LITMIR.BIZ

      If nostalgia tinted many of my father’s memories, he was careful not to wax rhapsodic about his childhood. His father -- my grandfather -- was seldom gainfully employed.

      “He had no real trade. He kept a small candle-making business but he was too proud to work. He spent much of his time at the synagogue or immersed in his precious books -- the Torah, the Talmud, the Kabbalah -- or strolling up and down Sighet’s main artery, deep in thought and attired in fine three-piece suits bought on credit and rarely fully paid for. He also kept my mother endlessly pregnant. We were nine in a three-room house -- two adults and seven young hungry mouths to feed, seven growing bodies to clothe, seven pairs of feet constantly in need of shoes, ribbons and petticoats and combs for the girls -- Helen, Malku, Lilli -- new knickers and frocks and prayer shawls for the boys -- Yosi, Leibi, Favish and me.

      “We ate lots of potatoes; potato soup for breakfast, potato pancakes, salted or daubed with thin layers of homemade plum preserves at lunch, and we often dined on boiled potatoes, sautéed onions dressed in melted chicken fat and moldy crusts of black bread. Meat was a rare and welcome treat. I don’t remember ever feeling full at the end of a meal. It was a miserable existence.”

      Lost in inscrutable mystical abstractions, sustained by rigid Orthodox discipline and endless devotions, my father's father seemed indifferent to his family's plight. My grandmother withstood multiple pregnancies, penury and privations with a stoicism and self-effacement that often made my father weep with anger.

      “How can you take it, mama,” he asked, grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking her.

      “Shh, it’s alright, son, that’s life, you know. We must accept our lot. We’re in God’s hands. But things will be better, you’ll see,” she’d whisper. “Study hard and maybe you can leave all this behind one day.”

      It was shortly after his Bar Mitzvah that my father, in a fit of youthful rebellion, cut off his peyot, the curly ear locks that had adorned his temples since childhood, repudiated his mother’s fatalism, rejected predestination, renounced God and began to defy the nearly insurmountable obstacles of youth, indigence and anti-Semitism. It was also at that time that he decided to become a doctor, “to treat humankind’s tangible afflictions and to snatch my family from the clutches of poverty.” My father would later claim that it was not at all a question of indebtedness -- “Children don’t really owe their parents anything, they don’t ask to be born” -- but a rage against life’s Sisyphean absurdity and an acute sensitivity toward the suffering of others. Engaged and combative, incorruptible and iron-willed, he would spend the rest of his life fighting intolerance, denouncing hypocrisy, speaking for the voiceless and defending the weak. These contests would keep him in a perpetual state of frustration. He understood the futility of his principles and often voiced bitter disappointment at the shortcomings of those in whom he had placed his trust. When he died in 1987 at the age of 83, widowed for over fourteen years, he’d become a misanthropic recluse.

      *

      One day, on his way home from an errand, my father saw a high school senior set upon a small boy, pinning him against the ground, beating him about the face and pulling at his ear locks with such force that the boy shrieked in pain. Taking pleasure in the pain he caused, the bigger boy pulled harder, battering

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