When I was about ten or eleven years old, I read a book that terrified me. It had a supernatural being that could take people over and leave them as empty husks. My father tried to comfort me by talking about how fears could be irrational. He gave as an example a fear from his childhood. He had been afraid that there was someone hiding behind the couch and that they were going to jump out and beat him with a stick. I am afraid I might have laughed at him, because I could not imagine that being something scary.

==

In Ashkenazi tradition, new babies are named after a deceased family member. In keeping with that tradition, my father was named Nathan, after his Aunt Yetta’s husband who had died not long before Dad was born. Whenever anyone would say my father’s name, Yetta would cry. So they started calling him “Baby,” which evolved into “Bobby,” then “Bob.” For his whole life, everyone who knew him called him Bob. People who didn’t know him tried to address him as Nathan, or, worse, Nate. 

When he was dying in the hospital, he wanted me to tell that story to the nurses.

==

My father’s mother, although Jewish, was not religious. She thought that studying Torah was just an excuse for the men to get out of the house so that the women would be left to do all of the work. My grandfather was not home a lot, but not for religious reasons. He was gone a lot; he was involved in union organizing and the socialist party. Probably the Communist party, too.

My great grandmother lived with them, and was apparently more insistent on following the dietary laws. When my great grandmother died, my grandmother smashed the kosher for Passover plates.

==

The radio in their New York tenement recited the never-ending list of territories as they fell to Hitler’s troops. 

When his grandmother heard the name of her home village, she cried, and asked him in Yiddish what the announcer was saying.  “You can’t tell her,” his mother whispered to him.

My cousin tells the story differently, as the story came to her from my uncle. In this story, my father always wanted the radio to be on a station that played music rather than the news. It’s plausible, because Dad loved jazz his whole life. Maybe both stories are true.