“Seenas Cheenam!”, (Yiddish for senseless hatred) is the only phrase of my grandmother’s I ever heard quoted enough to remember.  Irv’s mother uttered this, in exasperation, to her sons, as the prelude to a display of rage.  She said it whenever her sons fought or quarreled.

“This is not what you should be writing today,” says the skeleton of my father, emphatically.  Today, on his hill in Cortlandt, NY, his grave is covered with two feet of snow.  He’s right, I need to get back out there and continue my digging, see if I can tunnel a path out to the feral kittens and give them a feed.  They are hunkered down somewhere under all this snow.

But I did want to make a note of this key phrase that explains so much about the living contradiction that was my father.  The once-living contradiction, I suppose, if you want to be technical.  Contradictions endure, I’ve noticed, especially in the case of a parent.   A parent is also a riddle.  Take my father’s mother Chava, for example.  

Chava’s younger son, my Uncle Paul, was a small man and by all accounts a sickly child, much doted on.   Chava’s first child, a daughter, died, either still-born or shortly after birth.  Her next child was a gigantic baby she named Israel Irving, after a terrible struggle birthing him with her tiny body.  She always called him Sonny.  Talk about seenas cheenam, I dug up some insight into that double edged, twice-cooked phrase.

I never met my grandmother Chava, she died shortly after my parents’ wedding.  There is a black and white photo of her at the wedding, old at sixty-two, wearing sun glasses to cover the eye that had been removed not long before.   My mother met her a few times during the courtship and had only a small handful of stories about her.  

The first time my father took her up to Peekskill to meet his mother my mother made the mistake of wearing red shoes.   My father’s mother took Sonny aside and told him sternly that red shoes are for shiksas (non-Jewish women).  She apparently had the same opinion about brown shoes– no Jew should wear anything but a black shoe, according to her strict view of matters.  I learned this unusual fact the first time I bought a pair of brown wingtips.

“She was a great cook,” my mother told us at dinner one night, “and I’d ask her for recipes.  She’d show me how to cook something, ‘you throw in a little handful of this, and a handful of this…’ but she had these tiny hands.  The recipes never worked for me.”  My mother held up her good sized hands.

I’ve been told Chava was barely five feet tall, red-haired, beautiful, religious and with a bad temper.  As invisible as my father’s father was to me, his mother I could easily picture, though I heard as little about her as I did about him.  What I heard made a huge impression on me, she loomed scarily in my imagination.  The most important thing I learned about her I got from my father’s first cousin, Eli, who was her beloved nephew.  I was close to forty when Eli revealed this to me.

There are a lot of details to be filled in between that last sentence and this one, but I have to get out there and try to dig my way to those freezing kittens.  They will be wanting a feed today, of all days, to help them stay warm.  

Toward the end of his life Eli gave me this gift insight, after describing his great love for Tante Chava, and how they fell in love at first sight when his father and he picked her up at the ship that brought her from what is now an undesignated spot on the outskirts of Pinsk in present-day Belarus.  The American-born Eli was a handsome boy and he described his aunt as a goregeous red-headed girl, bursting with health and joy as she came toward them.

It was Eli, perhaps a decade later, who came down to the Lower East Side in his father’s truck to transport the unfortunate little family up to Peekskill where his father could watch out for his little sister and her luckless little brood.   He told the story to me out of love, it was story he was not happy to tell, but he knew it would explain things that were otherwise incomprehensible.

“Your grandmother had a bad temper.  She had a Glieberman temper,” he paused to let me recall the many shows of red-faced rage I had seen from him and others on his side of the family over the years, “so you know what I’m talking about.  A real temper.  She used to sit at the head of the table in the kitchen and there was a drawer next to her.  She kept the cord to her steam iron in that drawer.  You remember those old, heavy cloth wrapped electrical cords?”  

I did, from when I was a boy.  They were covered with frayed burlap, a rough, sturdy cloth covering from the days before plastic was supple and insulating enough to be used for this purpose.

He then described to me how she would fly into a rage, reach into the drawer, pull out the heavy cord and whip my young father across the face with it.  

“How old was he?” I asked.  

“From the time he could stand, he was maybe a year old,” he said, with infinite sorrow and tenderness.