The Righteous Gentile
by Philip Graubart
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
“Pickleball?” I asked. “You’re not going to Grandpa’s 90th birthday party because you have a pickleball tournament?”
My mother was stacking boxes, her back to me. Dust mites tickled my nostrils. I was two weeks past my 35th birthday, time to “get my shit out of the house.” I remembered her invoking the magic age of 35 — the get rid of shit age — the day I turned 15. Apparently, she meant it. She tossed a pile of yearbooks into one of the new cardboard boxes she’d purchased for the occasion. Those boxes were my 35th birthday present.
“Mom,” I said, a little louder. I was trying to get at least a quarter of her attention. “He’s turning 90. How much longer do you think...”
“Oh, please,” she interrupted, tossing an old soccer trophy into the garbage. Not even a cardboard box for that participation prize; I was terrible at soccer. “He’s been saying that since he turned 70. ‘How much longer?’ ‘Could be your last visit.’ Listen, it’s not like he lives around the block. It wasn’t my idea that he move ten thousand miles away, to some foreign county.”
“Some foreign country? You mean Israel?”
“It’s not foreign? I can speak the language? I don’t need a passport? I can fly there on eagle’s wings? It’s an important tournament. I have a chance at a 4.0 ranking. We’re all entitled to our narishkeit when we get older. Mine is pickleball. His is fleeing his family so he can eat falafel in Tel Aviv. We make our choices.”
“Mom, he’s your father.”
Finally, she looked at me, smiling like a patient, comforting soccer mom. It was a hot, humid Kansas City morning. Sweat dripped from her nose, as if she’d spent the afternoon swatting pickleballs. “Get your shit out my house,” she said sweetly.
* * *
One month later, in late September, I was at his flat in Tel Aviv, a seaside apartment with a picture window view of palm trees and the Mediterranean. A surprising — to me — number of party guests surrounded my grandfather, clapping as he pounded out Yiddish songs on an electric keyboard, a gift from one of his new friends. I vaguely remembered two of the melodies, though I couldn’t have pronounced a single lyric.
Most of the partiers looked ancient: 80’s and upward, though apart from a cane or two and one walker, they didn’t seem particularly infirm. “Survivors,” my grandfather had told me when I asked about his friends. “Almost all.” That would place them in the high-elderly demographic. And their Holocaust memories would all be those of children.
The only exceptions to the old-folks feel of the night — besides me — were two tall, rugged young men in army uniforms. Late teens, early twenties, I guessed, each with sharp shoulders and knees. And one petite, curly dark-haired young woman — 25? 30? — who clapped along enthusiastically to the Yiddish songs, but seemed to be mouthing the words in a different language. When I stared for a beat too long at her lips, trying to read what she was actually singing, she winked at me and clapped louder.
After a particularly rousing song, filled, from what I could gather from the giggling, with sly sexual innuendo, my grandfather stopped abruptly, removed his glasses, then wiped them with a napkin. It was somehow a signal for everyone to quiet down.
“Speech,” shouted an old lady with unworldly yellow hair. Then she unleashed a guttural stream, which might have been Hebrew or Yiddish or even Arabic, for all I knew.
My grandfather shook his head, smiling. “No, no. English. English, for my Nathan, my grandson. Even though he’s heard these stories so many times, no?” He looked at me and winked. He loved winking. The problem was, he didn’t seem to know what it meant; he always deployed it at inappropriate moments. Or maybe the problem was me. I nodded my head. “English,” I agreed.
Of course, he was right that I’d heard his stories a million times. What I don’t think he quite knew was that I’d stopped listening years before. Why pay attention to a re-run you’ve already watched over and over?
My grandfather took a shot glass to his lips and sipped a bit of its contents. Maybe that’s his secret to long life with vitality, I thought. A few uncommitted sips of schnapps, inhaling more than imbibing. He licked his lips and then shocked me by tilting his head and looking me in the eyes, as if asking for permission to start. I was about to nod, to encourage him to go ahead, when he abruptly turned away from me and began his performance.
“It was in the forest next to Szeged, my hometown in Hungary. I was eleven, a little pisser, eighty pounds soaking wet, but already a frum yeshiva bukher. We’d gotten word only an hour before: clear out, hide. Nazis were coming. This was 1944, early June, a beautiful spring day. Less than a year later, the war would be over. But our war began that day.”
This was how he always started the story. Beautiful spring day. The forest. Nazis chasing Jews. I could have recited it with him. Desperately afraid of unrelenting boredom, I searched the room for some distraction. I found the young woman, the curly-haired Israeli. She was watching my grandfather with rapt attention. I watched her watch him.
Some words, even phrases, even sentences leaked through my erotic imaginings. It was always impossible to ignore my grandfather entirely and, when I was a little kid, of course, I’d listened to the whole story. So his first deviation shook me.
“There was a girl there in the forest with us. A goyishe, Hungarian girl: blonde hair, pale skin, blue eyes, a regular Heidi. Pretty. A very pretty girl.”
But she wasn’t pretty, I almost interrupted. You always told us, I thought, running the story through my head, that she was chubby, scowling, with a frog’s face.
“An angel,” he said now. “White dress, lovely punim. Like God created her that day, for that moment. We were hiding from the roundup. I huddled with my father behind a thick oak. My mother had dug a shallow pit and covered it with leaves and branches. She lay there still, with the baby, my baby sister.
“The goyishe blondini, she ran to the Iron Cross soldiers. She described a family just like mine: a boy, a baby, two Jewish parents. She knew them, she said, she watched where they ran. A soldier knelt beside her, asking politely, like a gentleman, ‘Where did they go, girly?’ She smiled slyly, mischievously, her blue eyes twinkling in the spring sunshine, and pointed her tiny arm in the opposite direction from our hiding place.”
No, she didn’t! I wanted to shout. I turned abruptly from the young woman to my grandfather’s perspiring face. That’s not the story, I almost said. But I didn’t.
He continued. “The soldiers believed her. They ran off into the woods, following what they thought was our path. She ran with them just a few paces, then circled back to us. ‘Go, go,’ she whispered, pointing in the opposite direction. My father grabbed me by the arm. My mother quickly handed over the baby. We ran faster than any Olympic medalist. Then we stopped. We needed rest.”
My grandfather also stopped for a moment and panted, as if he’d been running through the forest and needed to catch his breath. “That one stop for rest doomed my mother. An Iron Cross soldier spotted her and, whoosh. One second. One bullet flies by my nose, hits her in the chest.
“I am watching. I see it. Her yellow dress suddenly explodes in deep, red blood. The light from her green eyes. Eyes that enchanted me, that calmed me, that loved me. I watched the light go out.
“My father took absolutely no time to grieve or cry. He grabbed me with one arm, held the baby close with the other, and we flew. Yes, flew. It’s the only explanation. But if it weren’t for the girl, our angel? Dead. We’d all have been dead.”
“No,” I said. Not very loudly, but loud enough. He stopped talking. Everyone stared at me, especially the young woman. I felt myself blush. “That’s not—”
“Yes, Nathan?” he said, nonplussed, gentle, as if I were ten-years old and he was anxious to hear my opinion on dinosaurs or galaxies or some other useless childhood obsession.
The girl pointed right at your mother and the baby, I wanted to tell him, to correct him. You watched — you, your eleven-year-old self, you watched while the Nazis — not the Iron Cross, the Nazis, the fucking Nazis — dug out your mother and sister and shot them both in the head. In the head, not the chest. That was the story you told us approximately one billion times.
The girl wasn’t an angel. She was the devil! Okay, just a little girl, doing the devil’s work. We always wondered how that devil-girl remembered that day. Did she feel guilty? Proud? Did the moment haunt her for the rest of her life, like it haunted my grandfather? That was the story.
Of course, I didn’t say any of this. It wasn’t my birthday party, it wasn’t my story. Anyway, he was almost done. He finished his narrative with a little less verve. He hid with his father and sister a month in the dark forests of Hungary. The baby died of hunger, or disease, or who knows what, who cares.
The boy and his father were captured, but by then the extermination machines had shut down. The father and son survived the month in Belsen. End of war, end of chapter. A typical visit to hell, a standard recounting of an experience that cannot be recounted. Same old story.
Except it wasn’t. The girl suddenly got promoted. She was a moral exemplar. A heroine. The heroine. Not a devil. An angel.
* * *
I had my reasons for flying halfway across the globe for my grandfather’s birthday party and, truth be known, it had very little to do with my grandfather or his story. I was the sports editor of a start-up website called Freedom — a rightward tilting multi-media outfit that offered ridiculously high salaries even as it bled money.
Its ever-patient investors seemed confident that the financial picture would improve any day, but I wasn’t so confident in my own future. There were rumors that they’d cut out sports altogether. Chillingly, my editor wondered what I thought about focusing totally on baseball. I stared at him, waiting for the giggle. But he was serious. Baseball?
I went over his head to the managing editor, a founder/owner of the website. With a smooth shiny face, skinny jeans and a designer tank top, she looked at least ten years younger than me. I pitched a new idea: covering Jews. According to our demographics, nearly one third of our readers were Gen Z Jews, or half-Jews, or quarter-Jews, or sort-of-Jews. Why not hire one full-time writer for the Jews?
I had two ideas to start. First, Israel was currently tearing itself to pieces over judicial reform. The government, egged on by settlers and fundamentalists, was literally rewriting the Jewish definition of democracy, triggering furious street protests. The kerfuffle seemed to touch on the very definition of Judaism as a modern political force. And I was the perfect correspondent to cover the mess: I was Jewish and a lawyer. Well, I had a law degree I never used. And a tenuous Jewish identity. But better Jews than baseball. Jews, I figured, would survive at least the 21st century. Maybe.
My other idea was to write about my grandfather. I’d call the piece, or even the series, “The Last Holocaust Survivor.” Because, let’s face it, any day now the last eyewitness will pass on, along with all of the first-person Holocaust narratives. My idea was to scour the US, Israel, and Europe, and interview the last survivors, starting with a long-form piece about my grandfather and the little Hungarian girl who ratted on his hiding mother and sister.
The editor carefully studied her phone while I pitched. She took her eyes off her screen once to tell me to go for it, but I’d have to pay for my own airplane ticket to Israel. She looked down at her phone, then popped her face up again for a final thought. And any other expenses, she said.
* * *
As the guests slowly scattered, signaling the end of the party, I kissed my grandfather’s scaly scalp and rode the elevator down 24 stories to the lobby. I thought about ordering an Uber, but I decided to take advantage of a sudden jet-lag fueled burst of energy and walk the thirty minutes along the Mediterranean to my seaside hotel just across from Jaffa.
I was practically jogging, wind blowing the sand on my ankles and cheeks, when I realized what I had to do. I took out my phone and called my mother. I was so agitated, I didn’t factor in the time difference. Luckily it was late in Israel — midnight, late for me anyway — so it was mid-afternoon in Kansas City. My mother picked up after five rings and panted a hello. “It’s my tournament. I told you. Is everything okay? Your grandfather, he’s still alive? Listen, I’m in the middle here. Can I—?”
“Pickleball,” I said.
“Yes! This is an emergency?”
I considered the question. Confusion over the little Hungarian girl’s actions eighty years ago, or my mother’s pickleball tournament? “I’d have to say it isn’t.”
“Okay then. I’ll—”
“It’s just,” I interrupted. “Wasn’t the little girl a villain? A she-devil?”
It’s a tribute to my grandfather’s storytelling skill that I didn’t have to explain myself further. “Of course! Of course, she was a villain. I mean, six years old, but still. She pointed right at my grandmother’s hiding place. The Nazis shot her. It was the girl’s fault.”
I could hear the wok-wok of pickleball rackets wacking against plastic balls. What a noisy sport, I thought. “Grandpa said she saved them. That she pointed in the opposite direction, gave the family time to escape. That they only got caught later and not because of the little girl. He told everyone that the little blonde saved his life.”
“Saved his life? What nonsense. You probably weren’t paying attention.”
“No, no, that’s the point. I was paying attention. That detail caught my attention. He told the story wrong. Why would he do that?”
Wok, wok, wok, wok. She was either back to swatting plastic balls or thinking of an answer. It was the latter. “How should I know?” she said. “Maybe he wanted to put a more positive spin on the incident, now that he’s got his happy ending in Israel.”
“Or maybe,” I said, “he was telling the truth tonight, but lying to us all in America. Maybe in Kansas City he needed a villain, a non-Jewish villain. So we wouldn’t let our guard down.”
“Maybe,” she said, with about as much interest and enthusiasm as my editor gave my Jewish beat idea. “Listen, I’ve got to—”
“Pickleball,” I said. “I understand.”
“When you think about it, it doesn’t really matter does it? Gotta go.”
“Well, of course it matters,” I said.
But even the wok, wok, woks went quiet. She’d hung up.
* * *
Copyright © 2025 by Philip Graubart
