Week 7. Character

To my father

One of my favorite stories about my father is the one about his plan, which went belly up, to open a print shop in Jerusalem. All the equipment was already shipped from Europe but found its rest in the bottom of the ocean. Without any means to revive the plan, he was forced to turn to a plan B and became a teacher.

This story was not very popular in my family and I only heard it after his death, sitting “Shivea” in his apartment in Jerusalem, from my aunt Eva. It did not match my family’s preferred versions of him as A. “Almost a rabbi”, in which my father as a rebel, decided in his last year, of the rabbinical school, to split and become a working man. He decided that the future lies in true workmanship and tried his hands in different professions to the utter disgust of his father (who was a rabbi) and hoped this was a last and passing juvenile phase.

 Or B, “The intellectual”, the promised student who in times when Jews where hardly allowed into the Universities managed to get his PhD in Philosophy from the university of Budapest.

 Or the best one, “the Hero”, the World War II hero, who joined a Zionist youth organization as his “calling”,  and saved hundreds of people (including most of his family) by supplying them with false identification papers and hiding places.

My father was not big on telling past stories. If it was left up to him none of this would ever make it my ears. He was always very quiet, somewhat subdued and the constant aura of aloofness, wrapped around him, made him appear as if all the daily tasks evaded him. He was satisfied with putting everything down in his diary, the one he kept since his early twenties.

I knew about the diary and heard the family stories how he kept it during the war, in an old leather bag he carried from place to place. He even managed to hold on to it while hiding from the German Gestapo. He kept the diary on the way to Israel, on the boat, when he and my mother took the illegal route cynically called “immigration B”.  Many times I wished that I could read it.

 After my mother death, few years prior, and our move to the U.S we did not speak much. Neither he, nor I, were good with long distance phone calls. Our contact for the last four years before his death, were weekly letters I sent him and an occasional card from my daughters. I was surprised when we returned to his apartment, from the funeral, to find the diaries. He left them in a neat pile, on a shelf in his room, as if to say “Here, you can have them now.”

My aunt Eva, and I, spent the whole week of the “Shivea” together. The tradition calls for the close family to spend seven days in the deceased home literally “sitting” while friends and relatives bring food and “sit” with them.  We sat in the apartment in Jerusalem. During the day people kept coming, some old friends of my parents, neighbors, and some of my friends. They sat with us for awhile and we talked about old times. I heard many stories, some for the first time, about the great things my father did. My aunt, who is my father youngest sister, added color to the stories with her great skill of storytelling. At night I read his diaries.

There were 15 notebooks. The older ones, from before and during the war, were not in Hebrew. I looked with frustration at his small and neat handwriting and wished I could read them. Later, I gave them to my aunt who deemed them illegible and told me a long story how no one, including my grandparents, could read my fathers’ handwriting. She said she tried but could not make sense out of what he wrote. And anyways, she added, these were just old and uninteresting stories.  There was nothing about the war, nothing about his involvement with the underground for which he was decorated.

  I read the notebooks written in Hebrew, already in Israel. I have to be honest; I was disappointed too with what he wrote. It is not every day that you are handed a key to someone else’s most cherished memories.  I wanted to know more about my father but most of all I was curious to see what he wrote about us, his family.

 I read them very quickly, night after night, searching for him but mostly for myself. Fifteen notebooks, almost seventy years of writings and I could put everything he wrote about me on no more than two or three pages. Realizing what a small fraction of his world I seem to have occupied left me stumped. He wrote about his work, work and more work. I remembered, vaguely, how my mother used to complain about his total obsession with his work. Work for him was his school, teachers and other kids.

When I opened the last notebook a pack of letters fell out.  I picked them up. These were all the letters I sent him since the day we left Israel. Every picture I sent was there, every card from the girls. I showed them to my aunt the next morning. She was not at all surprised. She told me how every Saturday he would come to her house for lunch and bring the letter he got that week, to share with her.  That was the highlight of his week, she told me, reading about you and his granddaughters.