A Paler Shade of Red: Memoirs of a Radical. W. E. Gutman
grief and misery are tolerated, if not subconsciously foretold, precisely because they herald purification and redemption and are encoded by God himself. God has decreed that Jews may not defy their own destiny by repudiating Moses’ legacy without unleashing upon themselves the fires of hell. This is why Jews, to this day, live in a state of controlled anxiety -- the Diaspora’s assimilated ones subliminally, the new Canaanites with a sense of urgency and fatalism.
Some believe they can circumvent fate by calling it coincidence.
“When will it ever end?” I can hear my great-great-grandfather Abraham asking rhetorically, readjusting his prayer shawl around his shoulders, his bright blue eyes fixed heavenward, his right fist hammering softly the left side of his chest, unaware that his grandson, his wife and several of their children would perish and become mere statistics in the nihilistic calculus of the Final Solution. No one has the heart to tell him. Or maybe he forgot. This form of self-induced amnesia spares men the trauma of storing up too much knowledge which, everyone knows, can render them mad. Everyone at the table looks quizzically at each other for a moment then continues to eat.
“Never,” I reply, breaking several generations of leaden silence. “We’re the Chosen People.” My father, who catches the bitter irony of my words, smiles and pours himself another jigger of Tsuica. My mother looks at me, a grown man, as she always had, like a hen admiring her newly hatched chick. It’s a look that had caused me great embarrassment as a boy but whose reassuring tenderness I would miss when she died, still young, of pancreatic cancer.
“Everything is convention,” she had sighed, “except pain.”
*
In “All Rivers Run to the Sea,” Elie Wiesel, a distant relative, wrote:
“Why is it that my town [Sighet] still enchants me so? Is it because in my memory it is entangled with my childhood? In all my novels it serves as background and vantage point. In my fantasy I still see myself in it.”
From all accounts, my father, also a native of Sighet, neither felt enchantment for his town, nor saw himself in it, in fantasy or otherwise. Sighet was the embodiment of a niggardly heredity, a childhood filled with misery and privation, an adolescence overflowing with unattainable dreams long surrendered by his own forefathers.
A shattered dream is like a broken vase; you can cement the pieces but you can never hide the fracture lines.
LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON
My great-great-grandfather, Abraham Gutman, was also born in Sighet, a small town in northern Transylvania, not far from the Hungarian border. His grandfather may have migrated from Poland or the Ukraine. Abraham's son Fabian, my father’s grandfather, lost his mother when he was just a child. Thirty days after his wife's death, having complied with tradition by engaging in histrionic displays of mourning, lamentations, breast-beatings and tearful one-way dialogues with God, Abraham remarried. His new spouse, Rivka, a pretty, young orphan he’d been screwing when his wife wasn’t looking, produced three children. Fabian was just a teen when he was apprenticed to a soap and candle factory many kilometers from home. He carried bitter memories of his childhood well into adulthood and once told my father, tears streaming from his eyes, of the indignities he suffered at the hands of his father’s new wife. When he went home for brief visits he would be fed leftovers and forced to sleep in the attic in the stifling heat of summer or on bitter winter nights. His stepmother made him do degrading chores and took pleasure in humiliating him in front of her own children.
“Like his Biblical namesake, my father Abraham,” Fabian claimed until the day he died of a heart attack in the arms of his mistress, “gave in to his wife’s frivolity and meanness. He never intervened. I was not cast out into the desert, like Ishmael; I was abandoned in a barren field of desolation where love and tenderness did not grow.”
Calumny or cry from the heart? The truth would turn out to be more sinister.
Memory may have holes, be short, sometimes even blocked. In the end it is always deformed.
*
Conscious of his heritage, painfully chained to his lot, my father would neither seek nor find comfort in the very device that gave Jews their identity, favored their survival -- religion. As a child he complied with its elaborate rituals and conformed to its stringent mandates, brutishly and without reaping the slightest spiritual gratification.
"I waited for the high holy days, not as re-affirmations of the Jewish ideal but in anticipation of a better meal.”
Like other Jewish children, he’d worn peyes and attended Cheder, the elementary Hebrew school where he was taught to read the Pentateuch and other sacred works -- a formality to which he submitted without eagerness or fervor out of filial piety, along with a hundred other daily conventions and obligations.
“Impoverished parents show love by providing food and clothing. Caresses, kisses and embraces are in very short supply, dispensed on rare occasions and with extreme parsimony. Impoverished children redeem themselves by obeying their parents and submitting to their lot with cheerful self-effacement. Suffering dilutes a child’s capacity to love. I did what I was told to do. We all did. Conformity and measured indifference, I learned, will get a child through anything: boredom, endless chores, long hours of rote study, not enough sleep, even the nagging urge to turn tail and run as far as your legs will take you.”
“Did you ever run away,” I asked.
Absconding would have been out of character for my father, an inconceivable act of betrayal against his parents and siblings. They needed each other “the way parasites need their host.” Each fed on an enormous well of collective emotion when his or her own was depleted. It was his family’s sole defense against the vast and incomprehensible universe that stretched beyond the walls of their little town.
“No,” he sighed. “But I thought about it with nagging frequency. I dreamed of places I’d only read about. Late at night, in the glow of a small kerosene lamp, I thumbed through picture books, fascinated, lusting for the wonders that unfolded with every page: Budapest, Vienna, Rome, Paris, New York. I longed to be delivered from the stifling sameness of my life. I would eventually earn my independence by getting an education. It was one hell of a long shortcut to nowhere.”
“What do you mean by ‘nowhere’?”
My father looked away.
“It’s hard to explain. I don’t know if you’d understand.”
I understood perhaps better than he could ever imagine, with a keenness and sensitivity only heredity, empathy and similarity of circumstance can inspire. Like father, like son. I too had taken shortcuts. Some led straight to a precipice. Unlike my father, I’d defied reason and sidestepped convention, veering away from a course I knew I was not qualified to navigate. Fearing failure, I’d circumvented well-trodden lanes and cut my own footpaths. (I often boasted that I thrived on adventure when, in fact, it was a fear of commitment or a lack of faith in the constancy of my own objectives that catapulted me from one castle-building venture to another). Insufficiently schooled, ill-suited for commerce, undisciplined and ferociously eclectic, I would drift into journalism less by conscious choice than a happy confluence of wishful thinking and naiveté, youthful immodesty and self-created opportunities. Necessity, in my case, was the mother of invention. I enjoyed writing -- no, I liked to test the limits of forbearance, to indict, to bait. I was seduced by controversy, polemics, and I would invent myself bit by bit: part-chronicler, part agitator. The pleasure I derived from telling inconvenient truths surpassed any possible urge to inform or enlighten. I treated facts as props, words as projectiles; I relied on the mood they’re apt to convey. I am and have always been a good visualizer and words evoke strong images. I used surreal colors. I savored the vibes they were meant to provoke. It was the disquiet or indignation that my essays might elicit that found me pen in hand. I cared little for the Fourth Estate or the public it serves. I had one objective: to cause unease and discomfiture, to unnerve, to remind the gullible and the smug that the emperor was still