REMEMBERING PAPA STORIES

     My grandfather was the cushion between my mortality and me. Granny called him Lazer; I called him Papa. Even at ninety-one, Papa walked the two miles every day to work or synagogue. Then one day I stood in a hospital corridor watching a team in blue wheel a gurney towards an operating room. I kissed Papa’s forehead but he didn’t know me. A pressure was building in his skull. During the surgery, waiting in silence it hurt to think about an empty chair at the holiday dinner table with Papa surrounded by his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. While waiting I fell asleep; Papa stories, his accent, his smiles came to me, singing in the dark.
     As a small child, I spent many Saturday afternoons in Papa’s barbershop. I liked the perfumed smells of hair tonics and after-shave potions lined on the neat shelves. When there were no customers, I’d climb into the big black and white chair. Papa lifted a comb from a tall jar filled with a deep blue liquid. He swiped the comb dry with a white towel hanging from a side bar in front of a long mirrored wall. While he parted, then snipped at my ringlets, a sleepy feeling warmed me. When he finished, he’d say ‘next’ and then my younger brother popped in my place. I would continue to drift off in a metal folding chair listening to the buzz of an electric trimmer as Papa gave my brother his summer crew cut. Black wet curls lay at the base of the barber’s chair, marking another season, another year. After each haircut, Papa pushed a broom across the vinyl-tiled floor, always proud of his clean shop.
     Once I asked Papa how he came to be a barber. He told me: “My father, Da, and I passed a barbershop while walking down the streets of Warsaw. You know Warsaw; it’s a big city like Washington, and not so far from where I lived in Novy-Dvor. I stared in the window admiring the barber’s white coat. I told Da, I like the clean smells of the barbershop better than the stables.” Several months later, at twelve years old, my grandfather apprenticed to a barber in his hometown. Shortly after Da, my great-grandfather, was killed in the Great War.
     Near the end of the Great War, at age fifteen, Papa was drafted into the army as a runner from a supply station to the front line: “I didn’t use a gun.” To avoid another conscription, my Granny, Rose and Papa left Poland. Papa left first in 1922; in 1923 after raising enough money cutting hair, he sent for Rose. He said, “No more pogroms for us, I wanted to live where no one could tell me to take off my hat, not for nothing.” First they settled in Havana until they heard it was easier to enter the United States from Panama. Papa told me, “I cut hair for ten years on the American air force base near the Panama Canal. I cut the hair of an officer who helped us with visas to the United States.”
     Papa snipped my son Michael’s blond locks on his first birthday. Papa lifted the toddler up on two phone books atop a tall kitchen stool. After unwrapping scissors, Papa snapped a clean towel around my son’s neck. Michael stopped getting Papa-cuts when he entered adolescence. While the lopsided bangs bothered Michael, I miss the ritual of Papa cutting his great-grandson’s hair.
     I remember the worn sidewalk leading to the steps of my grandparents’ red brick row house. As a child, I kicked my hopscotch heel across the cement squares. On hot summer evenings Papa and Granny sat on aluminum chairs on the porch, while I, at six, seven and eight years old, sat on the front stoop eagerly awaiting the sound of the Good Humor truck. When we heard the jingle of the truck’s bells, Papa reached in his pocket for a nickel.
     One day in the summer of ’86 Papa’s son Isaac died. Isaac, a strapping six-footer with my grandmother’s dark curls and deep blue eyes, had died of a brain tumor. When I came to walk Papa to synagogue he was sitting in the same aluminum chair wearing a dark flattop cap and dark sunglasses. Papa walked down the steps with one hand gripping the iron railing; the other carrying his talis, in a blue velvet bag.
     Papa anguished, “Never did I think of this day, I expected Isaac to mourn for me.” As we walked with arms linked, I felt Papa stumble at times on the larger cracks of sidewalk. Fate tested my grandfather many times; he lost his mother, two sisters along with their families in the Holocaust. But he was not prepared to mourn his only son.
     When we reached the synagogue, men were gathered at its entrance waiting for the requisite ten to perform the daily prayers. Before joining them, Papa tugged on my sleeve and whispered, “I’m sorry, don’t wait for an introduction. It will ruin my business if they find out I’m blind.” After I told the men about Isaac’s death; they huddled around Papa murmuring their condolences.
     For seven days, three times a day, Papa said Kaddish for Isaac. Morning and evening, the requisite ten came to worship at my grandparent’s house. Just after sunrise, each man wrapped his talis around his shoulders, reciting the blessing sanctifying himself. In the ancient tradition of laying tefillin they wrapped dark leather straps, binding two small boxes on their weaker hand and forehead. Each man carried the five-thousand-year-old prayers in the boxes reminding them “to love their g-d with all their heart and with all their soul and…Bind them as a sign upon your arm and let them be tefillin between your eyes.”
     My grandfather continued his prayers for the next eleven months, praying for Isaac’s grace while his spirit rose from his grave, before our tradition allowed his spirit to rest. And every year, five times a year, for the rest of Papa’s life, he remembered Isaac in his prayers. These ancient rituals soothed my grandfather’s grief. And in turn, the mere act of watching Papa stamped my soul with his religion.

     Before Papa lost his short-term memory, before he fell and hit his head on the bathroom tile floor, he continued to work part-time, in semi-retirement, at Sam’s Barbershop, cutting the hair of young Yeshiva men and rabbis. While their clients knew both Hebrew and Yiddish, Sam and Papa spoke Spanish. As Papa cut Sam spoke Spanish ‘uno poccito’ above the right ear, shave higher at the neck; his part is on the left. Papa accepted whatever his clients offered; Papa said, “a good enough cut for three dollars.” All together, Papa cut hair for seventy-nine years until he was ninety-one years old, including his last decade, when he was legally blind.
     After Papa’s head surgery he was confined to the nursing home; Rose joined him a year later. The last time I saw my grandparents together was in the nursing home. On an unseasonably warm day in March, a nurse helped me wheel them to a sunny patio. Granny had held tight to her fury for having to move to the nursing home, so I was surprised when she smiled; it was as if the warmth of the sun melted her anger.
     “How is your day, Papa?” I asked. He didn’t recognize me.
     He replied, “No, sir. I didn’t stay in Havana for nothing. I closed my shop and packed my bags for Panama the moment those halarias ran through the streets popping off their guns. I ran from Pomechove to avoid the Polish army. Da was drafted so many times he finally caught the bullet in the Great War while still a young man of thirty-three.”
     Papa recycled his past; his conversations spoke his history, rambling on about his Cuban and Polish. Granny rolled her eyes, acknowledging his crazy making.
     Jumping time zones, he continued, “We didn’t go like sheep to their ghettos, their trains, and their crematoriums. It was a terrible thing.”
     He asked Rose if she remembered Neskele’s son Yael? Yael, along with Chiam, Yisrael, Nachman and Yankel worked for the Gestapo and joined the Judenrat. They handed out food cards of little value to the Jews. The hunger was unbearable, which forced people to take risks. Eight men were caught receiving food from outside the ghetto.
     Recounting these horrors, there was no stopping Papa now: “They were hung in the center of the ghetto, their bodies left hanging for three days for the dogs to eat.”
     In an attempt to pull Papa from his horror, I asked, “Papa, did you go to synagogue this morning?”
     “Cutting hair is good to me. I can always earn an honest dollar.” He answered. Then the nurse unwrapped two chocolates and popped them into the toothless mouths of my grandparents. For a brief moment, as I kissed Papa good-bye, he re-visited the present, pointed to Granny and asked, “Do you know this is mine wife, Rushka, my Rose?"

     I remember Papa huddled in a wheelchair, wearing a torn black mourner’s ribbon pinned to his lapel. He looked lost in his suit, too large for his sunken frame. Did he know he was there to say good-bye to Rose, his friend and lover for almost three-quarters of a century? Papa died on September 7, 1996, a little over a year after Granny died. Two days later he was wrapped in a plain linen shroud and buried in a plain wooden box, next to his beloved Rose.

     Late at night, when I can’t sleep, I slip into my study. My grandfather’s talis, neatly folded in the same worn blue velvet bag he carried to synagogue, rests on a shelf. I carry the velvet bag to my chair and empty its contents: Papa’s kepah and talis. Sharp folded lines and tiny worn holes mark Granny’s years of ironing the prayer shawl. I finger the four tsetses, and count the eight strands. I press my nose against the yellowed linen shawl redolent of Papa’s tonics. I place the kepah embroidered with the Star of David on my head. I wrap myself in my grandfather’s talis, remembering Papa stories.

THE END