Here's something I scribbled on 12/26/04.
I don’t know where to begin. I do realize that it’s a rather hackneyed way to start a topic, but in fact I’m afraid, confused and feeling just ignorant, inadequate and unworthy. There are plenty of opportunities for my ego to soar – when I master my visual craft, when my daughter looks groggily toward me and says “abba, I happy.” The smooth experiences are overwhelming gifts for which I have no explanation and no way to repay. I sense some balance at these moments, as if all the hard work and the tears and the arguments and doubts have somehow culminated in a massive win. And also it’s that whole tincture of goodness, which I’ve spoken about before. That notion of the negativity in the world, with its overwhelming ability to strike fear and paralysis into me; and then as if an elixir of magical intensity, born of absolute redemption, like a droplet of amniotic fluid, breaks through reminding me that the sun shines. It’s the same feeling I have when listening to Bob Dylan’s “The Hour When The Ship Comes In.” You know he really had this ability to sound like biblical verse, and I want to weep when I hear him, just in the same wavering quiveriness that my father’s voice took this evening when he paraphrased the book of Ruth as we drove down Los Feliz Boulevard.
This is what it is. I told my father this evening, during his many refrains about the death of Jewry, and not just Polish Jewry, but the actual death of The Jew, in the gas chambers (I’m so fucking sick of the gas) – what I told him, what I thought he wanted to heare, is that he’s the last Jew left on earth. And for him it’s true, and I think that even though it’s grotesque to say that, it’s true for him. You know? I mean he’s the last surviving member of the Singer clan, that is other than his cousin in New York, and he’s so pissed off at her for whatever reason. He just goes on and on about what the Nazis destroyed. And I get so raging angry with him. He’ll stand there in Walgreen’s at the photo counter, exasperated and disgusted with Jews and Judaism and the liturgy, all swirled like a caustic soup and it splashes out at the frum (religious) Jews standing, waiting for their photos. These tall guys with dark beards and tzitzis hanging down their hips and my father’s squealing a foot away that there are no Jews left. And he rants on, how it’s preposterous; the centrality of the exodus from Egypt in our prayers. He wants the narrative of destruction, the annihilation of Polish and Lithuanian Jews to replace the “going out from Egypt.” And he’s disgusted with young Jews who for him know nothing, blindly and happily chanting “you’ve chosen us from among the other nations and lifted us above them . . . “ And I feel like I should summon the peace to let him know that I feel the truth in those words of prayer; that I identify with the notion of holiness brought to people by the commission of commandments, and most of all I want to tell him, to somehow prove to him that he’s wrong. But how can I tell him he’s wrong? He thinks that Moses was killed by the people after the Korach rebellion. He thinks that the corruption in Jewish history is so deep and pervasive, that he contradicts his own idealized view of his fellow Jews in Tomaszow prior to the Shoah. He thinks that Hitler was successful.
He asks where is his "goral" which sort of loosely translated means fate, and my mom tells him to turn around and to look in the back seat, and I say yeah your goral is snoring in the backseat, referring to our little girl snoring with abandon just like my dad, strapped in her car seat.
