I guess it's the first anniversary today, at least your first English jahrzeit. I don't know what to call it, but in the eleven days between your Hebrew anniversary and your English, I got diagnosed with the same potential for sudden death you had. The very fact that it happened between your two jahrzeits feels providential. It's still quite early stage, but I sort of wish it was early stage cancer or MS so that I could make a big announcement, get a big old load of sympathy and maybe a little sympathy sex. Unfortunately few people want to **** a person to death. I'm sure there's a subculture somewhere: I hope I have enough time to find it. In the meantime, I will be happy for some friendship and companionship in my life.
I somehow knew it was coming. I've known for fifteen years, and I haven't made it easy on myself. As you of course predicted so many times, I have a middle age ahead of me where I have to do everything I can to make up for every one of my many excesses. The task is herculean, but I'm taking it on. I don't know how much time I have, but I mean to make it to Bubbie's 100 years. I don't mean to tempt fate, but this world will not lose me without the fight of that century.
You didn't live a life that long, but you didn't live a short one either. Actuarial tables would say you broke even, which is pretty impressive for a guy who passed out as many times as you did, from both heart problems and brain problems. I look forward to the same affecting me, and I hope you didn't use up your son's karma with your eighteen lives.
I'm happy I can make this joke to you now. You had few limits in the jokes you told, but there are some jokes between father and son that probably shouldn't be made--not that you didn't make them, but I think you'd have felt quite a bit more prudish if they came from me. It's the 2020s, you should have done what I do, put all your mishigas on social media so that you can live a halfway normal real life. If I go soon, and I don't really think I will, there will be a giant footprint of who I was.
It wasn't really who I was, or maybe it was. At times I got confused which was the real me and which was the avatar. For years I would hear people say 'he's nothing like he is on his facebook page.' I suppose I was supposed to be flattered, but everybody knew me better through social media than they did in real life. At some point I became more comfortable as words on a screen than I was in my personal life.
Part of the problem is just being in your mid-40s. You realize you don't really have people anymore. You don't quite blame yourself for that, or anybody else: social life declines in your thirties and by your forties it's virtually non-extant for everybody. Your own people are all very busy--kids, work, decompression, very few have that kind of time, and if they do, they would rather spend it with other parents so that the kids have something to do without getting a babysitter. Who could hold anything against anybody for that?
With E & J minding the business, I have world enough and time to achieve all my literary ambitions, but it's at just the moment I'm finally ready that the ambitions seem somewhat empty. Who needs an immortality you won't be around to enjoy? A wealth you may not live long enough to spend? A veneration that only comes from people who inevitably want something from you? I'm a pretty fucking good writer, no matter what your criticisms, but there are thousands of pretty fucking good writers, all of whom are writing books nobody wants to publish in this age of depleted reading. Who even knows if anybody will be able to read in 100 years and if we won't be depleted to an entirely visual iconographic language like on those medieval cathedrals you took such care to explain to me?
All my life, I've had such fiery visions for everything I've always wanted to achieve creatively. It mattered more to me than human friendships, dating, every other thing in my life felt subordinated to a big task I found so onerous I could barely start on it. My life was full of emotions too powerful to do much else, and my life was too full of emotion too powerful to do this either. Other people dreamed of wealth and power in business, politics, sports, show business; all I ever wanted was to be was a great artist: it was the only thing I felt cut out to do, the only thing I was good at, the only thing that justified this comical existence of mine. Oh how you hated that about me. Even after you're responsible for exposing me to it all you poo-poo'd most every one of my ambitions. I don't know if it was because you were being realistic or you were afraid I'd achieve something you never got, or that you plead realism because you didn't want your kid to succeed in something interesting, because that meant you could have too and chose not to. But now that you're gone, I fear you were right.
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But at many times these ambitions don't even feel like ego. They feel like a mixture of isolation and burdensome duty. You raised me in a world that no longer existed if it ever did: a world simultaneously of high culture and thrift, a world that looked at American stupidity with contempt even as it looked to European sophistication with burning hatred. I was left completely ill-equipped for this world, because you raised me for a world that didn't have the Holocaust, a world where we never had to leave Europe, a world where withstanding the waves of history mattered more than anything in the world even as we were in denial that history happened at all.
Jewish families who survive the Holocaust are not like any other Jewish families, and I sometimes think we don't belong together. Non-Holocaust Jews seem so normal, so American, so 2026; without Yiddishkeit or tasteless jokes, without humiliating stories, without the 'will-to-cattiness' where everybody in their lives is judged with the heymischer diplomacy of a chopping block. Everybody else is a generation or two ahead in the Jewish story, and lives without the presence of a trauma so fundamental that nothing in their experience could ever compare with that giant exclamation point of the silenced. We are two different civilizations and I sometimes get the false notion in my head that I can identify which any Jew belongs to in two seconds: just from the darkness of the sarcasm and the loudness of the mannerisms I feel as though I can tell who has an oven trapped in their nervous system.
What I do know, almost for certain, is that Jews from Holocaust families feel, sorry for this metaphor, stretched on a cross. We have not been here long enough to shed the Jewish parts if we want to. Our grandparents had already been through it all, but unlike the vast majority of those whose families were already here by the immigration ban in 1924, we came here too late in more ways than we even know. It's 2026, and we are entirely American and entirely Jewish in an era when the world starts demanding us to choose which part of ourselves to give up.
There are so many moments when I'd like to amputate all that Yiddishkeit you put in me: not just the language but the prayers and the food and the community of spoiled lemmings and the f*cking Zionism. It doesn't do me worth a damn to be part of this community that is all too willing to go parochial again, utterly heedless of what they're about to lose. But I am that I am, and I wouldn't be able to stop being this way no matter how hard I tried. You clearly didn't know how to live in an era where you had to choose which side your loyalty is on, and the fact we are going to be asked to choose was a terrible shock to your system. I don't quite know how to live in it yet either. I hope I find out, because there is so much to lose if the Jewish-American partnership goes by the wayside.
Maybe you just raised me to be too secular, but a religion and a peoplehood does not strike me as enough to sustain a person for a meaningful life. It's roots without wings, a way of entombing a peoplehood without the ability to explore. No Jew is a perfect victim, nor should they be, any more or less than any other minority. Even when the world treats us like we're millennia of monsters, we have to face how sometimes we deliberately provoked their monstrosity. A community that locks its doors to the world is a community that will fall into maltreatment. That is how misunderstandings happen. That is how people we might find sympathetic prejudice themselves. It is not only unwise, it is un-Jewish and goes against all kinds of Jewish rulings. Many anti-liberal Jews hate Tikkun Olam, but along with Tikkun Olam there is also the far older Talmudic concept of the Darchei Shalom: Ways of Peace: feeding the gentile poor, visiting the gentile sick, burying the gentile dead. The Talmud considers cheating a gentile a still greater sin than cheating another Jew.
If that is true, what then is our current behavior? It's not just a sin, it's a desecration, a Chillul Hashem. It ruins Jewish security in Jewish security's name, and all it takes is one loss to consign us to exile yet again. Whatever once was true about the Israeli wars, whatever losses we incurred on October 7th, however terrified we were and however vengeful we felt--not just at the enemies of Jews but at gentile friends who willfully refused to offer comfort, that's a matter tabled for another day: a day that may only come when Netanyahu is gone, when these infantile wars are over, when we realize we're powerful enough to make overtures to very unsavory enemies, when we rebuild bridges to former allies.
THAT is the Judaism which the '48 generation fought for and the subsequent generation betrayed. That is the Judaism YOU fought for, and that is a Judaism worth joining. Not a scattered people, not a fortressed people, but a people who associate with the world without assimilating and add their particularity to the world's tapestry: a friend to the world that asserts its own right to be an equal among its inhabitants. A people who make themselves secure not by martial law and not just by military might, but by liberal rule of law. Helping to lead the world not just by force but by example.
This is the world you raised me to believe in. It's the world that so many custodians of it betrayed. It's the only vision of the world I want to live in, and the only vision of the world for which I would fight: a world where secular and sacred stand together as equal partners, where you can be entirely Jewish and entirely American, where rule of law matters but so do all the fundamental rights within it, where culture is an equal partner to entertainment, where you can believe in both patriotism and solidarity, where history is something to be studied carefully before you make it, You didn't just raise me to believe in these ideals, you raised me to take them all as immutable truths. I've based my entire reality on them, and now that nobody upholds it, I worry I won't fair any better in this new world than you have.
That world is nowhere now. Whether or not you or Mom ever shared my view of it, it's thanks to the way that you and Mom and Bubbie raised me that I feel completely unsuitable to my own time and place: either the one crazy person in my life or the one sane person in a kingdom of the mad. I drive away from the hill where I grew up and immediately feel as though I exist in a parallel universe. Out past our faimly, I've met maybe half a dozen contemporaries with similar inheritances to mine..., ever? Some of them became good friends, others of them are, of course, too snobbish for words.
If the other people of my timeline don't exist, I have to bring them to life. I don't know why you raised me the way you did, but if it had a purpose, the best I can do with your upbringing is to bring them to life. Not the exact people obviously, I'm no Maharal, but to write somehow about the world of Old Europe, the ethos of Old America before '68.
I'd say that you raised me this way because it was just the world you knew, but we both know that isn't true. I was your beta test, and when my test failed, you decided not to subject your other two children to the same educational regimen. No Yiddish, no music lessons, no random history lessons; the disappointment of my turning into a bad student was clearly too acute for you to risk it again. You weren't big on letting any of your children live their own lives, but compared to me you let J & E become the people they wanted. But what could I do? The stuff you showed me was so much more exciting than any classroom I ever stepped in. Maybe I was too stupid, maybe my learning style was utterly not cut out for the classroom, or maybe I was just bored out of my mind, but an education under you was too good not to ruin me for regular schooling.
You and mom and everyone else in our small world taught me, the academic failure, to study history so closely, yet you were in utter denial that history ever happened. What is the point of being this reliquary weirdo who got his mind stuffed with a giant tree of the past, when you don't accept that the ethos's of the past lead to the catastrophes of the past?
If there's no place for me in the present except as a gadfly, then my reason for fighting on isn't to live in the past, but to illuminate the present: a person who doesn't belong in the present has a unique vantage to point out what's wrong or strange or even right about it. All I've got, however hard it is, is the ability to conjure a past I didn't even experience.
The irony is that the whole point of all that ambition was not to write about me, it was to write about you. Not you particularly, but the whole world you conjured through a million stories: many hilarious, many unaccountably cruel and gossipy, many extraordinarily moving. You were the natural storyteller in the family, not me, and for whatever reason it never occurred to you to write much down. That's left to me: the world of yesterday, and the yesterday before that, and that, and that, in the hope that in illuminating some kind of past, I can illuminate for someone some kind of future.
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