Straits of Tiran

            In recent years, I’ve come to believe in the power of environment over nature. It’s my father Miguel who embodies the seminal force of experience best. If you knew the family history, all you’d have to do is look at him to see a man physically transformed by the events of life. I’ve never been to Poland, but I picture him there, an infant. There he is, his body covered in the red blotches of rheumatic fever, floating in a tub. In the next frame, he’s a little street urchin, begging for food from a group of soldiers. It’s World War I, or the Great War, as it was called in Europe, and with his father away, he has to beg for all his siblings. Next thing you know, he’s a boy of eleven, wielding a stick like a sword. Easter Sunday. Church bells. And he and his little brother are cornered.

            They kidnap babies and use their blood in the Pesach matzos. They’re a bunch of greedy murderers.  Get ‘em!

            It was these scuffles that gave him the wide, muscular build, that stunted his growth. Made him thick as a tree, that fast-forwarded his biological clock like the winding of a key.

            And yet, though he could be incredibly domineering—my older brother, Isaac, left to start his life in the States as he could get out from under our father’s thumb—for much of his life, he was a gentle man. He’d hang around the Jewish Deportivo playing dominos until late at night, while my uncle held court at chess. Maybe it’s because of what he did for our family that I feel the way I do, because without him, none of these people would have made it to Mexico.  None of them would exist.

            These days, the factory Miguel built is closed. NAFTA chopped one of our legs out from under us; then came the Asian invasion. You can’t buy an electrical part anymore that doesn’t come from China, or some goddamn place. But the point is, for a while there, we had it good. The old man made his money before he got out. 

            True, he did certain hurtful things, but what man who’s lived a life like that has not? Ever been locked in a Guatemalan prison? Ever tried to make it another country, an orphan, on forged papers?

            I’ll tell you this—the man was a better human being than you and I! People might not see that today, because everyone is defined, it seems, by their worst moments. But it’s not mistakes that define us, but our accomplishments.  The ability to pick yourself up, fight off failure and despair, and make something of your life. 

            My brother’s wedding took place on a scorching August afternoon in Ramona, in east San Diego County. Driving from our hotel in La Jolla, palm trees, luxury cars, and mirrored office buildings gave way to brown hillsides with low shrubs, red boulders, condors circling in the sky, hoping to peck on our withered carcasses. My wife, Ellie, and I reached the vineyard just around the time that my father’s car pulled up.   

            “Some place for a wedding,” I said. “You’d think he’d want to impress everyone after all these years, not give them heat stroke.”

            “You know how your brother is,” Ellie said. “Remember when he moved to Italy? One day he just calls us from Florence. No one’s ever had a clue what’s going through his head.”

            “True, he could have picked this place because he had a feeling about the girl who answers the phone. Or maybe he just wanted to piss everyone off.”     

            Just then, Isaac came out to meet Miguel at his car.

            “Hola, hijo,” Miguel said in his singsong cadence, “engordaste!  She must be some cook.” He gave Isaac’s stomach a little tap.

            “No te conosco, mosco!” he said to his grandson Adam, and he snapped at him and took a bite of his hair, holding it in his teeth.

            “Déjame Zeyde!” Adam squealed.

            Though he was eighty-two, Miguel still had the compact, muscular build of welterweight and a full head of silver hair. When he reached Isaac’s oldest son, my nephew Etan, he started in for an embrace, then pulled back, as if he’d caught sight of a spider on the tip of Etan’s nose. 

            It wasn’t a spider he’d spotted, but the piercing Etan wore in his eyebrow. Otherwise, his face was remarkably unchanged from when he was a boy. He looked very young, with fleshy cheeks and large, piercing blue eyes, and dark bags under the eyes, like Miguel himself. 

            “What’s up, Zeyde?” Etan said, and he took Miguel’s hand in an awkward handshake.

            “Nieto mío. What’s new in your life?”

            “Not much. I’m going to make aliyah this year. I’m moving to Israel to become a paratrooper. Three more months, and I turn eighteen. Then I’m gone.”

            “Really,” Miguel said, “That’s very interesting. Does your father know all this?”

            “He knows.”

            “What does he say?”

            Etan brushed two fingers across his face, as if adjusting an invisible cigarette.

            “He says it’s cool.”

            When Etan was five, Isaac and Etan’s mother went on a vacation to Israel, and Etan came to stay with us in our home in Mexico City. It was then I got to know my little nephew. He was whip-smart, gifted at math for his age, and very shy. Every morning, he’d insist that Ellie put on Sesame Street on our TV.  “Quiero ver Big Bird,” he’d say, his eyes looking up at us with a puppy-expression. “We don’t have Big Bird,” Ellie would try and explain. “Seriously, there’s no Big Bird in Mexico.” “Big Bird!!” he’d insist. I always think of Etan as the boy who couldn’t accept that life could go on without Sesame Street.

            “You hearing this?” Miguel said to me. “Your nephew says he’s moving to Israel to join the army. Incredible. I remember when you were nine or ten and all you cared about were a bunch of dolls. The beanies. What do you call them? Bean babies! First you had a little dog, then you wanted a cat, then a monkey, and on and on it went. There was a dozen of them all across your bed. We’d come to visit you, and you wouldn’t shut up about them. ‘Cómprame uno, cómprame Zeyde!’ To be honest, I was a little worried. What kind of boy sleeps in a bed with thirty little beanie dolls?”

            Etan didn’t answer him, just blushed in an angry, brooding way, and fidgeted with the stud in his eyebrow. “Funny, Zeyde. You’re a funny guy,” Etan muttered, “I forgot we had a comedian in the family!” Then he wandered off toward the food.

            I caught up with Etan by the spread of appetizers. He was assembling a plate of giant strawberries and miniature Kobe beef sandwiches. I helped myself to a glass of champagne from a caterer’s tray.

            “Hold on,” Etan said to her, as she moved past us, “let me get one of those.”

            “Hey, uncle Nick. What’s up?”

            “Etan, take a walk with me,” I said. We took our drinks and plates with us and walked off into the vineyard.

            “How’s your mother?” I said.

            “Ruthy? She’s alright.”

            “She’s still living in Israel?”

            “Yep. Still there, writing the next Harry Potter or some bullshit. So she says.”

            “And you’re moving there too?”

            “Not because of her, if that’s what you’re thinking. I barely saw her last summer – I mean, shit, she sent me packing after like two weeks.” He lit a cigarette. “She was so pissed at me, she sent me off to some fucking army camp.”

            Who would have guessed all that? was all I could think. My rich little nephew from Rancho Santa Fe moving to Israel to become a paratrooper. This was a boy who used to have a basketball court in his backyard and a servant called Igor.  

            “How’s your Hebrew?”

            “Terrible. I actually used my French quite a bit, though. Bon soir, madame, voulez-vous my thing?” He gestured obscenely, finished his champagne, and let out a belch. “You know, uncle Nick, what I can’t figure out is why you and Zeyde would even bother to show up for this. It’s not like you and Isaac even talk anymore. And I know Zeyde. He’ll just be pissed off the entire time he’s here.”

            Just then, they called everyone to sit down and start the ceremony.

            “And now,” the rabbi said, “we call the groom’s father, Miguel Podolsky, to lead us in the blessing over the wine.”

            My father heard his name with considerable surprise. It took him a moment to get up—he had to lean on Ellie’s shoulder to pull himself up from the chair—but then he was on his feet, taking steady, small steps without his cane. He reached Isaac and Denise beneath the chuppa, took the glass from the rabbi, and lifted it up.

            “Baruch ata adonai,” he began, his brow furrowing and tightening as if six different emotions were competing to express themselves.

            The Kiddush, said every Shabbat, was one of three of four Hebrew prayers my father-in-law knew by heart. He wasn’t raised with much religion in Poland, though he’d read extensively about Judaism later in life and sent me and Isaac to the Yidishe in Mexico City, where we learned Hebrew and Yiddish, in addition to Spanish.   

            “eloheinu melech ha’olam”

            What a mark the man had made. Through his presence and his absence. In his actions and in death. Though Miguel had left Poland long before the war, he had a very clear image of his father’s death. His father had been a soldier, and Miguel understood with a lucid certainty that he had not gone willingly to the camps but fought. His father kept a rifle from his army days. Miguel pictured him reaching for it, saw him shot as held the weapon to his hip. 

            “borei pri hagafen.” 

            In a recurring dream, Miguel crept out from a secret hiding place and stood over the body. Wind whipped through the house in a loud moan. He looked down at the body. 

            “Moshe, where were you?” his father asked him. The sound of his birth name filled him with terror. 

            After the war, he’d traveled to Poland, and his vision had been confirmed. It had taken money to pry the story out, even threats, but the dream had more or less been verified by neighbors, Pollocks who had not thought twice about occupying the dead man’s house. His father was shot in his home, his body discarded in a mass grave near a bridge.  Now Miguel saw it again in his mind’s eye, the whole drama. So transfixed was he by his father’s apparition, that momentarily he lost his sense of where he was, but then Isaac came over to him, and placed a hand on his shoulder, and reality came flooding back.

            Isaac was taller than he was. He was naturally thick, like all the men in the family, but lacking in musculature.  He had the body of a man who has never performed a day of physical labor in his life, which, as far as Miguel could remember, he hadn’t. Even in his suit, he looked pale and soft. Looking him over, Miguel could find little evidence of the genetic inheritance that should have passed from his own father, through himself, and on to his oldest son. 

            “Papi,” Isaac said gently, and he put his hand around the rim of the glass as if to take it.

            Miguel suddenly felt that he couldn’t possibly hand over the glass. That to hand it over would only implicate him in the most shameful duplicity.

            “Papi, let go of the glass,” Isaac said quietly.

            As my father looked at Isaac, I felt I knew exactly what he was thinking. That Isaac couldn’t possibly take the glass from him. That to take it from his grip was simply beyond his power, his will.

            “Hijo, I can’t allow it…”