I entered the little Spanish-style house in the Fairfax district of LA that my dad had bought when I was six years old. It was roughly the size of a shoebox, with two small bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen, a dining nook, and a living room that Ma optimistically called a parlor. It wasn’t much compared to the riches of Hollywood that were practically at our doorstep, but Dad bought it brand-new, and by the sweat of his brow. He’d hemmed thousands of pairs of trousers just to afford the down payment. The way Ma and Dad tended the postage-stamp lawn, touched up the paint each spring, and hosed the dust off the shutters every week without fail, you’d have thought they were the head caretakers of the White House. I told Ma there weren’t wooden floors in the whole of Los Angeles that were better polished than the 967 square feet of their house. The only thing that shone brighter than they did was her smile when I paid her the compliment.
I wasn’t greeted by the usual scents of baking bread or simmering lamb stew, but by the soft sounds of my mother weeping. Dad sat next to her on the sofa, his arm wrapped around her. He was home from his shop hours early, which had never happened in my memory. He’d closed it once for a week when he fell dangerously ill with the flu, and then another week when I was born, but not since then. He prided himself on keeping the shop open from eight to five, Sunday through Friday, without fail. He did close an hour early on Fridays in winter when the sunset fell before five o’clock, so he wouldn’t miss the Sabbath, but only during the four or five weeks it was truly necessary. The only other exceptions were for High Holidays. More often than not, he opened early and stayed late to help busy clients who couldn’t schedule a fitting during his shop hours.
“What’s wrong? Is Ma sick?” I asked Dad, not bothering with a greeting. I thought better of the question, knowing she wouldn’t spend tears on her own account. “Are you sick?”
“Have a seat, bubbeleh,” Dad said, calling me the endearment from my youth no one had used since I was in grade school. “We’ve had some bad news.”
I sat in the armchair Dad usually lorded over, and Ma passed me a wrinkled letter with shaking hands. The first sheet was reasonably crisp and written in English by a woman’s hand. The second was written in Yiddish by a man and looked like it had been run over by German panzers a few times before making its way to us.
To Mr. and Mrs. Blumenthal,
I had the pleasure of meeting your cousin Hillel Blumenthal when I was serving as a nurse for the Red Cross in Riga. The extent of the atrocities committed against the Jewish people in Latvia cannot be described in words. I saw him six months ago in the Riga Ghetto, and while he was dangerously underfed, he was as well as can be expected. He begged me to send this letter to you, but I did not dare try until I returned home to Sweden. I am sorry to send you such grim news, but I hope knowing the truth can somehow give you some solace. I keep Hillel in my prayers each night, and your family as well.
Yours faithfully,
Freja Larsson
I turned to the second sheet, and while I was reasonably conversant in Yiddish, I’d had little practice in reading it. My father saw how I struggled with the language and harried penmanship and paraphrased the letter himself.
“Hillel says there was a mass execution of Jews when the Germans invaded last year. Your grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins were all rounded up. Hillel was spared because of his schooling in Moscow, he thinks. He’s been relocated to a ghetto in Riga and thinks it’s just a matter of time before the Germans decide they can do without him too. The German army kicked out the Red Cross, so they have no plans to make peace.”
I passed the letter back to Ma, whose sobs had grown louder as she heard the news spoken from my father’s lips. She had been worried about the absence of letters in the past couple of years, but the mail had never been reliable, even before the Soviets invaded in 1939. We’d heard the Germans had invaded last year, but I got the feeling my parents thought they couldn’t be any worse than the Russians. Worry was worry, and it didn’t matter which army held the bayonets.
I’d never met any of my family in Latvia, but my parents spoke of them so often, they didn’t feel like strangers. I hadn’t told my parents, but I’d planned on taking them on a trip back to the old country, once my practice was established, so they could introduce me to my extended family. They’d sacrificed those relationships for my sake before I was even conceived, and it seemed one small way to thank them for the opportunities they had given me. But now, there was nothing to go back to.
I placed the letter on the table Dad used for his evening drink when we sat together listening to the news or radio shows. I crossed the room, knelt before my parents, and took them in my arms. For the first time in my life, I saw my father dissolve into tears, and I couldn’t restrain my own.
“I wish I could make this better for you,” I said. “Roosevelt will make that bastard Hitler pay for all of this.”
“I wish my mother could have met you,” Dad said. “You look so much like your grandfather, may he rest in peace, that she’d think she was looking back in time. I wish you’d known what it was like to have big family dinners for the Sabbath. To have a house full of cousins for Passover.”
“And so I did. The Katzes, the Greens, the Hirschels . . . they may not have been blood relatives, but it’s family all the same. You’ve given me an amazing life.”
“And you still want to fight, don’t you, bubbeleh?” my mother finally managed to ask, mastering her voice for a few moments.
“I do,” I admitted. “Now more than ever.”
“Then go,” Ma said, cupping my face in her hands. “Go over and make those mamzerim pay for what they’ve done.”
CHAPTER THREE
CRUMBLING BOXES
BETH
April 26, 2007
Encinitas, California
I stood in front of Dad’s door and paused before knocking, hoping I could dislodge the wayward breath wedged sideways in my chest. For all the times I lamented him not being in the living room and visiting with the other residents, this was one time I was glad he’d retreated to his room. It gave me a few more seconds to collect myself. The breath finally escaped, painfully, and I rapped my knuckles on the door in my familiar pattern—hard, soft, hard, soft.
“Back again, Bethie?” Dad said, opening the door to his room, the perfume of the plumerias and orchids hitting my nose like a tidal wave.
“What can I say? Rush-hour traffic is my guilty pleasure,” I said, bending slightly to give him a kiss on the cheek as he stooped over his walker.
“Nothing like the smell of fresh exhaust to invigorate the spirit,” Dad agreed solemnly. “Come on in and take a seat.”
I noticed the new clipping looked more verdant than it had a couple of days before. Even at ninety he had the gift of making things grow under his care. I grabbed my seltzer and took my spot at his little table. Just across from him, like at the dinner table when I was little. Back then, I chose to sit across from him rather than next to him, to make chatting easier. I couldn’t remember a time that he and I were ever at a loss for words with each other. His room wasn’t overly large, but he still had four chairs, though it was rare that the third was occupied, and the fourth never would be. I just didn’t think Dad could bear not leaving room for her, no matter where she was.