KADDISHEL
A Life Reborn
father’s friend Ezra, from Haifa, would live with us for weeks at a time as he learned about America. In fact, when he eventually moved his family to the United States, they lived only two blocks from us for the first few years. Other differences were more profound. I learned that there were two kinds of people in the world: Jews and goyim (non-Jews). There were good and bad Jews and good and bad goyim. Bad goy- im, the Nazis and Ukrainians, had murdered my father’s family and had almost killed him, leaving him with severely frostbitten feet. Good goyim had helped my father stay alive by bringing him milk to drink when he was abandoned to his fate because some bad Jews would not risk taking a crippled child along with them. My father’s personal experience, as well as the holidays of Purim and Passover, taught me that bad non-Jews repeatedly set out to murder Jews on a collective basis. Their most recent attempt to annihilate Jews had almost been successful and had created ma- jor gaps in our family. My father’s parents and his two sisters were murdered for no other reason than that they were Jews. While other kids read about the Holocaust and understood it in an interested but emotionally detached manner, for me it was very real in the most visceral sense; I saw the damage to my father’s feet, and was haunted by old photographs. In his desk, my father kept a worn gray leather billfold filled with those old photographs of people I never knew. Every so often, he would show me these black and white photos and tell me about the people in them. They were, for me, ghosts of a life and world beyond my grasp and comprehension. My father also had (and still has) a large rifle, a British Enfield 303, and a large jar of bullets. I remember the rifle from the time I was as tall as it was. My father told me that he had sworn to himself that he would always have a gun to protect his family, and if anyone came to hurt us, he would make sure that they would die before we would be taken away. He encouraged me to handle the rifle. His father had not had a rifle, he said; Jews always needed to have guns. Today I own both a rifle and a shotgun.
10
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online