The Laws of our Fathers (83 page)

    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

    

  
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,
 

1996

    

    Allah, Yahweh, sweet Jesus - by whatever name we know You, Lord - take the soul of Bernhard Weissman. You caused him in his life to confront terrible wickedness. He now deserves Your eternal peace.

    Were we all - all of us here - to share our memories of Bernhard Weissman, You'd hear a lot of different things. There'd be many voices. There are folks here who can tell You he was a genius in his work. Winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics invited him to their table and treated him as a peer. His granddaughter, our sweet Sarah, would tell You he was a great old guy who responded to her kindness. And You've heard Seth say he was a tough father, and I tell You, I was around to see that, and it is word.

    I can speak only for myself. I
liked
the dude. I'm here as his friend. Soundin goofy, I know, sayin I was friends with a fella

    twice my age. But we
were
friends. When I was a little kid, he scared the livin hell out of me. I remember him wearing those nasty glasses that looked like they pinched your nose - pince-nez? - and talking with that funky Viennese accent? Half the time to start, I couldn't tell if he was speaking to me or clearing his throat. I wanted no part of this cat.

    But by high school, I had gotten into him. I can tell You a lot of good things about Mr Weissman. He was funny. Kind of sneaky funny. He'd catch you. I remember a few years ago, I was visiting, and we were talking about the things we talked about often, politics, race, America, and I said I saw how the government had finally relented and was going to let a group of black and Jewish leaders go together to visit various capitals in the Middle East, hoping to make peace. 'Zere is no kvestion, Hopie, zat ze government vants zem to go,' he told me. 'Zey vould razzer, however, zat zey not come back.'

    And something else I always appreciated about the man - he liked me. Part of that, I always knew, was for Seth's sake. Bernhard was doin the best he could, takin to Seth's main man, even if he couldn't always do the same for Seth. But he was into me for me, too. I had no doubt about that. I could make him laugh. And he had no trouble with a Negro kid being smart. He was not born American and he did not have a trace of our color-thing, not even a speck of it, on his soul. I appreciated that, I must say. And I have to allow, on my side, that it was easier for me to accept him than many other white folks, because he had paid the price. I couldn't ever say to him, 'You don't know what it's like.' He knew. He understood how it felt to be stuck in this situation, to be labeled and judged, always and constantly under the weight of something you never really fully chose.

    You know, I'm like everybody else on the planet: I am deeply struck by the suffering of my own. It's a terrible truth that identity is steeped in the blood of martyrs, a phenomenon you can see clear round the world, people everywhere grouped under ethnic banners and all of them beefin about the way their kin were treated in times past. The Armenians, the Kurds. The Igbo. The Rom. The list is damn near endless. Everybody recalls their oppressors. Even the Pilgrims, WASPs, who I grew up thinking had everything, celebrated Thanksgiving to recollect how bad folks back in England had been to them. And the fact is, nobody's makin this stuff up. We cannot bear homage to those who made us without recognizing their suffering. But it's a sad lesson, nonetheless, that we all so often lay claim to our heritage out of fear of those who once hated us and thus may do so again.

    But I'm like the rest: I have always known the pain of black folks. All my life. I've felt it in my bones. We had it good in my home, no complaint about that, but it didn't take me very long, even as a little kid, to notice how hard it was for so many others, and to see that a whole lot of those folks had the same skin on them as I did. I'm the first to tell You that I did not have a clue what to do with that. As a young man, I didn't want the burden. And then I discovered I'd never know myself, never accept myself, unless I took it up. And the absolutely amazing part, as I look back, is that the person who taught me more about dealing with that -
the
man in my life - is Bernhard Weissman. I'm sure, if there had been some cagey old ex-slave who lived down the block, I'd have sat at his feet instead. But there wasn't. I guess Bernhard was the closest thing I could find, a firsthand victim of unbearable oppression, someone I could ask what I see now I was always askin him, even though I never once said it out loud, namely, How do you come to terms?

    The last time I saw him, I was asking that again. I was truly in a state. Upset. I was trying a lawsuit, a very confusing lawsuit. It

was confusing to me, because I saw what I see every day in a new light. Usually, I view the life of the ghettoized as a professional. I see it case by case: one crime, one rousting, this thieving client, that dishonest cop. I render what aid I can on that basis, one at a time. But being home, I somehow lost my grip on my professional perspective. I saw the larger picture again, and it was, at moments, heartrending. A terrible thing is happening here. In our midst. And I saw how hatred and desperation may yet engulf us all.