Alte #15: Father

Helen Englehardt

MY FATHER DREW ME A MAP

from memory of the home town

he left 50 years before

I wanted to see it for myself

from the railroad station to the Rynek

where his mother kept a stall and kept the family together

where Russians soldiers warmed themselves by their fires

singing and drinking vodka

laughing in the shadows of a strange town

in a strange country far from home

when he was a boy on an errand hurrying through the darkness.

His house was still on the side street to the right and right again.

I wanted to go to the cemetery and place pebbles on my ancestors’ stones,

but the Germans killed the dead along with the living

erased all traces of my father’s footprints

running between the graves

chased by ghosts.

My father was a depressed, withholding man. The youngest by far of eight children, he seemed to feel bullied by life, and sought his revenge by withdrawing from it. When he came home from his job as a pharmacist, the rule was that my brother and I had to “keep out of his hair” for at least half an hour. Once he was settled in, he usually had a book or magazine in front of his face and a haze of cigarette smoke around his head.

I left home when I was 17, but for years after I had an abiding yen for my father’s attention. One evening I phoned him at a later-than-usual hour, and in the course of our conversation I took a risk by complaining that he always seemed to keep me at arm’s distance.

Dad was shocked. “Why do you say that?” he said. “You’re the one person I can complain to bitterly and you don’t judge me for it.”

I learned at that moment that for Morris Bush, bitter complaint was the main way of sharing intimacy, and sympathetic listening was experienced as love.

From then on, instead of yearning for my father’s attention, I gave him more of mine, and we became very close for a decade before cancer sealed him off for good at age 70.

Lawrence Bush

Jessica de Koninck

Founding Fathers

I cut up the words
to the United States Constitution

I used sharp scissors and dropped
each piece in
a ballot box
a juror selection box
a shoe box

and tossed the confetti around
to make sense
or reason
out of

the rules for acquiring persons
and for paying taxes on their acquisition 

the rules for disenfranchising
people of color and native
Americans
and women

who are not actually mentioned in the text
it being understood that women
are not people

3 years of law school notwithstanding
and decades spent drafting language for laws and regulations
that could not be
misconstrued
or result in unintended
consequences
I should have simply

I should have simply
selected random words
and said
These words mean whatever I say they mean

If only I were a person
within the letter of the law
as originally written
and still construed

I could do anything

Mark Johnson

Poem for my Father’s 85th Birthday

Thank you for answering the phone 

Thank you for talking to me again 

Thank you for starting to forget things 

Thank you for the money 

Thank you for beating cancer and diabetes 

Thank you for your second hard wife who nurses and protects you 

Thank you for slowing down 

Thank you for laughing at my tired jokes 

Thank you for being smaller and weaker 

Thank you for letting me feel sorry for you 

Thank you for finally being human. 

Judith Kerman

WAITING FOR MY FATHER TO COME OUT OF SURGERY

The doctor asked me 
why Dad would even think 
of trying to lift the bureau. 
I’d warned him, said I’d give him a hand. 
And he’s lucky — just a hernia. It could 

have been his back. Or a heart attack. 
He’s never faced the fact 
that sitting around doesn’t equip you 
for heavy exertion. He said 
he could hear the muscles tearing. 

It’s not that he’s bullheaded
he just can’t perceive anything clearly 
unless it was born in his own mind.  
It’s a kind of nearsightedness  
no one makes glasses for.  
If you insist on pointing something out,  
he looks puzzled and peers at you.
Then he shakes his head 
and continues in the direction  
he’s already chosen. 

Helen Engelhardt

ABEL RECOLLECTS

While I was shepherding my flocks

My brother came with stones in hand.

“Your quarrel is with Him!”

“Coward — fight me like a man!” he cried.

I fell upon my knees and then

he kicked me into total darkness.

GOD GETS IT

I know, I know I should have chosen

harmless grains, but how could they

compete with lamb sizzling in the fire?

Too busy licking every finger,

I turned away from Cain. He brought

another sacrifice for me —

the earth forever soaked in blood.

Zev Shanken

DAY CAMP BUS

Waiting with my son for his first day camp bus, 
we eat his favorite maple-dripping waffles 
and write a poem about a runaway rocket   
that wanted to be a day camp bus.
We joke about listening to the counselors. 
Last week he forgot to show us a note  
from his teacher about behavior.
After we punished him, I heard him say to the cat,
“I’ll always be bad in school.”
Now he tells me to go away.
He doesn’t want the other kids  
seeing him with his father.  
I tell him I’m just a man sitting on the steps.
No one will know who I am.
“Yeah, right,” he says. “Just a working man  
enjoying a simple cup of coffee on his break.” 
We’re friends again.
”I’ll always be bad in school.”
And when the bus arrives I say to myself, 
“I really considered giving this up 
just to find meaning in life?”

SPINNING RED HORSE

For grades 5 & 6 Dad would drive me  
to my Hebrew day school in the Bronx.
Usually I’d listen to Alan Freed,  or call out
the year, make, and model of cars.
But sometimes he’d teach me Hebrew 
by making up a phrase for me to repeat 
about what we saw on the road.

After a while the sites became our
private landmarks; the phrases,
mantras of those beautiful years.

The spinning red horse at the gas station
right off the Mosholu Parkway:
Soos Adom ha-mistovayv.
Reciting it now feels like a prayer.

Steve Zeitlin

DALI AND DAD

Salvador Dali called his melted clocks
the Camembert of time

Camembert, my father’s favorite cheese
just as Rolex was his favorite watch
Cutty Sark his favorite brand of scotch
Dad was a fan of all things fine —
except, perhaps, his children.

As his hard edges melted down
we recalled
how his sense of humor rocked
our time together aged and ripened
like Camembert
like Dali’s melted clocks. 

Richard Klin

VANISHING POINT

MY FATHER died in 2017 at the age of eighty-five. The death of a parent is a pivotal experience. A natural impulse is to try and put that parent’s life into some sort of recognizable context. It is a time of mourning, as well as summing up.

By the time my father died, he was a Holocaust survivor. This may sound paradoxical, because he was, in fact, that very thing: a Holocaust survivor who had hidden out the war in Belgium. Those are the plain facts. He was born in Brussels in 1931 to two Polish Jewish parents who had emigrated to Belgium the previous year.

In the late 1930s, his father — my grandfather — in a case of lethally bad timing, emigrated to New York City, intending to send for his wife, son, and daughter. The advent of the Second World War made this impossible; in 1940 Belgium was under Nazi occupation. Those are more plain facts, but these facts become plagued with ambiguity almost immediately. What was the nature of my grandfather’s relocation to the United States, just before Europe burst into flames? After the war, he did send for his son and daughter. Was it pure abandonment, as my father came to believe? Or something else? There’s no answer. My father’s wartime narrative, from the outset, becomes muddied.

As the German knot tightened, my father and his sister were among a group of Jewish children who were hidden — basically in plain sight — as pupils in a Catholic school, where they all passed as gentiles. My grandmother was caught, transported to Auschwitz, and perished.

Holocaust commemorations rely on bare facts and narratives that have a beginning, middle, and an ending. These narratives are often presented as examples of good triumphing over evil, or lessons in moral instruction. Nuance, ambiguity, and contradiction are banished. There is no room for the horrible murkiness of trauma, grief, mourning. My father’s own chronicle — the way he recounted it — did not have much in the way of a linear progression.

It was only in the last decade of his life, really, that he identified himself as a Holocaust survivor. To the best of my recollection, the word Holocaust never passed his lips during my upbringing. References, when they did come, were to “the war,” which needed no additional amplification. Belgium itself was almost a secondary factor; he had been raised in Brussels, which was absent any elaboration: Simply the name of a city, a place. Just Brussels.

My father’s account of his mother’s fate was this: She would visit him every day. One day she simply stopped coming and was never heard of again. End of story. It is a child’s tale of wishful thinking. The mother simply vanishes. She is not loaded into a cattle car to meet her death in an extermination camp. She is not beaten, starved, or gassed.

One of the greatest joys of my life was, when my daughter was little, engaging in the ritual of bedtime reading, seeing these magical books through her eyes. It was during this period when I suddenly realized I knew not a single one of my father’s favorite childhood books or tales. He was nine when the Nazi regime began. Nine is a fairly well-developed age, full of preferences and interests. I don’t know the name of any of his friends, teachers he liked or didn’t, favorite movies, songs. I have no idea if his mother read to him every night. Not a single one of his childhood books or toys is extant. There are almost no photos of him as a young person.

Scattered anecdotes, when I was growing up, did creep in. He loved Tintin and went to the movies regularly. He had the first bicycle on the block, imperiously meting out the length of time that the other children had to try it out. There were regular family trips to the beach. The beach, in fact, is the only photograph we have of my grandmother where she is posed with her two young children.

One could deduce that the beach was in Belgium, but it had no specific name or locale. It was only during that last decade of my father’s life that it occurred to me to ask where this beach was, exactly. I then learned the name was Blankenberge, where pasty-faced British vacationers also sojourned. I had not known any of this; not the name, not the composition of its visitors.

His stories from the war would sometimes make their brief, unsettling appearance, popping up and disappearing: spare and strange, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Once, while lying in bed, he had heard a man being shot and the subsequent cries of pain. During the period when he was in hiding he subsisted on leeks. These were stories related to me when I was younger. Perhaps the intervening years have diluted my own accuracy, although I tend to doubt it. Those are the sort of jolting details a kid would remember.

He also mentioned — once and only once, sans any sort of detail — some person who had a special, extrasensory ability to identify Jews by sight alone, this deadly presence who went around with the Germans. This also, in retrospect, seems like a children’s tale or rumor. It is horrifying, of course, but also, I imagine, comforting in those nightmarish circumstances: If you could stay out of this mythical person’s way, you could perhaps survive. The reality was that there was no formula whatsoever to survive.

MY FATHER came to this country as a teenager, but still maintained strong linguistic and cultural ties to Europe. I remember copies of Paris Match, for example, all during my childhood. These ties were all culled from France, not Belgium. That was to be expected. The infrastructure of the Francophone world is, obviously, not heavily tilted toward Belgium. Yet I remember nothing of Belgium penetrating our home.

A cordon sanitaire is defined as “a protective barrier (as of buffer states) against a potentially aggressive nation or a dangerous influence. . . .” He had constructed a cordon sanitaire around his past. Our house was permeated with his presence of absence.

As my father began to decline physically and mentally, he began to suffer from war-related hallucinations. The Germans were breaking into his house, for one. My visceral, utterly illogical reaction was one of relief. He really had gone through the Holocaust. His trauma was codified, identifiable. Again, this is completely illogical on my part.

IT ALL BOILS DOWN to the mother, doesn’t it? The mother makes everything bearable. When there are bullies, the mother is your recourse. The mother protects you, not just from bullies, but from all manner of bad things. In my father’s case, these particular bullies are shockingly malevolent. As it turns out, they want to do more than bully; they want to inflict great, enormous harm. And then it escalates: They actually want to kill you. The mother is powerless to stop this, to save you. She can do nothing. And then the bullies mean to inflict great harm on your mother as well. It is more than great harm: They want to kill your mother. And they do. They kill your mother.

THE PAINTER Arshile Gorky was a survivor of the Armenian genocide, a witness to his mother’s death from starvation. His extraordinarily moving The Artist and His Mother depicts the young painter side-by-side with his mother, who is looking out into the distance. I can think of nothing that illustrates my father’s experience with such tragic, wrenching accuracy.

The young boy in the painting is gazing out as well. Mother and son are juxtaposed close to each other, their sleeves almost touching. They are not looking at each other, but the figure of the mother looms large. She is so tangible, but not quite there. It is as if Gorky painted The Artist and His Mother fully cognizant of my father’s story.

Next to the mother is a boy. Just a boy. And that is all, ultimately, there is to say.

Dana Jacobs

Jessica de Koninck

SLICE OF LIFE

Dad’s still in the bedroom
facing the TV.

Like Gaul, his ashes divided
into three paper bags.

He would have enjoyed
that classical reference.

Reading glasses
open on the nightstand.

Norma Ketzis Bernstock

Maiden Voyage

In 1945, the year of my birth, my family lived on the fifth floor of a Bronx tenement in a corner apartment filled with light—the kind of place a family settled into for life, according to my mother. That’s why it surprised us all when one evening at the supper table Dad announced that we were moving to Queens for a better life, according to my father.

The next day another surprise! Dad arrived home with his first car, a new four door Plymouth because he said, “Everyone in Queens owns a car.” Dad needed little encouragement as he proudly led the way downstairs out to to the curb where he unlocked the doors to what surely appeared to be the biggest, shiniest and whitest car I had ever seen.  

Mom proudly took her place up front while the three of us jumped in back. We drove down West Farms, turned left at Boone Avenue past P.S. 66 and then headed up a steep hill towards the corner deli. How well my dad handled the controls shifting from first to second, then third. He maneuvered as if he'd been driving for years when actually he hadn't driven anything since World War II when he had worked as a trolley conductor.  

Just as we approached the top of the hill, the light turned red. Dad braked unexpectedly and we all lurched forward. As the light went from red to green, we lurched forward, then back, then flew forward and back again and then another time. For a moment I was Hopalong Cassidy on a wild stallion. My stomach did flip flops. We were all grabbing for something or someone to hold onto, unsure of when this bronco ride would end. We stared at Dad up front behind the wheel. He was in charge, could do anything, fix anything, somehow make everything all right. 

For a second time, Dad put his foot on the accelerator and let out the clutch.  And once more we were thrown into convulsive motion, the three of us falling over each other in the back seat. After about the third attempt to get moving with many screams of "Oy gevalt" from the front seat and maddening looks being exchanged between my parents, Dad pulled on the brake, shut the engine off. Complete silence. Dad stared straight ahead through the windshield his arms hugging the steering wheel. Was that bewilderment, anger, disappointment on his face?

Mom, seated beside him, faced the three of us huddled together, her finger over her lips indicating that under no circumstances should we open our mouths. For a  few moments longer nothing happened. Dad continued to stare straight ahead as if he saw something that no one else could in the distance. We waited.

"Honk! Honk!” A commotion behind us!  We turned around to see a lineup of cars with the drivers leaning on their horns, waving their hands and yelling at us. The turmoil jolted Dad from his stupor. In an instant, he appeared to be in charge again. But he got out of the car — not at all what we expected! He opened the back door and ushered us out onto the sidewalk. Mom, too, left the car and stood with us under the awning of the deli. There was such a racket that Mr. Blumberg, the deli owner, came out to investigate. Soon other people walked over to see about the trouble. Everyone stood by the curb pointing at our new, shiny, white, conspicuous Plymouth stuck on the steep hill which by now had quite a traffic back up.

Shortly, amidst all the excitement, a man wearing a Yankee cap and jacket approached Dad, started talking to him, all the time pointing to the car and then to the curb up ahead. Then Dad handed over the car keys to this man — a perfect stranger in our new car! Dad stood beside us on the sidewalk as the stranger started the car and did what Dad could not — he drove the car off the hill through the intersection to an open spot on the street up ahead. Still holding onto Mom's hand, I was yanked across the street as the five of us ran to where the car was now parked. Dad and the stranger exchanged a few words after which we got back into the Plymouth and without a sound being spoken among any of us, Dad put the car into gear and pulled away from the curb. We circled back down Freeman Street past the theater, left onto Hoe Avenue and right to a parking spot in front of 1320 West Farms Road.

Then one Sunday about two months later, we piled into the car for a visit with Aunt Claire near University Heights. All the chatter in the car noticeably died down as we headed up that hill near the corner deli. The light turned red as we neared the top. How we survived those thirty seconds without breathing I'll never know. When the light flashed green, Dad shifted into first and accelerated in one smooth motion. After a few more minutes the car was in third and we were sailing past Southern Boulevard. Dad, driving like a pro!

Dana Jacobs

Dana Robbins

THE WAVE

On the beach in Acapulco, 

I was twelve, standing in a foot 

of ocean, 

squinting in bright sun, studying 

my toes, strange pink fish 

in the shimmering water,   

when a wave knocked me over,

spun me around, swirled me, 

head over heels within a vortex.

Before I had time to be afraid, 

I felt my father’s strong arms

lift me out.

A decade later, in Mexico, 

my father would fall, head over 

heels in love with a man, 

and be knocked down by AIDS, that  

dangerous wave that, like a riptide, 

swept him far from shore. 

Karen Taylor

DRESSING THE BODY

Before the burial
at the veterans cemetery
and the memorial
at the gay bar
I dress his body.

I chose the traditional white yarmulke
even though
he was not traditional.
I chose silk prayer shawl
brought from Berlin
by his father
before the war.

The threads
were ordinary
white
greyed by disuse

and blue
a color
the rabbis say we see
when night ends
and day begins,

and silver
glorious
flashy,
its afterimage
a rainbow
behind the eyelids.

There is so much past
in the past
which thread
do I follow?

Esther Cohen

My father, quiet, considered, funny enough

a man named Meyer, went to Cornell in 1924.

Graduated pre med with every intention of going

to Yale Medical School.  At his interview a man

named William Butler said this sentence:

The Jewish Quota is Full.  So my father moved

to New York City got an apartment and a research job.

A while later, after the Army (New Zealand Australia

Guinea Bisseau  some out of focus black and white

pictures) after he’d started some businesses,

one was wholesale candy and he loved candy, he went back

to the small town in Connecticut where he was born to take over his father’s

Men’s Clothing store.  Oscar Cohen’s.  His father was born

in Lithuania.  Maybe Vilna maybe not.  His mother from Bobpst,

in the Ukraine.  He married my mother, then decided, with his

college roommate Solly Stein, to buy a beach house together

for the summers.  A big green wooden duplex on top of a cement

sea wall right on the Jewish beach of Woodmont, Connecticut.

Adjacent to Italians.  Solly and his family were right next door.

Solly was an inventor.  He invented a machine that blew out hot air

on hands in public bathrooms.  He married an ambitious woman

named Elaine.  She dyed her hair white blonde, played golf, and

frequently mentioned her unchanging weight: 111 pounds exactly.

Her motto:  She did not eat desserts.  My mother dyed her hair

dark brown.  She referred to the color as Chestnut.  She was not

thin, did not play golf, and spent much of her time reading library books

on our screened in porch.  Mostly Jewish novels like Marjorie Morningstar.

She did not exercise ever.  The two women did not get along.

After a few years the Steins moved out.  Elaine told my mother

that our house was nowhere.  My mother said to us at dinner Good Riddance.

Norma Ketzis Bernstock

Will You Always Know My Name?

I sit with him on an oversized sofa,

TV chatter, a constant.

He stares blindly at the screen.

No Bingo or memory games..

I trim his nails 

no longer black from printer’s ink,

massage his neck and shoulders

certain he misses my mother’s touch.

Almost eight years since her death

but in his world she died yesterday

and somedays not at all.

Despite blank stares, 

empty hugs, angry fits, 

when I enter his room 

he still knows 

that I am his daughter,

he still remembers my name.

Wendy Saul

Yom Kippur services were held 

in our living room that year.

Grandfather, elevated on his hospital bed prayed

bashing tumor-crowded lungs with a rhythm

men long dead used to load shot.

He packed repentance tight

while I like a bag-pipe breathed,

    but my father,

My father sang.

Mikhail Horowitz

MIRROR

Hello, father, so fully present
in furrowed brow, stooped attitude,
eyes resigned to the world’s sadness
and lips forever withholding the words
that should be said and can’t be said . . .
how can you be so many years
dead, yet stand here gazing back
at me, the one who wears your face
now, the one who has usurped your
place among the impossibly living?
I’d give this face, this fear, this
fierce vitality and stupid freedom
back to you if I could — even this
beard you never grew — but the glass
that gives me your reflection
can’t give mine to you. 

Richard LeDeu

of screaming at your kid
for pouring milk down the heating vent,
while the power bill goes up again,
along with the price
of the only crackers he'll eat,
as names that aren't worth remembering
argue over minimum wage,

of muddy puddles on a Tuesday,
when all you want
is a hot cup of coffee
and an episode of Seinfeld
you've seen a dozen times,
yet still laugh at,

of a quilt with a 1000 thread count
bought on a Black Friday
for a Christmas gift
because what else can you give
dementia
but some warmth?

of a kiss that says goodnight
when you don't want to admit
you can't sleep
after forgetting your house keys at home
for the third time in a week
or missing a turn on the same road
you've traveled on for years.

Lawrence Bush, “Father’s Day” (top), “Room 803” (bottom)