Bills to Pay

My grandfather emigrated from Russia to the U.S.A. at the turn of the 20th Century, when he was 18 years old.

My grandfather was a Jew, and with pogroms being a fact of life, Russia was not a good place to be Jewish.  So my grandfather and his older brother took advantage of the first opportunity to leave, though it surely hurt to leave the entire family behind.

My grandfather came from a learned family and already spoke five languages. (With English, it would be six.) His plan was to study to become a doctor, like his older brother. But once in the Promised Land, the dream became unreachable. First my grandfather would have to learn English and find work — any work, in order to survive.  He never found the money or the time to study medicine. Instead, he ended up selling shoes and marrying my grandmother, also a Russian Jew.

They had three boys and a girl. My father was the youngest. Dorothy, the oldest, died at the age of ten from polio. My grandmother was never the same again. She forbade my father from going into public places, for fear of losing another child to this cruel and insidious plague. She was terrified of the circus, the park, department stores.

During all this time, my grandfather and his brother were the only ones in their family who ever got out of Russia. I’m not sure if the others didn’t want to leave or if they tried and failed. What I do know is that my grandfather kept in contact with them through letters. He did not have a telephone and he awaited the letters from Russia with anxiety and probably a bit of guilt as well.

In the early 1940s, during World War II, the letters from Russia suddenly stopped coming. My grandfather wrote to other family members, asking what was going on. There was no response. He wrote to others from the village. No answer.

Worried, my grandfather contacted the Red Cross and asked for help.

After a while, the Red Cross gave him an answer. They had investigated and discovered that, in the summer of 1941, the Nazis invaded my grandfather’s village, named Vitebsk. They murdered all the Jews, threw the corpses into the river, and burned everything to the ground.

The great Jewish painter Marc Chagall came from Vitebsk. Before the Nazis invaded, there had been 50,000 Jews living in Vitebsk. Now there were none.

My father was only two years old when this happened, and my grandfather never spoke to him about what had happened to his family, nor of his childhood in Russia.  He hardly spoke, period. He simply kept working in his shoe store and providing for his family.

My father’s memories of his father aren’t very happy ones. It was like living with a boss that you hardly know: a rigid, bitter man.

My grandfather never told my father that he loved him. He hardly ever smiled or laughed. He went to work, came home tired and irritable, and my father tried not to cross his path if he could help it.

I remember a story that my father liked to tell me: that his father never once gave him a birthday present. Then, on my father’s 18th birthday, my grandfather appeared with an envelope in his hand. “Today you’re 18,” he said. “Take it.”

My father was shocked. Was this really happening? Could it be that his father, for the first time, was about to reveal a bit of humanity?

“Now that you’re an adult, you can start to contribute. Take it,” my grandfather repeated. “Your first bill.”

While my father lived under his father’s roof, strange noises would sometimes awaken him at night. The sounds came from the opposite end of the house, from the kitchen. In the darkness, my father could hear his father, seated at the kitchen table, weeping.