by Liz Paley (Concord, MA)
There’s a certain time of day when the light comes in my kitchen that reminds me of my childhood home. Only recently did I start to notice it. My father died in January, on New Year’s Day, and now he and the house are gone. I miss him terribly. It’s during the late afternoon when this light comes in, and it’s the same time of day that I usually called my dad.
“Well, good afternoon,” he always said, when he picked up his old landline.
My father grew up in the Bronx, in a segregated neighborhood; Jews in one area and Blacks in another. So, at an early age, he understood injustice. He was the first in his family to attend college and after marrying my mother, who was not Jewish, they moved to Long Island. They built a life there for my sister and me and he was deeply rooted in the community. A local newspaperman, my father was fair and forward thinking.
He ran for town supervisor in the 1960’s. He was a Democrat in a Republican stronghold, but also a Jewish Democrat in a predominantly Irish and Italian community. He told us that when he campaigned he would introduce my mother using her maiden name, a recognizably Italian one. It was a strategy, he said matter-of-factly. He knew he was up against antisemitism and he wanted the Italian vote. He still lost. It took me years to recognize the vulnerability and courage it must have taken for him to run for office.
Our family embraced our different backgrounds but most of what I learned about Judaism was from my mother, not my father. He was a man who had faith in family and community, but not in religion. My mother, the daughter of immigrants, grew up in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She went to Brooklyn College where she met my father who was seated alphabetically next to her. A schoolteacher, she tried her best to teach us about Jewish holidays and tradition. Growing up, we would celebrate with both sides of our family, and it was fun – Seders with some cousins and Easter egg hunts with others. Sometimes, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins from both sides would gather at my parents’ house. What we all had in common was a connection to each other.
For me, though, there were times I felt I belonged to both traditions and other times when I felt as if I didn’t have either fully. I watched my mother hide the Christmas wrapping paper when she brought gifts to my Jewish grandparents because she didn’t want their neighbors to see. And I remember when the Rabbi in our town told my sister she could no longer attend Jewish youth group because a parent had complained she was there. These experiences were all part of my foundation.
In the last few years of my father’s life, we sat quietly in the house he had lived in for over sixty years. It was the one I grew up in. I can picture him sitting in his worn black leather chair holding a pencil nub, working on a Sudoku puzzle in the New York Times, and sipping lukewarm coffee from a mug he’d poured earlier in the day. The afternoon light would fall across the room. I found purpose and love in those visits, and my father and the house anchored me.
After my mother’s death, a few years prior, I often felt powerless. I turned to family recipes as a connector with my father. I made the dishes for him that my grandmother had made when I was a young girl. I’d make her matzo ball soup, challah bread (to mixed reviews) and sour cream cake, carefully following her cursive notes in an old cookbook. I’m not all that sure of the connection my father felt with his parents. His emotion was often kept at bay. My grandfather had failed my father in many ways, mostly through his absence. But the food helped me feel connected to my past, my Jewish heritage, and most of all, my father.
I have unanswered questions about what my father’s Jewish identity meant to him. I feel a sense of loss now in not having discussed it more with him. I do, however, know what his identity as a newspaperman meant to him. My father instilled in me a love of words and using them to somehow try to make sense of things, even if we got parts wrong. He modeled a life of curiosity and reflection. Today, I continue to question the role of religion in my life but I do have faith. I also follow in my mother’s footsteps by trying my best to pass down Jewish traditions to my daughters.
New Year’s Day seems like an odd day for a life to end; it can be a time of anticipation and hope. It was one of my mother’s favorite holidays and I’d like to think they spent this past one together. Someone once told me if you’re not looking for signs, you won’t find them. So I look. I notice the afternoon light coming in and wonder what my father would think of this exploration of our family’s Judaism. I watch shadows dance across the floor and listen closely for my father’s, “Well, good afternoon.”
Originally from New York, Liz Paley worked in social services for many years. She now lives in Concord, MA where she teaches preschool. Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe and Ruminate Magazine. She was a finalist in Ruminate Magazine’s 2021 William Van Dyke Short Story Prize. She has two grown daughters.
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