My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents Jonathan Silin (pocket ebook reader .txt) 📖

communities that once existed in the today’s fragmented neighborhoods. Both projects demand that I bear witness to the suffering of others and that I be absolutely pitiless with myself.

I try not to give in to hopelessness. I resist the rescue fantasy that seduces me into believing that I can prevent my parents from further pain, even death, and that the educational reforms we propose will change the life prospects of the children in our project’s classrooms. I replace the lure of rescue with the reality of living alongside another.

And I struggle to make sense of what is happening within me and those I write about, between my life as caregiver and my life as researcher. For I have come to believe that it is in these awkward spaces and unexpected relationships that I may just find a story that hasn’t been told before.

6

Unspoken Subjects

Once home was a far away place, I had never been to but knew well out of my mother’s mouth.

She breathed exuded hummed the fruit smell

of Noel’s Hill morning fresh and noon hot, and I spun visions of sapadilla and mango as a net over my Harlem tenement cot in the snoring

darkness rank with nightmare sweat.

au d r e l o r d e , Zami: A New Spelling of My Name When I was growing up, my parents did not speak longingly of another time and place. There was no mythology to master and little poetry to imbibe. As Jews of Eastern European descent, we were heirs to a tradition that more often reminded me of dark, cramped shtetl rooms with hard wooden benches for Talmudic study than lush, sun-filled days in tropical settings. We lived in a permanent Diaspora, yet I never really believed myself to be in exile or that my parents wished to be elsewhere. Of course there was always the ritual singing at the close of the Passover Seder—“Next year in Jerusalem!”—signaling that our true home was only to be found in Israel. My primary sense of connection was to an overbearing intellectual heritage, peppered on 91

92 n jonathan g. silin

occasion with the domestic humor of Yidishkayt, not to a rich spiritual life or one that promised sensuous pleasures of the body.

I will never know if the fact that my grandmothers were sisters had anything to do with it. But they both married men who were serious scholars, active in the Jewish community, and successful in the “dry goods” business. They personified a certain time period, a wave of Jewish immigrants who placed an exceedingly high value on learning for themselves and for their children. I can’t imagine that my grandparents were disappointed in the large number of Ivy League diplomas and advanced degrees amassed by their offspring during the 1920s and 1930s, who in turn sustained similar ideas about the value of education.

Needless to say, when I dropped out of Harvard in the early 1960s and was in serious doubt about my own commitment to scholarship, my parents were deeply troubled. This was the time, when I was on the cusp of adulthood, that my father spoke most vividly about his own father. The talks were infused with the significance of intellectual projects for Jews who lived a transient existence, subject to dev-astating pogroms, and always at risk for imminent exile. Perhaps too recent and too overwhelming, the Holocaust itself was never mentioned. I was reassured that the life of the mind could not be con-fiscated and would travel well if necessary. Underpinning this history lesson, but mostly unspoken, was the middle-class assumption that degrees in the pocket—postgraduate work a necessity—had the power to provide financial security and social status.

Despite my father’s reluctantly offered lectures on anti-Semitism during these years, and the emphasis on expressing feelings and fears in my younger days, like most of my peers, I grew up in a household filled with silences. Later, as a young adult, I was determined to break through these silences, writing a master’s essay on the place of death education in the classroom. Then, as a gay man and HIV/AIDS educator during the 1980s, I became an advocate for socially relevant curriculum for even the youngest children. With these consuming m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 93

passions, I fell prey to a particular form of amnesia about the secrets that framed my childhood.

Then one chilly fall night in 1999, on my way home from my parents’ apartment, I found myself on the northeast corner of Eighty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue and noticed that a work shed had grown up around the ornate limestone and red-brick mansion that had long stood on the southeast corner. Seeing the shed, I recalled a short article in the New York Times announcing that the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the building’s last occupant, was moving to a modern facility in Chelsea where it would join forces with another archive of Jewish history. It was a time of cultural mergers as well as corporate takeovers. Drained by my efforts to shore up my parents’

own sagging prospects, I saw that the massive metal and glass front doors of the once grand but always graceless building were boarded over with plywood, a harsh fluorescent bulb was giving off an eerie light on the first floor, and the tall French windows on the second floor had been carelessly left open.

A preservationist with a deep longing for the city of the 1940s in which I grew up, distressed by the disappearance of familiar structures, even those of no particular architectural value, I viewed the gutting of the former YIVO Institute with a mixture of dread and relief. For while it reminded me of a disquieting childhood visit to this former repository of Jewish memory, it also suggested the possibility of deconstructing that visit, which has haunted my adult life.

It is 1954. I am ten years old, and unlike many