He held the photograph under my eyes. I don’t know if faces can be the polar opposite of each other, but in contrast to the solemn face of the first grandfather, this one grinned as if he’d been photographed on the happiest day of not just his life but all life everywhere. He wore overalls splattered with white paint, had wild blond hair, and was streaming sweat.
“Actually, the truth is I don’t look at these photos much, because all I see when I look at photographs of dead people is that they’re dead,” Dad said. “Doesn’t matter if it’s Napoleon or my own mother, they are simply the Dead.”
That day I learned that my grandmother had been born in Poland right at the unlucky time Hitler annihilated his delusions of grandeur by making them come true- he emerged as a powerful leader with a knack for marketing. As the Germans advanced, my grandmother’s parents fled Warsaw, dragged her across Eastern Europe, and, after a few harrowing months, arrived in China. That’s where my grandmother grew up- in the Shanghai Ghetto during the war. She was raised speaking Polish, Yiddish, and Mandarin, suffering the soggy diseases of monsoon seasons, severe rationing, and American air raids, but surviving.
After the U.S. troops entered Shanghai with the bad news of the Holocaust, many in the Jewish community left China for all corners of the globe, but my great-grandparents decided to stay, having established themselves as owners of a successful multilingual cabaret and kosher butcher shop. This perfectly suited my young grandmother, who was already in love with my grandfather, an actor in their theater. Then, in 1956, when she was just seventeen, my grandmother got pregnant, forcing her and my grandfather’s families to rush through the wedding preparations as you had to do in the Old World when you didn’t want people to do the math. The week following her wedding, the family decided to return to Poland, to raise the coming child, the cluster of cells that would become my father, in their homeland.
They weren’t welcomed back with open arms, to say the least. Who knows whether it was guilt or fear of retribution or simply the unwelcome surprise of a family ringing the doorbell and saying, “You’re in my house,” but they had been home less than ten minutes when, in front of my grandmother, her parents were beaten to death with an iron pipe. My grandmother ran but her husband remained, and he was shot for praying in Hebrew over their bodies, though he had yet to say “Amen,” so the message wasn’t transmitted. (“Amen” is like the Send button on an e-mail.)
Suddenly a widow and an orphan, she fled Poland for the second time in her young life, this time on a boat bound for Australia, and after two months of staring at the daunting circumference of the horizon, she went into labor just as someone shouted, “There it is!” Everyone ran to the side of the boat and leaned over the rail. Steep cliffs crowned with clusters of green trees lined the coast. Australia! The younger passengers let out cries of joy. The older passengers knew that the key to happiness lay in keeping your expectations low. They booed.
“Are you with me so far?” Dad asked, interrupting himself. “These are the building blocks of your identity. Polish. Jewish. Persecuted. Refugee. These are just some of the vegetables with which we make a Jasper broth. You got it?”
I nodded. I got it. Dad continued.
Though she could still hardly speak a word of English, my grandmother hooked up with my grandfather number two after only six months. It’s debatable whether this should be a source of pride or a source of shame, but he was a man who could trace his family back to the last boatload of English-born convicts dumped on Australian soil. While it’s true that some criminals were sent down for petty crimes such as stealing a loaf of bread, my father’s ancestor had not been one of them- or that is, he might have been, but he also raped three women, and if after raping those women he swiped a loaf of bread on his way home, it is not known.
Their courtship was fast. Apparently unperturbed by acquiring a child not of his own making, within a month, armed with a Polish dictionary and a book on English grammar, he asked my grandmother to marry him. “I’m just a battler, which means it’ll be us against the world, and the world will probably win hands down every time, but we’ll never give up fighting, no matter what, how does that sound?” She didn’t answer. “Come on. Just say, ‘I do,’ ” he pleaded. “It comes from the verb ‘to do.’ That’s all you need for now. Then we’ll move you on to ‘I did.’ ”
My grandmother considered her situation. She didn’t have anybody to help look after her baby if she went out to work, and she didn’t want her child to grow up fatherless and poor. She thought, “Do I have the necessary ruthlessness to marry a man I don’t really love for my son’s welfare? Yes, I do.” Then, looking at his hapless face, she thought, “I could do worse,” one of the most ostensibly benign though chilling phrases in any language.
He was unemployed when they married, and when she moved into his apartment, my grandmother was dismayed to discover it was filled with a terrifying potpourri of macho toys: rifles, replica pistols, model war planes, weights and dumbbells. When immersed in bodybuilding, kung fu training, or cleaning his gun, he whistled amiably. In the quiet moments when the frustration of unemployment settled in and he was absorbed with anger and depression, he whistled darkly.
Then he found a job with the New South Wales Prison Services near a small town being settled four hours away. He wasn’t going to work in the jail- he was going to help build it.
Because a prison was soon to loom on the town’s outskirts, an unkind publication in Sydney dubbed the settlement (in which my father was to grow up) the least desirable place to live in New South Wales.
The road entered town on a descent, and as my grandparents drove in, they saw the foundations of the penitentiary on top of a hill. Set amid huge, mute trees, that half-built prison looked to my grandmother to be half demolished, and the thought struck her as an unpleasant omen. It strikes me as one too, considering that my grandfather moved to this town to build a prison and I am now writing from one. The past is truly an inoperable tumor that spreads to the present.
They moved into a boxy, weatherboard house, and the following day, while my grandmother explored the town, inadvertently frightening the residents with her aura of the survivor, my grandfather began his new job. I’m not exactly sure what role he had, but apparently for the next several months he spoke incessantly of locked doors, cold halls, cell measurements, and grilled windows. As the building neared completion, he became obsessed with everything to do with prisons, even checking out books from the newly established local library on their construction and history. At the same time, my grandmother put as much energy into learning English, and this was the beginning of a new catastrophe. As her understanding of the English language grew, she began to understand her husband.
His jokes turned out to be stupid and racist. Moreover, some of them weren’t even jokes but long pointless stories that ended with my grandfather saying things like “And then I said, ‘Oh yeah?’ ” She realized he bitched endlessly about his lot in life, and when he wasn’t being nasty, he was merely banal; when not paranoid, he was boring. Soon his conversation made his handsome face grow ugly; his expression took on a cruel quality; his mouth, half open, became an expression of his stupidity. From then on every day was worsened by the new language barrier that had grown up between them- the barrier of speaking the same language.
Dad put the photographs back in the box with a dark expression, as if he had wanted a trip down memory lane but when he got there he remembered it was his least favorite street.