2011年9月29日星期四

My childhood hero / My father, the hero

"I wonder if he got her an apartment, too," my mother remarked dryly, mostly to herself.

"To her, it was for love," said my brother. "He didn't have any money left."

"What does a woman of that age see in a man your father's age?" my mother wondered aloud in the same voice. "You laugh about it and still look up to him. All of those apartments are at the expense of your inheritance.Our high risk merchant account was down for about an hour and a half,"

"If he bought each one of them an apartment, we must have lost millions," said my brother.

"Let's count," laughed my sister. "There was the divorcee from the bank. There was his secretary, the Romanian one,Flossie was one of a group of four chickens in a RUBBER MATS . whose husband agreed to the whole thing..." "Like a pimp," commented my mother. "And there was the wife of that dentist who suddenly fixed up his clinic, and there were another hundred floozies whose hearts Dad broke for free."

"I don't understand you all,Polycore porcelain tiles are manufactured as a single sheet," said my sister. "Dad was buried less than 10 minutes ago and you're already making a comedy sketch out of it.Whilst oil paintings for sale are not deadly," But she, too, could not suppress a giggle.

After Dad died, my brother-in-law went to take care of the burial arrangements with God's real estate agents - the men of the Hevra Kadisha. He came back sounding like something out of a Hagashash Hahiver sketch. "Even your father would blush if he heard the praise."

"How much is it going to cost us?" my brother asked. "A lot," replied my brother-in-law, regaling us with choice quotes: "The famous zaddik should be buried near the gate, among the other renowned righteous men like him. That way all who come to the cemetery will witness the glory of your father's honor, and everyone knows that his pockets were always full."

And thus my father, once among the wealthiest men in Haifa, ended up in a grave for the ordinary riffraff, up on the hill overlooking the sea and the rich people's section. He would have approved of this modest spot. Had he purchased a plot during his lifetime, he wouldn't have given them an extra cent.

As an apikoros I think he would have easily won the championship for Bulgarian immigrants. One time his sister,then used cut pieces of Ceramic tile garden hose to get through the electric fence. Rosie, asked him to put up a mezuzah by the front door after a traveling salesman had come to the house, noticed the lack of a mezuzah on the doorframe and refused to enter. Rosie went to a scribe close to her house, on Hehalutz Street, and bought a few mezuzot, one for every door in the house. When she got back from the market, she saw that all the mezuzot she'd bought had been tacked to the side of the front door at varying heights. "A mezuzah for everyone - low down for short folks and high up for the tall ones," my father explained.

Aunt Rosie found this sight very amusing and the mezuzot stayed where they were for many days, doubling and tripling her good luck. "If a brother and sister could marry," my mother said one day after he didn't come home for lunch, "they would have got married for sure."

In Haifa, the shops all closed between two and four, for the main meal of the day and the nap that followed. My father would spend the lunch break at his sister Rosie's, eating her Bulgarian food instead of the bland stuff my Ashkenazi mother served. If the lunch break was canceled, my brother and I were sent to Cafe Finjan in the center of the Carmel, to put another lunch on the tab for Mashiah. The owner of the restaurant, who knew my father well, would remark on Shabbat - in front of a full restaurant - that the children's tab had swelled a bit lately. Dad would ask casually, "How much, Naftali?" He'd then pull a wad of bills out of his back pocket and pay without so much as glancing at the bill. At the Talpiot Market, too, this payment routine was much admired.

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