Jack and Rochelle

by Lawrence Sutin

  But there was one elder relative who had survived, and whose presence in our home gave both to my sister and myself the sense of extended family that we craved. This was my grandfather Julius, who possessed as sweet a disposition as I have encountered in my lifetime.

  My grandfather and I shared a bedroom, and he cared for us, in the role of a third parent, through our childhood and teenage years. He died when I was twenty-three. His preferred diet was a remarkable one for a man who lived to age ninety. He especially enjoyed butter-and-sugar sandwiches and pan-fried fatty meats. There were two ritual medications in his daily routine—a spoonful or two of Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia, and a shot (or, now and then, two) of schnapps. The schnapps was always imbibed between four and five in the afternoon, and was accompanied by appreciative lip smacking. Julius did not otherwise consume alcohol, except for wine or cherry liqueur during our family festival meals for the major Jewish holidays.

  In all our years of family intimacy, I cannot recall a single occasion in which my grandfather lost his temper. When he found it necessary, on rare occasions (the rarity due to his fore-bearance, rather than my goodness) to discipline me, it took the form of a gentle pleading. His face—with skin that stayed smooth through all his years—would grow slightly redder, but his smile, a relaxed and almost moony smile, would only grow broader. His discipline, as he saw it, was never intended to deny me anything—only to protect me. It worked very well, by and large. I loved him and hated to displease him. He did not—this is how I felt it—deserve to be disobeyed. I disobeyed often enough, nonetheless.

  My grandfather did have a quiet stubborn streak. This showed itself most strikingly in his attitude toward the English language. In twenty-five years of living in America, he never learned to speak English—or, perhaps more accurately, he never consented to speak it. Yiddish was his language; he subscribed by mail to a Yiddish newspaper published in New York City, The Jewish Daily Forward, for which Isaac Bashevis Singer, amongst others, wrote. Julius certainly understood a bit of English, as he would watch American television now and then and would seem to comprehend at least some of the English-language conversations swirling around him.

  But Yiddish was his true tongue. We all spoke it in our household, sometimes mixing in English here and there—my sister and I did this more often, as we were and are far less fluent in Yiddish. I should clarify that English became the dominant language in my family as we children grew older and my parents grew fluent in the speech of their new land. But when matters became serious or emotional, Yiddish was the means of communication. The choice to switch to it was not a conscious one—an automatic instinct, perhaps an instinct of survival, prevailed. Yiddish is an extraordinarily rich language with respect to personality types and states of mind. To speak in Yiddish is to philosophize whether you wish to or not. I am grateful to have some knowledge of it in my bones.

  I have said that my grandfather was a “partial” exception to the awareness of the past—the Holocaust—that was so strong in my parents. I say “partial” because I know that the years left their mark on him. Quite literally, his world was destroyed. But he spoke of it so seldom, and so briefly when he did so, that I cannot in honesty tell you what feelings he had about it. All I can say is that the serenity of the last decades of his life—and, mind you, he never fell into senility—was a kind of miracle of practical wisdom. It puzzled even my parents, who would joke that they wished they could have some of that peace of mind for themselves. It can be summed up in a remark Julius would make when he was asked why he did not attend synagogue on Yom Kippur. Yom Kippur is the most sacred day of the Jewish year, a day of penitence during which God inscribes the names of all Jews in the respective Books of Life and of Death. Julius would say (in Yiddish, of course), “Well, maybe if I’m not there in the synagogue, where He can see me, God will forget altogether that I’m still alive.” This approach, in my grandfather’s case, worked wonderfully.

  As for my parents, the Holocaust remained visible in them. There was a tension, a fierceness, a constant intensity of feeling they manifested that was different from the other American adults whom I met growing up, as teachers or as the parents of other friends.

  This intensity frightened me. I knew, early on, the basic facts of their lives. Now and then there were Nazis in my dreams. The Nazis wanted to kill me. The indifferent world (and indifferent it was in the years before and during World War II, when much could have been done to save Jewish lives) was willing to let me die.

  And yet, this fear was mingled with, even superseded by, a sense of pride and of hope. My parents had not only survived, but they had also fought back. That in itself was a rare and blessed opportunity in the hell of wartime Poland. But that was not all. Oh how we loved, as children, to hear my father tell of his dream of my mother, how she would come to him in the woods, how they would love each other and spend their lives together. The dream had the magic of a prophecy. Life, we children learned, could be filled with wonders, actual wonders, rare though they might be.

  My parents love for us was so strong, so passionately held—utterly unconditional, in a sense. It would never be withdrawn, no matter what we did. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, family was sacred to my parents and—because of the impassioned way they cared for us—became so to my sister and to myself as well. Within the bonds of family we were secure. Our talk was free and open. We laughed a great deal. We could bring up any topics with our parents, and we could be assured that we would receive direct and honest responses. My sister has offered this apt and paradoxical summation, “My parents managed to give us a normal, happy life—even though they had probably forgotten what ‘normal’ was.”

  There were tacit conditions to this love from our parents—conditions that affected not the fact of their love, but the comfort and happiness (the Yiddish word naches covers the feeling of gratified love that I mean here) with which they could bestow it. These conditions ensued because the sacredness of family meant that all youthful signs of independence were viewed with a mixture of pride (my parents wanted their children to grow up strong and happy and sure of themselves) and trepidation (when family loyalty was threatened by autonomous decision making or—more terrifying still—outright adolescent rebellion and defiance).

  My father is, but for rare occasions, a relatively silent man. He worked long days and nights to support us. Adore his children as he does, he was always tentative in playing games with us in our youth and is to this day more comfortable in showing physical affection to our mother. She is the polestar of his life. But for one brief and painful exception, he has never taken a trip without her—not in all the years of conducting his sales business. His tender name for her is maisele—mouse—which originated with my mother’s love for cheese. Maisele is the name we grew up with—“Rochelle” was the signal of an awkward formality imposed by the presence of strangers.

  My father is a patient man who is, at the same time, ravaged by nerves. The wisdom he has learned in the course of his life is at odds with the damage done to him during the years of hell. For all his considerable achievements as a businessman, he is singularly free of greed or self-importance. He recognizes that money is an important means of survival, but he is also aware that it is no indicator of character and no guarantor of genuine happiness. His generosity, not only to his family, but to his friends, to employees, and to charitable causes, is a constant of his character—it does not depend upon a rosy mood or a canny plea. He certainly can and does explode into rages. The cause here is almost always something that he has perceived as a threat—or an insufficient showing of respect—toward my mother. If, during my years of growing up, I disagreed with my mother on any matter of importance, my father would storm into the fray. Not only would he argue on her behalf—that was a given—but he would also express loud and outraged disbelief that I would dare to cause my mother pain. Nothing that I could want or believe was worth that, in his view.

  My mother never seemed, to me, to require qui
te as much protection as my father felt she did. She is, like my father, an extremely intense person, and is capable of rages and silences of her own. But these are very rare. For the most part, my mother radiates joy within the intimate bounds of our family life. She is the igniter of the best of our times together—the determined one who brings up the topics that need discussion, the daring one who laughs and teases with the greatest glee. My mother has an exceedingly sharp and swift sense of humor. This never bothered me, but it certainly has startled some rigidly nice persons who have met her. My mother will say what she thinks, and she happens to find a great deal of human behavior misguided, deluded, or hypocritical. Her best lines are generally in Yiddish, a language that delights in earthiness, which means that—in English, out of context—they can sound cruder than they are.

  For example, what does she think of my career as a writer? Because she loves me and fears for me, and because she knows that (1) writers usually make a precarious living; and that (2) most people don’t give a damn about what writers have to say, though they may fervently pretend to do so, my mother communicates her feelings on my profession by describing it, with a Yiddish-Russian phrase, as resembling a “philosof na iaitzach”—a philosopher sitting and scratching his balls. Does this offend you? It shouldn’t. It is a caricature, apt enough in many respects. In my own case, I see it not only as a challenge that I have accepted, but as a useful curative to the pretensions that abound as to the “writer’s role” in society. And when, as I write this, I imagine my mother’s face as she offers that description, I start to laugh. By the by, even though I have written this book on my mother’s life, her opinion of writing as a livelihood remains unchanged. She said once to me, during the long course of our interviews, “Better you should find a subject that could make you some money.” The rewards for this book are certainly not economic—trust me on that. And my mother knows this, and included in her seemingly callous statement is a sense of doubt that people will really take in what she has said in the narrative, a sense of respect for the work I have done, and a sense of concern that I not do it too often, lest my wife and child suffer financially.

  Having detailed my mother’s acerbity, I should add that most people who meet her adore her. They enjoy not only her humor but also her evident kindness. She is a gracious hostess and a sumptuous cook. To be invited to her home for a meal is to enjoy a feast of Jewish delicacies—kugel and kreplach, chopped liver and kasha varnishkes, gefilte fish and chicken soup with knaidlach, and on and on. Of course, true to the Jewish mother stereotype, she pushes the food hard, but this has become less frequent in recent years, as health consciousness has begun to overcome memories of starvation. People not only wolf down my mother’s food, they confide in her—and not just close friends, but also the beautician who does her hair, the handymen who come to work on her house, the customers who loyally patronized her gift shop in downtown Minneapolis for so many years. The very joy and recklessness of her humor convinces people that here is a human being who will listen to them with understanding, without fixed prior judgment. And they are right. My mother has seen too much to judge too quickly or too harshly. Her standards of what is truly contemptible are very high—after all, they were set by the Nazis themselves.

  It was obvious, both to my sister and to myself, that, in a converse sense, the standards of judgment to be applied to my parents as Holocaust survivors required special care. We knew this even as children. It was unmistakable, a task we were given, a means of expressing our love, and, at times, a trial to our souls. My sister described it this way in her speech:

  I have always had an exceptionally close relationship with my parents. I feel like I understand them and why they act and feel the way they do. And …

  —if they sometimes cry a little more than others, they’re entitled;

  —if they sometimes worry a little more than others, they’re entitled;

  —if they cling to their family a little more, they’re entitled.

  There are many kinds of heroes in this world: military, athletic, political. But there are also heroes of the spirit. I think my parents, and other survivors like them, are heroes.

  It is true that my sister and I saw our parents as heroic for having lived through what they did. It is also true that we understood why, at times, they were so tense, so clinging, so demanding of our love and loyalty. But neither the sense of their heroism nor any understanding we could muster could shield us from the recurrent buffeting of growing up as “American children” in a Holocaust survivor household. Many of our very typical problems—fitting in at school, getting along with our friends, discovering our identities as adolescents—were all but incomprehensible to our parents, given the Holocaust standards of pain and struggle against which, reflexively, they measured the complaints of their children. The refrain that we heard over and over again was, “If that is your biggest problem, you should kiss the ground in gratitude.” Given how much of their own adolescence and young adulthood was stolen from them, is it any wonder that my parents were less than adept in acknowledging the angst of our growing up in the safety of a suburb?

  There was, in my case, much pain and desperation that I could not share, for all their apparent willingness to listen. Their response to me was almost always blunted by the fact that what worried me seemed ridiculous to them. Of course, in retrospect, much of it seems ridiculous to me as well. But that isn’t the point. Growing up is a ridiculous process, and it was little help for me to be constantly reminded that it could have been worse—much, much, much, much worse. That approach, in my case, amounted to pouring gasoline on the fire. I rebelled all the harder during my teenage years in the sixties, on the simple grounds that my options seemed either to be rebellion or engulfment by my parents’ past. My sister was far more patient than I was in this regard.

  I can recall one brief incident of mutual rage between my mother and me that gives a sense of how little was needed to touch deep emotions on both sides. I was eighteen or so at the time, and was sitting talking—arguing—with my mother in our family den. I was wearing worn jeans with a tear in the right knee—a style that has since become an enduring favorite amongst American adolescents. In sheer frustration at seeing me dressed as if I couldn’t afford decent clothes—at seeing me ungrateful and defiant despite all that she had and could and yearned to provide for me—my mother crooked her finger in the rip and tore my pant leg straight down to my ankle, rendering it unwearable. We stared at each other. I ran out of the den, out of the door of the house. I have no memory of where I went or even if I was gone for long. I was furious, but my mother’s point prevailed within me. My torn jeans were a mere costume of life experience. I would have nothing to offer my parents or myself until I had lived a life that was truly my own. And so I tried.

  The simple fact of my growing older has healed many of the rifts of those times. I have made choices that my parents can understand only with difficulty. I have, often enough, paid the steep price of incurring their pain and their anger in exchange for becoming the person I have become. I do not suffer from the illusion that I was always right in what I did. But I do know that, had I not broken away when I did and as long as I did—I left home for college when I was sixteen and lived in places far from my parents until I was twenty-five—I could not have respected myself. I also know that had I not, in the years since, returned to my home city of Minneapolis and lived in proximity with them, I would have lost precious legacies: the pleasure of their company, the sustenance of their wisdom, and the recognition (one that comes to many of us, if we persist with our families) that the best of myself is rooted in the best of my parents.

  Please understand that never, not even in the nine years of rebellion and exile, did I lose sight of the fact that my parents are remarkable persons—and not only because they had survived the Holocaust. Let one example suffice. In 1971, my father—by then well into middle age—was walking to his car in a shopping mall parking lot when he noticed that a large, agi
tated man was grappling with a younger woman and forcing her into a car. My father quietly came up behind the man and then, pretending that a pen in his coat pocket was a gun, stuck the point in the man’s back and demanded that he raise his arms. The man obeyed. My father marched him into a nearby store, where a security guard was summoned to take over. The man was ultimately arrested and convicted, and the woman he had assaulted was spared the worst. My father’s explanation for his action, which put his own life at risk, and could have brought chaos and agony unto his family, was that when he saw what was happening, he thought that it could have been his own daughter being forced into the car.

  I would like to record a final memory as regards relations between survivors and their children. I offer it as a warning for those who would seek to understand either generation too quickly.

  I remember my bar mitzvah. The American rabbi who presided did not know me or my family very well. This was understandable. We had not regularly attended his services. But still, a bar mitzvah was a rite of passage that mattered to me and to my parents. It was, all of us in the family felt, a happy occasion to come.

  Well it came, and the rabbi—who knew that my parents were survivors—chose to focus, in his Sabbath morning sermon, on the tragedy of the Holocaust and the fact that so many of our family members could not be present because they had been murdered.

  I was sitting up on the platform, to the left of the rabbi. As he spoke I watched my mother and my father cry while my grandfather (taking in as much English as he needed) looked anguished and my sister writhed in discomfort, not knowing how to console the adults around her.

  Even as a thirteen-year-old, I knew that the rabbi meant well, and also that he was behaving very badly, without genuine understanding. For him, the Holocaust was an appropriate topic for a sermon—and the presence of my parents made for a convenient rallying cry to the American-born congregants “Never to forget!” For my family, its emphasis was a gratuitous and banal infliction of pain (as if we had need to be reminded of our dead!) on an occasion when we felt that simple joy was what we deserved.