Camp Tel Yehuda, the national camp for Young Judaea, the Zionist youth group my father had long worked for as his second job, was located by the Delaware River in Barryville, New York.   Who Barry was nobody knew, or even where exactly the town of Barryville was in the late 1960s and early 70s.  

There was a German restaurant called Reber’s, a mile of two from the camp, in what we thought of as downtown Barryville, if there had been anything else downtown with it.   Across a little metal bridge from Reber’s was Shohola, Pennsylvania.  Shohola had a little general store and possibly also a post office.   There was probably also a post office in Barryville, beyond Reber’s, and maybe even a store of some kind.  But if you needed some little item from a store, you went to Reber’s, hung a left and clanked over the Delaware to Pennsylvania.    

We were told that Barryville had once been an epicenter for the German-American Bund.   The Bund was an organization for Americans of German ancestry, a group that comprised more than a quarter of the white American population during World War Two.  The Bund made its voice heard in large public demonstrations when people, particularly Jews, began defaming Time Magazine’s Man of The Year for 1938.  By 1938 Mr. Hitler was very controversial, and taking a lot of shit for things he was doing to make Germany great again.    Hitler, for his part, originally had expected that America, with its large, proud Aryan population, and its many Anglo-Saxons, who were almost Aryans, would join Germany in helping end the menace of world Jewry.

Some of the locals who worked at Camp Tel Yehuda displayed an attitude that seemed a bit more what you’d expect in Mississippi than a few hours from Jew York City.  While I never directly saw anti-Semitism from any of them, one or two skated close to the line as they did their jobs in the Jewish camp.  Stories were told in camp of the local Klan types who drove the dark roads in the heavily wooded area, hunting deer, drinking, hating Jews.   Thankfully, I never had any encounters with these types.  

My parents spent quite a few summers at the camp, my father as the director, my mother as the registrar.   I attended a few sessions there as a camper, made a few lifelong friends, learned rudimentary Hebrew and eventually, since many of my good friends were going and I had little interest in college at the time, flew off for a year in Israel after High School.  At the very least, I figured, I’d come home bilingual.

When I returned from the year in Israel, speaking Hebrew to a lying, criminal Israeli cabbie named Sarfati who drove me back from JFK, it was summer and my parents were up at camp.   I got a chance to betray and enrage them almost as soon as I touched down, but that is a story for another time.   I went up to Barryville not long after I got back and my parents and aunt and uncle took me out to a restaurant several miles from Barryville where this memorable vignette unfolded.

The little town may have been Pond Eddy, I don’t recall, I’m too lazy to look at a map, and what difference does it make anyway?  It was a restaurant with a salad bar.   We sat at the table, my parents and I, along with my aunt and uncle.  My sister may have been there or she may have been a camper at T.Y.  that session.  I don’t recall any other customers eating there while we had an early dinner.  It was full daylight outside, I remember that.

I was at that time skinny as a Whippet.  I was a skinny teenager, but also, had just completed a month-long intensive course of dysentery during the end of my time in Israel.   It was hubris that brought about my weeks unable to keep any food in my body.  I had eaten all the things we were warned not to eat, the fly speckled shish kebab in the Old City, fresh berries that flies also loved, other delicious but allegedly dangerous foods.  By the late spring, after several others had been afflicted with stomach troubles,  I foolishly thought myself immune.  Turned out I was not. This became clear when  I woke suddenly in the middle of the night, stomach full of daggers, running down the hall, hunched over, barely making it.

I’d been better for a few weeks by the time I got back and my appetite was in full effect.  I finished my salad and went up to the salad bar to get some more salad.  The short, stout maitre de smiled at me.   She was nursing a drink and she may even have winked at me.  Then my mother got up to get some more salad.   My mother was quite heavy at the time, as she had been for most of my childhood.   She could have by then been considered obese, I suppose.   It was not until after her beloved husband died, and what she called The Widow’s Diet, that she lost the weight she’d been unable to for many decades. 

When my mother reached the salad bar the maitre de turned mean.  “Haven’t you had enough?” she snapped, as my mother was about to put some pickled beets on her plate.   My mother recoiled as if she’d been slapped and she fought to hold back tears.   Suddenly all this Nazi stuff I’d heard about the area was palpable.  I remember thinking “what the fuck?”  and having no doubt this snippy maitre de was an anti-Semite.   I looked at my father across the table from me, his lips were pressed together and he sat perfectly still.  

My uncle jumped up at once, like an angry rooster, and went straight over to the maitre de.   “That was a very disrespectful thing to do!  You owe my sister-in-law  an apology.  If you weren’t a woman … I’d take you outside and teach you how to treat your customers!” he snarled, not sparing a bit of sprayed saliva.   The maitre de stood her ground, smug, clearly not cowed by this empty threat from a slight, middle-aged Jew.  

There was eventually a muttered, almost convincing apology to my mother from the maitre de, but the meal was pretty well ruined.   We stayed, and ate there, I’m not sure why, thinking back on it.   I remember clearly my father’s silence, and it bothered me that it took my uncle to stand up and take my mother’s part.  My father later explained that the bitchy maitre de had been drunk, if not also a little crazy, and, yes, probably an anti-Semite.

The only other thing I recall is the tipsy maitre de, in an attempt to, as my grandmother Yetta would have phrased it, “make nice”, coming up behind me and putting her hand on my shoulder.   She asked me sweetly if I was enjoying my food.  I answered by roughly shrugging her hand off my shoulder.  She took the hint and backed discreetly away, the ice cubes in her glass gently clinking as she went.

When my mother finally died the long death she never wanted to talk about, I had a moment.  Alone in her apartment the night after she died, I walked into the little dressing closet to the side of her bedroom, looking around at her things.  

There was the shelf of photo albums she’d assembled, sitting high on one wall.  There was a shelf with other books in there.   Her robes and house dresses hung on a rod on the opposite wall.   The tiny room smelled of the powder she dusted herself with, it smelled like her.   I stood there suddenly unable to take my next breath.

I never had a moment like that in connection with my father’s death.   On the drive back to the hospital in the early morning hours of that last night of his life, I felt my throat close up slightly as I waited for a light to change near the hospital.  I felt close to tears.  The feeling passed quickly and was replaced by the feeling that I had a duty to do and needed to be calm and centered to do it.

It makes sense, though, the difference in the intensity of the pain I felt. I was much closer with my mother than I’d been with my father.   My father had never told me how much my first cousin Ann smelled like me, as my mother had.   My father and I were not aware of each other’s smells, except for the bad ones.  

I was always surprised whenever I noticed the color of my father’s eyes, which I noted for the last time before I closed them forever. They were the color of a cold northern sea, somewhere between green and grey.  Or they were a pale hazel color, close to the color of the bullrushes of a salt marsh as the cool weather descends.  It was hard to tell, since the eyes were rarely shown directly to anyone, were apt to shift away at times you might have otherwise noticed their color and they were always displayed behind the thick glasses that corrected his 20-400 vision.

I can remember my mother’s eyes very well, they were dark like mine and my sister’s. I remember her many facial expressions.  I remember the way she smelled, even now.  I think of my father’s eyes, and their elusive color, and I recall the thought that drifted away as I fell asleep last night.  It was about the difficulty of ever truly putting yourself in another person’s place.  

I had entered my father’s death chamber in the way I’d learned was right: like I was entering a holy place, a temple.  In the opening of How We Die, the author, Eli’s first cousin on his mother’s side, mentioned this, and the feeling of reverence one should have approaching a person close to death.  The time and place were all about my father leaving this world, and, whatever my issues, I was on hand to help him however I could.  

We were both aware that he was dying, though neither of us knew the exact moment, but the clock was ticking loudly and his voice was getting weaker and weaker.  He had waited up for me, hoping I’d arrive for this last conversation.   He’d told me earlier the day before that he wanted to talk to me, that he was still gathering his thoughts.   This was the time for that talk.

At one point, underscoring some difficult thing he was trying to express, he said that he’d never expected to find himself here.  The reference threw me for a second, I had a hard time making the connection.  

“Find yourself where?” I asked.  

“You know, where I am now,” he said weakly, gesturing around him at the room, the tube draining ugly fluid from his body, the machines counting his bodily functions.  The most obvious point in the world, you know?

My father, Irv, was not called the D.U., the Dreaded Unit, for nothing.   He relentlessly inflicted tremendous damage, most of the time in a manner subtle enough to make you believe that you were the enraged two year-old, not him.  

As he was dying he admitted, for the first time, that he had been the enraged two year-old all along.  A brilliant one, without a doubt, but an emotional fucking two-year old.  

“My life was over by the time I was two,” he told me with great sadness and defeat as he began to make his peace before he shuffled off this mortal coil.   I had by then learned as much as I could about the childhood he never spoke of.  I knew exactly what he was talking about, how his tiny spirit had been broken.  I was at a point in my life, and he in his, when I could finally react with sympathy, which spurred him to be as open and honest as he was able to be.

To put the blessing of this deathbed reconciliation into perspective, it is useful to compare it to another reconciliation between a difficult parent and long-suffering adult child.

I had a good friend who visited his mother in France almost every summer.  When he came back he’d be in a black mood for days, sometimes weeks.  

“Why do I bother continuing to go to visit that bitch?” he’d say, “it’s Einstein’s fucking definition of insanity.  Every time I go, I expect an insane, ice cold bitch to suddenly become the mother I always needed…”

One summer when he came back I put my tongue into my cheek and asked him if he’d had a nice time with his mother.  

“Oh, my God!” he said, “I did, you won’t believe it.  She was the same, like always, and I was kicking myself for going, like always, and then, the last night, we drank two bottles of wine and she started telling me me about her life.  She told me about the abuse of her childhood for the first time, how she was raped, things I never imagined, terrible shit.  She began to cry.  She told me she knew she’d been a shit mother and begged me to forgive her, thanked me for never giving up on her.   I hugged her and told her it was OK.  We talked until dawn, until I had to get in the cab to go to the airport.  I can’t wait to go back and see her.  I feel like I just found my mother, like I just met her for the first time.  It was amazing, man!”

A beautiful and rare story.  

The next time he saw her, about six weeks later, was after her massive stroke.  His sister called and he jumped on the first plane.  He found his mother lying, filthy and unable to move, in a pool of her own waste, in a French public ward.  He immediately got her out of the hospital into a rented apartment, had his sister stay with her while he rushed back to New York, wrapped up his affairs, and moved to France to take care of her. 

When she was able to speak a few words again she struggled to tell him she wanted to die.  He told her if she still felt that way in a year, he would help her die, not to worry.  But she had to promise, in exchange, to let him help her live.    

He spent the next few years lighting her cigarettes, driving her around, doing physical therapy with her, making her laugh.  She made a lot of progress under his loving, constant care.   She recovered some of her ability to speak, slowly over the course of many, many months.  She regained the ability to laugh, too. Sadly, I lost touch with him after a while.  It is the most wonderful and inspiring story  about a reconciliation with a difficult parent I know.  

The last-night-of-his-life reconciliation with my difficult father felt to me like a great blessing to us both at the time.  Thank God, I thought, I’d had the chance to hear the brutal fucker apologize, tell me that the long, senseless war between us had been his fault, that I’d been right and he’d been wrong, that he’d felt me reaching out many times over the years but had been too fearful and fucked up to reach back.  

It was certainly a blessing to Irv, as he was dying, to hear his son, calmly priest-like in the face of his anguished confession, telling him over and over that he had done the best he could, that if he could have done it differently he would have.  

I’ve had more than a decade now to consider the blessing to me.

“How’s that blessingy, changey thing working out fer yuh?” asked the skeleton in an eerily perky, more than passing Sarah Palin imitation.  

“You know, it was a great blessing to me, no doubt, and I’m very grateful that you were at a point in your life when you didn’t want to hurt me back.  I have to say, though, I don’t really know that it was a such great a blessing to you, to be brutally frank about it.  

“Hey, if it had come two weeks earlier, maybe, and we’d really had a chance to talk and talk and get to the bottom of some things.  I mean, the way it happened, I kind of went down a checklist of my deepest regrets, expressed each one and you told me it was okay.”  The skeleton gave a little chuckle.  

“Hah, I did notice that long pause after I told you I thought you and your sister always knew that, in a pinch, I was always there for you.  You can hear the silence hanging in the air like pestilence. You hear it continue and continue and then I say ‘well, you can never be sure about that…’ and went on to the next item on my checklist.  

 “I felt like a horse’s ass then, as I said more than once at the time, and I feel like one now– to have waited until I was only hours from my death to start trying to tell my children how much I loved them, how proud I was of them, how sorry I was for putting obstacles in their way instead of helping them find their way around obstacles, as a father who is not insane should always do.”  

The skeleton looked off into the distance, toward the Hudson River that was not far away, but invisible from his hilltop grave.