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PARTISAN REVIEW
forth on his knees . One of the women pats him on his head . " Not his fault," I
hear. Suddenly frightened, I search for my mother. She is standing in the
circle of women . They have surrounded Butch's mother, a woman with
distant, vacant eyes. Butch's aunt is smiling. She says' 'Jesus" over and over
again, and I remember that Butch's mother and aunt are Christian Scientists.
I do not know what a Christian Scientist is , but I know that for aJewish woman
to become one brings upon her my mother 's unbridled contempt. I have
heard her speak about Butch's mother and aunt to my father . "Not even real
goyim.
Not like in the old country . Even
goyim
don 't believe in such
nonsense." But my mother stands in the circle of women . An obligation .
There are rules for suffering . Betrayals of history are put aside for the moment .
My grandmother sits on her milk crate and holds my brother. My brother
is not yet three and he is trying to pull away from her , determined to get to my
mother. My grandmother holds him firmly . I show my grandmother the gun .
" Look what I found ,
baba.
"
Annoyed , my grandmother shakes her head . She
is not interested. No one is interested in the gun. I turn and trot slowly back to
Bainbridge . I climb the fence once again and re-trace my steps through the
lot. I nestle the gun in among the rocks . I would like to cover it with broken
glass bottles, but I cannot find one nearby. I kick mounds of dirt around the
gun, burying it. I would like to come back here tomorrow and discover it
again . But I know that I won 't . .
Niles Gardens held no history for my father . In any case, he did not need
to locate himself in history . History was all he had ever known . And now his
history was tied to that of his wife 's family . A closed fate . My Uncle Harry 's
wife, my Aunt Dvorah, died a year after my father came here . She was my
father 's sister and she died of cancer and my father , trapped and alone ,
jumped into the open grave at her funeral. My grandmother memorialized his
grief. Kriegels were more emotional than Breittholzes. That was understood .
But my father reached into his sister's grave to rescue some part of himself, to
be the man his shtetl Europe had promised. They pulled my father out and
they buried my Aunt Dvorah .
My mother was Uncle Harry 's sister. After Aunt Dvorah died , Uncle
Harry and his three young children moved in with us . A succession of Bronx
apartments until we arrived at Niles Gardens. My grandmother ruled .
Beneath her, my Uncle Harry , my Uncle Morris , my father , my mother, and
then the five children, each of us half-Kriegel, half-Breittholz .
It
was a
crowded apartment, but the lack of privacy disturbed my cousin Sylvia and my
cousin Millie more than it did Leo or me or my brother. The way we lived ,
though, that galled my father. The four of us slept in one large room . But it
wasn't the lack of space alone that got to him . By 1941 , his life in Niles
