The Catholic Owl And The Jewish Pussycat

By Robert M. Grossman

We set sail together. It was 1956 and Matt Malison and I, the Catholic Owl and the Jewish Pussycat, were ensigns aboard ship on our way to serve at a U.S. naval airbase near Casablanca. Less like the America of today, it was not a time when I expected to find a friend who was Roman Catholic, especially one who had gone to Notre Dame and whose ancestors came from Poland, where mine on my father’s side once dwelled.

My run-ins with Catholics started early. I got into stone fights with “those Italian kids” who claimed I was trespassing through their parish on my way to public school in the 1940s. In the early 1950s my parents sent me to prep school at Andover where a Catholic classmate approached me from behind one day while I walked alone across campus. As he quickly passed by, he blurted out of the silence, “Well, at least I’m not a Jew.” I was stunned. I had seen him in class from time to time but we’d never spoken in the two years I had been there. I just stopped and stared as he mockingly sauntered off into the distance. As I think about it now, the ugly meaning of those words was probably his way of disguising his own insecurity as a Catholic in what was then for both of us a dominantly WASP world. This was a world in which the few Jewish students dutifully attended the daily Protestant service at the Protestant chapel, standing erect as we sang hymns and recited prayers which almost always included the words “Father, Son and Holy Ghost.” Each time we reached the point of memorializing this triumvirate, I lowered my voice to a whisper and substituted the names of three of my guys – Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

My Catholic encounters continued in college, but not with fellow students. I had many acquaintances, even good friends, who were not Jewish, but we hardly ever talked about whether they were this or that kind of Christian. I did write my senior thesis on the perceived ties between Catholicism in Italy under Pius Xll and fascism there prior to and during World War ll. In my sophomore year as a student reporter for The Daily Dartmouth, I also wrote a piece on an excommunicated Catholic priest in Boston named Father Feeney who made rancid remarks to me when I interviewed him for the paper, ending the session by telling me to “wipe that dirty Jew-smile off your face.”

My column, entitled “Dirty Jew-Smile,” caused quite a stir on campus. The article’s principal lesson for me, based on letters to the editor and comments from fellows students, was not so much Feeney’s anti-Semitism, which for his demented soul was a divine calling, but how much enmity existed between Catholics and Protestants in the America of the 1950s. The letters from Catholic students emphasized their distance from this excommunicated priest and the comments from Protestants claimed that
Feeney epitomized what Catholics were really like. As a Jew, I made no such distinctions. They were all Christians to me.

Upon meeting Matt aboard ship and developing a warm friendship with him over the next two years during our naval service in Morocco, I learned that Catholics were hardly of one mind. He introduced me to the sophisticated magazine, Commonweal, which I began to read with great interest. Through his gentle tutelage, I discovered that not everyone who went to Notre Dame played football, and that professors who taught English literature there were as much revered as mine at Dartmouth. I also learned that many Catholics were disgusted with Joe McCarthy and deeply opposed to McCarthyism. Over the years he also helped me see that for every Pat Buchanan there was a Gene McCarthy, for every Justice Scalia there was a Justice Brennan, for every Cardinal Spellman there was a Cardinal Bernardin.

On days off in Morocco we would often drive to Tangier. Matt had found a Russian couple there who owned a restaurant and bar and with whom he could hone his language skills. The couple had escaped to Turkey after the Russian Revolution in 1917, made their way to Paris and ultimately settled in Morocco, which was then under the aegis of France. Prior to boarding our ship for Casablanca, Matt had studied Russian in a concentrated, nine-month course at the Navy’s language school in Washington. His work at our airbase involved translating and interpreting Soviet communications from Moscow that were intercepted through our electronic resources aboard elements of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean and elsewhere in Europe. The couple liked Matt so much that they wanted him to meet their daughter Tania, who was then a student in Spain at the University of Madrid. They did meet and, not surprisingly, they married, first in a civil ceremony in Gibraltar and next in a military one conducted at the naval air station by a Catholic priest. I was the best man.

Their marriage came as our active duty stints were about to end in late

June, 1958. We each entered law school in the fall of that year, though after six months Matt decided that law school was not for him and joined the

Foreign Service. From then on he and Tania lived abroad, ultimately settling in Madrid after he left the Foreign Service. There they raised their children and followed in Tania’s parents footsteps by opening and running what became the city’s finest Russian restaurant, El Cosaco (“The Cossack”), where the King of Spain dined on several occasions. In the meantime, I finished law school and, as Justice Brandeis advised young lawyers, returned to my roots in Chicago and, after my clerkship and my marriage, began my legal career.

Our families grew even closer as we visited each other year after year. Matt and I would also go on our own forays in Europe, and it was during these adventures that we talked more and more about our family histories. I had known relatively little of mine. The first time I ever heard anything other than a passing word about my Polish forebears was not until my father was in his late 60s and I was nearly 40. It was only then that he was willing to speak openly about what he remembered and had been told of life in Poland and the travail of the Jews there. It was really my son, Ted, then only six, who helped pry open some of the hidden memories. For Ted, it was a matter of great pride to have a grandfather who was born in Poland. He asked the kind of questions that only a six-year-old might ask. My father felt more inclined, even eager, to respond to his grandson than to have dwelled on these memories during my childhood, when the security of Jews in America was more tenuous. This is a portion of my father’s reply, written in 1973:

“My dear grandson,

“I am so pleased that you wish to know about your roots. I was only five years old, about your age, when I came to this country in 1910. Much of what I write here is what I heard from my parents. I was born in a small town in Poland which at the time was part of Russia. The town was called Wysokie Litovsk which was in the province of Gradno Gubernia. This small community consisted of a few Poles who were farmers or laborers but mostly Jews who also owned or worked the farmland and the orchards, and conducted the business life of the town as well. My mother told me that my grandfather, who was your great, great grandfather, and his brothers operated several orchards in the vicinity of the town.

“You asked me how long it took to get to America. My father first came to this country so he could earn the money he needed to bring all of us over. After he did so, he came back and we left Wysokie Litovsk by horse and wagon. We traveled to Berlin and then to Belgium and on to New York City. From New York we settled in Bloomington, Illinois…”

On one of our times together I showed a copy of the letter to Matt and out of the discussion that followed we determined to go to Poland together to uncover our pasts. For Matt, the experience would be as compelling as for me. Obviously, the Catholic Church, certainly in this country, is not the same as when the two of us first sailed together in 1956. Pope John XXlll had ascended to the papacy at the end of that decade and embarked on lasting changes that made Matt more comfortable with his Catholicism and wiped away many of the barriers that might have stood in the way of an enduring friendship between us. From the outset of our discussions, however, we were under no illusions about our forebears. Though those forbears had lived part or all of their lives in what was then Poland, as Catholics and Jews it would have been extremely rare for them to have been friends. It is much more likely that they would have hated one another.

Our plan was first to travel to Klecko, the little town is western Poland where Matt’s grandparents on his father’s side had lived. We would then move on, ultimately reaching Wysokie Litovsk in Belarus which was once part of Poland at its eastern end. We decided to meet in Berlin, which in itself would be a wrenching beginning for me. Matt would be flying from Madrid and arriving in the evening on March 17, 1997. My Air France flight would get me to Tegel airport there around noon that day so I would have four or five hours alone to explore what I found bearable to see. I had made a reservation for us at the Hilton hotel in what used to be East Berlin. After checking in, I grabbed my video camera, put on my fedora hat and wrapped myself in my long, camel’s hair coat. I purposely decided to travel in this outfit. It conveyed a sinister air, evoking the image of “The Third Man.” It also reflected my view of Germany and my sense of the darkness that lay ahead in Poland.

The concierge at the hotel told me how to find Checkpoint Charlie, the vestiges of the Berlin Wall, the Brandenberg Gate and the main synagogue. Except for the synagogue, everything was within easy walking distance. As one who remembers World War ll as a youngster, the sights I selected had a special meaning for me both as an American and a Jew. I practiced with my camera at each place and by the time I reached the synagogue, the sun had gone down. I could see a well-lit Byzantine structure with a golden dome on top and a minaret rising up one side. Next to the synagogue was a community house with two German guards standing in front. As I raised the camera and began to speak into its microphone, tears started flowing from my eyes and my voice wavered with each word. I can’t say that any specific thoughts or memories played on me. It was just the scene of this restored synagogue in the capital of Hitler’s Germany where the full plan to annihilate my people was laid out in the nearby suburb of Wannsee and relentlessly pursued not far from where I was standing. The synagogue was on a principal Berlin thoroughfare with streetcars running past my filming every few minutes. There were also German passers-by, both young and old, who gestured to me to film them without any notion of who stood behind the camera.

When I got back to the hotel, there was a message from Tania saying that Matt had missed his plane and would not be arriving until late the following morning. That would work out as long as it left us enough time to catch the afternoon train to the city of Poznan in western Poland. The next morning I found my way back to the synagogue and took more pictures in daylight. This time my eyes stayed dry. I again wandered from Checkpoint Charlie to the Brandenberg Gate, past one construction site after another, and upon my return to the hotel there was Matt waiting for me in the lobby. We were happy and relieved to be together and went straight to the train station.

The Polish border was several hours away, so any chance of seeing what its countryside looked like would have to wait until morning. My expectation, however, was of our traveling from one dank and rainy setting to another during our days there. It was hard to know what brought me greater satisfaction and relief, the train’s slow but gathering movement out of Germany or its entry into a desolate Poland where millions of my religious brethren had, within the confines of hatred and exclusion, survived and endured over the centuries, only to be systematically exterminated in the course of a few years. This was a story I had heard from the time it began to be reported at some point in the 1940s. Looking from the window of that train as it click-clacked its way out of Germany deeply replayed those tragic stories for me as I gazed intently at every passing German house and car and person. But I was with Matt, whose Catholic relatives, no matter what many of them may have thought of mine, had also gravely suffered during the Second World War at the hands of the Germans. I told myself that I must not forget that story either.

We crossed the Polish border and arrived in Poznan about four hours after leaving Berlin. Our hotel there, as elsewhere in Poland, was hardly elegant, but the prices were probably a third of what they would have been in Western Europe, and Matt and I were satisfied as long as we could find a place that served a decent meal. The hotel receptionist, seeing two hungry Americans, told us about a restaurant called “Kresowa” in the old section of Poznan, which she said had character, liquor and fine Polish cuisine. She was right. It took us longer to get there than we thought, but with the help of a number of people as we walked, we finally made it. Aside from tables filled with lovely, cigar-smoking women and well-dressed men, I was certain the place was a find because I didn’t have to teach the bartender how to make a martini. Matt and I both relish martinis, but whether in Paris, Madrid or Rome, I often have to go through a step-by-step martini march so that what the waiter brings to the table is not a full glass of warm vermouth.

We stayed at the restaurant until well past midnight listening to a white-bearded entertainer singing Russian folk songs and filling ourselves with a variety of tasty Polish dishes chosen by Matt from childhood memories of his grandmother’s cooking. We finally left about 1:00 a.m. with the place still packed. The square we walked out onto was set in cobblestone, and as we moved around it, we were charmed by the medieval feeling of this old part of town whose centerpiece was a church that had once been a stone fortress. At least this section of Poznan had been left as it had always been, even though under the auspices of the former Soviet-controlled regime almost everything else in the city had about as much architectural creativity as most of the public housing in Chicago.

The next morning we set out for Klecko, the little town not far from Poznan where Matt’s grandparents on his father’s side had lived and where, Matt hoped, we would still find two of his great aunts who would then be in their 90s. The dinner the night before had been a special introduction to some of the surprises of Poland, but perhaps the greatest surprise was the cloudless sky that greeted us when we woke up. Indeed, each day during our stay, instead of my dank and desolate expectations, Poland was bedecked in sunshine and chirping birds. The bus to Klecko was filled with the kind of faces I might have expected – ruddy and working-class with hair a bit unkempt and smiles that revealed missing teeth. We rumbled along the two-lane highway across farmlands that reflected the first signs of spring.

Matt had been told that his two 90-year-old relatives lived together in a three-story building in the central square in Klecko. As soon as we arrived,

we found the building and Matt rang the downstairs bell. After a few minutes a woman in an apron and head scarf leaned out of an upper window and with a hand gesture asked what we wanted. In the best Polish he could summon, Matt told her that we were looking for the two old women. Matter-of-factly, she responded that one had died several years ago and the other within the last three months. This was a deep disappointment for Matt, and for me as well, since they were the last living link to Matt’s forebears in this country of his origin.

Matt asked the woman in the window where we might find family records and she pointed to an opening in the square through which we could see the town church. It was a large, red brick structure surrounded by a walled-in lawn and a stand of tall trees. As it happened, the bishop whose jurisdiction covered Klecko was scheduled to arrive within minutes. We learned this from a priest we found in the rectory behind the church. He spoke at least a touch of English and was probably in his early 30s. He asked us to call him “Jimmy” since he knew the Polish equivalent was just too tough to handle, certainly for me. He was somewhat harassed because he thought the bishop might arrive momentarily, but he took the time to look at the marriage certificate of Matt’s great grandparents from 1875, which Matt had brought from the family archives in New Jersey and whose lives his father had enriched with stories that had been passed on to him. Matt’s father, while not born in Poland, grew up in an immigrant, very Catholic household in South River. He ultimately became one of the town’s most leading citizens.

Jimmy pulled out some relevant records from the church files but nothing was disclosed that Matt didn’t already know or have. I took the opportunity to give him a present and ask a few questions that he might not have expected. My wife, Fran, had suggested that I take with me little trinkets with Michael Jordan emblems on them, so I pulled one out and handed it to him. He immediately knew what he was getting and smiled warmly. Something had come up in our halting conversation which opened the door to my asking whether the issue of the Jews was ever discussed in church. He quickly responded by saying, “I tell my parishioners that Jesus was Jewish.” I didn’t expect that from a local Polish priest and would have taken the matter further but his English was running thin and he was anxious to join his fellow priests at his post in the bishop’s procession. We thanked him and walked to the church which was now filled with the people of Klecko in their Sunday best waiting for the bishop and his entourage to proceed down the aisle. It was an impressive scene and a firm reminder of what a significant role the Catholic Church played in their lives. I filmed the service and then we left, moving on to the cemetery before it grew dark so Matt could attempt to find family plots.

The ancient graveyard was a short distance from the center of town. As we entered the main gate, we were immediately accosted by a woman who turned out to be the self-professed guardian of the cemetery, someone who apparently took it upon herself to tell visitors where the gravestones they were seeking could be found in the hope of picking up and passing on as much gossip as possible. We more or less ignored her as we started down one of the many foot paths, and Matt rather quickly found headstones which bore both the “Maliszewski” name, which was the Polish original before being anglicized to “Malison,” and other headstones which bore the name “Brzezinski,” which was his father’s grandmother’s maiden name. The headstones of various members of these families went back to the mid-1800s, and Matt had now seen for the first time a visible reminder of his distant past.

When we moved back to the entrance, the cemetery maven could not contain herself any longer and approached us to find out whose graves Matt had been seeking. As soon as she heard the names, she took us to one we had missed. As we were leaving, Matt asked her if there was a Jewish cemetery in the area. She obviously knew that Matt wasn’t Jewish and assumed the same of me. She instinctively made furtive looks at others in the cemetery, and lowering her voice said with a sly smile that there had been a Jewish cemetery but it had been wiped out, as had all the Jews. She asked why that mattered. It seemed beyond her comprehension that Matt would have come to “her” cemetery with a Jewish friend, one who was standing right in front of her.

We left Klecko with some satisfaction, though we wished we had come a year earlier when at least one of Matt’s relatives would still have been alive and able to shed more light on the people that Matt had come from and what life had been like in this tiny Polish town. We returned to Poznan and made it to the train station in time to head east to Belarus and ultimately to Wysokie Litovsk.

Months before flying to Berlin, I had learned that I would need a visa to enter Belarus. In order to obtain one, I was told I would first have to make a hotel reservation through the Belarus intourist office in Minsk, the capital. Belarus, which was previously known as Belorussia before the breakup of the Soviet Union, had become its own independent country, but essentially it continued as a Communist dictatorship under the guise of a few, paltry democratic tendencies.

I was fortunate to have in my law firm a highly educated woman who had left Russia after the fall of communism and was studying to become an American lawyer. She obviously spoke fluent Russian, which was the language of Belarus, and by telephone made contact with the intourist office in Minsk. I had given her Matt’s name as well and within a few days I received a fax from Minsk confirming a reservation for both of us at the intourist hotel and casino in Brest Litovsk, a fairly large city at the Polish/Belarus border about 30 miles from Wysokie Litovsk. The people at the Belarus embassy in Washington also received a copy of the hotel reservation from Minsk because when I called there they knew what arrangements my Russian colleague had made for me. I next proceeded, again with her help, through the labyrinthian corridors of Belarusian diplomacy to obtain the visa, and in due course actually received one.

Matt took a different route. After I got the hotel reservation, I had urged him to send me his passport and visa application which I would transmit to the Belarus embassy in Washington along with mine. Instead, Matt called the Belarus embassy in Paris – there was none in Spain – and was told that he did not need a visa if he was traveling on a European passport. Matt had both a U.S. and Spanish passport, and based on that decided to proceed without a visa.

The first sign of trouble occurred as our train neared the Belarus border. A Belarusian customs officer dressed in a mawkish green uniform appeared at the door of our compartment and closely examined the documents we presented. He had no problem with mine, but when he asked for Matt’s visa and received an explanation instead, he frowned and walked off with Matt’s Spanish passport. Two other customs officers returned with the first one and Matt repeated his explanation. By this time the train was crossing the border and would soon arrive in Brest Litovsk. The lead officer announced to Matt that he would have to come with him when the train reached the station. I tried to use whatever lawyerly skills I could muster to plead with the three in English, showing them the hotel confirmation with Matt’s name on it, but they were either determined to ignore me or they concluded that Matt might well be a spy. I told Matt that as soon as the train stopped at the station, I would race to find the couple who would be our guides and were waiting for us at the main terminal.

I had gotten the names of Shlomo and Sarah Weinstein in the course of searching for information and sources on how best to make our way to Wysokie Litovsk. I went to the Spertus College of Judaica in Chicago where as background I learned that the Jewish villages in the Brest Litovsk area had actually been part of Poland beginning as far back as the 14^th century and for nearly 500 years thereafter. In 1795 Russia conquered eastern Poland, absorbed these villages, which are called shtetls in the Yiddish language, and maintained its hegemony over the whole of Poland until 1989, except for a brief period of Polish independence between the two World Wars and until the Russian and Nazi occupation occurred in 1939.

With the help of the people at Spertus, I was given the names of Shlomo and Sarah who were among some 300 Jews still living in the Brest Litovsk area. I again called on my Russian colleague at the law firm, and through her we phoned Belarus. After numerous tries, we finally reached the Weinsteins. Sarah spoke a little English, and after a brief introduction, I put my colleague on the line and they conversed at length. I then confirmed the conversation by letter, which my colleague translated into Russian. My letter told the Weinsteins when we would be arriving, what we wanted to do in the two days we were permitted to be there and the hotel where we would be staying. I said I would call them a day or two before we were to arrive, and, in fact, I felt relieved after having done just that from Poznan and hearing Sarah tell me they would meet us at the station.

I saw the direction in which they were taking Matt and then proceeded toward the main terminal where I found two old people standing alone waiting for me. I say “old” because, in fact, Shlomo was 80 and Sarah 73 but, while they looked their ages, Shlomo”s handshake was very firm and they were both full of vitality. I explained what had happened. The three of us quickly set off for where they were questioning Matt and where he was still trying to explain. We found him in a huge hall attached to the main terminal which was like a wood-warped, decrepit gymnasium. There were as many as 20 customs officers in small groups just standing around looking at us at we walked in. We were the only other people there.

Shlomo walked over to where Matt was being held. The officers assigned to his case listened to Shlomo’s plea and retired to a back area, apparently to further consider the situation. We could get no response from them. After checking train schedules, Shlomo concluded that they were actually going to put Matt on a train to Warsaw that would be leaving the station at midnight. We had about an hour before that happened, so after conferring with Shlomo through the assistance of Sarah, we decided that Sarah and I would go to the hotel while Shlomo stayed behind to guard Matt as best he could. We hoped to be able to get some satisfactory proof that Matt’s name was on a formal hotel reservation form and return with it to show the customs officers.

Off Sarah and I went to the local intourist hotel and casino, which turned out to be much the same as most other large, Communist buildings we had seen – mausoleum-like in a haunted setting. We walked to the front desk and there behind it sat a grim-faced woman. I told her through Sarah who I was. She pulled out a document which bore both Matt’s and my name and had an embellished black border around it. I said why we needed it. At her insistence, I reluctantly gave her my passport, and in return she released the document to me. We raced back to the customs hall with it in hand.

But where was Matt? Shlomo walked over to us and said that in spite of all his efforts, they had put Matt on the train back to Warsaw which would be leaving in five minutes. I frantically looked around. I sighted a senior customs officer who must have arrived while we were at the hotel. I immediately presented the document to him. With the assistance of Sarah, we told him that it showed that Matt was a legitimate visitor, that he was there to spend dollars, and that he would not lead a revolt against the government. The officer studied the document carefully, looked us over, and in Russian said “Wait here.” Off he went and within minutes he was back with Matt by his side. As they walked toward us, we could hear the train pulling out for Warsaw.

Matt had been fully resigned to spending from midnight to four in the morning in a Siberian-like worker’s car stretched out alone on a wooden bench. He had come to terms with what they had done to him and would see if he could quickly obtain a visa in Warsaw and come back. Even though he had been rescued from the train, however, the customs officers were not yet prepared to let him go. We sat for another 45 minutes while an officer meticulously prepared and Matt completed a visa application for which he paid what amounted to the same $50 I had paid in the U.S.

The visa experience reflected the differing attitudes Matt and I had about returning to the land of our forebears. Matt’s return was to the unquestioned roots of his grandparents. His inherent sense of belonging as a Catholic of Polish ancestry created a deep level of comfort about the people he would meet, the things he would see and even the difficulties he might face. Hence, visiting the church and cemetery from his Polish past was a warm remembrance. Hence, nothing was likely to happen in Poland proper that he couldn’t handle. Hence, if he could avoid going through the onerous process of applying for a Belarus visa, why not! Hence, if he had to ride through the night in a frigid cattle car back to Warsaw, he’d survive.

I, as a Jew and perhaps as a lawyer, reacted quite differently. For me, of course, Poland was to be dark and dank, not sunny and cloudless. For me, the visa application through the Belarus embassy in Washington was to be handled with the utmost care and timing so no border guard could find any possible excuse for not stamping my passport. For me, even with my visa and passport, a midnight detention ride back to Warsaw strapped to a wooden bench was more of a likely reality than a dreamed-up nightmare.

With all this in mind, we were finally able to leave and once again find our way to the hotel. We unloaded our bags and at last were able to say good night to Shlomo and Sarah, who were exhausted. After checking in and receiving a grimace from the receptionist when I told her that I had to leave the document she gave me with the customs officer, we were pleasantly surprised to learn that dinner was still being served in the dining room, even though it was now one in the morning. We were both starved, so we made our way through the dark corridors to another large, bland, Communist-designed sanctuary with a dance floor and mostly empty tables. A band was playing deafening popular music. Several couples were on the dance floor, including two or three sets of women, each dancing together.

We placed our order for the best we could find on the menu --meat and potatoes. As we looked around the room, we saw four or five tables in a distant corner filled with well-dressed, attractive females. They eagerly smiled at us as we glanced in their direction. Suddenly, two of them walked right over and, in a Russian that Matt easily understood, asked us to dance. We soon learned that this would have been just the first step. Matt and I were hungry for meat and potatoes, nothing more, but they persisted. When Matt told them we were Americans, they couldn’t believe it and laughingly asked for proof. Since I was the only one with a U.S. passport, which I had retrieved from the disgruntled receptionist, I showed it to them. They still seemed unpersuaded at our disinterest, but they did return to their table, though they continued to keep their eyes peeled on us throughout our dinner. In the midst of our meal, our waitress told us that aside from gambling, the hotel was the town’s center for prostitutes. She said that men with a goodly supply of rubles usually found their way there and that prostitutes were one of the few groups in Brest Litovsk who seemed to be living well.

The Weinsteins had arranged to pick us up at 9:00 o’clock the next morning. As soon as they arrived, we started the 30 mile drive to Wysokie Litovsk. The landscape on this sunny day was mostly flat with a slight roll here and there and the beginning growth of some form of corn or soybean. There were frequent stands of fir trees punctuated by a crowd of lean, white pillars of birch – a quintessential Russian setting. Shlomo was driving all over the road, partly due to an uncooperative steering mechanism and partly due to his age, but fortunately there was almost no traffic. When we arrived at the immediate outskirts of Wysoko Litovsk, we observed rows of wooden houses which we later learned had been there since the late 1800s. Within moments we were in the center of town, which had one paved street that formed a square around an empty park. A few people were selling clothes and other essentials at a flea-market in one part of the square, but there were hardly any buyers to be seen.

When we got out of the car, Shlomo walked over to a man dressed in a military uniform and asked for directions to the town hall. The man pointed to a side street off the square where we could see a rather large, red and white, pre-revolutionary structure. Shlomo motioned us to walk in that direction. We entered the red and white building and went up the stairs to a second floor office where a woman was sitting behind a desk. Shlomo began speaking Russian to her but the conversation was so fast that Matt couldn’t keep pace with what they were saying, though he did hear the word “mayor.”

The next thing I knew we were being ushered into the office of the mayor of Wysokie Litovsk. He greeted us with enthusiasm; after all, here were two Americans who had unexpectedly arrived in his backyard. We sat down on one side of a finely-polished, rectangular table and explained why we were there. He immediately picked up the phone, dialed a number and went on at length, apparently about us. When he hung up, he reported to

Shlomo, who reported to Matt, who reported to me that the mayor had called the former mayor who was coming right over to be our guide. I then, through my interpreters, asked many questions about the Jewish community. The mayor told us that 90 percent of the 3,000 population of Wysokie Litovsk had at one time been Jewish, but almost every Jew had been wiped out during World War ll. Of the very few who had escaped and survived, only three or four made it back and lived out their lives there, but they were gone now, too.

The former mayor, who we were told had run the village for many years, turned out to be a woman in her 60s. Her appearance was similar to that of a solid and sturdy British governess, complete with frayed tweeds and sensible shoes. She immediately instructed us to follow her as she led us to the door. Before leaving I handed the mayor a keychain with a Michael Jordan emblem on it. He smiled and placed it right in front of him.

Our guide, whose name was Maria Petrovna, led us down a dirt road, talking as we went about what life had been like during the Communist era, how difficult the change was and the little she knew of the former Jewish community. She was warmly greeted by the occasional passers-by or those who called out from their modest yards. We approached a hand pump which she said had been used to draw water from a well for more than a century. She was sure that my forebears had carried their filled buckets from that pump to where they lived, since it was the only source of water at the time. We made our way down another dirt road on either side of which stood squalid hovels. I saw a man sitting on a bench near the opening to his; he was completely oblivious to our passing by. Given the lines on his face and his stooped shoulders, he looked like he was in his 80s, though he was probably a good deal younger.

Maria Petrovna took us down other dirt roads, all of which were filled with the same kind of wooden shacks. I had no idea in which one my grandparents lived or my father was born, but I certainly had a strong sense of their surroundings. As we moved along, two men came by atop a cart being pulled by an ox. We were next approached by a man who was clearly drunk, weaving in our direction and then reversing course. Our guide soon led us to a special road, the one where we found the vestiges of the only remaining synagogue. It had been built of brick, though weeds had grown over what was left inside the four, crumbled walls. The village had taken no steps to preserve or memorialize it (though I have since learned that in 2006 children from the nearby school and their teacher worked for days clearing the brush and other growth in and around it). The building’s main entrance faced onto a rolling, grass-covered meadow at one end of which sat the former mansion of the Polish duke and duchess who long ago had granted permission for Jews to live in Wysokie Litovsk. I walked through the inside of this ruined temple which seemed like the remains of a bombed out structure during World War ll. I had no idea whether this was where my grandparents attended, but I presumed that they worshipped at one of the then existing synagogues before they came to America. We made our way back to the town square and bought lunch for Maria Petrovna. I wanted to give her a payment for her efforts but she refused to take anything except one of my keychain gifts.

We departed for Brest Litovsk in the late afternoon and as we drove I sat in silence thinking about my father. I thought about how his growing up in America had been very different from mine. After arriving in Bloomington, my grandparents settled into a decent but modest home. My father had to work before he was fully ten years old, and as he grew into his teens he staked out his turf in what was a largely non-Jewish community.

The Jews of Bloomington were very much like Jews in small towns scattered throughout the Midwest at that time. They were close-knit as a group, protective and jealous of one another as individuals, and dutiful to their religion. But they were also more at ease and accepted by their Christian neighbors than Jews from the large urban centers.

Like what Matt had told me about his father, mine, who ultimately became a prominent Chicago lawyer, was always a safe harbor for me. He seemed to know, almost intuitively, how to tackle a problem or resolve an issue. He was a man’s man. If you weren’t a man, with those elusive but understood qualities which that expression evokes, you wouldn’t last with him. Other men sought him out. He never wanted for friends. He fished with them; he played golf and cards with them; he laughed his deep, resonant and joyful laugh with them, and told great jokes and stories. Both he and Matt’s father had the rich qualities of small town boys who achieved success as grown men.

My father wanted the prosperity that money could bring and the knowledge that he had measured up on the yardstick by which most Americans define success, but he was fully aware that it was a phony yardstick when it came to measuring what a man was really worth. He enjoyed the company of men who had been well-defined by that yardstick, but he could always be heard to challenge them. He loved to argue about essentials with them. He loved to make them question.

I was ever the son of my father. The roles were never reversed or eroded, not even at the end, not even in his most weakened condition as he lay dying in 1987 at age 83, ten years before my visit to his birthplace. As a mature adult and an experienced lawyer, I have often been called upon to deal directly and firmly with others. However I may have stood up to these challenges, I could never deal with my father as I would any other man. I could never be harsh with him. I could never deliberately hurt him. I could never be disrespectful of him. Even when I knew he was wrong; even when I knew he was stubbornly certain or maddeningly obstinate, it was just not in me to go after him for these failings. These were the failings that made him human to me, that taught and reminded me as I grew up under his firm and tender protection that he was not a god. I came to terms with my father’s failings, and loved him nevertheless and all the more.

These memories filled my thoughts as we made our way back to Brest Litovsk. There was one other aspect of life in Belarus which Shlomo felt strongly about our seeing. We had a train to catch back to Poland at noon the next day, but he insisted on picking us up early enough so we could visit the Soviet War Memorial built in recognition of those who fought the Nazis. Shlomo had been one of those fighters and was anxious to have us know how the Soviets had memorialized that fighting and how much his role meant to him.

He was born in Brest Litovsk and as a young man joined the Polish cavalry. For several weeks after the Nazis invaded in 1939, his regiment, which had moved to Warsaw, fought them off until it seemed they would probably have to surrender. Before being captured, the captain of the regiment dispersed his men, sending them back to where they each came from. Shlomo returned to Brest Litovsk where he quickly joined the Russian army. For the rest of the War he fought the Nazis, first on the defensive after Hitler breached the non-aggression pact with Stalin, and then on the offensive, driving them out of Brest Litovsk, out of Poland and back to Berlin. At the end of the War he returned to Brest Litovsk where he met and married Sarah. She was originally from Minsk and had somehow survived the Nazi annihilation.

They picked us up at 9:00 o’clock sharp the next morning, which was the first day in our whole time in Eastern Europe that the sun was not shining for us. There was a heavy mist in the air and the darkness fully reflected my prior image of Poland. It was also a fitting day to visit a memorial to the war dead. We entered a large park and made our way through the cold wind to the principal site, which was an enormous sculpture that had been hacked out of the side of a rocky cliff and bore a strong resemblance to a young Lenin whose shoulders hunched forward like some prizefighter erupting from the mountainside. Uniformed soldiers, both male and female, marched up and down past the sculpture, goose-stepping just as they had when Belarus was under the control of the Soviet Union. There were plaques throughout the park with names on them of those who had died, some on stones embedded in the ground, others on slabs that had been erected for that purpose. In one section, a stream flowed quietly and near its edge another huge statue of a dying soldier lay sculpted on the ground with one arm striving to reach the water. Shlomo reiterated his wartime experiences as we walked from site to site with Sarah translating for him and Matt adding his understanding. Actually, it turned out that Sarah had never accompanied Shlomo when he guided other people through the War Memorial. Part of this was Shlomo’s wish to run the show himself, particularly where he spoke the language of those he was guiding, and part of it was Sarah’s not realizing that she might herself teach and learn from the experience.

It was soon time to leave and Shlomo and Sarah took us to the train station. We told them how much they had meant to us, then both of us kissed Sarah good-bye, which surprised and touched her. We next embraced Shlomo, ignoring his outstretched hand. We boarded the train for Poland and as it pulled out of the station, Matt and I instinctively clasped hands in warm recognition of what we had experienced together. We talked about our fathers, about their roots at opposite ends of Poland, about their parents who rescued them before they were fully able to learn to hate one another, about the possibility of their having met as grown men in America who, while still encased in their pasts, might actually have turned out to be friends. And, if not, how they had laid the groundwork for the enduring friendship of their American sons.