Haunted by My Grandfather’s Warnings about America
My paternal grandfather was born in Austria-Hungary in 1897. He was a Torah scribe. He spent his life inking Hebrew scripture by hand with a feathered quill. His son, my father, was born in 1930 in Vienna. In 1933, my grandfather watched in horror as Hitler became chancellor of Germany. My grandparents sold everything they owned and left Austria for Portugal.
This move likely saved my grandparents and my father. Their relatives in Austria were shipped to concentration camps and murdered by the Nazis. After the war, my grandparents sent my father to America by ship to live with a distant cousin. America was a bastion of freedom and democracy. My grandfather’s hope was that a dictatorship could never happen across the sea.
In 1983, my grandfather became ill. He slowly wasted away to 90 pounds. He went in and out of coma states, babbling incoherently. At times, he was lucid. These moments were rare. I visited him and held his hand, reading him comic strips from the Sunday Herald Examiner.
Not long before his passing, my grandfather awoke from his torpor. I happened to be with him that day. He opened his eyes, looked up at me and smiled. He asked me about school and my siblings and if I’d decided on a career yet. I was only 19 at the time. I told him I might go into the movies like my dad but I wasn’t sure.
