languages.”
“Yes,” I said. I put down my fork.
“That’s good. That’s good,” he said. “The study of language opens the mind. You get to see how other cultures think.”
“Well, that’s what I want. I want to learn how people think.”
He took a long, slow bite of pot roast, and swallowed with excessive delight, as if it were the most delicious pot roast Mom had ever made. Then he took a long, slow sip of wine, swooshing it around in his mouth, as if the Gallo Hearty Burgundy was Château Lafite.
“And you picked a most excellent language,” he went on. “The language of Hegel. And Nietzsche.
Man and Superman
. I mean
Übermensch, ja
?”
“Heshel…,” my mother tried to intervene, but we all knew it was hopeless.
Karen looked up happily from her mashed potatoes.
“No, no, my dear,” he said with unctuous civility, “I think it’s wonderful. Wonderful!”
“Dad,” I said, “it’s just a
language.
”
“Well, then,” he said, “perhaps you’d like to read
this
!” And he pulled out a large, gray volume from under his chair, and slammed it on the dining room table right in front of me. It was volume one of the original German transcripts of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. He had all forty-two volumes.
“So, you do still read German,” I said.
That’s when he stormed out of the room, and out of the house, too. We heard the back door slam, and then the screen. “That wasn’t nice,” my mother said.
“What wasn’t?”
“That last remark.”
“Well, he wasn’t nice to me.”
“He’s your father,” she said. She looked over at Karen. “And close your mouth when you chew!” she said. That was the end of the matter.
But I knew I couldn’t leave it at that. He didn’t speak to me for the entire three weeks of vacation (and I was just a freshman—it still mattered to me, I still thought of the house as my house, too), and when I went back to NYU, he did not go to the bus with me. This upset me much more than I let on, even to myself.
I would not abandon my German, just on principle. But I had to make up with Dad. My solution was to ask him for help.
I started with a phone call. Dad, I said, I don’t understand the
ge
’s. You know…
gemeinschaf
t, ge
zeichnet
…what’s with the
ge
’s? He hung up on me. I called him back. Dad, I’ve got this test coming up, and I don’t understand all the cases. I actually don’t even know what a case is—I’m going to fail! He hung up again. Ten minutes later the phone rang. What kind of test? I told him what kind of test. He told me what a case was and hung up. A few days later I called again. How come the
S
’s look like
F
’s? How come so much stuff is capitalized in the middle of a sentence and it’s not a name or anything. Soon I was coming home on weekends, loaded with work. I had to write an essay, I told him, on my favorite foods. I spread out my papers on the kitchen table and appeared to be struggling. I noticed him going to the refrigerator a lot, and I could sense him looking over his shoulder at me. Then he was standing next to me, looking over
my
shoulder. Then he had drawn up a chair and was pointing with his finger at my crude mistakes, and thumbing through the dictionary to show me the right words. And finally we were discussing the essay itself, and how best to express, in German, my love for Grunning’s chocolate fudge swirl ice cream. At the very end of that day my father even mumbled something about the beauty and intricacy of German grammar. This scene was repeated in suburban New Jersey almost every weekend for two years, the father and the son, the notebooks and the textbooks, the pencils and pens, the glasses of soda or beer, the bowl of chips, the plate of sandwiches, the mother coming at last to chase us away and set the table for dinner. It was the one thing, in my whole life, I did solely with my father. It was something like an affair, really. By the second year we were conversing in German about everything. In fact, it was in that language that I first told him about Ella.