My Grandfather’s Lover

For Father’s Day

By Helen Engelhardt

“Remember the days of old. Remember the years of many generations. Ask thy father and he will answer thee. Ask thy elders and they will tell thee. It is self-understood and also natural to know one’s self. To know one’s own family and family origins have to be considered first.”

(From the introduction to Abraham Chaim Engelhardt’s Family History.)

In the summer of 1947, at the age of 72, my grandfather Chaim Engelhardt sat down at his desk in his bedroom in a small dark apartment in Coney Island and began to write the genealogical history of his family from the middle of the 16th to the middle of the 20th century — four hundred years of names, relationships, occupations, locations and religious affiliations. He put it down in Yiddish, between the covers of an elementary school composition notebook without referring to notes of any kind. He knew it all by heart.

The slim notebook intrigued me from the moment my father told me of its existence. All 108 pages are filled with his elegant, back-slanting, calligraphic Yiddish hand. He neatly penciled in margins on the right side of every page to balance symmetrically the red vertical margins on the left side of every page, and to assist him in writing a right-to-left language. Sometimes he embellished those margins with acrostic puns. The flowing script is decorated with red-pencil or pink-crayon highlighting of chapter headings and parentheses, little touches of passion and wit. The book exemplifies Chaim as I remember him: a black-suited, Orthodox Jewish gentleman, his austerity softened by the sweetness of his smile and the humorous expression in his eyes.

In spite of my rudimentary Jewish school education, I could barely decipher the phonetic alphabet to sound out the familiar music of the words. So I engaged my father as translator, interpreter, historian. I encouraged him to reminisce as he gave me the names and dates of the men and women who were my ancestors. This turned out to be indispensable, since my grandfather had actually written only the narrative equivalent of a family tree: who had married whom, who had been born to whom, and where and when they had lived and died. In spite of his considerable knowledge of history, he had never put the genealogy into a historic context, nor interrupted the succession of names with any asides about out-standing events experienced by each generation. The one aspect he was careful to include was religious affiliation — whether someone was of the “Haskalim” (students of the Enlightenment) or “Khasidim” (followers of the Baal Shem Tov and his mystical inheritors) or “Mitnagdim” (religious opponents of Khasidism).

What my grandfather had written was a record of his yikhes — his status. In the Jewish world, yikhes depends on the number of learned, eminent or notably charitable men in the family. Everyone was simply described as “good,” “kind,” “devout,” “scholarly.” But my father’s own recollections of relatives he had known sometimes contradicted the official version. “My father didn’t lie, exactly, but he idealized everyone. He didn’t need to because there really were outstanding scholars in the family. He himself was one of them. Though he was largely self educated, he was regarded as an authority. Whenever questions about the Talmud came up, the men in the synagogue he joined in Coney Island would turn to him instead of the rabbi. My father studied to become a rabbi -- it was a family tradition -- but for some reason he never completed his certification.”

The book was a stunning achievement, for in every generation until his own, each family had six to eight children, and my grandfather seemed to account for everyone. Or almost everyone.

I had been working intermittently for more than fifteen years with my father at translating this genealogy, when he decided to tell me a startling piece of personal history that Chaim had left out of his book. It was something I never would have imagined about him -- such a proper, modest gentleman. He had been dead by then for over thirty years; I had become the mother, late in life, of a son who was then about 3. The morning my father confided in me, we were together at my parent’s country cottage in Putnam County. It was very hot, and we had gone down to our pond for a swim. Standing on the floating dock, my father suddenly said, “What are you going to do with all this information I’m giving you?”

“It’s mostly for me. It’s Aaron’s legacy, but who knows if he’ll be interested? You weren’t when you were a child, or even as a young man. If it weren’t for me, you would never have translated your father’s book. So, I guess I’m doing this for my grandchild.”

“Here is something I wasn’t going to tell you about my father.” He paused; I waited quietly, giving him permission to continue.

“We were in Antwerp, Belgium . We were on our way to America , 1920- something, and we were waiting for the money to arrive from my mother’s relatives in New York to pay for our passage, when he told me about the one time he had been unfaithful to my mother. It was with my cousin Esther, the only child of one of my mother’s brothers. Esther’s father died before I was born, and she earned her living as a seamstress. As her workplace, she used our apartment.

“My mother was pregnant with Rachel when my father first left for America. I was 3. He wanted us to emigrate with him, but my mother refused. Her rabbi told her that in New York it would be impossible to lead a kosher life. My father was stifled in Krosno, he couldn’t earn a living. At that time, with few exceptions, all the Jews there made a living by selling goods, either out of proper stores in the central square or out of stalls that were set up temporarily on market days. He tried to make a go of it, but he wasn’t meant to be a peddler. He was a teacher.

“I still remember the walk that we took together the day he left. It was in the springtime. Everything about that walk was memorable: being out alone with my father, being permitted to choose a gift for myself in a shop -- a little cane. I had to choose between a beautiful wooden cane carved in the traditional style of the Carpathian mountains, or a black cane with a silver handle. I was attracted to the silver handle, and I wouldn’t listen when my father and the shop owner told me that it wasn’t as well made as the wooden one. So he bought me what I chose, and later, of course, the metal handle fell off.

“We kept walking through the square, until we came to the street leading down to the railway station. Then my father stopped and told me to go home. He told me he was taking a trip and would be away for awhile, but he did it in a natural way, as though he would be back very soon. He knew that I knew my way home and would be safe. He watched and waved to me until I turned the corner. I didn’t see him again for three or four years.

“When I came home without my father, my mother knew immediately what he had done and she began to cry, ‘I am an agunah!’ — an abandoned woman,” he explained, “like a widow only worse, because if you don’t know for certain if your husband is alive or dead, you can’t remarry.

“Of course, my father didn’t abandon us. He wrote letters and sent us money as he began to make a living tutoring Hebrew to children on the Lower East Side. In those days, a man could support his family on $15 a week. I remember receiving books from him, Yiddish translations of American science books, American literature, because I was now able to read. I used to read aloud to my friends from the serialized novels he sent to me in newspaper packets.

“During this time, my mother managed as best as she could. She opened a small store in the square with the money he sent her. Her mother came to live with us and help her with the new baby. Then we moved into a new, larger apartment off an unpaved street above a flight of steps that led down to the river. It was a large rectangular room, which we divided in two. The back room was the bedroom with two beds, one for me and my grandmother, the other for my mother and the baby. The front room held the kitchen and living room. I believe that Esther and her mother, my Aunt Rivke, slept in a double fold-out bed in the kitchen during the three years my father was in America. During the day, my cousin Esther set up her workbench for her sewing in a corner of what was the living room.

“She employed two girls to help her. Esther not only repaired clothes, she made them from her own designs. She had a wire frame on which she would arrange the cut-out pieces of material. She was really very good. All the sewing was done by hand. She once made a lovely dress for Rachel.

“I loved spending time with Esther because she was so pretty and lively. I was very young, so Esther’s mother would let me sit on her lap and listen to the stories the girls told. That’s where I first heard tales that I later learned were from the Arabian Nights. It was very cozy. They would talk and laugh and drink tea and the room would get darker and darker until they would have to light an oil lamp to continue sewing. That’s when they would rest and tell me stories.

“Within two years, tickets came for us to join my father. Again, my mother refused to leave Krosno, so he returned and did his best to make a living in Krosno. He couldn’t bear to be separated from me and the baby daughter he had never seen. He and my mother had another baby, my brother Meir. We moved into another apartment with a smaller kitchen and a larger bedroom. After that move, Esther had to find another workroom. Her mother had remarried.

“A group of parents formed a new private school paid for by a Zionist organization and they asked my father to teach their children Hebrew and Torah. I was in the class, too. It was like a one-room schoolhouse. My father developed innovative methods. Traditionally, children would read whatever was being read in synagogue that week, and that meant we would never be able to finish any portion of the Bible, because we couldn’t read well enough to keep up. But my father had us begin at the beginning of Genesis and just keep reading. It didn’t matter that we fell behind. We read at our own pace and that way the words made sense to us.

“Shortly after we moved into the new apartment, the financial crisis that preceded the outbreak of World War I began. The families at the school could no longer afford to hire my father. He went out of Krosno in search of work but couldn’t find any. My mother had to close her store. We faced starvation. He came home from one of his trips carrying a big salami and a bag of broken slabs of chocolate. We hung the salami from the doorway between our two rooms, and every day we cut pieces off from it. That was our sustenance. We were able to buy some bread and milk, but that was all. We knew that when we reached the end of that salami we were going to have to go out begging from door to door, and the shame of that would stay with us forever.

“He took me along on a trip to the next big city east of us, Przemsyl, a city where we had relatives. I needed eyeglasses, so he thought he could accomplish several things. He could look for work, buy me eyeglasses and continue collecting information for his genealogy. He was always gathering facts for his genealogy. He didn’t find any work, but on the way back, we stopped in a town at an uncle’s house. I remember a walk that we took together. It was a lovely summer evening and when we got back to the house we learned that the Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary had been assassinated in Sarajevo. By the time we returned home to Krosno, war had been declared. We didn’t have to worry about starving or becoming beggars. The war was our salvation! We bought tobacco from the government and began making cigarettes for the soldiers. Everyone helped, except Meir, who was only 3.”

I had heard most of this before and didn’t really want to hear it again, not when my father had promised me something so compelling as a love affair. “What about your father and Esther?” I said. “When did that happen?”

“I’m coming to that! At first we thought we could remain in Krosno throughout the war. The Russian soldiers, when they first came through town, were very polite. But as the war went on, things got pretty bad. After the Cossacks burst into our bedroom and threatened us for our money in the middle of the night, we left. We went over the mountains in a hay wagon to Prague and stayed there for the duration of the war. My cousin Esther fled to Linz, in the mountains north of Vienna.

“The Czech government welcomed us along with thousands of other refugees and found housing for everyone. We ended up in a two-room apartment in a small village, Zalov, which was near a town, Rostok, on the suburban train line to Prague. About a month after we settled in, my mother had to go to the hospital. We thought her physical collapse was a result of what had happened the night the Cossaks threatened us. When she was awakened by a man standing at the foot of her bed, waving his sword around in the air, shouting that he would kill my father unless he gave him all his money, while the other Cossack smashed open our bookcase and slashed all our books, she was so terrified that she ran out into the street wearing only her nightgown. All our money, such as it was, was hidden in that very lamp above the head of the Cossack. At any moment his wildly waving sword could have cut the chain and brought the coins tumbling down. She probably saved our lives by doing that, because the Cossacks panicked and ran away. Some neighbors brought her back home to us severely chilled.

“Now she collapsed with a serious respiratory illness. My father wrote to Esther, and she came to Prague to take care of us. I was about 12, my sister 9 and my brother 4. She stayed with us for about a month and then, when my mother was well enough to come home, went back to Linz for the remainder of the war.

“Probably the affair between my father and Esther began during that time. To the best of my recollection, we all slept crosswise on one bed. She may have had a cot of her own in the kitchen, but I’m not sure. Let me say something here. My father was very lonely with my mother, especially after he came back to Krosno. They just were not suited for one another. She shared none of his interests. He felt duty-bound and trapped. He was not the kind of man to take advantage of a young woman. He was not a philanderer. Esther was attractive, a lovely young woman. I guess it was just too much for him.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, “Did you say that you all slept together on one bed?”

“Yes, as best as I can recall it now. Crosswise. I was not aware of anything going on between my father and Esther until he confessed to me in Antwerp. I didn’t have any knowledge, any suspicions. But my sister Rachel, who hated our father, wouldn’t speak to him…”

“What do you mean, she hated Grandpa? I saw them together a lot, and I never detected anything like that.”

“It’s true nevertheless. She would act as though everything was all right, but she ceased talking to him. It broke his heart. He loved his children. She never talked to him again, even the day he died. Then she got hysterical and practically threw herself into his grave. She told me once the reason why she could never forgive him. She heard him making love to Esther.

“After Esther returned to Linz, we stayed on in Prague for two more years. My father didn’t say, but I guess they must have kept in touch by letter. Again, I was completely unaware of anything at any time. Eventually the government stopped subsidizing the refugee families and sent them back from where they came. It was probably 1916 when we returned to Krosno in a private train car, a freight car fitted up with beds. We picked up food and water every time the train stopped. We traveled for two nights.

“Our old apartment was taken. We had to find a new place to live. It wasn’t easy. Eventually we found one room near the river. Everything was in that one room: kitchen, living room, bedroom. My father, brother and I slept in one bed and my mother and sister in the other bed. The children slept nearest the walls.

“Esther also returned to Krosno and resumed her work as a seamstress. She came to live with us again. She put up her workbench and slept on a cot in the corner. And in this crowded room, in the middle of the night when everyone else had fallen asleep, my father would meet Esther in the darkness and enjoy ‘tactile pleasures’ (that’s how he put it) with her. They did not lie down side by side together, they remained standing upright. They enjoyed what they could. How much hugging and kissing could have gone on under such circumstances, I don’t know. My father assured me that no penetration had ever taken place, yet somehow Esther became pregnant. Such things do happen.”

“Oh come on! They had to be really close for the sperm to survive! Such heroic self-control! He must have believed he was protecting them, protecting her . . . How horrible! What did they do?”

“She had to leave. My mother was told that Esther had become impregnated by a stranger on a train returning from one of her tobacco-smuggling expeditions. In addition to working as a seamstress, she was also smuggling tobacco to earn extra money. My mother also earned extra money this way. Tobacco purchased in Germany was far cheaper than any they could buy in Poland. Once across the border, however, the government imposed tariffs, reducing their profits. So my mother would return on the train from Germany with her bosom bulging with tobacco. Esther too. Esther was supposed to have fallen asleep on the train, waking to find the man fondling her like “The Marquise of O,” that story by Kleist, do you know it?”

“Yes, it was one of the stories I read while studying the German Romantics. But the Marquise never woke up and the man who took advantage of her while she was unconscious fell in love and returned to marry her. Anyway, did your mother really accept such a story? Did you know anything at all about this at the time?”

“No. At the time I was away in Prague. Everything I’m telling you now is what I first learned when my father confessed to me in Antwerp. I don’t know what my mother actually believed, but I never heard her refer to Esther in a derogatory way, or to accuse my father of any wrongdoing -- and she would have, if she’d known.”

“So what did they do?”

“Esther went to Vienna to have the baby in a foundling hospital. It was a boy. She never returned to Krosno. Not too long afterwards, she was put in touch with a matchmaker who introduced her to a widower, and married him. My father met him and was not impressed.”

“How amazing that he confided in you like that!” I remarked.

“Well, I was the only person he could have confessed to. He also hoped that somehow I might be able at some future time to locate this half brother of mine, though how I was going to do this without a name I don’t know. The only information I had was the name of the foundling home. And there was never any opportunity. I did see Esther again, though, when I visited Vienna in the 1920s. It must have been, let me see, 1928, something like that. She no longer looked attractive. She was slovenly in appearance.”

“She must have been very depressed. I wonder if she ever tried to find her baby after she married. Did you meet her husband?

“I don’t remember. Maybe he wasn’t home that day.”

“What happened to her?”

“She perished. But I seem to remember that her husband survived the Holocaust and made his way to Sweden after the war.”

We looked down at the water lilies carpeting the water between the dock and shore. They had folded their petals against the warmth and light of the midday sun. I thought about my grandfather and his prickly, double-pointed white beard, the way he looked coming towards me from the bus stop in his black bowler hat and long black coat, tapping his cane in rhythm to his slow deliberate walk, or sitting at the head of his table conducting our seder with quiet authority. I tried to imagine him passionately embracing a young woman, his niece by marriage, in the close, hot darkness of that crowded room while they listened to his wife and children breathing in the beds behind them. I imagined that those moments with her, and the nights when he had first reached out for her across the bed, which also held his children, were the only moments of erotic joy he had ever known.

I thought about the wide gulf of time that separated me from him. I had just begun to know my grandfather as a person when he died. My father had kept his secret for sixty years. If he hadn’t confided in me, it would have died with him. What happened between Chaim and Esther Toba in the darkness of the rooms in Zalov and Krosno during the years of the First World War existed only in my father’s recollection of his father’s confession. By unburdening himself, my father had given me a bridge to reach the grandfather I never knew.

Everyone in the story was gone except my father and Uncle Meir. And the child — their half-brother — my unknown uncle who never knew who his mother and father were — did he survive against all the odds? Was he alive somewhere? Who knew his name? My grandfather had left him out of his book.


Helen Engelhardt is an activist, author, poet, storyteller and independent audio artist. She sings with the Brooklyn Jewish Community Chorus and is a member of the Brooklyn Dialogue Circle. Her works include The Longest Night — A Personal History of Pan Am 103, an audiobook.