To my father

By Yael Lavie

Dedicated to my father, who was born in March 1927 and passed away in June 2004

I DON’T THINK I EVER REALLY FORGAVE MY MOTHER

“Finally!!” my sister nearly shrieked when my father said that.  Noni was walking around for months in between hospitals, ICUs, recovery halls and several of my father’s comas lamenting how he must forgive his mother if he is to achieve any level of inner peace.

My father smiled slowly while she continued her mantra

“See she left you with this big hole, a big dark hole and it is ok to admit it, you need to come to terms with it” she lectured on. Noni loves to lecture. She does it for a living at Tel Aviv University. She is wonderful at it with her students, not so much with our family I sometimes think. But my father adored being lectured to by her. Always proud to be put in place by his daughter regardless if he practiced her advice or not.

“Come to terms with what?!” asked my mother, who entered the conversation breathless after her morning routine hospital round. “The futility routine”, as I used to call it, included telling the nurses what to do for dad, how to make him feel comfortable, advising the doctors (who stopped humoring her long ago), just how to save his life and asking them repeatedly to relay last night’s events to her – those eight hours we were away from him because they essentially kicked us out somewhere around midnight each day.

“Come to terms with what?!” exclaimed my mother again. She had a tendency of exclaiming everything she said during our hospital days with dad, as if her punctuated sentences would make them come true – “You need to eat this!”, “You will live!” “He needs more blankets!” The nurses hated her and us but four hospitals in, none of us really cared.

“Edith” my father mumbled matter-of-factly, as he always did when he spoke of his mother. He was slouched on the visitors couch in his hospital gown. Clutching the cane they gave him so he could stand up, possibly walk, preferably not fall. Mom sighed and sat, giving my sister the evil eye who rebutted with her academic hand gesture of “It’s about time!”

My father turned and looked out the window – it was May and the Israeli summer was creeping in like a noisy army brigade; with lots of light and humidity foreshadowing the unbearable months ahead. “There is going to be a heat wave” he whispered with a smile, revealing the trademark gap between his 2 front teeth…

My father was born on a dark and cold March morning in Leipzig Germany, 1927. There was very little light to greet him. No one was terribly excited or exclaimed a sentence out loud. He simply arrived, a mistake of sorts; a mistake of an 18 year old Jewish Romanian girl who was living with her aunt and uncle in Leipzig.

Edith Hauben was sent to Germany with her brother Robert to make a better living. Romania was of little opportunity for them which is why the distant relatives in Germany agreed to take the two of them on, more with a reluctant sense of family “duty” rather than enthusiasm.

Edith liked Germany much better than the village in Romania. No more milk carrying from the village square to her mothers dilapidated house. None of her mother’s mood swings lamenting the disappearance of her father who eleven years earlier left for America with a promise to bring them all along soon, soon. Never to be heard of again.

No, Germany was much better. Leipzig was exciting. There were book fairs and young men who came for the book fairs and slightly older men who came with the young men for those book fairs. All of them dressed beautifully with a distinctive sense of urgency about them. The annual book fair drew the world. Uncle Moshe always told Edith the publishing houses of Leipzig were the envy of Europe. Leipzig the capital of Saxony and such a liberal hub, every writer wanted his turn at the big publishing houses during the book fair month of June he explained. ‘They come from all over; they even come from London to learn from us because we do it efficiently. Every writer knows that a Leipzig publishing house won’t just take any garbage Edith, they know we only pick the best, that is why they come, we set the literary tone for Europe’ Uncle Moshe always said, beaming with pride as if it was his own achievement; as if he did not just own a general housing store in the 9th Grunderzeit industrial area of town, but instead was a great Leiptziger publisher himself.

Edith did not really understand what a publishing house meant, nor did she care much. The book fair month of June brought in all these young men and they loved looking at her.

She was a small girl. A sign of the sizes of our future family members. Small people with big voices, big dreams, big talents and very big neuroses. She wasn’t pretty or beautiful in a conventional way rather different and intriguing. A boyish figure with sensual body gestures she perfected early on. In fact the little my father remembered of her was the sensual way she carried herself around. He said there was something sensual in almost everything she did, including beating him on the head with the wooden part of a knife when he was four, while they were both living in a tiny dingy room in Marseille by the bay. Not that he knew much about her, he barely did. She shipped him back off to Germany when he was 6 years old. Black and white photos she sent him through the years show a little woman with bright grey eyes, dark blond hair and a sad gaze that with time turned a little proud, more bitter but mostly remained sad.

My Grandfather was a young Lithuanian writer. He arrived in Leipzig during the summer of 1926.  A striking man with a wild curly-ginger head of hair, piercing green eyes and a big smile that always stood out given a slight gap between his upper front teeth, making his laugh a bit mischievous.

But his most prized characteristic was his unshakeable belief in himself. He regarded himself an amazing literary talent, the one Leipzig’s publishing houses had been waiting for. Already having written 2 novels by the time he was 16, which he decided not to publish, a decision he believed came from his strong understanding at the time that his best work, the one to launch him into the published literary world is yet to come.

His third novel was the one he picked to debut his genius. It was a 534-page tale about two eccentric scientists who set out to try and measure the world, literally. One is a free spirit trotting the globe, climbing mountains, crossing rivers with an Indiana-Jones-like enthusiasm. The other scientist character was a garden variety recluse, who lives mostly between the pages of his mathematical calculations and rarely leaves the house. They meet in a convention at the end of the eighteenth century and somehow click, forging a pact to measure the world. Their contradicting personalities weren’t surprising as they represented the two sides of my grandfather’s personality. The one that wants to swallow the world and knows he can digest it. The other, the one well hidden, the one that in those rare moments questions his ‘incredible’ talent, late at night lying shivering and naked under the covers after not having left the house for nearly three days as he failed to see the point of living. Questioning it all, almost hoping he was dead, almost but not quite, not just yet.

When my grandfather arrived in Leipzig, he knew he had a best seller under his hands. The idea of two oddballs setting out to measure the world, literally, was a good premise – that much he knew. But his book was funny as hell to boot, with cameos of Thomas Jefferson (Grandpa was fascinated and obsessed with America or anything to do with the new world) and one very senile Emanuel Kant. “I am surprised at just how talented I truly am” he said to himself as he got off the train in Leipzig’s central train station.

He met young Edith Hauben in the coffee shop she worked in on Kurfusterdam Strasse. Filled with so much excitement he made her laugh when he ordered his coffee from her singing it out loud. The other coffee house visitors were baffled but soon he had carried them all in a roaring impromptu sing-along; ‘Young beauty bring me an espresso…. short …like you my dear…and as strrrrrrooooonnnnng’. Edith was overjoyed. She loved being the center of attention and this young ginger haired man, who did not know her, made the entire coffee house cheer her as she felt she deserved to be cheered. She did not yet know what she deserved to be cheered for but she was convinced there must be something. Clearly this young man recognized it.

When her shift ended he invited her to join him for a small glass of plum schnapps. It turned into three glasses and ended in his tiny guesthouse bedroom around 2 AM that evening. My grandfather told Edith she is most definitely the inspiration for his next novel and promised to make her 17 years of life far more interesting in it than they really were. That made her very happy over breakfast coffee the next morning in a little cafe across from ThomasKirche, where they had toast and ham. Edith never had ham before and thought the Jewish restrictions her aunt and uncle imposed on her were even crueler than she imagined.

My grandfather told Edith that ThomasKirche was the famous church where Johann Sebastian Bach worked as a cantor in his youth. She was fascinated by his knowledge and even though she had no idea who Johann Sebastian Bach was she nodded in appreciation, intent on seeming as worldly as my grandfather. She said she loved ‘Bechs’ early books. My grandfather smiled and paid the bill. Kissing her passionately, he told her to meet him the same evening, after his publishing house meeting, in the cafe they met in the night before. When left and Edith thought; ‘This is how I should be kissed’.

The same evening, as she waited for my grandfather to come meet her, she learned that drinking Plum Schnapps on her own definitely helps when someone lies to you. Nine months later she gave birth to my father. A quick child birth that excited no one and was at the center of no one’s attention.

As for ‘How to measure the world’ it was published and became a huge success but not that of my grandfather because he never wrote it. It was written in and around 2007 by an up-and-coming German writer called Daniel Kehlman. Kehlman has nothing to do with me or my father who died 3 years before ‘How to Measure the world’ came out. It is a fabulous tale, I recommend you read it. Edith is real, Leipzig is real and Johann Sebastian Bach did moonlight as a cantor in its church. But granddad was no writer. Nor was he a student in Leipzig’s university or ginger or talented or Jewish or anything. He may have had a gap between his two front teeth because my father did. A small gap that always made his big smile seem a little mischievous.

As it were only Edith knew who my grandfather was and she seemingly told very few people neither of which were my father. All of who were long gone and dead by the time he wanted to ask someone who knew, who his father was.