NEW: Work In Progress

An Excerpt from Andy Fraenkel's work in progress
In Search Of Story
Chapter: Life Stories From The Kitchen Table
Copyright, Andy Fraenkel, 2001

Someone once said that the world is not made up of elements, it is made up of stories. Stories lie at the very heart and soul of Judaism. The wise men even tell us that the easiest way for man to go to God is through a story. Some say that a story is like a candle. Both a candle and a story provide illumination.

When the Jewish people were confronted by the often hostile world around them, they found illumination and comfort in a story. The Hasidic rabbis carried on the tradition of the story with a fervor. Whether a question, or a doubt, or a celebration, there was always a story to be told. My father grew up in eastern Poland and that oral tradition of the Hasidim came to me through him.

As a child, I lived with my parents in upper Manhattan, an area so populated by German speaking Jews it was referred to as the `Fourth Reich'. My father was one of those who survived `The War'. One could not call him a religious Jew. On the Sabbath, when all my friends and their families would get dressed up and hurry off to the synagogue, my father would stay at home. I watched the families go down the street. I was left alone to play as long as I wanted. I thought, surely my friends were having the greatest time and I
was missing out on something big.

I asked my father why we don't go. "On the high holy days they make you pay for a seat," he said as if this was the worst thing in the world. He saw I was perplexed and he paused to tell a story. "During the war, I was with the Russian troops. We were walking through a field when the German planes began to drop their bombs. Gewalt! I started to run. But where can one hide in an open field? So I stopped and sat down by a nice patch of flowers. Ahhhh, they smelt so wonderful. It seemed the perfect spot to sit down. `God,' I said, `if You want, I will live or die right here.' The bombs fell all around, but I was not harmed. So you see, a man doesn't have to go to the temple to pray. He can pray anywhere." After he finished his story, he lit a candle that was placed in a glass jar with some Jewish writing on it, and then returned to his place in front of the TV.

Once a man with a long beard came for a donation for Israel. "Right after the war, I gathered together a group," my father explained to him. "We wanted to go to Israel. The Underground would take us only if we came up with the money. They asked for too much. We couldn't go. But then a few months later, when Israel was getting it's independence and needed people to fight, they came back to us and said `now we'll take you for free.' The stinkers!"

The man in the beard shook his donation can and said it was for the orphans in Israel. My father asked him how much money he had in the bank. "Ten thousand dollars," the man said. It was a very large amount. This was in the fifties. We had just come from Europe a few years earlier. "I have practically nothing," my father said, "and a family of my own to feed. And you, with ten thousand dollars in the bank, are coming to beg from me. That's some nerve." My father dropped a dime into the can.

One day I was upset because I had lost my toy gun. "Guns you don't need. There are enough guns in the world," my father warned. "When you carry a gun that means you have to use it. In the Russian army I was a barber. I wasn't a soldier. I cut the hair and trimmed the beards of the generals. I wasn't supposed to have a gun, but I carried one anyway. Now one day I was shaving one of the generals when they brought in an officer. He was a deserter. He stood there in front of the general, trembling. I guess he knew what was in store. `Fraenkel,' the general said looking up at me, `shoot him.' `But I'm not a soldier,' I said, `I've never killed anybody in my life.' `Then why are you carrying a gun? Fraenkel,' he said, `if you don't carry out my order, I'll have you shot.'. . . What could I do?"

Why were you carrying a gun?" I asked. My father looked annoyed. "`Y' is a crooked letter," he said. He said this whenever he didn't want to answer my persistent questions.

My father worked six days a week. In the little leisure time he had, he wandered, forlorn, around our apartment in an old pair of slippers and shorts and a stained T shirt. Usually, the time our family spent together was spent in front of the TV set. If we took our meals together, it was in front of the TV. But every so often, inadvertently, we found ourselves together at the kitchen table, and this is where magic took place. My father would break into a story about his childhood, about Jewish life in Poland, or, more likely, about 'The War'. . .

Before the war, he had a wife and children. He also had a girl friend on the side. The girl friend wanted to know how their relationship would work out, and she so took him to a Gypsy fortuneteller. "Forget this man," the Gypsy told her bluntly. "In time, we'll see a great war. This man will be taken away. He'll survive. And after the conflict, he will cross the ocean." And so, one morning, my father started off to work. On the way, he was picked up by invading Russian troops who were rounding up able bodied men in their struggle against the Germans' Blitzkrieg. He was taken to Russia. He never saw his family nor his friends again.

Through his stories, the kitchen table took on magical proportions, transforming me to other times and other lands and other realms of consciousness. Sometimes the kitchen became a confessional or a vaudeville stage. Sometimes my father hummed the sacred Hasidic melodies. Sometimes he told of his encounters with ghosts and dogs and witches. And always about 'The War'. He spoke of a strange time; a time when being a few minutes late, or a few minutes early, could change the course of a persons life. Now, his stories return only in whispers and faint images. But their telling has left a residue in my being - a residue of longing to remember and to tell the stories of our mystical past.

Stories cannot go on indefinitely. There's a fitting time when a story comes to an end. My father knew that time, even as I would plague him with my insatiable questions. "Why did you have a girl friend if you were married? Why did the Russians take you away? Why do people have to kill each other?" He ended with a smile, leaving me to find the answers. " Y '" he would say, "is a crooked letter."