Forgiveness and hope in the china cabinet

National Catholic Reporter, May 7, 2004 by Mark Klempner

My father's side of the family escaped Europe on the last boat out of Poland. My father, his two brothers, one sister, and both his parents, boarded the ocean liner M.S.S. Batory on August 25, 1939. One week later the Nazis invaded and all sea travel was verboten. My grandmother, Lillian Klempner, once sat me on her lap, and, turning the pages of photo albums from the Old Country, showed me wedding pictures, sepia-toned young couples, smiling women, plump children in their little white shoes. "Hitler took them all," was all she said.

Lillian used to keep two photos in her china cabinet. The cabinet itself was the closest thing to a shrine you'd find in this frum, that is, highly observant Jewish home: Behind two spotless glass windows were her best dishes, menorah, candlesticks, challah plate, ritual spice box and other gleaming silver and gold objects.

But it was the pictures that made the biggest impression on me: One was of John F. Kennedy, the other of Pope John XXIII. Even as a child growing up in the 1960s, I sensed that there was something a bit incongruous about those pictures being there.

Kennedy was familiar to me. I'd seen him on TV several times. He always struck me as profoundly comforting, everything a young child could want of a president. Like all the elementary school students at P.S. 87 in the Bronx, I'd been exhorted to take to heart his admonition to "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." Until his assassination, I had no direct experience of the adult world being vulnerable. A sadness covered everything that day, and my 8-year-old self tasted for the first time the aching lost-at-sea quality of grief.

Pope John was not entirely unfamiliar. Before we moved upstate when I was 11, my family lived in a lower-middle-class Italian neighborhood where I was one of three Jewish children in my elementary school. Girls from the nearby parochial school would speak of the pope sometimes. I once irritated one of these girls--I don't remember how. When I walked by her house, she was standing there in her white blouse and navy knee socks glowering at me. "You dirty Jew," she shouted, and then added, "Your people killed Christ!"

I knew this was an attack of a more ancient and insidious nature than the typical rough-and-tumble epithets my occasional and usually momentary childhood enemies would hurl at me. Not knowing what to say, I think I called her a dirty Catholic. Even with out understanding that Jesus had been Jewish as well as Mary, Joseph and all the disciples, I was quite sure that whatever she was imputing to "my people" wasn't true, and, even if it were, why should I be judged by what others of my religion had done, especially those who lived so long ago?

She never said such a thing again, but I could not forget the verbal weapons she had in her arsenal--weapons I did not have, and did not want to have. I realized, though I couldn't have expressed it, that the very act of carrying such weapons does damage to one's soul.

So there was the photo of Pope John sitting in my grandmother's china cabinet. "A good man," she told me once, "a kind man." His regalia looked impressive, but it, too, gave me pause. Whereas the girls from St. Francis of Assisi wore little silver crosses around their necks, this guy had a huge one planted on his chest. Yet he also had something on his head that looked like a yarmulke. Could there be a connection between the two faiths? After all, my mother had told me--this is not, I think, the answer that most Jewish children get--that Jesus had been a great prophet.

Thinking back to it now, I see the photos in my grandmother's cabinet embodying her forgiveness, her hope, her ultimate trust that despite the fact that in Poland she had to stay indoors on Easter and Christmas to keep from being attacked by bands of churchgoing peasants, despite the Holocaust that killed nearly all her family and friends there, despite the fact that the world for the most part had abandoned the Jews to their destruction, she was still happy to honor those whom she viewed as good leaders and good Catholics--those who offered hope that the terrors of the past need not reappear in the future.

Mark Klempner is a folklorist. His forthcoming book, The Heart Has Reasons, is about Dutch rescuers of Jewish children during the Holocaust.