Noticing differences between my grandparents became a kind of hobby that year. Cooking was the first to stand out: Grandma improvised her dishes with whatever she could find—stale cookies, squishy kiwis, a half teaspoon of leftover oatmeal. Grandpa, on the other hand, excelled at ornate dishes that required precision timing and ingredients you had to go out of your way to buy. Grandma could not bear to throw away food—waste gave her nightmares. She even fished the bay leaves out of her stews, washed and dried them, and put them back in the jar for later use. My grandfather tossed things out with something approaching relish: a lettuce leaf with a tiny spot, the green middle of the garlic clove, the white flesh in the not-quite-ripe tomato—all of it went into the trash with less than no regret. Grandma favored bright colors, and Grandpa wore only muted ones; she preferred flowers, and he preferred leaves; she liked Rilke, and he liked Baudelaire; she watched TV, and he listened to the radio. Unlike my grandmother, who clung to her Austro-Hungarian-Romano-Franco-Yiddish accent as a last link to a lost world, my grandfather’s English was impeccable, spoken with more heed and purity than any BBC announcer. Where Grandma divined my sentences before I even spoke them, Grandpa pretended not to understand me at all unless I enunciated as he did, removing all trace of America from my words.
But their biggest difference was the war. My grandmother’s war seemed almost friendly, almost enviable. I loved to hear her tell of that perilous era and all her near misses. She called the war “the university of my life” and took a zestful, triumphant pride in all the ingenious ways she’d figured out how to survive. Grandma believed everything in life came with a lesson, and the lesson she conveyed as she told of her encounters during the war, from the gendarme who’d kept her off the deportation lists to the woman who took her in for the night just to keep the Nazis from requisitioning her spare bedroom, was that everyone she’d met was just as luckless—or lucky, depending on how you looked at it—as she. My grandmother surged through life armed with a lid she clapped over her memories when they got out of hand, keeping discipline among them with a battery of axioms and aphorisms. If she had survived, it was because whatever comes, comes for the best—as she reminded me over and over. Grandma had deep faith in a God whose goodness she’d accepted she would never comprehend. If everything happens for the best, what right did she have to question? What right had she to founder in grief?
My grandfather did not believe he was lucky. God had not been good to him, and in retaliation, he had become an atheist, a revenge he exacted daily on the Holy One, lest the Holy One forget. My grandfather spent his days remembering; after all, if God did not exist, then someone had to do it. His house was filled with books and articles on the persecution of the Jews during World War II, and he regularly attended conferences and films on the subject. The only Jewish holiday he observed was Holocaust Remembrance Day, when he forced himself to sit through at least three hours of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. But much like the God he didn’t believe in, he did his remembering in silence. He never said anything about what had happened to his parents, and I never dared to ask him. I knew a little from hints and slips of stories I’d picked up from other people in the family, but broaching the topic with him seemed as foolhardy as exposing pure sodium to air, as if it could spark a grief strong enough to deafen and blind us, a white-hot sadness that would stun and burn us beyond remedy.
Once a week though, on Shabbat, I would strike a single, dangerous match. The first time I asked if I could light candles I was merely homesick and hadn’t considered the implications of my request. Grandpa, in his perfect, measured English, reminded me of them immediately: “You understand, I hope, that I no longer believe in God after what happened. During the war, you know.” Then he added, “If it makes you happy, please go ahead. But I shall not participate.”
Nevertheless, he retreated to his room and returned with a pair of candlesticks. He set them in the middle of the dining room table and rummaged through the hall closet until he found a box of candles. Then he stood back and looked at me a little defiantly. “There’s no challah,” he observed.
“I’ll just use ordinary bread.” I took some from the kitchen, set it on a plate, and covered it with a paper napkin. We stood there awkwardly.
“I can open a bottle of wine,” Grandpa suggested. “I shall go get one from the cellar.”
When he uncorked the bottle, I unfolded another paper napkin and covered my head. Outside it was already dark, the blue night stained green by the streetlamps and orange from the floodlights gleaming off the soccer stadium across the street. I scraped the match against the box and it puffed into a flame; I lit the two candles, gestured the light toward me, and cupped my hands over my eyes. The apartment grew even quieter. I wondered, as I said the blessing, whether Grandpa had slipped out of the room. When I uncovered my eyes, I looked through the dim glow of the candles and saw he was weeping, his shoulders shuddering, just barely suppressing sobs. He looked up at me with wide eyes I could hardly bear to meet.
“My mother,” he whispered hoarsely.
The next week he asked me to come on Saturday morning. Then I went back to showing up on Friday night, and every time he would pause in our dinner preparations to ask, “Are you going to light candles?”
And with some subterranean instinct that it was necessary to shine at least a wavering beam across the darkened plane of his past, I would always answer in the affirmative. Weeks went by in which every Friday night was the same: I would touch the match to the candlewick, and he would begin to weep, and I would weep with him, and we would eat our dinner in near silence.
Then one Friday night he appeared at the table wearing a kippah. “I found this,” he announced, as if he’d picked it up off the ground in the park. “I thought I didn’t have one anymore.” He wore it every Friday after that. A few weeks later a braided loaf appeared on the table. By spring, we made it through the ritual without crying, exchanging a tiny smile once the candles were lit.
And one day he led me into his bedroom to show me something new: a glass frame he’d hung over his bed. In it were the only photographs remaining from his childhood, a posed portrait of him with his parents and siblings and a snapshot of his young mother.