Sunday, September 26, 1999

On Friday the men in the building put up a sukkah by the pool for Sukkos. It is made from white plastic pipe and a green tarp, with palm fronds on top for the roof, which Rolando the building manager cut for us from the trees by the driveway. He asked me what it was for. I told him, it is to remember that we lived in huts in the desert and God took care of us. He looked at it and said, "Like a chickee hut." Exactly like a chickee hut. Moses would have liked Rolando.

Today I ate my lunch in the sukkah with Sol. After a while Irving came in carrying two coffees and put one down in front of me and sat. He did not say he was sorry. He said the coffee from the bakery on 41st Street is better than the coffee in the card room. It is. We will play on Tuesday.

Adam writes to me every day now on the e-mail. He asks questions. What was my father's shop like. What songs did my mother sing. I answer a little every day. I am learning that a man can say things to a computer at five in the morning that he would not say to his own family at dinner.

People have written to me from far away. A man in Winnipeg whose parents were also in Lodz. A schoolteacher in Oregon. A young woman who said only "thank you" and nothing else, which was enough. I am slow, but I answer everybody.

This morning on my walk the ocean was flat like a tablecloth. I stood there and I was grateful and I was angry, both, at the same time, the way I have been for fifty-four years. I think that is just what I am. Nu. Good night.

Tuesday, September 21, 1999

Yom Kippur. Sunday night Kol Nidre at the little shul on the Beach. Monday I fasted until eleven o'clock in the morning. Then I took my pills with a glass of water and a piece of toast, because Dr. Mehta made me promise, and the rabbi said the same thing: to guard your life is a bigger mitzvah than to fast. The rabbi is thirty-four. They are all young now.

At Yizkor you stand and say the names of your dead. I said them. My father, Chaim. My mother, Malka. My sisters, Rivka and Dora. My Hanna. The whole shul was old men and old women saying names under their breath, all at once, like a shop full of sewing machines, everybody working on something by himself.

Every Yom Kippur I have an argument with God. We have been having the same argument since 1942. He does not answer, which some people say is an answer. This year I told Him, all right, I will give You this much: the ocean in the morning, Sheila, Howard, the grandchildren, forty-eight years with Hanna. The rest we will discuss next year.

At the break-fast there were bagels and whitefish salad and I had two pieces of honey cake. Dr. Mehta doesn't have to know everything.

Thursday, September 16, 1999

Tuesdays and Thursdays is pinochle in the card room downstairs with Sol, Bernie and Irving. Sol is from Philadelphia and very quiet. Bernie is from the Bronx and believes the Bronx is the center of the world. Irving talks. He talks while he shuffles, while he deals, while he loses.

Today Irving was talking about some program he saw on the television, and he said, not to me, to the table: "Enough already. It was fifty-five years ago. People should let it go." Then he saw my face and said, "Morris, I didn't mean you."

I put down my cards and went upstairs. I have not been so angry in a long time. Angry at Irving, who spent the war on a Navy base in San Diego and is a good man and a fool. Angry also at myself, because some mornings I would like to let it go too. It does not let go of me.

Sol called at six to say that I walked out ahead on points, which is the first time this year.

Sunday, September 12, 1999

L'shana tova. Friday night Sheila drove down and took me to her house in Fort Lauderdale for the holiday. Round challah, apples and honey, and her brisket, which is not her mother's brisket, and I said it was wonderful, which is the kind of lie God forgives on Rosh Hashanah. My son Howard called from New Jersey and talked for ten minutes about the Mets.

Yesterday was Shabbos and also the first day, so tashlich waits for the second day, today. You go to the water and you empty your pockets of crumbs, which stand for your sins, and you throw them in. Most people here go to a canal. I have the Atlantic Ocean across the street. At four o'clock I went down and threw my crumbs into the ocean, and a pelican came and ate them. I don't know if that counts. I think he took my sins to Cuba.

Wednesday, September 8, 1999

Today I spoke to a history class at a high school up in Broward. I do this two or three times a year. The children were sixteen, seventeen, the same as Adam. A few were sleeping when I started. Nobody was sleeping at the end.

I tell them the facts. Lodz, the ghetto, 1940. My father, the winter of 1942. August 1944, the trains to Auschwitz. At the end of the train my mother and my sisters went one way and I went the other. That is all I say about that. I don't tell children everything. Some things are mine.

A girl in the front asked me do I hate the Germans. I told her the truth, which is that I hated for many years, and it was like carrying a sewing machine up four flights of stairs every day. Now I carry it only some days. A boy in the back asked if I still believe in God. I said I believe in Him. We are not always on speaking terms.

After, the teacher, a nice woman who cried a little and said it was her allergies, took me to the cafeteria for lunch. Pizza, in a rectangle. I ate the whole thing. I have eaten worse, believe me. That is a joke I did not tell the children.

Monday, August 30, 1999

Today the heart doctor. Dr. Mehta is a very nice young man of about fifty, which to me is young. He listened for a long time with the stethoscope, then he looked at the papers, then he looked at me and said, "Mr. Rosenzweig, your heart is tired." I said, "Doctor, so am I."

He changed one pill and added one more, the Coumadin, so now every two weeks they take blood to check it. Keep walking, he says. No salt. And no fasting on Yom Kippur. I said we will discuss Yom Kippur closer to the time. He said, "We are discussing it now." I like him.

In the waiting room a lady had a little dog in a bag. The dog wore a sweater. In Miami Beach. In August.

Thursday, August 12, 1999

Every morning I walk on the beach. Six-thirty, before the heat, on the hard sand by the water, twenty minutes north and twenty minutes back. At that hour it is the same people every day. A Cuban man who swings his arms like a windmill. Two ladies from Montreal who speak French and Yiddish, both, in the same sentence. A young fellow with a metal detector who has found, he tells me, a great many bottle caps.

This morning the sun came up very red and for some reason I thought of my father. He had a tailor shop on a side street off Piotrkowska, and he was up before the sun every day of his life. When I was small he took me along to open the shop, and I sat on the cutting table and watched him chalk the cloth. He had beautiful hands.

He died in the ghetto in the winter of 1942. I was twenty-four. By then I had the same hands, and in the ghetto that is what kept me alive, because they needed tailors. They needed uniforms. So I made them uniforms.

I don't know why I am writing this on a Thursday after a walk. Adam says you write what comes. This came.

Tuesday, August 3, 1999

My grandson Adam says I should keep a journal on the computer. He is seventeen. He came down from New Jersey for two weeks in July and put this machine on my kitchen table where the fruit bowl used to be. The fruit bowl is now on top of the refrigerator. Nobody asked the fruit bowl.

Adam says, Zayde, people want to know what you think. I said, which people? He said, people. So. People, hello.

My name is Morris Rosenzweig. I was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1917. I was in the ghetto there, and then in Auschwitz, and in 1945 I was liberated. I came to New York in 1949 with my wife, Hanna, whom I met after the war, and I was a tailor in Brooklyn for forty-one years. Hanna died in 1995. After that the apartment was too quiet and the winters were too long, and my daughter Sheila found me this condominium on Miami Beach. Near her, but not too near. This is also a practical arrangement.

I am eighty-two years old. I type with two fingers. Adam says that is fine, everybody starts somewhere. I told him everybody starts with a needle and thread. He did not laugh. Seventeen.