The Laws of our Fathers

APRIL 4, 1996

Seth

Who writes letters anymore? This is probably an act of craziness. But Dubinsky dropped off the copies of the eulogies the Trib people had printed. (Beautiful, aren't they? This was a touching gesture, Seth.) I'm a little too hard-headed to hold on to them on the assumption you're coming back. And I can't simply slide them into this envelope without a word of my own. It's 9:30 now. Hot Time, as you say. The hour we have spent together most nights. I miss you. The laughter, the connection. I have nasty thoughts. The body yearns.

Which means what? I've been running all the what-ifs in my mind, watching each clip to see the different endings to our movie. Nothing is exactly right. But I thought I' d take you at your word and speak my mind, at least the part I know. We're both relatively honest. I regard that as one of our pluses.

When I left Charlie, at the age of forty-four, I had to recognize that I'm one of those people who may never come to rest, never find the opening in the world where I am going to squarely fit. My life, in its current shape, will tumble on for a while, and then I'11 feel the way I always do, that it's not quite right, that maybe there's something better, or not quite as bad, over the next hill and I'll be gone in that direction. There are times I think almost abstractly about my lifetime of shifting obsessions and feel washed away by a pounding wave of shame. Four different graduate programs. All my jobs. And men. And a thousand pastimes undertaken with unflagging ardor, each intended to save my spirit at night while my body slaved in obeisance to the future during the day. The relics are in that horrible Fibber's closet of a basement where I won't let you roam: an enormous loom; plastic jugs and curing vats (I was going to culture my own wine); bridles, bits, and saddle from the period I decided to retake my squandered childhood by riding. Not to mention the boxes of Y-Me literature and the books on various dietary obsessions. Each of these phases passed away, lifted like fog, traceless, if you do not count the accessories that mildew in the cellar or a single blanket I wove which Nikki still clutches for comfort when she sleeps. At my worst moments, I suspect I bore Nikki simply to have an anchor.

And even having done that, I'm never right, never fully at ease. I know there's a chance I' ll be here by myself at the end, on the other side of something I'm still longing to get over. There's a lot of pain in that. Not just the recognition, but the fact. Yet there are moments, like now, when I'm more or less at peace and willing to say, Maybe that's me. If this thing – us – if it doesn't work out, I'm going to be okay. I know that. It's one of the best lessons I learned from Zora: I know how to wrap my arms around myself. And I don't mean that as a sop. It may even be a warning.

Which is not to deny I'm angry. I am. I'm aggravated that you' re gone and that you let it come to this, with two women reaching after you. I ask myself questions I heard in my head all the time with Charlie: Why does it seem to be women who have to stand up for everything of real value in the world? For children, first of all; for nurturance. For homes. And, yes, even love. I know that's not entirely fair. I sometimes watch you with Nikki in mild amazement – unloading her backpack, making snacks. I leave you a lot more room to be that person than Lucy ever did. But it's your confidence and contentment that are striking, the way you see a household. Not a war zone. Not a field of mutual striving. Not some prolonged adolescence inwhich the partners travel, each for themselves. But a family. You can show me how to do that, as Charlie, of course, never did. And even so, that's hard for me, because it leaves me wrestling with the hardest question of all, whether it's me you need or Nikki. In the end, we both have to deal with the fact that it's loss that brings you to me.

History. Circumstances and events. They still stand between us. I never would have suspected the degree to which I'm haunted by our past together. Twenty-five years, you think. We were only children. And yet it feels like it could be fatal. What's the difference now? I wonder. Why won't we fail the same way we did a quarter-century ago? I suspect these are the furthest questions from your mind, Seth. What's the saying? Within the body of every cynic beats the broken heart of a romantic. You still believe in the transforming power of Will and

Love. It's so endearing. I want to let you win, to triumph at this quest. I know how important it is for you.

But I worry I may let you down the way I did decades ago. Back then, you needed my devotion, probably so you had the strength to stand apart from your parents. And I couldn't provide it. Not, as I think you feared then, because I didn't believe in or admire you. You do not know ten people, Seth, who feel more vindicated or less surprised by the way the world has embraced your talent. No. What troubled me was your celestial devotion to me. To the girl philosophy student who was supposed to light up the skies at Miller Damon. Because I knew she was a fake. Oh, I had certain gifts. I've never sold myself short. I read Plato while I was still in high school. And believed what Socrates said about knowledge as life's highest quest. To the thought of replacing passion with reason, some singing (passionate?) chord in me responded. Instead, over time, I learned that the differing endpoints of various philosophical excursions were due largely to the places they'd begun. The zero points. The irreducible assumptions. It's who you are to start that makes the difference. And in that light, Plato was, if not wrong, at least deserving of correction. All knowledge derives from passion. And what my passions werewas largely a mystery. Certainly not philosophy. I read the texts in a bloodless way, like an inspector on a tour. I was, I suddenly decided, leading someone else's life. Whose? I didn't have a clue then. But my mother knew like Holy Writ those heavyweight German philosophers I studied. To this day, I can hear her shrilling at meetings, 'That is not what Engels meant! Never!' So l fled, mystified about my motives.

All my life I've been afraid I lack common sense. My mother, shrewd as she was, had none. I mean that she seemed to forget that people would be hurt if she called them names, that a small child might need a meal now and then, that she couldn't work in South Carolina and be a mother tome here. It wasn' t just that she seemed at times to feel overpowered by her own needs – the truth is that we all do – but she had no recognition when it was occurring. And even now I'm afraid she left the same traits in me, the way an unhappy spirit is supposed to remain in a woodland tree.*You' re acting just like Zora' is something I can unleash against myself with the primitive anger of a curse, as I prime myself not to act or speak or feel in given ways. It turns out that one of the passageways to my adulthood was this vow, this secret I didn't even tell myself out loud, not to be like her.

Don't misunderstand. I loved – love – my mother. Yet it was years – not until the end of that trial was nearing – since I felt free to embrace the best of her. I believe Zora would be proud of me. And I know she would adore Nikki. Both thoughts mean a lot. But throughout my younger years I wanted a lot more. I wanted her to be my salvation, my ideal. God, I needed that. I would feel fifty times a day how much I could utilize the strength born of knowing I could simply form myself to her example. And it's my task, the stone I've been rolling up the hill forever, to recognize that can't take place, to see – even though I couldn't bear to say it most of my life – that she was, at moments, a selfish lunatic, that there were times when all her passions, her anxieties, all her towering concerns made me beside the point. Here I am in the shadow of fifty and there still are mornings I wake to happy dreams of the total, devoted, desperate way I loved her when I was young. And when it comes to me that's no longer right, possible, real, I'm crushed. My spirit's broken for hours.

She loved me. Passionately. When it suited her. In response, I learned how to hold some distance. (Big surprise!) And resolved, with the same desperation of my love for her, that I would try not to be as unhappy as she was. Because I knew that for certain, too, that nutsy Zora, with her rages, speeches, scraps of quotes, with her warm whispers for me, her smell of lotion, her walleye, her midnight pacing, meetings, and constant grumbling at the way of the world – that she was swirling like some nebula around a livid core of pain.

The project of my life is to cherish what I can of her, and yet to be neither her mindless imitator nor her willing victim. I will always worship her ferocious independence. But I would rather be dungeon-condemned for all eternity than consign myself to her isolation. I want you to understand how hard this is for me. To be the one writing this letter. To be the one speaking first. To be the one asking. It seems almost cruel to have to say Yes, knowing you may say No. But I heard what you said the other night and I know this won't happen any other way. You are entitled to be told that you are needed. More essential. Not only to Nikki, but to me. You are. It has taken my whole life for me to say this, but I deserve someone I can rely on. Through and through. I know you can be that person, Seth. If I let you. I want to try.

This is a love letter.

Sonny Eulogy for Bernhard Weissman by Seth Daniel Weissman April 1, 1996

I always return to the story of Abraham and Isaac when I think about my father. Some of that springs from the legacy which gave our son his name. But there is more to it, of course. No doubt, we all recall the story. Abraham was the founder of the Western faiths, the first Jew, the first person to know the God to whom most peoples in the world now pray. He was a visionary, a prophet, and, surely, an iconoclast capable of cleaving to his beliefs in the face of universal scorn.

But despite this, Abraham's God decided to test him. He asked Abraham to make a sacrifice of his and Sarah's only child, Isaac, their miracle, who had been bom to them when Sarah was already ninety years old and Abraham one hundred. And according to the story, Abraham complied. He did not say what we would hope a father of today might: I am hearing ugly voices, I need help. He did not ask what was wrong with a God who would demand such a thing, or question whether He was worth worshipping. He did not, so far as the Bible tells us, even beg for Isaac's life, as he had done for the people of Sodom. Abraham simply walked his child up Mount Moriah – I imagine he even made the boy carry the wood for the fire. When Isaac asked where the lamb might be for the religious sacrifice they were undertaking, Abraham told him God was bringing the lamb.

In candor, I've regarded this for some years now as a strange story, a grim tale of how a father would sacrifice his son to his own faith, his own visions. What kind of starting point is this for us anyway, for all the Western faiths? Celebrating the twisted dynamic between the first Jewish father and the first Jewish son? Why do we retell this story? Is it to remind us that every parent since has done better?

I initially asked these questions in an anguished state. It was the last time I ever entered a synagogue. The occasion was the New Year. The other congregants were there to express their commitments to what is referred to now and again in the writings as the God, the faith, and the laws of our fathers. I was there to say the Mourner's Prayer, inasmuch as not much time had passed since my own boy named Isaac had died. For us – Lucy and Sarah, and certainly for me – it's probably the case that every funeral we go to for the rest of our fives will be Isaac's. I apologize for having to share this. But in order to speak of my father, I also have to talk about my children – our wonderful, extraordinary daughter, for whose presence I thank God and all else in the universe every day, and the son we lost.

I don't know how many of you here know the story of how our Isaac came to be given that name. But it is, fittingly, my father's story, and the one we all shudder to recall. In March 1938, the German Army marched into Austria and brought with them their war against the Jews. Jewish businesses were emblazoned with signs and vandalized or confiscated, while 12,000 Jewish families were thrown out of their homes. The Nazis turned synagogues into smoking parlors and beat at random Jews found on the streets. On April 23, a Saturday, in Vienna, that most genteel of cities, the home of Sigmund Freud and Gustav Mahler, a group of Jews was taken to the Prater, Vienna's amusement park, and there, in the presence of the usual weekend crowd, the SS forced the Jews to their knees and made them eat the lawn. By June, more than 500 Viennese Jews had committed suicide. On the sixteenth of that month, my father, his young wife, and their four-year-old son, who had been out together for a hasty visit to a shop, were accosted by storm troops. They were informed that their home was now state property.

In the next three years they moved half a dozen times as more and more of the city was closed to Jewish residency. Jews were removed from their jobs and forced to wear the yellow star when they walked down the street. But my father remained. His mother-in-law had had a stroke and was not transportable. And emigration became increasingly difficult as time went on and the nations throughout Eastern Europe closed their borders for fear of being overrun by Austria's 180,000 Jews. More to the point, flight would have shattered some essential vision of himself. He was, very much, the man he had planned to be, the son of a shopkeeper, a silversmith, who, as I understand it, had longed to have a son who would be, as my father had become, a scholar, broadly respected at the university.

The deportation to the camps of Vienna's Jewish population came slowly at first, but by October 1941 was fully under way. With the assistance of the leaders of the Jewish community under the direction of Rabbi Murmelstein, Jews were sent off to the 'East' in batches of 1,000 in closed freight cars. My father, his wife, and his son were among the first to go. He was pleased to be sent to the concentration camp at Buchenwald, where many noted Viennese had preceded him. The boy, now seven, developed a painful ear infection on the trip. By the time they were herded off the cattle car in Buchenwald, the boy was crying nearly constantly, whimpering and moaning in pain. His mother begged the guards for medical treatment. Finally, after three days, a guard agreed, took the child from the barracks by the hand, and immediately outside the door shot him, where the boy, my brother Isaac, died. These events, which my father never once mentioned to me during his lifetime, defined him. They were with him every day. They transformed him – forgive me – deformed him, as a tree can be misshapen by tethering it as a sapling. He needed no injunction never to forget. It was from my mother that I learned what transpired, in short, unbearable conversations over the years. One of the great agonies of her Alzheimer's was that the horrible recollection of the camps survived with her far longer than anything else except, probably, her memories of me. During the stage when she could still speak of things with clarity she repeated a phrase I had heard from her from time to time. 'The best did not survive,' she said. 'Those who would not wheedle or cheat, who shared with the sick – I think they were admired to a degree, but admiration in such circumstances is a very fleeting feeling.' Then my mother, frail and enfeebled, her flesh loose, her eyes dull, but her very look still deeply familiar and precious to me, made certain to face me. 'I have lived the rest of my life recalling them,' she said. She cleared her throat. 'They are my heroes.' Death deepens my wonder at her. She was surely wrong, for my heart allows no doubt that she was among the best. But I realize that in her usual deep and delicate way she meant to communicate to me some exculpation of my father. For no matter who they were when they entered those horrible facilities, neither she nor he nor any other human being could be subjected on a prolonged basis to such confinement, such humiliation, such intense and repeated brutality, such incessant privation, fear, and constant debasement, and emerge with their humanity fully intact. I accept this. It seems obvious to me, although you can travel to corners of this city – to the towers of Grace Street or Fielder's Green – and see the lesson is not yet learned. One of the thousand morals of the story of Abraham and Isaac is that the parents' ordeal – and we all have ours – will inevitably become the child's, as my father and mother's ordeal became mine, and mine no doubt became Sarah's and Isaac's. But it is also a tale of survival and of mercy. In the end, Abraham heard his God instruct him not to set his hand against his son. Isaac was spared. He survived and surmounted. He became a parent, blind to Jacob's defects, but one who, pointedly, attempted no sacrifices of his own. I bear my father the intense gratitude I ought to. Lame and halting, he still went on. But surely we could have both done better. Here at the end, things can be put simply. My father and I often treated each other cruelly. I am sore with shame at the memory of my craziest antics – and would have been more at peace if I had seen in my father any trace of a similar regret. I wish we had negotiated some truce, some settlement. It would have been hard bargaining. No doubt, he trumped me in the category of suffering, particularly since much of mine has been self-inflicted, which, generally speaking, people of his age and experience refused to recognize as pain. But couldn't we have matched up, soul for soul, those two dead little boys, his son and mine, the Isaacs whose fathers could not save them? Isn't there a point of absolute equality in futility and despair? Yet we learn , we grow, we gain. Sarah, surely you and I have already done much better. There's a great deal in that.

So I think about Isaac – my son, my brother, my father's son, the first son of the Western faiths – and I think about the story that is told again and again. We hear it first as children, and repeat it throughout our lives. We tell it by way of apology. And warning. We tell it with some measure of hope. We tell it because we have all been the child, we have all been Isaac, and we know the part of the story that is never mentioned. For the Bible does not record Isaac's responses. We do not know if he, like Jesus, asked, Father, why have you forsaken me? We do not know if he begged, the way most of us would, for his life. We know only this: that he obeyed. That he was a child. That because he knew nothing else, he did as his father required. We know he allowed himself to be bound in rope. We know he let his father lay him on the altar of pyramided firewood which together they had raised to God. We know he watched his father on the mountaintop raise the gleaming knife above his breastbone. We know he was a child, the son of a man with a Big Idea, who in his longing and confusion, even in his final instants, could only look to his father with that eternal if foundering hope for love. Eulogy for Bernhard Weissman by Hobart Tariq Tuttle April 1,