“It was in the Bochnia ghetto that I met Attorney Perl, and then we met again in Haifa.”
“Mr. Hirsch was very helpful to me in the Lodz ghetto. If not for him, who knows…”
“I was at the men’s camp in Ravensbrück and then I was transferred to Stutthof, but in any case Ravensbrück was officially affiliated with Stutthof. Officially, I stayed in the same place. In the train car, it took three days.”
“The Death March? No, I wasn’t there. Fortunately, I was transferred from Gross-Rosen to Waldenburg, so I was saved.”
“Buchenwald uprising? Haven’t heard of it. Perhaps it was after I was transferred from Buchenwald to Gross-Rosen.”
The Shoah raged through the world, and Grandpa Yosef traveled to and fro on trains. We sometimes wondered why.
“He wasn’t a good social fit at Buchenwald, so they transferred him to Gross-Rosen,” Effi suggested.
Fifty years later, Grandpa Yosef himself explained. “It was not the Nazis who moved me from one place to the other, it was my heart that moved worlds until I found her, Feiga.”
Feiga was his wife, the princess of his youth, his queen, who lay eternally ill in her room. When he stepped off the last train into a world turned upside-down at the end of the World War, he found his fiancée from before the war, Feiga, and married her, as their parents had agreed six years earlier in the spring of 1939. They were engaged at nineteen, married at twenty-five, and gave birth to Moshe.
Moshe was Grandpa Yosef and Feiga’s only child, and from the moment he was born, it seemed, the angels had showered him with a host of disasters. He was mentally retarded, but not profoundly enough so that he could exist in a dulled serenity. He had slight brain damage, which tormented his movements, pulled his limbs as taught as springs and did not let go, only twisted them in pain. And adenopathy, a disease of the lymph nodes which caused internal sorrow to hide beneath his sealed face. “He has pain, sometimes. Try not to let him eat food that’s too spicy or too sweet,” said Doctor Gnessin. And there was something else. Not exactly autism, but a nameless disjointedness that thwarted all known methods for treating autism, prevented him from being taken in at autistic homes, and finally left him in his place under the sun on the low fence opposite his house, where he sat upright all day long.
Between sick Feiga and Moshe, Grandpa Yosef was in constant motion: Gemara, mitzvahs, preparing food, washing dishes, biking here and there. Medication for Feiga. Medication for Moshe. Even so, we were not amazed when Grandpa Yosef announced one day that he had decided to take some courses at the Open University. Why not? After all, Grandpa Yosef was a prodigy whose rabbinical dreams had been cut short by the Holocaust, and in any case he always had fifteen minutes to spare here and there. He would get his bachelor’s degree and then see.
He signed up. Disappointed by the slow pace and the meager load of material, he decided to register at a regular university. He took the entrance exams and was accepted. He was even interviewed by the student newspaper; the university was happy to publicize their elderly student. But their delight was somewhat marred when, six months later, Grandpa Yosef applied for permission to take all the required exams for the bachelor’s degree. His request was rejected, of course, and Grandpa Yosef dared not appeal (“Do not presume to defy the rulership,” he had learned). The one thing Grandpa Yosef did accomplish with his request was to be taken under the wing of Professor Shiloni, a kindly renaissance man who was impressed by this elderly beacon of knowledge and arranged a customized course of study for him. And so on Chanukah of 1985, Grandpa Yosef was awarded an MA in Jewish History.
The Masters degree did not quench the predator’s thirst. Grandpa Yosef decided he wanted a doctorate, claiming this had been his goal from the first. It was his life’s duty to earn a doctorate on the topic of Jewish heroism in the Middle Ages — this and no other. We were surprised by his narrow focus: Why would Grandpa Yosef be interested in Jewish heroism in the Middle Ages? But under the guidance of Professor Shiloni, during Grandpa Yosef’s plentiful quarter-hour openings, a foundation for the dissertation was laid. To this very day, the end of 1993, Grandpa Yosef can still be found scratching away at drafts he is never pleased with.
The years of our childhood solidified our belief that Grandpa Yosef knew everything, and this estimation was not diminished when we grew older. The main tenets of his knowledge — Talmud and Jewish history — were barely tested by us. Astronomy, meteorology, zoology — absolutely. When Brandy the dog gave birth to six piebald puppies underneath his brown desk, Grandpa Yosef was forced to elucidate for us the riddle of procreation. Even in the strangest corners of human knowledge, Grandpa Yosef was never without a response.
“Grandpa Yosef, when was the kite invented?”
“Grandpa Yosef, are giraffes kosher?”
He was our resource for settling any argument. The matter would be brought before him and the loser would reap consolation thanks to Grandpa Yosef’s slight bending of the facts, allowing him or her to squeeze in next to the winner at the last minute.
“The longest river in the world? The Amazon.”
Effi loses.
“But the Mississippi is the longest of the North American rivers.”
Effi takes her place alongside the winner.
We would lie on our backs in the garden at our place, beneath the trees, and let our thoughts fly, contemplating the farthest or the strangest, to the very edge of our wits. Even before the era of Brandy the dog, we learned to love a good game of fetch. We would toss our questions as far as we possibly could, and wait for Grandpa Yosef to return with a proud answer in his mouth.
“Grandpa Yosef, what else can you grit, other than teeth?”
“Grandpa Yosef, why doesn’t a spider float in grape juice?” (A failed experiment.)
Our memories were crumbled into the flakes of a kaleidoscope, and the answers are difficult to see. Things get forgotten, scattered, but Grandpa Yosef’s gravity is remembered well. He would never belittle our questions.
“Grandpa Yosef, who would win: a thousand scorpions or a bear?”
“Grandpa Yosef, which prison is the hardest to escape from in the world?”
Grandpa Yosef considered. Were we counting the camps in Siberia as prisons? Would we count prisons that have been closed down? Like Alcatraz? Instead of a simple answer, Grandpa Yosef told us about the most terrifying prisons, lying with us on a blanket with blades of grass crumpled beneath our backs, roots crushed. We listened with eyes closed, pondered prisons, and enjoyed the strength infused in us by their force.
Wherever religious ceremonies were concerned, Grandpa Yosef’s advantages were enjoyed by all. He was handed the field marshal’s baton and asked to lead the way. He always positioned himself on the front, at the edge of the rabbi’s beard, where he could hum with him, emphasize and echo certain syllables of his prayers, and cover for our awkward silences. And when necessary, with a reassuring look, he would urge orphans to recite kaddish, fathers to sign documents for their children’s nuptials, bar-mitzvah boys to squeak out the readings he himself had taught them with the utmost patience and grace. Salvation and redemption were for him simple tokens to be distributed for the asking. He was summoned to every ceremony to stand as advocate between us and God, or at least between us and Uncle Mendel.
Uncle Mendel, a member of Grandpa Yosef’s generation, was never even honored with candidacy for grandfatherhood. We had no choice but to tolerate his presence at funerals and brisses, where he would rapidly ignite with holy furor and terrible wrath against us idol worshippers. His eyes dispersed threats against the family and the officiating rabbi. His hints were clear: the slightest deviation from tradition, and heads would roll. The presence of Grandpa Yosef was able to slightly dilute the anxiety. “Shhh…Shhh…,” he would calm Uncle Mendel with an enchanting whisper, unburdening the holy man of his anger and extracting from him a momentarily turned blind eye.