When I Said Kaddish for my Father
When I was working on my first book, Joe Rapoport: the Life of a Jewish Radical, I once read my father a story from Joe’s defiant youth. It was the tale of Joe’s bar mitzvah, when he did not learn his haftorah, his reading from the Old Testament. That day Joe had humiliated his father before their shtetl with his brazen rejection of their religious tradition. Joe’s father had responded by virtually disowning Joe, saying he did not believe Joe would say the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning and remembrance, after he died.
I remember reading Dad this story as a needling reminder that I too was a son who had rejected his father’s tradition. I was disavowing Dad, his generation of assimilated middle-class American Jews, and their banal homogenized suburbs like Skokie where our family lived. Telling Joe’s Kaddish story, I was denying my obligation to recognize and honor Dad’s continuity through me.
Dad hadn’t responded to that story. Perhaps my challenge had been too obscure.
A few years later, when Dad was sick with ALS, I wanted to assure him that I would say Kaddish for him one day. I was his son, and I would mourn his death, and I would remember him.
But how could I start a discussion about my future reaction to his future death? How could I promise to honor his legacy to me, when I still did not know what it was? I could not bridge the chasm between us simply because I suddenly hungered for continuity.
Instead, I offered to read to Dad from my book on Joe’s life. All I could do was show him my search for a historical tradition, for my roots and his too, in this book I was writing on the Jewish immigrant generation, Dad’s own parents’ generation.
Dad followed closely as my voice swung along with the familiar rhythms of the prose. I edited my reading selections, omitting stories of conflict between father and son. Dad was a liberal Democrat, but not very political, and I do not think he understood Joe’s life devoted to the establishment of socialism. I didn’t try to explain how I identified with Joe’s story. It was enough that Dad liked the book’s Old World Jewish flavor and its passionate tales of New World struggles for trade unions and social justice.
My brothers and me on a day hike in California around the time of Dad's death. Bob is at the upper right, Mark in the center, and me to the lower left.
Half a year later, a few days after Dad’s funeral, my brothers and I went to a late afternoon service at Skokie’s temple B’nai Emunah where we each had a bar mitzvah. We joined the minyan of old men praying. I stood with my brothers as we chanted the Kaddish in our broken Hebrew, praising God’s greatness despite the loss of our father. I kept the vow I had made when I had read to Dad from my manuscript on Joe Rapoport’s life, avoiding the story of Joe’s father’s curse that Joe would not say Kaddish to remember him. I had assured myself that I would recite the Kaddish in Dad’s memory, and I did it that day.
But I was not satisfied to praise God after our months of inexplicable suffering from ALS and this terrible loss. Kaddish was not my way. Writing history was how I could remember Dad and mourn his loss. History is what I had wanted to write from early in Dad’s illness. Throughout those terrible months of Dad’s ALS I had considered myself “just a historian,” of no practical use in our crisis, not like the physician or attorney I might have been. But in the end I knew that history would help me understand the extraordinary illness ALS, the life and death of my father, my own life with Dad through it all, and his legacy to me.
Now that book has arrived: My Father’s ALS: A Son’s Healing Journey.