As I am watching the last pink of the evening sky from our terrace, I think about the weird dreams and reminiscences that this time of pleasant idleness has begun to produce. Last night I dreamed about an undead twin, that was a Jewish me that kept getting up and denying that it was dead. Then tonight, as we strolled through the tea plantation, we were once again struck by the fact that here we are in India, and why didn’t we do this a long time ago. This led to the rehearsal of the travels we did when our kids were younger (usually to Germany and a few times to Israel) and to wondering what our respective mothers would think of our children now that they’re grown. “And your father?” Miriam asked. Which made me laugh, as my father does not usually figure in these conversations. Then we realized that he’s been dead for forty years.
I thought of my father recently when I skyped with an old German friend of mine, whom I’ve known since shortly after my father died when I entered the Evangelical seminary in Krelingen, near Hannover. Johannes just completed a research project deciphering his father’s war diary that he discovered too late to ask his father or mother any questions about it. “What about your father?” he asked me, too. I tend to forget my father. He’s been dead such a long time and he wasn’t much of a presence when he was alive. As I worked my way from a born-again Christian orientation toward a more Jewish and philosophical one – a passage that took many years, two of which I spent in the Holy City – I tended to emphasize my Jewish family relations.
The truth is that things are much more complicated. There’s no recipe for living. We all improvise. Just like our parents.
