My Grandfather the Atheist and his beloved Holy Book: How do I make Sense of this?

What possessions does my family treasure? Treasure is a strong word, with powerful emotional connotations. For me, treasure is not only something cherished, it is an object that has some quality that makes it rare and irreplaceable. As I think is the case with most people, my family treasures objects from our past, objects that are seen as their heritage. The item that instantly came to my mind was my great-grandfather Leo’s tanakh.

“Tanakh” is an acronym composed of the first letter of Judaism’s divisions of the Old Testament. It comes from “Teaching” (Torah), “Prophets” (Nevi’im), and “Writings” (Ketuvim). A tanakh is an extremely common book, just like the Bible; they’re everywhere. So what makes ours special? To begin with, Leo’s tanakh is incredibly old -- well over 100 years. It’s very small -- about 5” by 7” -- but very thick; I can hardly hold it in one hand. Leo’s tanakh also has that Vogue mystical book look: dark yellowing pages, that beloved musty smell, warped pages from water exposure, peeling brown covers missing small chunks around the edges. And of course the biggest appeal of them all: it’s written in a language I can’t read and don’t (yet) understand. This is Indiana Jones level for a six year old, and I still have a reverence for the tanakh today.

Yet when my family discovered the book, our first emotion was surprise that Leo had a tanakh in the first place -- nevermind one that he brought with him everywhere. As a committed atheist and Communist, we would never have expected him to carry a religious book. Why did Leo keep the book with him? It’s a question I pondered a lot out of simple curiosity when I was younger. Now the question resonates more as I’m making important life decisions, such as what colleges I want to go to, and what I’m looking for there. These concerns are quite ordinary and far removed from ancient Jewish texts of the Old World. But in making these decisions I’ve been thinking a lot about how Judaism fits into my life right now, how I want it to work in the future, and how important a factor it is to me in the college search. For example, Notre Dame is a great school, 18 on the national list. On the other hand, 89% of the students are Christian. I need to decide how much statistics like these mean to me, and how much they will influence my decisions.

For both Leo and I, our schools and our Jewish identity were linked. It turns out that Leo got his tanakh when he was three years old (around 1898) on his first day of cheyder, a religious school that all Jewish boys went to. When Leo was fifteen -- younger than we are currently -- he saw the Romanian peasant uprising brutally beaten down by the monarchy, a sight that turned him into a revolutionary and an atheist. He then left the religious school to work in his father’s woodshop, a choice that hurt his father, who was a learned man and bible scholar, and wanted Leo to become a rabbi. Instead, Leo became a historian. Although he wasn’t religious, he still loved the tanakh, and occasionally read the Prophets. This book stayed with him his entire life, from his journey to Austria as a young man, his midnight flight from Berlin to Prague after Hitler took power, his years in the US, then Mexico, then Israel, and then his return to Austria after World War II -- another decision I have spent a long time trying to understand.

Leo traveled the entire world, and during all this time kept with him the tanakh he received when he was three, and didn’t believe in. His son, Friedrich, also carried the tanakh when he grew up, despite being an atheist. For a long time I wondered about Leo’s attachment to the tanakh. How could he treasure something so much that he did not believe in? And then I started asking myself questions. Why is reading from the Torah important to me, and why do I love Shabbat services, even though I don’t believe everything they say? I think that for both Leo and I, these practices formed a link to the past (albeit a rather imagined/recreated “past” for me), and were our way of staying connected with the Jewish tradition. The sense of community and history we revisit through these practices outweighs the practical teachings themselves. We may neither of us believe in God, but as the saying goes, we believe in the Jewish people.

PS: Here are some photos:
 

Take me Back to Paradise City

The time in my life that I would like to revisit would be when we lived in NYC. When was in 5th grade, 2009-2010, my family lived in New York since my parents had gotten one-year teaching offers at NYU. It was the best year of my life so far, thanks to a range of different factors. Some of the biggest influences came from my friends. For starters, I was shocked by the fact that I had friends. The last few times I had changed schools it hadn’t worked out that way. I was also astonished that I had made friends so quickly. Within a record-breaking two months the four of us had formed a band and chosen names from our favorite fantasy series. From then on we were literally inseparable.

We all loved books and were constantly talking about what we had read or what the others should read. One of my friends knew the manager of a local bookstore, and he gave her the manuscripts of unpublished books to read, which she shared with me. My friends also knew all the cool places for 5th graders to go in New York: bookstores, Central Park, the one really good ice cream store, Chelsea market, and so forth. My best friend, Julia, also loved horses and took me to the stables a few times, so I could watch her lessons.

Also, I was literally closer to my family. My grandparents, Jana and Friedrich, lived three blocks away, and my dad’s parents, Grandma Lorraine and Grandpa Leonard, were an hour’s train ride from NYC in Westchester. I usually visited them on weekends, a throwback of sorts to when we lived in Chicago. At Jana and Friedrich’s, we played Scrabble and I practiced my (spoken) German with them. My grandfather also told me fascinating stories about Pancho Villa and the Mexican revolution, a subject he specialized on as a professor of Latin American history. In Westchester Grandma Lorraine would show me her backyard and house plants. She has an amazing green thumb; she grew an ENORMOUS jade plant from a single leaf. I would watch TV - cable TV - with Grandpa Leonard. What we watched was quite varied, anything from sports games, Broadway, or opera, but I always had fun. I especially loved listening to Grandpa’s jokes throughout the program.

And then there was Saturday, also known as “family day.” Every week we found something to do together, which is not hard in NYC. We went bike riding, visited museums, took part in walking tours, saw movies, and once mom and I got to see the opera Don Giovanni at the Met itself!

All in all, I really miss New York City, and occasionally the simplicity of 5th grade life, but mostly I miss the closeness I had with my family, my grandparents, and my friends. During that year, I gained a lot of friends. It was something that I struggled with before then, and has helped develop more relationships now.  But at the time it was a huge surprise to discover that I could make friends, and that people beyond my family actually liked me. I also found everything in NYC exciting and new, doubly so with friends. I remember the year as a kind of bildungsroman of how to make friends, and what to do once one has them.

Now a Non Fiction Writing Blog

Hello, I'm just letting you all know that this blog is no longer for the 20th century novel but for non fiction writing.