PHOTOGRAPH BY JONATHAN BLOOM
PHOTOGRAPH BY JONATHAN BLOOM

One morning, my grandmother’s brother, Avraham, decided to stop being religious. He shaved his beard, cut off his side curls, shed his yarmulke, packed his things and resolved to leave his hometown of Baranovichi and begin a new life. The town rabbi, considered a Talmudic prodigy, asked to see him before he left. The meeting between Avraham and the rabbi was brief and not very pleasant. The rabbi knew Avraham to be a gifted Torah student and was profoundly disappointed that he had decided to abandon religion. But he didn’t mention any of that to Avraham. He merely gave him a piercing look and promised that Avraham would not die before he returned to the ways of the Torah. It wasn’t clear at the time if that was a blessing or a threat, but the words were spoken with such conviction that Avraham never forgot them.

It’s during the shiva for my father that I hear that story. My older brother is sitting on my right, and my sister is seated on a low stool on my left. I offered her my comfortable chair, but she said no. According to the customs of Jewish mourning, which my ultra-Orthodox sister strictly observes, the family of the deceased must sit on lower chairs than the people who have come to pay their condolences. Sitting across from us is a distant relative from the ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak, and like many others who come to visit us at the shiva, he offers us not only a bit of solace, but also a new, totally unknown story about our father. It’s amazing how many more sides there were to that man than the ones I knew when he was alive. And it’s no less amazing that it’s the total strangers, people I’ve never met before, who help me grow a bit closer to my father even now that he’s gone.

The ultra-Orthodox relative from Bnei Brak doesn’t eat or drink anything in our house during the shiva, refusing even a glass of water. I don’t ask why, but it’s quite clear that he doesn’t completely trust us on matters of kashruth. All he does is tell the story. As if he’s come here as a messenger, to place another story about Dad at our doorstep, offer a few restrained words of comfort and leave. But before he goes, he has to finish the tale.

So where were we? That meeting between Avraham and the rabbi. Years after Avraham, grandma’s brother, left the yeshiva in Poland, immigrated to Israel, and joined a kibbutz, he found himself in the very heart of a terrible war. It was 1973, and on Yom Kippur, a surprise attack was launched against Israel. The Israeli army was caught unprepared, and during the first days of the war, everyone felt that the end of the State of Israel and of the Jewish people was approaching. Avraham was in a place that was being heavily bombarded by the Syrians, and with the shells bursting everywhere around him, he stood up and called to a woman who was lying on the ground not far away to come and lie down beside him. The woman hurried over, and when she asked the supremely confident Avraham why he thought it was safer where he was, he explained that she should stay close to him because no shell would fall anywhere near him. “A lot of unlucky people are going to die in this damn war,” Avraham said, trying to calm the frightened woman, “but I won’t be one of them.” Shouting over the whistling of the artillery shells, she asked how he could be so sure of that, and Avraham answered without hesitation, “Because I still haven’t returned to the ways of the Torah.” Avraham and the woman survived the bombing, and years later, when he fell into the sea during a storm, the rescue team found him thrashing in the water and shouting to the heavens, “I still don’t believe in you!”

Avraham raised a large, thriving family and reached a ripe old age in relatively good health until serious illness struck. At one point, after he had lost consciousness, the doctors told his family that he would not last for more than a day or so. But that day went on and on, and a few weeks later, when my Dad visited Avraham’s family and heard how much he was suffering, he asked them for a prayer book and a yarmulke, went straight to the hospital, entered Avraham’s room and prayed all night beside his bed. At dawn, Avraham died.

“It’s not so hard to pray for the soul of a Jew when you’re a believer,” that relative says as he makes his way to the door. “As a religious man, I can tell you that it’s very easy, like a reflex, almost involuntary. But for a secular man like your father to do it—he has to really be a Tzaddik.”*

That night, when the last of the visitors has gone and our mother goes to bed, only my sister, my brother and I are left in the living room. My brother is smoking a cigarette and staring out the window, and my sister is still seated on her low stool. Soon we’ll all go to sleep in our childhood rooms. My parents left the three rooms exactly as they had been, as if they knew we’d come back one day. On the wall of my room is a poster of a comic book hero I loved as a child; in my brother’s room, there’s a map of the world hanging above his bed; and on the wall in my sister’s room is a tapestry she embroidered when she was a teenager, depicting—of course—Jacob wrestling with a white-robed angel. But before we go to bed, we try to steal another few minutes alone together. The shiva ends tomorrow. My sister will go back to the ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood of Mea Shaarim and my brother will fly back to Thailand, but until then we can still have a cup of tea together, eat the strictly kosher cookies I brought for my sister from a special store, savor the stories we heard about our father during the week of mourning, and be proud of our Dad without apology or criticism, just like children.

*Tzaddik is a Hebrew term for a particularly righteous person.

This essay is excerpted from “The Seven Good Years: A Memoir,” out in June from Riverhead. It was translated by Sondra Silverston.