Lost and Found

It was after Yom Kippur, in the year I was bar mitzvah’ed, that we heard the news. There was a slight chill in the air, with the leaves falling more quickly than usual. I did not expect to hear more about the history of my father or grandfather that I got in dribs and drabs on those quiet early Sunday mornings that my father and I sorted the newspapers for sale. I did not ask more about their past lives. There was every reason not to.

Yet it came unexpectedly. My father was watching Walter Cronkite on the evening news. Our candy store was closed on Wednesdays, so there was nothing to distract him. It was just a short comment that only the interested would notice. A minor Israeli official, a rabbi and Holocaust survivor, had been killed on the streets of Tel Aviv by another Holocaust survivor.

Dad dropped the newspaper that he often read between the commercials, looked white, and did not speak for a moment. I barely noticed, but the name of the person who was assassinated was Izrael, our real family name, the name my cousin had whispered to me as a family secret. My mother, sitting next to my father on the sofa, looked at him.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“No, I am not okay,” he said, red-faced, going to the phone on the kitchen wall. It was a “princess” phone with a light-up dial that was easier and lighter to hold with his one hand than the old phone in the living room. He closed the glass door to the kitchen. When I glanced at him, I could see his hand was shaking. He did not see me looking. I saw him sit down on a chair at the table, fumbling with the little telephone book with all the important names of friends and family members. He pressed the numbers on the phone and, after a pause, started speaking in Yiddish, quickly and angrily, as if he had planned on having the argument he was having.

My mother dared not go in and interrupt the conversation, but he was loud enough to hear through the door. It was about his father and, even if my parents did not know it, I could understand most of the Yiddish he was speaking. I saw my mother clench her teeth as soon as she’d heard the news, anticipating such a reaction in my father. We all had seen his mood change before, but hoped that this time it would not be as dramatic. Now it was unavoidable.

She changed the TV station to cartoons, to my and my brother’s delight, and turned the volume up, not wanting to hear any more. Wile E. Coyote chasing Road Runner was all that my brother and I needed. I had never known that cartoons were on at that time. There was only one TV, and nothing on earth would prevent my father from watching Walter Cronkite.

The conversation, or argument, did not go on for long—a call to Brooklyn where his younger sister lived. His other sisters lived in Montreal. My father opened the door, but he was still red, and now he was sweating and shaking.

“I have to go to my sister in Brooklyn. I won’t be too long,” he said looking at us quickly, pre-empting any question that I would be going, too. 

“All the way to Brooklyn?” my mother asked. “How can you not be too long?”

We did not have a car then. He would need to take three subways and maybe a bus. I had been on that trip once and it had taken the worst part of a day.

“I’ll take a taxi,” he said, without hesitation. “I can take the subway to Grand Central, so it won’t cost so much.”

This still would not be a small expense, even if he were going halfway to Brooklyn by train. This must be important, I thought, especially at this time of the night. There was no explanation. Even my little brother was smart enough not to ask. My father left without saying goodbye, so we expected him home later that night.

My father called early the next morning. It was before school and before the store was opened. He was so loud I could hear the whole conversation.

“Don’t open the store today. I won’t be home. I will sit shiva here today. You don’t have to come. The children don’t have to come. They can go to school. I will sit no more than one day here. It is out of respect to them.” He meant his sisters. “I will see you later.”

No one in the family had ever died before, not in my experience. I was confused. My father had said his father and mother were killed after he and his friend escaped Budapest on a train. Who was this man named Izrael who had been killed in Tel Aviv? Why was my father so upset? It had to be a close relative. Did my father have a brother? He had never mentioned a brother. The man who died had my Hebrew name, Mordechai. If it was his father, why had he lied to me?

I did not sleep well that night, worried about my father and the question. Yesterday’s New York Times was still sitting on the lamp table next to the sofa, so I looked through it. There was a long article in the back of the paper about this person’s assassination. My mother did not notice me reading it. She was too busy with the housework and making sure my brother got fed before going off to school. I was supposed to be leaving for school, too, but she did not notice me. She was too distracted, worried about my father.

The article said the murdered man had been involved in a trial that rocked Israel. It questioned the nature of good and evil for Jews, how they had chosen to survive, if they’d had a choice. My father had made his choice and he had survived, just barely, with a lot of luck. Mordechai Izrael had succeeded in a bargain with Eichmann and his officers, and had gotten himself and his family out of Hungary on a train to Switzerland. He had saved his family, as well as scholars and rabbis, artists and rich merchants, people who had money. He had failed, said those who accused him in the trial, to warn all the other people for whom he was responsible, about the trains that would take them to Auschwitz.

The judge in this libel trial had accused him of “selling his soul to the devil.” Mordechai Izrael, a rabbi and now an Israeli government minister, had won the suit and walked free, although publicly shamed and vilified. His accusers then killed him on Dizengoff Street in broad daylight, when he was walking out of his office in Tel Aviv for lunch. One killer was caught, a Hungarian survivor of Auschwitz, whose whole family had perished. He had no remorse.

“What are you doing reading the newspaper?” my mother yelled at me, pulling the paper away as I ate my breakfast. “You need to go to school.” She did not notice the story I’d had been reading as I dropped the paper, folded closed, on the table.

I did not want to go to school. I was afraid people would know, and they would persecute me for what my grandfather had done. I did not tell this to my mother, who was already upset. My father was always angry when he left his sister’s. Today would be worse. My mother did not know what I had been reading. She avoided the news: in papers, on radio, or TV. She said it was always bad news anyway.

“Okay, okay, I am ready to go,” I said.

“Here is your lunch,” she said, giving me a kiss. I grabbed the lunch and ran, not kissing her, so she would not see I was worried.

No one at school knew a thing. They did not look at me any differently, they did not seem bothered. I sat through school, not paying attention, thinking of my father, who I imagined still sitting on a stool, staring, holding in his anger and the resentment so it would not spill over into our family.

I walked home from school, hoping my father was back. My mother was busy cooking. She had already cleaned the whole house twice. She’d had even played with my brother, who was very excited at the attention she was paying him, since most days she was too tired after work to do more than feed him and make sure he ’d had washed himself, brushed his teeth, and gotten into bed. He was six years younger than me, and very sensitive to being overlooked and ignored. I tolerated him but sometimes played his childish games, secretly enjoying being a little kid again.

My mother excited us both by baking cookies. This was just not done in the middle of the week on a school night, but she needed the distraction and it made us quiet and well-behaved. We helped mix the eggs, flour, sour cream, and sugar. We got to lick the spoon, rub our fingers along the inside of the mixing bowl, and after we had carefully washed our hands, press the shapes into the rolled-out dough, and put them on the baking sheet. The pan was put in the oven just as the phone rang. My mother ran over with her hands covered in flour. She told me to do my homework and my brother to play with his toys, with the threat that we would not get any cookies if we were not good.

She spoke loudly into the phone. I could hear the loud response back. There were no secrets over the phone. It was my father.

“So, when are you coming home?” she asked.

“Tonight. I have had enough. Just sitting there, stewing in my juices… I can’t take it any longer. For me, he died sixteen years ago. My sisters can sit there the whole week. They don’t give me any comfort, they just make me feel guilty or angry, sometimes at the same time. They are on another planet. Their husbands won’t even talk to me when I am here, so who needs this? I will take a taxi to Grand Central and then I will take the subway home. Don’t wait up. We’ll open the store tomorrow. Shiva is over.”

My mother hung up slowly. It wasn’t over. He was still angry and he would be angry when he came home. The cookies were in the oven and food was cooking slowly on the stove. There was nothing else for her to do. She washed her hands of the flour, wiped the phone, sat down with my brother, and played with him again. She did not bother me as I did my homework. I did not bother her.

“When is Daddy coming?” my brother asked.

“Soon, but he will not be home for dinner, so after the cookies are done, we will take them out and let them cool down and you can have some after dinner.”

He went back to playing with his toys and did not ask again. I heard the worry in her voice. I could not ask him any questions, but I had lots of questions. I picked the paper up and folded it back to the front page. My mother did not notice. I sat down to finish my homework.

The house was filled with the smell of the soup and the freshly baked cookies. It was warm and safe in here. My mother made it that way. I wished that she felt more safe, safe from her fears, worries, memories, and sadness. I could not protect her from that.

We finished our soup and bread as my father walked in, looking tired, but not angry. He was happy to see us and our mother, and showed it by hugging us both and kissing her.

“It is good to be home,” he said.

“How did you get back so fast?” Mother asked.

“I said to hell with the subway. The taxi driver offered me a deal. Now I am not so tired, but I am tired,” he said.

It was as if the time he’d been away had not happened. He was sitting, smiling and looking at us in a way he had not done for quite a while. It made us happy that he was happy.

“Would you like to have your soup now?” Mother asked.

“Thanks. I am hungry. I did not eat much the whole time. How could I?”

He ate the golden chicken soup quickly, the thin noodles dripping with broth from the spoon, then he chewed the pieces of meat still on the bones, which he deposited on a plate after he’d cleaned them off. He took pleasure in the process. We did not interrupt and we sat politely at the table, watching as he, now and then, looked up and smiled.

“Do I smell cookies?” he asked.

“Yes,” chimed my brother happily. “Mommy said we could have some after dinner,” unable to contain himself any longer. It was way past dinner and the expected promise had exceeded his patience.

“Okay, I get the message,” she said smiling, getting up and pouring some milk for us. The plate of cookies was brought to the table.

“Why were you away so long, Daddy?” my brother asked, chewing on his cookie.

“I had to see my sisters because your grandpa died and they were sad,” he answered quietly, almost in a hush. I did not add anything that would show I knew more than that. But he had admitted, simply, to my little brother, who knew nothing, and in front of me, despite all my surreptitious and agonized questioning and investigation, that his father, my grandfather had died.

“Did we ever see Grandpa?” my brother asked.

“No, he lived in Israel,” my father said.

“Didn’t he like America?” my brother asked.

“He wanted to be in Israel more, to be with other Jews.”

“But there are other Jews here.”

“It is not the same. He was a Zionist, someone who wanted to help build a Jewish country.”

“Did you want to build a Jewish country?” my brother asked, dipping his cookie into his milk.

“No. I just wanted to be free and live on my own with your mother,” he said.

“We like it here,” my brother said, finishing his cookie. Mother quickly wiped his face of crumbs, ignoring his protesting grimace.

“Yes, I do too, but it is time for you to go to bed. You have school tomorrow and I will go back to work.”

“Will you tell me about Grandpa and Israel?” my brother asked, trying to delay bedtime.

“Yes, another time, but now it is time for you to go to bed.”

“Listen to your father and wash up for bed,” Mother said.

I got to stay up longer. I knew my father did not want to say any more, so I quietly sat in front of the TV with him and watched a program neither of us wanted to watch, but did because it was there and it soothed the silence he wanted to avoid. My father did not say more that night. I could not ask about what I had read in the paper.

“It is time to go to bed,” my father reminded me. “You have school tomorrow. You don’t need to tell anyone anything. They won’t care anyway.”

“Good night, Dad,” I said, giving him a hug. He grabbed me hard and hugged me back for a long time. I was surprised at how long it went on for, but then he let go, looking embarrassed by his emotion.

I could not sleep that night. If I had been worried, when my father left the day before, about what my classmates would say, I felt more worried about what they would say tomorrow. They had not said a thing yet. Maybe they had not heard it on the news or read the paper. Surely, they must know about it now. If my father was ashamed of his father, how could I not be? How could I face all those smartass kids who thought they were better than me because they were born here? We were just refugees, enjoying America because they were kind enough to let us in. And now we were not just refugees, but guilty of surviving because my grandfather had made a deal with the Nazis, even if my father had not agreed to it and had run away. Or had he? Had he been telling me the truth? Did he still want to protect me from the lies, or from his own guilt? I needed to read the papers, but how could I read them if my father would see me reading them and then know that I knew? It would hurt him to know that he had failed to protect me. It would hurt me that he had lied to avoid the pain.

My mother could not understand why it was so hard for me to get up the next morning. It was impossible for me to tell her. It would hurt her to know that I was even more disturbed than Dad. She had kept her own story inside, had told us very little of her pain and suffering and fear and death – not quite the same, but still disturbing.

“I thought you liked school?” she asked.

“I do, but I missed a lot of stuff and we are having a test on Monday,” I lied.

“You will do okay. Just tell the teacher and she will let you make up for it. After all, she knows your grandfather died.”

“I guess it will be okay, but I hope Dad is not too sad.”

“He will be okay. He says he has slept better than he has in days. It bothered him that he had to be with his sisters. It reminds him of too many things.”

“I hope he does not get too angry. I don’t like it when he gets angry with everyone and they don’t even know why,” I said.

“I will go down to the store with him soon, but I think he will be all right. You need to go to school. I made your lunch.”

“Thanks, Ma,” I said, hoping everything would be all right.

No one noticed at school. It was just another day. The schoolyard was busy with activity. I was happy to be anonymous and just play with my friends. It was true: no one cared. So why should I? My classes went quickly and I enjoyed the distraction of not having to worry. I got home just in time to help in the store and watch the kids buy all their treats. Being Friday, some of them had extra lunch money which they had saved over the course of the week, and bought stuff they could not afford before. Others just looked on and begged their more frugal friends to give them a piece of this or that. I was watching to make sure that they paid for what they bought. Stealing didn’t happen often, but when it did, it made my father really angry. He would yell at everyone and throw them out, whether or not they had intended to pay. That made some kids not come to our store at all. I was worried my father would blow up today, but he was calm. He did not even get upset when two kids got in a fight over who was to be served first.

“I will decide. And you” – he pointed to the noisier one – “can wait.”

The noisy kid made a face. “Fuck you, I’m out of here,” he said, stalking out the door.

“Don’t come back!” my father shouted. “You little trouble maker.”

It was just a normal day. Soon they were all gone. It got quiet, the regular customers coming in to have an egg cream or sundae. It was still warm enough that people wanted ice cream. My mother came down to spell my father.

“Go up with your father, you need to finish your homework.”

“But it’s Friday,” I said.

“Never mind, just go up and finish. I don’t want to hear you are sick on Sunday because you didn’t finish your homework or couldn’t study for your test. And then go play with your brother. He is bored.”

“He can watch cartoons.”

“No, finish your homework and play with him until I make dinner.”

“What’s for dinner?”

“Nothing if you don’t go upstairs now. And don’t bother your father. He is tired.”

I was hoping he would be just resting and not worried anymore. But when I got upstairs, he was yelling at my brother, who was crying, milk on the kitchen floor, my father on his knees mopping it up.

“Go to your room and don’t come out until dinner!” he yelled at him. “And you, help me clean this up with more paper towels, some wet ones, then dry. I already picked up the broken glass, but be careful.”

We both could hear my brother crying, half angry, half guilty, mumbling then yelling until the sobs stopped.

When it stopped, my father got up and opened our bedroom door.

“Come out, you can watch TV. Just behave, okay?” he said, wiping my brother’s runny nose.

“Okay,” said my brother, still sniffling.

I was let off for now. For self-preservation, I just sat at the table with my books open. My father was not as angry with my brother as he was with himself. My mother would be upset both ways — that he yelled at my brother for being clumsy and that he was still so angry and irritable. I would not tell her about the yelling, but my brother would, and my father knew it. I shut up and finished my homework and my father pretended to read the paper. As he lifted it, there, on the back page, I saw, to my horror, a story about the assassination and the ongoing controversy. I took a deep breath and looked down at my work again. My father did not notice. He could not concentrate on the paper or rest.

“It is time for me to go down to let your mother cook,” he said, putting down the paper. He did not read the paper as this time of day. “Old news,” he would say, since he was usually too tired and would fall asleep. So that day we avoided another reminder.

Every day for the next week, I awakened early to help my father prepare the papers for the morning customers. I told him I had to read all the papers for a school project about a certain subject.

“What subject?” he asked.

I saw the first headline: Reds Widen Razed Strip in Berlin – about the Berlin Wall that had gone up in August.

“It’s about the Berlin Wall,” I answered.

“Oh, yeah, Khrushchev wants to show he is a big shot, making Kennedy look weak. They don’t bluff easy, the bastards. Kennedy better do something soon. He didn’t look good with the Bay of Pigs,” he said.

My father was no friend of the Russians and he had voted for Kennedy, but he was still worried about the new president being too brash. My father was pleased to see I was ambitious enough to want to read the news so early in the morning and be ahead of the class. He appreciated me being there to help, even if it was a slow morning. I had a cup of coffee with him every morning. He even let me eat a Ring Ding.

“Don’t tell your mother,” he said. “She’ll kill me if she finds out you’re eating that dreck and spoiling your breakfast.”

“Don’t worry Dad, I will never tell,” I winked. He never suspected that I was scanning the news for any articles about my grandfather’s assassination. There was nothing about this today.

After that week, convinced that the story had died, I stopped coming down early. There was nothing in the news on TV. We resumed our usual jobs – we our homework and chores, and Mom and Dad their work – and we were all distracted from other worries. My mother was relieved for the moment.

But over the weeks, my father got more irritable with the customers and with us, shouting at my little brother when he was noisy after school. All my father wanted to do was rest in the recliner after the afternoon rush and watch TV. He had arguments with my mother and criticized her in front of us, something he had rarely done before, about dumb stuff that even we realized was unfair. For weeks he did not talk with me on those Sunday mornings when I helped him sort the newspaper sections. There were no more discussions about the old times in Hungary. He just listened to news commentators talking about American news. He ignored the newspapers and just worked. He never skipped the evening news on TV, which was all about Kennedy and his fights with the Russians or the Republicans. My mother turned off the radio as soon as he left for the store, irritated by his near-obsession with the news and politics. She would make an angry face when she saw him act irritably with us, and she stared at him until he stopped.

“Maybe you need to talk to someone about how you feel,” she said calmly over dinner one Wednesday evening when we were all together.

“You think I am crazy? Is that what you think? Yes, I’m crazy. At least that is what those psychologists thought when they did the tests with the ink blots, but I showed them. I just told them they were ink blots and they left me alone. All these years I have tried to forget what my father did, and then he dies, and not only does he remind me but he reminds all of Israel and anyone else in the world who cares, what he had done. I hated him, and my mother, and even my sisters for leaving, saving their own skins because they thought they were better than everyone else. Just themselves, they were thinking just of themselves.”

He got up from the table, his food only half-finished, looked at us, went into the bedroom, and slammed the door. No one spoke. My brother did not cry. We just looked down at our dinner, afraid to look at our mother. She did not move for a full five minutes.

“Eat your dinner, it is getting cold,” she finally said, her eyes red, holding back tears.

We ate our food without a word. My mother gathered up the dishes.

“You can watch television,” she said, which did not mean we could, but that we should – that there would be allowed no other communication, discussion, or noise. We sat quietly and watched whatever was on: news, game shows, or cartoons. That was the droning that would fight the silence and bring peace and comfort – that would drive bad thoughts and feelings from the house and from ourselves. We went to bed that night without seeing our father again. Our mother silently brought us milk and cookies on a plate as we watched TV, distracted but not unconscious of the pain around us.

My mother told my brother to brush his teeth and go to bed, and then, I was asked to do the same after my last favorite program was over, the one I would watch and enjoy with my father, who was not there on the sofa with me, but alone in the bedroom.

I went to bed sad, but I did not cry, and was not sure why I was sad, except that I missed my father and my mother, who were there in the house, but not with me. I was alone with the first big lie that my father had ever told me — that I had had a grandfather who had been alive but now was dead because of what he had done. I was ashamed for my father.

The next morning was no different than usual, my mother waking us up to get ready for school and making breakfast. I looked over to my parents’ bedroom door and it was open, but there was no one there. It was as if nothing had happened. My mother smiled at us, reminded us not to forget our lunches, and kissed us goodbye, reminding us to be good boys, as if we could be anything else. We both looked into the store to wave goodbye to our father as we did every day, but today, for me, to make sure he was there and that everything was okay. He said goodbye, smiled, and waved. I was relieved for the moment.

I sat in school, thinking about what had happened the night before. There was nothing I could have done, but that did not stop me from feeling some kind of guilt. I feared my father’s discovering anything more that could trigger another angry outburst and another night of turmoil and sadness. We were prisoners of a sadness that came without any warnings, would wax and wane, and could come day or night and last not just an evening, but a day or a week. It could come with anger or unhappiness, or just a lack of pleasure. We could be told to be quiet because mother or father had a headache, or to go out and play, or watch TV, or do our homework, but always be out of the way, because there was more sadness here, and we should not be part of it.