The history of the holocaust that I said that I would not write

I learned that Mr. Lindenblatt was dying when I was in London last November in business. I woke up with a dream that her daughter Ilana, who is one of my older friends, was engaged. I called her and asked if there was something I did not know, because I inherited my mother’s witch quality: I sometimes have dreams of people and it turns out that they are predictive or at least correct thematic. She laughed badly and told me that she was not engaged, no, but that her father was dying and that perhaps the thing I had felt through the ocean was her sadness. He has cancer, she said. He received palliative chemotherapy treatment and doctors should not guess how long he would live: weeks or months. No one really knew it, but the end was inevitable. And the inevitability? In this story, they are everywhere.

I hung up on the phone and I thought of Mr. Lindenblatt – his first name was Jehuda, pronounced Yehuda, although it is seditious to say even the first name of the father of a childhood friend. I thought of the way he was a runner, at the time when it was just jogging; How he drank rice milk before alternative milks was style. How he crossed the house in his shorts in progress and no shirt, which none of the other dads did; How he took ungrateful and happily the burden of driving Ilana and I in both directions to our losers basketball matches and our rehearsals, even Losinger, we were in “brigadoon” together, do not ask) when my mother was pregnant with my youngest sister; How he taught me to say: “Hello, how are you?” In his native Hungarian, which has proven useful in my life twice so far; How he walked on the Shabbat with a talkie-talkie because, in addition to working in his family’s cameras store in Midtown, he volunteered for the Jewish ambulance service in Manhattan Beach, near their home.

And I thought of the fact that Mr. Lindenblatt survived the Holocaust. In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, in the surrounding neighborhoods, it seemed that everyone was a survivor. We have all had the holocaust in our past to various degrees. We knew whose fathers were survivors of the holocaust and whose grandmothers had figures on their arms and whose aunts never left the ghetto, all discussed as part of our education of the holocaust at the Lycée Yeshiva that Ilana and I attended in Queens.

And let me say to you: Regarding the holocaust, we were educated. I need to reveal to you that yes, I am hyperbolic and that I know that the hyperbole combined with the way the brain rounded when he tried to make a point for too many years is fatal, but here, it is anyway: in my most bitter moments, with regard to the gymnasium or the gymnasium or the gym meetings, I said that I went to a school Jewish death. I say that my school taught us the history of the level of the masters of the Second World War and also just enough mathematics and sciences to succeed in exams of New York State. I’m kidding, but am I? I left high school after reading “Macbeth” not once, but Elie Wiesel’s “night” three times during my education. I can probably automatically match any sentence from Anne Frank’s journal if you start with three words. I forgot more about the holocaust than I knew about the American Revolution.

(Once again, I am especially hyperbolic here; many people hated their high schools and even more people of my generation have aged to see that their formal education let them fall crucially or another. There were other Yeshivas who were more focused on Math Business twice.