This essay, which won an American Jewish Press Award, originally appeared in the April 2004 Hadassah Magazine, April 2004. It is included in a collection of essays by Sandra Hurtes, On My Way To Someplace Else, that will be out next month from Poetica Publishing Company. Pre-orders may be made at OnMyWayEssays@yahoo.com. The price is $15.00 plus shipping. The book will also be available on Amazon in early November.

When I visited my father who was one week out of hip surgery, the hesitancy I inherited from him was nowhere in sight.

“Watch me, Sandy,” he called out proudly. “I’m on all fours.” He was gliding around the fourth floor of Hollywood Memorial Hospital with his walker. His nurse, standing by in starched white, softened at the sight of him. His physical therapist mirrored back the smile I’ve known my whole life, lips closed but turned slightly upward, uncharacteristically complacent, as if he were a tired old cat. My eyes watered as he headed back toward me.

“Why are you crying?” he asked, his eyes filling up too. “At the condo we call these Cadillacs.”

As I watched him take his post-surgery steps, so childlike and earnest, the fragility of his life hit me hard, although it has never been more than a whisper away. A Holocaust survivor whose parents and four brothers were gassed to death, my father’s quiet ache is my own open wound.

In my strongest childhood recollection I see him sitting bare-chested at the kitchen table in our Crown Heights apartment, the Yiddish newspaper opened on his lap, a 3″ x 5″ banana-shaped scar under his left shoulder announcing itself. The scar, the result of a bullet wound he received while serving as a paratrooper in the Czechoslovakian army, was a symbol of his quiet and solitary mourning, deeply dug into the skin, crudely healed over by flesh that looked like a third degree burn.

 When I was a child I believed my father was reading the newspaper searching for information about his youngest brother, David, whose death during the war was never documented. But when I got older I discovered my father’s search was far more inclusive. The guttural sounds echoing off the Yiddish newsprint transported him back to the world of his own childhood so that he saw in his mind’s eye: Hebrew books leaning on a bookcase made from rough planks of wood. Shabbos candles burning hotly atop the stove. His mother waving her arms over them as she prayed, a lace shawl covering her coarse black hair streaked with thin strands of gray.

In America, my father tried to recreate this world in my brother and me. But the two of us, so different we were termed night and day, were acutely united in our refusal to be Europeanized and our ambivalence about Judaism. After eight years of a yeshiva education, my brother sloughed off his Hebrew books as if shaking free of an atomic bomb. He hated being a yeshiva boy, but when he began a quest for meaning in his life it was to Israel he turned and life on a kibbutz which gave him a sense of peace he’d never before known.

My rejection was less dramatic and more internal. As a girl, I’d been allowed to attend public school. My assimilation into American culture was easier than my brother’s, and I assuaged my guilt by hating the rabbis with him. But in the back of my mind I nursed the feeling that had I been a yeshiva girl I would have filled the emptiness in my father’s heart that my brother was unable to, and I looked at boys in yarmulkes and girls in white knee socks through a strained cloth of shame and sadness.

My father’s quiet ache was louder than the myriad stories I’d heard on my mother’s knee of her own wartime experiences. She regaled me with her acts of heroism, how she saved her sisters during the line-ups, connived food from the SS, kibitzed even during the showers when the water pounded her head like needles.

After she came to America, she felt alone, save for my father, then my brother and me. We weren’t enough, and her hunger lunged through me, like a giant arm. “Don’t leave me,” she cried when I was ten, twenty, thirty. When she and my father moved to Florida, she left me. Our relationship had been punctuated by a closeness that asked much of me. When she left New York, I breathed a sigh of relief. Shortly afterwards, she left a message on my answering machine, “It’s Mommy. I had three heart attacks.”

My father’s hold on me is silent. It is in the curve of his shoulders, the slope of his eyes, the smile that asks for permission. “Simala,” he says into my answering machine, “It’s Daddy.” I hear his voice, and I become eight years old, the age at which he still believed I would remain forever like a wind-up doll — smiling, child-like, obedient. I have disappointed him gravely. I haven’t been inside a synagogue in years, date only Christian men, and have renounced marriage and motherhood altogether.

When I was a young, single woman, struggling for independence, I pushed away his palms filled with cash, the shopping bags he brought to my door filled with lamb chops and steaks from the kosher butcher. When I watched him from my window, placing the bundles back in his car, my heart broke.

One day while moving furniture around my apartment, the channel changer broke off my television. Not wanting to purchase a new TV, I discovered that I could use pliers to change channels. Every day my father called, and in a voice thick with anxiety, he asked, “You’re still using the pliers?” to which I’d respond, “I’m fine Dad, how are you?”

The pliers became a bitter tango between the two of us, until I came home one day and found him standing outside my apartment building, next to a large carton, marked Magnavox. As we rode up in the elevator, the box between us, the sweet flicker of independence I knew only in spurts, gave way and I saw the father of my childhood, a man with nothing to live for but the opportunity to fix his daughter’s life.

Broken by his inability to see that I was desperate to fend for myself, I tried to cast off his pain — my legacy. I could only do this when I didn’t see his smile — as fragile as a five-year-olds, or hear his voice which could turn to sadness in seconds. Acutely aware of the power I held over my father’s heart, I sometimes accepted the packages of food that he brought to my door without my permission. His eyes glistened with pleasure — as if his value was equal only to the weight of the packages.

“Why are you so strange?” my father asks. It’s 1988, and we’re walking up the street in Brooklyn Heights where I live. I’ve just returned from California, where I spent two weeks looking for a job. Three thousand miles felt too far from home, and I flew back on the wings of fear — a girl still trying to become a woman, searching for my rightful place, a place my father can understand. All his nieces and nephews are married and have children. They visit their parents often, accept their gifts of money and food, and give meaning and definition to their parents’ lives. I’m divorced and childless with a career as jagged as his scar.

My father has arrived at my apartment unannounced and although this upsets me, I’m unable to turn away this man whose eyes blink rapidly when he gets nervous, and who apologizes when we walk and he bumps into a tree. I live with a foot in two worlds. When my American side takes over I’m a California girl — wind tousling my hair, salt water shimmering off my skin — a surfer girl like the Beach Boys sing about. The shtetl sneaks into my world through my father’s packages. When it enters, loneliness envelops me.

Why am I so strange? I wonder, watching my father look at me as if I’m someone he met only yesterday. He takes out a stick of Wrigley’s and drops the wrapper to the ground. I’ve developed a social conscience, and it shames me that he does this. The woman’s movement and the 1980’s “have it all” credo have carried me far from my childhood lessons that I become a good Jewish wife. To my father I’m an anomaly. What he doesn’t know is that I’m an anomaly to myself as well.

Digging my hands deep into my pockets, groping for an answer that is not yet accessible, I meet his silence with my own. We’re containers of secrets my father and I. I’ve never told him of the hurt I still carry, that years before, when he discovered I loved a man who was a non-Jew, his rejection of me was total.

His anger, cutting through me like the sharp edge of a knife, sent me running from his home, believing we would never again speak. Hitler happened so many years ago, and yet he stalks us. I understand my father’s inability to contain a world where Jews and Gentiles mix blood, but can he understand my need to accept love where I find it?

Watching him now, inching up the corridor grasping onto his walker, my hips nearly cave, imagining the plastic implements, which have become part of his body. What is it like to be 83? To no longer rely on the power of the body alone to get from one side of the room to another?

I see him forty years ago, leaning into the newspaper; weakness etched into his silhouette, and I wonder — was it just a shadow of my own design? Was it his fragility I saw, or my own inability to turn back time, to undo the works of Hitler? I love my father perhaps more than I love myself, but can I ever forgive him for trying to hold on to some scrap of yesterday, when it nearly defeated my own purposes to get on with my life? He smiles, and I go weak.

When I was a young girl my father and I were infamous pals. We sat together for hours separated by a checkerboard; the television set’s hum the only sound in the room. So full in its simplicity, it was a time of grace. For each other, we were enough. Now, through the distance of time and miles, the ghosts of who we wish the other had become still shadow us. I harbor a wish for a Dad who can heal me. He longs for a daughter who can ask for help.