Grandpa Lolek enjoyed taking photographs, but developing them for free was too much. He demanded money and made no superfluous niceties about it. He set a regular price for “regular” photos and a special price for “special” photos. What constituted “special”? Unclear. But Grandpa Lolek determined, “This one is special,” and demanded a special price. Quarrels erupted. The relatives were furious. The Leica contained a precious moment of their new lives and in order to bring it out into the light they were being robbed. The impertinence of it. They would pay, of course they would, but so much? Goldberg on HaChalutz Street, the finest in Haifa, charges less. Why so much? The disputes thickened. Grandpa Lolek was not one to allow battles to simply die down. From the summits of Monte Cassino he taunted his adversaries.
The only person capable of moderating and untying these knots, sometimes by force of personality, sometimes with a little something from his wallet, was Grandpa Yosef. There should be no fighting among Jews, he believed.
Our kaleidoscope of memories, which turned everything upside-down, always contained a thousand colorful, crumbling versions of Grandpa Lolek arguing. Complaints from the audience, harsh words from Grandpa Lolek, back and forth. And everyone waited: When would Grandpa Yosef finally intervene? The kaleidoscope holds endless versions of one single dispute, until Grandpa Yosef arrives. He had been busy, someone needed his assistance, but now he was here. Why were they fighting?
Grandpa Yosef. The polar opposite of Grandpa Lolek. Our parents’ generation found him and declared without hesitation: a grandfather. A short man with a yarmulke, his face was always locked with sorrow, his strides always small. A champion of the needy, always helping, rescuing, supporting. From morning to evening he was busy doing mitzvahs. He rode his bicycle everywhere. Always modest, always in the shadows. The needy knew how to find him. Not only the truly needy, but the family too. Every time we had to temporarily pass through the straits of religion, Grandpa Yosef the kindly ferry man was summoned. At funerals, memorials, sitting shiva, marriage ceremonies, bar-mitzvah lessons. In each of these, Grandpa Yosef played the role so needed by the secular heart: a man intimately familiar with the ceremonial, a purveyor of benevolent versions to those who could not make head or tail of it all. Beneath his tender face burned a blaze of faith that could have scorched the entire world if Grandpa Yosef had not trimmed it down to the measurements of a quiet, retiring man.
Grandpa Yosef knew hundreds of Jewish precepts by heart, as well as the length of the Orinoco River. We could find out from him how the price of milk had increased, month by month, starting at any year we requested. He could recite the Book of Esther, the names of the Shetland Islands, and the birthplaces of Galician rabbis lost in the Holocaust. He was a stormy genius, very quiet, always soft-spoken, with a tired gaze, his face lined with furrows of wisdom and tiny white specks of unshaveable stubble on his yellowish cheeks. He had a soft French accent; no one knew why. But his compassionate voice sounded wonderful with its French enunciation. Because of his accent, people believed he had a refined approach to food and that he was knowledgeable about wine. In truth, he rarely encountered wine, and only then by force of mitzvahs. At family meals he gargled peach-flavored sparkling wine and mumbled something about its “delicate savor,” believing he was giving his audience what it wanted. In matters of food he was even less fussy. When he ate, his throat grew a pelican’s crop, into which he rolled any kind of food without needless enquiries. He ate to his fill at every meal and accepted offers of coffee and dessert. He had no potbelly, thanks to the bicycle and the mitzvahs and due to a metabolic problem which allowed food to pass through his body like a roller-coaster. Precious little of his meals remained for him to grow strong on.
He lived in a small neighborhood where almost all the residents were Holocaust survivors, at the edge of the Haifa suburb of Kiryat Haim. Little houses, little yards. We went to visit him almost every Saturday, desecrating the Sabbath by driving, but not to worry. We spent whole weeks with him during summers. We attached ourselves to him like tropical ferns to the juicy core of an enormous trunk.
At his home, in the little room they called the “hall,” which increased the value of the apartment, Grandpa Yosef had an old heavy desk made of brown wood, the only notable piece of furniture in his entire modest home. Behind it, on the wall, were book-lined shelves. First, gold-embossed volumes of the Scriptures, the six sections of the Mishna, the Babylonian Talmud, Rashi and Rambam. Then there were “liberal” books, which Grandpa Yosef knew by heart — Sholem Aleichem and Berdyczewski, Burla and Frischmann, Haim Nachman Bialik and Tchernichowsky. There was also an Encyclopedia Hebraica, which Grandpa Yosef did not know entirely by heart (he half apologized, explaining that it was wrong to know everything by heart as it only took up space in one’s mind), and Eben-Shoshan’s Hebrew dictionary (on occasion, he could be caught not knowing the definition of a word like ‘batten’ or ‘burette’). The desk itself was usually scattered with volumes of the Scriptures, textbooks and fine literature. Also a glimpse of a little dish of pickled herring, which Grandpa Yosef preserved himself, and the pit of a fruit. Grandpa Yosef would be sitting hunched over, studying. A small lamp illuminated his face.
Despite the yellowing cheeks, the stubble and the folds of skin, the image of Grandpa Yosef the righteous scholar was forever a cornerstone in our lives. In the Garden of Eden that was our childhood, he was the Tree of Knowledge, just as Grandpa Lolek was the Tree of Life. To this very day, although we have grown up, Grandpa Yosef is still the Tree of Knowledge. He always wore loose slacks and white dress shirts tucked in tightly, with large cumbersome jackets that conquered his body and covered up the fine shirts. Grandpa Yosef tried to dress carefully, but the flap of something always peeked out from something else.
He came from the same little town as Dad, Bochnia, and although he was not related to my father’s family, he knew them well. He would say things like, “He was a little rascal, your father, but a good boy. Got hold of lots of stamps for me,” (a slightly enigmatic compliment, which I sanctified without further contemplation). In his distant way he was a disciple of the Admor of Belz, and he feebly fumed when Effi referred to him under her breath as “the Admor of Belzec.” In our family’s underground cell of Bochnia ghetto graduates, it was a known fact that before the Admor of Belz boarded the train from Hungary to Switzerland, leaving his disciples behind to perish in Auschwitz, he had spent time in the Bochnia ghetto until the collaborator Landau was able to transfer him to Hungary, then a safe-haven, leaving his believers to contend with the nuisance of the gas chambers at Belzec. Grandpa Yosef did not reach Belzec or Auschwitz, but his Holocaust trail was the longest and most intricate of all the survivors we knew. Over the course of the war he passed through no less than twelve concentration camps, ghettos and extermination camps. He never explained why. He did not dwell much on depictions of those days, but often tied the present to the past.