My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents (16 page)

Freud and Dorothy Burlingham’s groundbreaking clinical work with war orphans in England to bolster her natural reserve. While calling attention to the fears and anxieties aroused by real deprivations and losses, Freud and Burlingham suggest that most young children are more damaged than helped by too close an examination of the aggression expressed in adult life. That is, real hostilities in the outside world are often interpreted in terms of imagined conflicts in the child’s inner world. The child’s inability to sort out fantasy and reality can lead to unhealthy outcomes. Because young children are vulnerable to such confusions, they need protection from the potentially disturbing knowledge of the violence practiced by individuals and nations.

When I question my parents, then in their eighties, they deny knowing very much about what was happening in Germany. The news was spotty and vague. To them, the defining historical event of their lives is not the Holocaust but the Depression and the more immediate threat it posed to survival. During the war they are absorbed by the demands of raising a young family. Afterward, like so many other Jews, my parents want to put the past behind them. And if they have questions about how to address recent events, they receive little guidance from their synagogue. For here they will only find the general admonition never to forget, along with the injunction never to become the victim again.

In Hebrew school we read stories of resistance such as that of Han-nah Senesh, the teenage freedom fighter of the Warsaw ghetto. The focus is always forward, on nurturing the young if very fragile state of Israel, on the new life that had been born from the terrible destruc-tion of the war. We save our nickels and dimes to buy trees in Israel so we can be part of this great miracle, literally making the desert bloom.

From the synagogue pulpit the rabbi regularly lectures about the ethics of living in the Diaspora, a word that I hear over and over again but never understand. Even today, so strong are my childhood associ-ations with this mysterious word that, despite its omnipresence in postcolonial theory, I continue to believe that it only applies to the 100 n jonathan g. silin

Jews. The rabbi works hard to balance the intense emotional and practical investment in the state of Israel that is expected of us—

every service ends with the singing of the national anthem of Israel

—with the safe and prosperous life we enjoy in America. Perhaps his sermons speak to the ambivalence of the adults, but as child I am left on my own to reconcile what I know of the history learned at the YIVO, the fledgling country that is to redeem it, and my daily experience of home and school.

Within my own family the silence about the “Holocaust” is almost complete. The fear of the stranger, even when Jewish, is so strong that we are not introduced to the idea of “survivors,” let alone children of survivors. What we know about are refugees whom we are taught to feel very sorry for. The large apartment across the hall from our own functions as a rooming house for elderly if respectable-looking men and women from Germany and eastern Europe. Although I have no interest in the political and personal struggles that bring them to our West End Avenue building, I am intrigued by their domestic arrangements, which are so clearly different from our own. When the front door is ajar, I can see just far enough inside to determine that the large foyer has been turned into a dining area with cream-colored carpet-ing. A vaguely oriental vase sits atop a stately oval table of dark ma-hogany. As the residents come and go, they greet each other with what I recognize as profusely polite but totally unintelligible phrases.

Later, in the privacy of my own room, I spend hours shamelessly imitating these strange guttural languages.

Far more forbidding are the inhabitants of the ground-floor apartment facing the street, a location that I instinctively recognize to be déclassé. While the three generations of nearly indistinguishable women dressed entirely in black clearly compose a family, they seem far more foreign than our seventh-floor neighbors. Are they in per-petual mourning? Why are there no men? Occasionally I catch a glimpse of a girl my own age or slightly younger as she enters or leaves the building, but I never hear any of the severe and forbidding adults say a word. In our comfortably middle-class world these particular m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 101

refugees seem to be doubly displaced persons, persons in transit, unable or unwilling to make accommodation to this temporary stopping point.

Mostly I remember the kindly older couple who own the modest candy shop that is a favorite childhood haunt. They patiently endure my twice-weekly visits that always include an exhaustive inventory of their stock. Although very small, the shop’s floor-to-ceiling shelves are filled with boxes of elegantly wrapped imported chocolates. The display cases are similarly overloaded with containers of candied fruits, assorted nuts, and trays of freshly baked cookies. Enticing as all these are, irrevocably influenced by my German nurse, I am inevitably drawn to the displays of marzipan, artfully crafted to resemble fruits, vegetables, sandwiches, and my favorite—a hot dog in a bun. Just as inevitable too is the day that I notice the row of numbers and letters tattooed on the forearm of one of the owners. Is it revealed as the husband stretches for the blue and white tin of Swiss chocolates on a shelf too high for my mother to reach? Or is it the hot summer day when his wife abandons the long-sleeved blouse and sweater she usually wears for a sleeveless dress?

I don’t talk with my parents about this observation, but I eventually realize that disfigurement is part of being a refugee, an unlucky person who comes from the far side of Europe. I cannot fathom how Jews got to such an inhospitable part of the world in the first place, why they stayed, and, most importantly, what they have to do with me. Might I become the unthinkable, a refugee living in reduced circumstances, missing parts of my family, trying to hide the marks that indicated I am among the numbered who had been sorted for living and dying? I have many unarticulated questions and little help in seeking the answers to them.

I am twelve and answers to my questions remain illusive. My first girl-friend has invited me to attend the Broadway movie premiere of
The
Diary of Anne Frank
along with her mother and older sister. Although Beth is physically more mature and sophisticated, we had enjoyed 102 n jonathan g. silin

each other’s company that summer, enjoyed being one of the camp couples. Once home, however, I had not enjoyed my brother’s inces-sant teasing or my parents’ intrusive curiosity, which was piqued by Beth’s Park Avenue address and her mother’s reputation as a successful art gallery owner.

It’s a miserable winter night, but the torrential rains do not come close to the waves of anticipatory emotion sweeping over me. Much to my embarrassment, my father insists on dropping me off at Beth’s house in a taxi, a trip that under ordinary circumstances I would make on my own. Beth and her family are downstairs waiting, and to my relief it is agreed that they will take me home at the end of the evening.

I enter the theatre that night preoccupied with the logistics of a first date—arrivals and departures, demonstrations of affection and restraint, talk and silences—and am confronted on the screen with the logistics of survival—securing safe shelter, storing up food, avoiding the enemy. Undoubtedly the numbing impact of the movie is heightened by my total lack of preparation for what I am to see. But the black-and-white bleakness of those Amsterdam street scenes, the anxious fear of discovery once the Frank family goes into hiding, and, above all, the stabbing sirens of the SS police cars, become an immediate part of my world, familiar reference points that mark my understanding of the Holocaust. For an adolescent, emerging from a childhood spent listening for strange sounds under the bed and possessing parents who have deep suspicions of anyone outside our close-knit family,
The Diary of Anne Frank
matches every fear from within with a fear from without. I imagine that Beth and her sister may have cried during the movie, but all that remains for me of that night is our stunned silence when the theatre lights finally come on.

Beth and I go out on a few more dates that winter. Although she runs with a faster crowd than my own elementary school friends, it is not her lack of interest but rather my own feelings of inadequacy that cause the relationship to slip away. Beth does not return to camp that following summer, and, when next I see her five years later, she has m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 103

turned into a tall, slender, and stunning woman of seventeen. Needless to say, I am still intimidated but in quite a different way.

When we are young and study history, it is always somebody else’s story, another world that we learn about. Then, with the passing of the decades, suddenly we find ourselves reading about a past that we have actually lived. Each of us participates in a world that at some future point may be described, interpreted, and judged by others.

In
Lost Subjects, Contested Objects,
Deborah Britzman writes a history of Anne Frank’s diary—its discovery, editing, publication, reception, and ultimate transformation into theatre and film. Now I can place my date with Beth in historical context. The sirens that punctuate my dreams can be heard within the debates about how to interpret the pages that Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, the two secretaries who help to keep the Franks alive for so long, find scattered across the floor of the secret annex after its discovery by the SS and Dutch Security Police. Do they, as Otto Frank suggests, tell a universal story of adolescence or are they, as the journalist Meyer Levin claims, the record of an unprecedented historical event? Does Anne speak about the perseverance of the human spirit in the face of adversity or is her voice powerfully but uniquely “the voice of six million Jewish souls”?

At age twelve I am largely unmoved by the so-called universal aspects of Anne’s story. I experience the movie as a Jew, frightened by the graphic images of life in hiding and ultimate discovery. I do not go on to read the diary itself at that time, nor do I knowingly see other movies about the Holocaust.

Given the strong impression left by the movie, I was surprised by my response when, several years ago, I took up the book in an attempt to exorcise my childhood demons. I was drawn to its poignantly adolescent themes—the struggle for independence, the growing self-consciousness and critique of adults, the longing for a soul mate.

These have undoubtedly been heightened in the 1991 definitive edition that contains material Anne’s father thought too sexually explicit or damaging to his family to be included in the original 1947

104 n jonathan g. silin

version. Two-thirds of the way through the book, my reading pace slowed to a few entries a day. I grasped the dwindling number of remaining pages between my fingers with the same sad certainty that I grasped the fate awaiting the Franks. Otto Frank and Meyer Levine were both right. The diary is of a particular time and place even as it transcends that moment through the depiction of fundamental human emotions.

When I was growing up, my parents’ silences about social issues offered me many lessons about what might be said and what should remain unspoken. Foremost among the unspoken subjects is human suffering, whether caused by illness, intentional cruelty, or systemic injustice. Today, I want to make up for all that was left unsaid. My educational commitment is compensatory. Troubled memories of the YIVO, the shopkeepers with indelible numbers on their arms, the refugees who came to rest in our building, do not lead me to censor-ship and protectionism. Rather, they prompt consideration of how adults might create opportunities for children to talk about the difficult knowledge they acquire during their early years. Beyond the mandates of the formal curriculum or our beliefs about child development, our willingness to listen and respond to the children’s lived experience is shaped by our own histories. How did we learn to manage aggression, sexuality, and sadness? What patterns of loss and recuperation, separation and dependence did we subscribe to as children?

This difficult work is essential to piercing the kind of social amnesia that permeated my childhood. It is undertaken to engage children in authentic conversations about the world they will inherit and to pro-mote their active commitment to social justice, which seemed to get such short shrift in my own upbringing.

7

The Other Side of Silence

When we are writing and the pencil

breaks, suddenly the content of our writing

disappears and goes into hiding, and the

pencil that we really did not see before

comes out of hiding to reveal itself to us.

t . t e t s u o ao k i , “The Layered Voices of Teaching”

We live in a noisy world. The impatient sounds of fax and answering machines, telephone beepers and voice mail, punctuate our daily lives. There is little opportunity for silence to speak, and, when it does, we are often too busy to listen. In the summer of 1997, when I ride the bus between my home on eastern Long Island and the hospital in New York City where my father lies voiceless, I am especially aware of the intrusiveness of the new technologies. The cacophony of sounds on these weekly trips—the continuous ringing of cell phones and clicking of laptop computers, the driver’s shortwave radio, the attendant’s amplified words about fares and safety—is a stark contrast to the silence that reigns in my father’s room.

As is often the case with cancer, the events that lead up to my 105

106 n jonathan g. silin

father’s surgery happen rapidly. I am made breathless by their speed

—the mysterious first symptoms, the new doctors, and technical language replete with numbers and unpronounceable words that need to be mastered within days, and, then, the 5:50 am bus for a final consultation with the oncologist. As I collect my parents at their apartment for the brief taxi ride uptown, my father moving slowly and cautiously, holding on to the arm of his home attendant, my mother lunges ahead in an anxiety-driven haze. As we walk up the clinic steps, the heels of her shoes make a loud slapping sound against the cement. The sound is testimony to her stubborn refusal to spend money on new, more sensible, and better fitting shoes. Her weight has dropped well below a hundred pounds, little wonder that her feet do not fill the shoes. Bob reminds her endlessly of the potential dangers of the slight heel given her precarious balance. But my mother thinks too little of herself and too much of my father to make a modest investment in her own safety.