By Sandor Slomovits

Earlier this year, we celebrated our daughter’s 30th birthday with a small ritual that has long been a tradition in our family. On every birthday, and on our wedding anniversary, we make time to review some of the best moments of the previous year. Since this was a significant birthday for our daughter, we upped the ante. This time we reviewed the highlights of the past thirty years! Unachievable in a week, preposterous in an hour. Still, we tried. Over a leisurely, celebratory breakfast, the three of us recalled and reminisced about favorite family vacations and outings, special concerts—ones we played, ones we attended—plays we’d seen, books we’d read, graduations, weddings, and other milestones. And we laughed about misadventures that were not funny at the time but have, with the passage of time, become hilarious.

When we finally got up from the table, I drew my wife aside and said, “We did okay.” What I meant, and she understood without me having to say more, was that we had managed to give our daughter a childhood and young adulthood filled with many happy memories.

In painful contrast, I remembered my father. Had my parents and I reviewed my first thirty years, we’d have been hard put to fill an hour reviewing happy memories. We might have reminisced happily of our early years, but no further. By the time I was eleven or twelve, my father and I had begun clashing, at first silently, sullenly, later increasingly bitterly. And later still, distantly. By the time I was thirty, I was not sharing almost any of the significant aspects of my life with him. I knew he would not approve. When I turned thirty-three and married my wife—at the time she had not yet converted to Judaism—my father and I stopped talking. For a decade. His decision.

Don’t get me wrong. My father was not a bad man, nor an abusive father. He never raised a hand to our mother or my brother and me. He worked hard to provide for our family; we never went hungry, were never short of necessities and more. My brother and I not only inherited our father’s musical genes, but he gave us our earliest and arguably our most important musical training. When I turned seventeen, he patiently and skillfully taught me how to drive. No small thing, considering he’d only learned to drive five years earlier. Those hours together in the car with him were among the happiest of my teenage years. And those two competencies, music and driving, have served as the core skills of my life as a touring musician. I have always known I owed him much.

However, he was stingy with praise, preferring instead to disburse frequent judgement and criticism, and he was very distant. He absented himself from most of our family activities that did not involve the synagogue where he worked. And, most crucially, once my brother and I entered our teens, he frequently expressed his bitter disappointment with our aspirations, accomplishments, and life choices.

Like all of us, he was a man of his time. Born in 1910, raised in a strict Orthodox Jewish home, my father came of age in traditional, rural Hungary. My twin brother and I were born in post-war Budapest and grew up, from the age of eleven, in 1960s urban America. Two worlds irreconcilably disparate.

As a child, and for most of his life, my father lived ensconced in communities of like-minded people. He had relatively little contact with people outside the Jewish settings in which he lived. My brother and I, even as children in Budapest—we went to public schools—and then increasingly once we moved to the US, interacted with all manner of people, most of them not Jewish. We began chafing under the restrictions of Orthodoxy that seemed to isolate and insulate us from most of our peers, Jewish and non. My father—with good reason (more about that soon) distrusted and feared most non-Jews. My brother and I—fortunately with very little reason to feel similarly—didn’t. He never managed to understand, or accept, that we didn’t want to—couldn’t—live in his past.

It was not an easy past. Until he moved away from his homeland at the age of 47, my father was never unaware of the undercurrent of virulent antisemitism that ran through Hungarian society. Beginning in the 1930s, that undercurrent gradually swelled into a raging flood that destroyed nearly his entire family, much of his way of life, and left him marked and damaged in ways I think he never fully understood or was able to—or allowed to—acknowledge. Instead, after WWII he simply carried on. He remarried, fathered my twin brother and me, and gradually attained a respected leadership position as both a cantor and administrator in Budapest’s Jewish community.

Ten years after the war, the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 once again threatened to swamp his life. So, he moved his family to what he thought was safety, to Israel, where he discovered that being Hungarian in Israel was as disadvantageous—though of course not as dangerous—as being Jewish in Hungary. (A subject for another time.) This time it was our mother who tugged our family to a better future, painstakingly dealing with both the Israeli and American bureaucracies to move us to the US.

Once here, my father and mother again began rebuilding their lives from scratch. Our mother, who was eight years younger than our father, had also suffered and lost a great deal in the war, but she had not been as traumatized as our father. She learned English more quickly than he and found it easier to adjust. Our father could not as readily acclimate to our new country and found it very hard to witness his young sons rapidly growing up and away from the faith and the world in which he’d been raised.

It was many years before I learned that it was not only Hungary’s, and later the Nazis’ lethal antisemitism that shaped and scarred my father’s life. It was also his relationship with his own father. I was nearly fifty, and my father almost ninety, when we finally talked about his life before I was born and especially about his parents and his first wife and children, all of whom had perished in Auschwitz.

My father was the second of eleven children and one of only two boys. The family was impoverished. At the age of thirteen, having discovered his exceptional singing voice, and having mastered the nusachim, the traditional melodies of the prayers, he hired out as a cantor to lead High Holiday services in a town near his own. When, after the Holy Days he proudly took his earnings home and announced to his father, Shaya, that he would now buy himself his first pair of new shoes, Shaya replied, “No you won’t. Lenke (my father’s older sister) is getting married. They need a bed.” And took away his money.

Not long after that my father was on his own. Ambitious, he began studying to become a rabbi, paying for his schooling by tutoring fellow students. He eventually made it to rabbinical school in Budapest. Sometime later, a man from his father’s town, after returning from a rare trip to the big city, reported to Shaya, “Your son has adopted a very fancy lifestyle. You must ask a uniformed doorman—wearing white gloves—to be admitted to his building!” (In pre-WWII Budapest, many apartment buildings, even relatively humble ones, had similar concierges.) Suspicious about the company his son might be keeping, Shaya travelled to Budapest, discovered that the rabbinical school my father was attending was not strictly Orthodox, and ordered him to withdraw.

Such was Shaya’s reputation for not brooking disobedience from anyone—and for often backing up his threats with real violence (more about that later) that my father felt compelled to obey. He set his sights lower and became a cantor.

After my father told me that story, I suddenly understood the cause of his constant feuding with the rabbis of every congregation he served. Decades after that painful episode with his father, he was still disappointed and resentful. He resisted the rabbis’ authority, as he hadn’t been able to resist his father’s.

My father’s father, my grandfather Shaya, was born in the late 1880s. All I know of his childhood is that his father died days after Shaya was born. Almost every other story I have heard about Shaya, from my father, my aunts, and from the only two of his grandchildren who survived Auschwitz, was colored by violence or the threat of violence. Everyone agreed that he was physically an unusually strong man. He was an advance scout in the Hungarian Army during WWI, climbing trees and lookout towers, occasionally behind enemy lines, reporting on troop movements. Recognized as a powerful swimmer, he also served in another way— ferrying wounded soldiers across rivers on his back. Hard to imagine his experiences didn’t mark him with some form of PTSD.

After the war, he routinely hiked into the Carpathian Mountains, felled trees, dragged them to the Tisza River, tied them into rafts, and floated back to his village. He cut the logs into firewood to heat the communal bathhouse and was known to guard his woodpile at night with an ax. After he was fired for threatening people at the bathhouse, he became a peddler, choosing to pull his cart with wild horses that no one else dared handle.

He tried teaching my father to swim by simply tossing him into the Tisza. My father nearly drowned. Shaya was not pleased. My father never learned to swim.

Shaya once so severely beat one of his daughters with a belt for buying unkosher wine, that his wife, Rozsa had to stop him, screaming, “You animal, you’re going to kill her!” Another time he kidnapped one of his adult daughters in Budapest, and attempted to bring her home, because he suspected her of being with a non-Jewish man.

After Rozsa delivered their eleventh child, her doctor, concerned about her ability to withstand another pregnancy, said, “Mrs. Slomovits, it’s time to lock the door.” Rozsa replied, “Doctor, my husband’s key will unlock that door.”

One of Shaya’s surviving grandchildren told me that story. The expression on her face implied the obvious.

But she, and other surviving members of his family, including my father, also recalled with pride the times when Shaya’s violent nature protected his family.

While on furlough during WWI, Shaya came home and discovered that his young son, my father, had not been allowed to attend the cheder, the Jewish school, because his wife, Rozsa, hadn’t had money to pay the malamud, the teacher. My grandfather, after learning that the malamud lived and taught in the synagogue’s attic and was hiding there to avoid serving in the Army. Shaya got dressed in his full uniform, attached a bayonet to his weapon, marched up the stairs to the shul’s attic, introduced himself, and had a brief, presumably one-sided conversation with the malamud. My father was welcome to attend cheder for the remainder of the war.

When WWI ended, small bands of troops from the retreating Czechoslovakian Army began looting homes and terrorizing civilians in Balassagyarmat, the town where his family lived. Shaya stood by his front gate, rifle at the ready. “They are not coming in here,” he said. And they didn’t.

When my father was about twelve years old, one Saturday morning he was walking home from shul with a few of his friends. Shaya and some other men were walking a bit behind them. A group of teenagers surrounded the boys, chanting, “dirty Jews, dirty Jews.” When one of them yanked my father’s payis, the customary long sideburns of religious Jews and landed a blow to my father’s head, Shaya came running and the young men fled. He caught two of them from behind and knocked them flat with a fist in each back.

During my tumultuous teenage years, when I resented and resisted nearly everything my father asked of or hoped for me, he at times bitterly lamented that my brother and I would someday lay flowers on our mother’s grave but—and I’ll put it far less coarsely than he did—we would disrespect his grave. He pointed us to the Ten Commandments, specifically to number Five. “It does not say, ‘Love your father and mother.’ You can’t command anyone to love. It says ‘Honor,’ in other words, ‘Respect.’”

But of course, he must have longed for our love, as we ached for his. It saddens me now to know that we were unable to give that to each other. That none of us knew enough about his past, nor about our future, to be able to accept either. I think my father, even to his dying day, may have felt that he’d failed as a father—twice. First, when he was unable to protect the children he fathered before the war. (As Barbara Kingsolver wrote in The Poisonwood Bible, “For if there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest.”) And second, when he couldn’t get my brother and me to abide by the strict tenets of his faith. He once told our mother, “I’ve lost them, just like I lost my first children.”

My father was mistaken. He didn’t fail. He didn’t lose his first children. They were brutally, heartbreakingly taken from him, something that no faith, no justice can ever hope to adequately explain or redeem. Nothing—not his faith, not his father’s violence—could have saved them.

And he didn’t lose my brother and me. Wherever we’ve gone, we’ve carried his name, his voice, and his music; they have been the foundation of much of the joy in our lives.

I’ll quote Barbara Kingsolver, again from The Poisonwood Bible, a book about a deeply wounded man—one who responded to his trauma in a far more misguided and abusive manner than my father ever did—whose children ultimately reject his path and yet go on to live lives that embody the essence of his faith: “Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.”

I reflect on us three fathers:my grandfather, my father, and me. Perhaps because of his memories of his own childhood, my father rejected Shaya’s violence, yet still managed to protect and nurture us. Similarly, learning from my father’s example, I have tried to not distance myself from my daughter, and have not insisted that she shape her future around my past.

When I said, “We did okay,” to my wife on our daughter’s birthday, I did not mean that I have been an ideal father. I have my regrets, doubts, and memories of things I wish I had done differently. I have tried to understand and forgive myself, as I have tried to understand and forgive my father. If I could, I would now say to him, “You did okay.”

Sandor Slomovits is one of the twin brothers who comprise Gemini, the nationally acclaimed children’s music duo. Since 1973, Sandor, with his brother Laszlo, has toured the US and Canada and they have released over a dozen award-winning recordings and a concert video. Sandor also plays music with his daughter, Emily, and is a freelance writer for a number of local and national papers and magazines.