THE RIGHTEOUS GENTILE

“Pickleball? You’re not going to Grandpa’s 90th birthday party because you have a pickleball tournament?” My mother was stacking boxes, her back to me. Dust mites tickled my nostrils. I was two weeks past my 35th birthday, time to “get my shit out of the house.” I remembered her invoking the magic age of 35 – the get rid of shit age - the day I turned 15. Apparently, she meant it. She tossed a pile of yearbooks into one of the new cardboard boxes she’d purchased for the occasion. Those boxes were my 35th birthday present.

“Mom,” I said, a little louder. I was trying to get at least a quarter of her attention. “He’s turning 90. How much longer do you think. . .”

“Oh, please,” she interrupted, tossing an old soccer trophy into the garbage. Not even a cardboard box for that participation prize. I was terrible at soccer. “He’s been saying that since he turned 70. ‘How much longer?’ ‘Could be your last visit.’ Listen, it’s not like he lives around the block. It wasn’t my idea that he move ten thousand miles away, to some foreign county.”

“Some foreign country? You mean Israel?”

“It’s not foreign? I can speak the language? I don’t need a passport? I can fly there on eagle’s wings? It’s an important tournament. I have a chance at a 4.0 ranking. We’re all entitled to our narishkeit when we get older. Mine is pickleball. His is fleeing his family so he can eat falafel in Tel Aviv. We make our choices.”

“Mom, he’s your father.”

Finally, she looked at me, smiling like a patient, comforting soccer mom. It was a hot, humid Kansas City morning. Sweat dripped from her nose, as if she’d spent the afternoon swatting pickleballs. “Get your shit out my house,” she said sweetly.

One month later, in late September, I was at his flat in Tel Aviv, a seaside apartment with a picture window view of palm trees and the Mediterranean. A surprising – to me – number of party guests surrounded my grandfather, clapping as he pounded out Yiddish songs on an electric keyboard – a gift from one of his new friends. I vaguely remembered two of the melodies, though I couldn’t have pronounced a single lyric. Most of the partiers looked ancient – 80’s and upward, though apart from a cane or two, and one walker, they didn’t seem particularly infirm. “Survivors,” my grandfather had told me when I asked about his friends. “Almost all.” That would place them in the high elderly demographic. And their Holocaust memories would all be those of children. The only exceptions to the old folks feel of the night – besides me – were two tall, rugged young men in army uniforms. Late teens, early twenties, I guessed, each with sharp shoulders and knees. And one petit, curly, dark-haired young woman – 25? 30? – who clapped along enthusiastically to the Yiddish songs, but seemed to be mouthing the words in a different language. When I stared for a beat too long at her lips, trying to read what she was actually singing, she winked at me and clapped louder.

After a particularly rousing song, filled, from what I could gather from the giggling, with sly sexual inuendo, my grandfather stopped abruptly, removed his glasses, then wiped them with a napkin. It was somehow a signal for everyone to quiet down. “Speech,” an old lady unworldly yellow hair shouted. Then she unleashed a guttural stream, which might have been Hebrew or Yiddish or even Arabic, for all I knew. My grandfather shook his head, smiling. “No, no. English. English. For my Nathan, my grandson. Even though he’s heard these stories so many times, no?” He looked at me and winked. He loved winking. The problem was, he didn’t seem to know what it meant; he always deployed it at inappropriate moments. Or maybe the problem was me. I nodded my head. “English,” I agreed.

Of course, he was right that I’d heard his stories a million times. What I don’t think he quite knew was that I’d stop listening years before. Why pay attention to a re-run you’ve already watched over and over?

My grandfather took a shot glass to his lips and sipped a bit of its contents. Maybe that’s his secret to long life with vitality, I thought. A few uncommitted sips of schnaps, inhaling more than imbibing. He licked his lips and then shocked me by tilting his head and looking me in the eyes, as if asking for permission to start. I was about to nod, to encourage him to go ahead, when he abruptly turned away from me and began his performance.

“It was in the forest next to Szeged, my hometown in Hungary. I was eleven, a little pisser, eighty pounds soaking wet, but already a frum yeshiva bukher. We’d gotten word only an hour before – clear out, hide. Nazis were coming. This was 1944, early June, a beautiful spring day. Less than a year later, the war would be over. But our war began that day.”

This was how he always started the story. Beautiful spring day. The forest. Nazis chasing Jews. I could have recited it with him. Desperately afraid of unrelenting boredom, I searched the room for some distraction. I found the young woman, the curly haired Israeli. She watched my grandfather with rapt attention. I watched her watch him.

Some words, even phrases, even sentences leaked through my erotic imaginings. It was always impossible to ignore my grandfather entirely, and when I was a little kid, of course, I’d listened to the whole story. So his first deviation shook me.

“There was a girl there in the forest with us. A goyishe, Hungarian girl – blond hair, pale skin, blue eyes, a regular Heidi. Pretty. A very pretty girl.”

But she wasn’t pretty, I almost interrupted. You always told us, I thought, running the story through my head, that she was chubby, scowling, with a frog’s face.

“An angel,” he said now. “White dress, lovely punim. Like God created her that day, for that moment. We were hiding from the roundup. I huddled with my father behind a thick oak. My mother had dug a shallow pit and covered it with leaves and branches. She lay there still, with the baby, my baby sister. The goyishe blondini, she ran to the Iron Cross soldiers. She described a family just like mine – a boy, a baby, two Jewish parents. She knew them, she said, she watched where the they ran. A soldier knelt beside her, asking politely, like a gentleman. Where did they go, girly? She smiled slyly, mischievously, her blue eyes twinkling in the spring sunshine, and pointed her tiny arm in the opposite direction from our hiding place.”

No she didn’t! I wanted to shout. I turned abruptly from the young woman to my grandfather’s perspiring face. That’s not the story, I almost said. But I didn’t.

He continued. “The soldiers believed her. They ran off into the woods, following what they thought was our path. She ran with them just a few paces, then circled back to us. ‘Go, go,’ she whispered, pointing in the opposite direction. My father grabbed me by the arm. My mother quickly handed over the baby. We ran faster than any Olympic medalist. Then we stopped. We needed rest.” My grandfather also stopped for a moment and panted, as if he’d been running through the forest and needed to catch his breath. “That one stop for rest doomed my mother. An Iron Cross soldier spotted her and, whoosh. One second. One bullet flies by my nose. Hits her in the chest. I am watching. I see it. Her yellow dress suddenly explodes in deep red blood. The light from her green eyes. Eyes that enchanted me, that calmed me, that loved me. I watched the light go out. My father took absolutely no time to grieve or cry. He grabbed me with one arm, held the baby close with the other, and we flew. Yes, flew. It’s the only explanation. But if it weren’t for the girl, our angel? Dead. We’d all have been dead.”

“No,” I said. Not very loudly, but loud enough. He stopped talking. Everyone stared at me. Especially the young woman. I felt myself blush. “That’s not. . .”

“Yes, Nathan?” he said, nonplussed, gentle, as if I were ten-years-old and he was anxious to hear my opinion on dinosaurs or galaxies or some other useless childhood obsession.

The girl pointed right at your mother and the baby, I wanted to tell him. To correct him. You watched – you, your eleven-year-old self, you watched – while the Nazis (not the Iron Cross, the Nazis, the fucking Nazis) dug out your mother and sister and shot them both in the head. In the head, not the chest. That was the story you told us approximately one billion times. The girl wasn’t an angel. She was the devil! Okay, just a little girl, doing the devil’s work. We always wondered how that devil-girl remembered that day. Did she feel guilty? Proud? Did the moment haunt her for the rest of her life, like it haunted my grandfather? That was the story.

Of course, I didn’t say any of this. It wasn’t my birthday party. Wasn’t my story. Anyway, he was almost done. He finished his narrative with a little less verve. He hid with his father and sister a month in the dark forests of Hungary. The baby died of hunger, or disease, or who knows what, who cares. The boy and his father were captured, but by then the extermination machines had shut down. They survived the month in Belsen. End of war, end of chapter. A typical visit to hell, a standard recounting of an experience that cannot be recounted. Same old story.

Except it wasn’t. The girl suddenly got promoted. She was a moral exemplar. A heroine. The heroine. Not a devil. An angel.

I had my reasons for flying halfway across the globe for my Grandfather’s birthday party and, truth be known, it had very little to do with my grandfather or his story. I was the sports editor of a start-up website called Freedom – a rightward tilting multi-media outfit that offered ridiculously high salaries even as it bled money. Its ever-patient investors seemed confident that the financial picture would improve any day, but I wasn’t so confident in my own future. There were rumors that they’d cut out sports altogether. Chillingly, my editor wondered what I thought about focusing totally on baseball. I stared at him, waiting for the giggle. But he was serious. Baseball?

I went over his head to the managing editor, a founder/owner of the website. With a smooth shiny face, skinny jeans and a designer tank top, she looked at least ten years younger than me. I pitched a new idea: covering Jews. According to our demographics, nearly one third of our readers were Gen Z Jews, or half-Jews, or quarter-Jews, or sort-of-Jews. Why not hire one full time writer for the Jews? I had two ideas to start. First, Israel was currently tearing itself to pieces over judicial reform. The government, egged on by settlers and fundamentalists, was literally re-writing the Jewish definition of democracy, triggering furious street protests. The kerfuffle seemed to touch on the very definition of Judaism as a modern political force. And I was the perfect correspondent to cover the mess: I was Jewish, and a lawyer. Well, I had a law degree I never used. And a tenuous Jewish identity. But better Jews than baseball. Jews, I figured, would survive at least the 21st century. Maybe.

My other idea was to write about my grandfather. I’d call the piece, or even the series, “The Last Holocaust Survivor.” Because, let’s face it, any day now the last eyewitness will pass on, along with all of the first-person Holocaust narratives. My idea was to scour the US, Israel, and Europe, and interview the last survivors, starting with a long-form piece about my grandfather and the little Hungarian girl who ratted on his hiding mother and sister.

The editor carefully studied her phone while I pitched. She took her eyes off her screen once to tell me to go for it, but I’d have to pay for my own airplane ticket to Israel. She looked down at her phone, then popped her face up again for a final thought. And any other expenses, she said.

As the guests slowly scattered, signaling the end of the party, I kissed my grandfather’s scaly scalp and rode the elevator down 24 stories to the lobby. I thought about ordering an Uber, but I decided to take advantage of a sudden jet-lag-fueled burst of energy and walk the thirty minutes along the Mediterranean to my seaside hotel just across from Jaffa. I was practically jogging, wind blowing the sand on my ankles and cheeks, when I realized what I had to do. I took out my phone and called my mother. I was so agitated, I didn’t factor in the time difference. Luckily it was late in Israel – midnight, late for me anyway – so it was mid-afternoon in Kansas City. My mother picked up after five rings and panted a hello. “It’s my tournament. I told you. Is everything okay? Your grandfather, he’s still alive? Listen, I’m in the middle here. Can I . . .?”

“Pickleball,” I said.

“Yes! This is an emergency?”

I considered the question. Confusion over the little Hungarian girl’s actions eighty years ago, or my mother’s pickleball tournament? “I’d have to say it isn’t.”

“Okay then. I’ll. . .”

“It’s just,” I interrupted. “Wasn’t the little girl a villain? A she-devil?”

It’s a tribute to my grandfather’s storytelling skill that I didn’t have to explain myself further. “Of course! Of course she was a villain. I mean, six-years-old, but still. She pointed right at my grandmother’s hiding place. The Nazis shot her. It was the girl’s fault.”

I could hear the wok wok of pickleball rackets wacking against plastic balls. What a noisy sport, I thought. “Grandpa said she saved them. That she pointed in the opposite direction, gave the family time to escape. That they only got caught later, and not because of the little girl. He told everyone that the little blond saved his life.”

“Saved his life? What nonsense. You probably weren’t paying attention.”

“No, no, that’s the point. I was paying attention. That little detail caught my attention. He told the story wrong. Why would he do that?”

Wok, wok, wok, wok. She was either back to swatting plastic balls or thinking of an answer. It was the latter. “How should I know?” she said. “Maybe he wanted to put a more positive spin on the incident, now that he’s got his happy ending in Israel.”

“Or maybe,” I said, “he was telling the truth tonight, but lying to us all in America. Maybe in Kansas City he needed a villain – a non-Jewish villain. So we wouldn’t let our guard down.”

“Maybe,” she said, with about as much interest and enthusiasm as my editor gave my Jewish beat idea. “Listen, I’ve got to. . .”

“Pickleball,” I said. “I understand.”

“When you think about it, it doesn’t really matter does it? Gotta go.”

“Well, of course it matters,” I said. But even the wok, wok, woks went quiet. She’d hung up.

As soon as I stuffed the phone in my pocket I felt a weird presence near my arm, like the lightest touch of static electricity. I looked up and, on my right, fronting the beach was a monument to the 18 teenagers killed in a terrorist attack on The Dolphin, a Tel Aviv disco and nightclub. Jetlag in Israel does weird things to you so I considered the daft possibility that I was somehow communing with the ghosts of dead teenage victims. I nearly jumped in panic when I felt an actual touch on my left arm. But it wasn’t a ghost. It was the young woman I’d seen at my grandfather’s party. She grinned at my brief moment of panic, revealing a slight space between her teeth, the cliched flaw in otherwise perfect features: thick, curly hair, black as midnight, bronze skin, shapely legs, shiny green eyes. “Didn’t mean to scare you,” she said, in perfect, only slightly accented English. “Hey, your grandfather. He’s got some stories.” She held out her hand. “My name is Heidi,” she said.

“Heidi? That’s an Israeli name?”

She shrugged. “It’s a name. Listen, I’m not sure if you know, but your grandfather and my grandmother have become great friends.” Her green eyes seem to tinkle at the word “friends.”

“Oh?” I said. “You mean. . .?”

“I’ll leave it to your imagination,” she said.

She was evidently going my way, so we walked south together, along the beach on Hayarkon Street. The potential for romance hit me right away. The notion was, of course premature. Less than a month ago, my reporter girlfriend of five years had found a “deeper, more stable guy.” That stinging heartache was at least a partial cause of my urgent desire to change my life, to leave baseball for Judaism, to tell stories that mattered more than how some score affected the playoff picture. But something about Heidi’s scent, her black Yemenite hair, her accent, her consistently mocking tone, the gap in her front teeth, drew me. It was the proverbial “chemistry,” as if we were characters in a romantic comedy. Also, I discovered, as the wind blew sand at our feet, she was a government lawyer and she promised to get me an interview with the Minister of Justice.

I peppered Heidi with question as we slowly made our way toward Jaffa. Her grandmother, she told me, like my grandfather, suffered through World War II, barely making it out alive. She was the only survivor in her family. Unlike my grandfather, she’d move to Israel from a refugee camp in 1949 as an eleven-year-old orphan. “Then she found a husband, built a Jewish home.”

“Happy ending?” I said.

“Not really.” She leaned in a little closer to my shoulder. A cool summer wind blew in our faces. I fought the urge to put my arm around her. “It seemed that way, sure. Her husband became a successful lawyer. She wrote a series of children’s books; one of them actually got published. She lived through wars, like all of us. She only had one child – my mother. But my mother gave her four grandchildren.”

“Four?” I asked. I only saw three at the party; two boys in uniform and Heidi.

“My oldest brother,” she said. “He died in the army. A terrorist drove a bus into a crowd of young officers celebrating their graduation. He was the only one who was killed. And it wasn’t quick and painless. He was conscious and in excruciating pain in the hospital for three days before he died. We all watched him go. It was a blessing, finally. My parents couldn’t stand living here after that. They’re in London. My grandmother is like a mother to me. My only parent.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. She’d slowed down, faced me. Was I supposed to hold her? When it came to new romance, I was out of practice.

“It’s an Israeli story,” she said, smiling sadly. “Or maybe we could say a Jewish story? Like your grandfather and that little girl. A Jewish story.”

“A Jewish story,” I repeated. Her hair, I thought to myself. That scent. “About that little girl,” I said. “I’m not sure. . .”

“My apartment is over there,” she said, pointing across the street. “Come upstairs with me. Have a drink. I’ll tell you some more Jewish stories.”

It turned out I wasn’t too badly out of practice.

First thing the next morning, I walked from Heidi’s place to my grandfather’s. “How’s the hangover?” I teased, when he opened the door.

“Please,” he grinned, ushering me in. “One shot of vodka, I drank. Okay, maybe two. Every ninety years I allow myself an extra glass of vodka.”

We settled into his living room. Plump beige pillows, two couches and a love seat. In the kitchen, an airfryer/toaster, enormous microwave, and a slick silver espresso machine. Nothing like my memories of his place in Kansas City. And, of course, there was the picture window view of the Mediterranean Sea complete with bikini clad young women frolicking on the beach. I started to see the advantages of Tel Aviv.

“I thought maybe you’d had a little too much when you told your story,” I said. He’d made us both double espressos and I was sipping mind, marveling how it was possibly the best coffee drink I’d ever had.

“Oh, no,” he said, pouring piles of sugar into his tiny espresso cup. “I told the story before the schnapps.” He pointed to his scaly head. “I wanted to keep clear up here.”

“But, Grandpa, you told it wrong.”

He sipped and smiled. He seemed to smile much more than I remembered from when I was a kid. Something about Israel? Something about the coffee? Something about seeing me? “Wrong?” he said.

I tilted my head. Was my grandpa fucking with me? “Maybe I heard wrong,” I said. “Tell it again.”

He did. The village gets word that the Nazis are coming.

“Nazis or Iron Cross?” I interrupted.

He shrugged, rubbed his chin. “Nazis, I think. Or, no, Iron Cross.” He shrugged. “It makes a difference?”

“No, no, please continue.

They run to the forest. Mom hides with the baby, Papa with him. A village girl shows up. Six years old. Blond. Blue eyes. A young shiksa. She runs to the Nazis. Yells at them. Points in the opposite direction.

“No she didn’t!”

He sipped his coffee. “Nathan, you are okay?”

“Yes, yes, it’s just that’s not how you. . . well, continue.”

The little girl, she not only points them in the wrong direction, she runs with them, she tells them she’ll show them exactly where the Jews are hiding. She risked her life. . .

“Stop! Stop,” I said.

He looked me over carefully, like a doctor seeking the disease. “It is maybe jet lag?” my grandfather said. “Or, perhaps you caught a cold on the airplane. You know these viruses and air travel. I should make you tea, not coffee.”

“Grandpa, that’s not how you told the story! The girl, the blond, the little shiksa – she’s. . . that’s not the right story.”

He slurped a tiny sip. “Nathan, I should think I know the story. It’s my story, after all.”

“Why does he keep doing that?”

I was yelling at my mother. It was midnight in Kansas City; I’d woken her up, panicked her with a call from Israel in the middle of the night. “The girl was a devil, not an angel. The way he tells the story now – it changes everything.”

She yawned, a loud and long sound, as if her fatigue with me reached her innards, her bones. “Nathan,” she said. “I don’t remember you paying such great attention to your grandfather. You would squirm, shut your eyes, read a comic book, switch on the TV. Maybe you’re just remembering it wrong.”

‘No, no, Mom! I listened once. At least once. Anyway, don’t you remember it my way? The girl didn’t save them. She turned them in. Isn’t that what you remember?”

Another yawn. Several yawns in one breath. Like a yodeler. “To tell you the truth, it’s past midnight here. I’m not sure I remember anything. I’m sore all over, you know.”

“Pickleball,” I said.

“Pickleball.”

“That’s so interesting,” Heidi told me. We were eating breakfast on her balcony – the fresh rolls and instant coffee I’d purchased on my jetlagged 5am stroll through Jaffa. Two nights together, and it was almost like I was in love. “For some reason, here in Israel, he feels a need to make a hero of that girl. In America she’s the villain, but here she’s a righteous gentile. I have a theory as to why, but first let me ask you a question. Why does it matter so much? To you, not to your grandfather?”

I sipped the instant coffee. It was surprisingly delicious. I wondered why Americans had stopped drinking instant coffee. “It’s just that. . . I don’t know. It’s sort of my family’s story. I never really paid attention to it – I’m just now realizing what an amazing story it is – but it was ours. It’s like suddenly finding out that someone was adopted. Like he’s not my real grandfather.”

“Oh, Nathan come on. You’re exaggerating.”

I looked at her closely. Were we arguing? I didn’t think so. I nodded.

“Can I give you some advice? Spend more time with him on this trip. Extend your stay.” She smiled. “Of course I have my own selfish reasons for this suggestion. But really. Forget the Minister of Justice. Our judicial crisis. You can write that story from America. Tell your grandfather’s story. Ask him to tell it again, but this time don’t interrupt. Convince him that you really want to hear it.”

I stared at her. My lover for only two nights, now advising me as if we were married. And she was right. Was this love? “That’s. . . so wise,” I said. She grinned, revealing the gap in her teeth.

As I walked to my grandfather’s flat, I realized I forgot to ask Heidi her theory for why my grandfather switched the story in Israel. Oh well, I thought. I’ll extend my stay, as she suggested. There will be plenty of time to share theories and stories and theories about stories.

As it happened, there was no time left for hearing stories from my grandfather. He didn’t answer the ring, and then the knocks on the door. I used my key. He was in bed, a sly grin on his face. I gently shook him and immediately felt the creepy coolness of his skin. He’d died in his sleep, two days past his 90th birthday.

My mother didn’t come to the funeral. I didn’t scold her. It was none of my business. Anyway, the custom in Israel was to bury the body as soon as possible. Heidi and her grandmother urged me to follow the local practice, so we held the funeral that very day. My mother wouldn’t have made it on time. The only mourners at Jerusalem’s crowded urban cemetery were the same folks who’d celebrated his 90th birthday three days before. I represented the family. As the white-shrouded corpse was lowered into the grave, the young black-bearded rabbi handed me a laminated card and whispered “Kaddish.” But I couldn’t read Hebrew. He quickly flipped the card over and I struggled through the meaningless transliterated words, allowing myself to be corrected every five seconds. When I finished, I was astonished to feel tears on my cheek. The rabbi gently patted my shoulder.

Heidi had arranged a mourner’s meal at my grandfather’s apartment. Pita, hard boiled eggs, oranges. Round things, Heidi explained, traditional for Jewish Yemenite mourners. I sat on a low cushion, blinking away tears that confounded me. I really didn’t know my grandfather all that well. Why was I crying? Heidi’s grandmother Miriam urged me to tell a few stories about him. But I was exhausted, numb, in shock and empty. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Well, I’ll talk,” Miriam said, her voice firm and high, like an accomplished singer. “You’ll think and I’ll talk.” She was addressing the small crowd, but she looked at me. “You see, Nathan. I was that little girl.”

I blinked, shook my head. “What little girl?” I asked, though of course I knew.

“I rescued your grandfather,” she said. “I pointed the Nazi soldiers in the wrong direction. They would have found him. Murdered him. I saved his life.”

I stared at her. Yellow colored hair, but at age 87, any color on the top of her head came from a box. Did her eyes emit a blueish tinge? They looked gray to me. And the shiksa in the story was Christian, Hungarian. “But you’re. . ?”

“Jewish?” she said, smiling sadly. “Israeli? Yes. I came as an orphan and my kibbutz family adopted me. But I always told the truth about who I was, where I came from. When I turned 18, I became an Israeli citizen through the Righteous Gentile Act. I took the name Miriam instead of Helena. Your grandfather testified on my behalf. I wouldn’t have been accepted as a citizen without him.”

“My grandfather?” I thought for a moment. “When you were eighteen, he was, what, 23? You stayed in touch?”

“Of course we stayed in touch. I saved his life. You knew none of this?”

I shook my head.

“We wrote letters to each other, at least once a month. Sometimes more. He wrote me about mattresses, his passion, then his business. And your grandmother; he said she had such beautiful brown eyes. Later he sent me money. The checks increased as he became more and more successful. I was able to send my daughter and granddaughter to university in England. We took vacations, Europe, South American, Disneyland, once to Kansas City – before you were born. And when he moved here? Well, I was alone. So was he.” She grinned, glanced at Heidi, then winked at me, a gesture that struck me as, at the same time, both cute and ghastly. She was sleeping with my grandfather. And enjoying it.

“He sent you money?” I asked. For some reason, that was the detail that hit me. I’d heard of my grandfather supporting cousins in Hungary, Russia and Israel. He bragged about these contributions in the long rambling storytelling speeches he gave every year at our Passover seders. But he never mentioned a righteous gentile. At least I don’t think he did. Did I block out so much? I thought of the money for one simple reason: despite his obvious wealth, he never sent me a single check.

This time I made sure my mother was wide awake when I called. I phoned at 4pm Israel time, 8am in Kansas City. After her coffee and morning run. “He never mentioned this family in Israel he was supporting?”

There was a brief pause. I figured she was taking her time, searching her memory, trying to give me a full and complete answer. Really, though, she was just taking a breath for the onslaught that followed. “Could you just give this a rest, Nathan?” she yelled. “You had 35 years to listen to his stories! No one kept any secrets from you. You just had to open your Jewish ears. Do I remember him supporting relatives in Budapest, Moscow, Tel Aviv? Sure. And he couldn’t spare few thousand dollars for me when I had to leave your father. So what? I got over it. And the girl you’re obsessing about – Miriam, or Helena, whatever her name? Honestly, I don’t really remember if she was a good guy or a bad guy. Listen, you think you were the only one who was bored out his mind when he told his stories? You think you’re the only one in the family who stopped listening?”

The next night, Heidi and I took a long walk along the beach from my Grandfather’s sky scraping apartment in North Tel Aviv, to the ancient ramparts in Jaffa, 4 miles south. We held hands easily, naturally, like a long-time couple. October in Tel Aviv felt like May in Kansas City – humid, warm, but with cool evening breezes providing blessed relief. I’d already made arrangements to extend my stay another two weeks. Now, as Heidi’s soft fingers clutched my sweaty palm, I thought of staying even longer. Maybe forever. Heidi led me down a twisty, weed choked cobblestone path to a pile of bricks and boulders that, Heidi explained in an unfamiliar professorial tone, were the world’s most ancient military site – ramparts that went back 5000 years. Jaffa was a strange Israeli city. No sacred stones or sites, the only thing it could boast of was the ancient art of war. Yet it was also Israel’s best example of peaceful coexistence, with Arabs and Jews each making up roughly half of the population, and living more or less in peace. Maybe all the great temples and mosques should be here, I thought.

We sat facing the midnight ocean. The very outer reach of waves wet our cheeks, so it looked like she was crying and smiling at the same time. “The real story is your grandfather. And the little girl – my grandmother. What happened that day in the forest? It matters. Forget about our supposed constitutional crisis. It’s just growing pains of a state that’s having a hard time becoming an adult. Believe me, one hour with our minister’s chief of staff, explaining the nuances of our invisible constitution and you’ll be bored out of your mind. Write the story of Helena and your grandfather.”

I squeezed her hand. “If I write that story, I’ll have to stay even longer. I’ll need multiple conversations with your grandmother. And your parents, when they come from England. And with you.” She grinned and squeezed my hand. The water on her face transformed what might have been a pleased smile into a sad, wistful look. “I can do both stories,” I told her. “I’ll still need that appointment with the minister. In two days, you said?”

She nodded.

“October 7?”

“October 7.”

We watched the ocean. I imagined ships headed for shore. Allies? Enemies? I wasn’t making distinctions. Just boats. In my imagination. “And you’ll sit in on the interviews?” I asked. “Translate for me?”

For no reason I could discern, she kissed me on my cheek. “I would,” she said. “But I’ve already got plans for that day. It’s okay, he’s fluent in English.”

“What are your plans?”

“There’s a music festival in the desert. I’ve been waiting all year for it. I’d take you with me, but it’s the only day the minister could see you. Anyway, it’s sold out.” She tucked her head under my arm. “It’s trance music. The beat, the melodies, lyrics, they radiate peace and light. Maybe you’ll want to do a story. I can tell you all about it the next day. I love the name of the show. It’s called the ‘Nova Festival.’

That’s where she died. At the “Nova Festival of Peace and Light.” It took us awhile to find out how. Was she raped, and left bleeding, mortally wounded? Blown up by a grenade? Was her throat cut? Did her killer call home with bloody hands, and brag to his parents? Was she stabbed in the neck? Executed with a bullet to her brain at close range? Lined up and shot? Hit by a stray round? Asphyxiated from burning car exhaust? Slaughtered by a vicious mob on her way to Gaza? Torn limb from limb? Her grandmother screamed at me in the bomb shelter underneath her apartment, her cackling, keening sorrow somehow drowning out the missiles and anti-missiles. “You’re a reporter!” she shrieked at me. “An investigator! Find my granddaughter!” By this time every news outlet in the world was covering the new war, and I wasn’t without resources. I made a few calls. “They blew up her car,” I told Helena the next day, as missiles soared overhead and I shivered from a sweaty chill despite the ninety-degree temperature. Somehow her hands were holding mine, as if she were comforting me. We were back in her building’s shelter, the only single individuals in a dark basement filled with whimpering children and shell-shocked parents. “A homemade rocket.”

She took in four quick gulps of air, but fought hard and triumphed in the battle not to collapse. She tightened her grip on my fingers and stared at me, begging for more information. “She would have been scared,” I said, my voice shaking. “But she wouldn’t have felt any pain. If that matters.”

She let go of my hands. “Of course it matters.” She called her daughter, who’d arrived at 11pm the previous night. Screaming, screaming, moaning, crying and screaming. That’s all I remember of that phone call.

A week later I managed to finagle a seat on a plane full of reporters heading back to New York. I stopped by Helena’s place on the way to the airport to say goodbye.

Her hands trembled slightly as she poured Turkish coffee and urged me to sip down every drop. She knew I hadn’t slept in days, and she needed my full attention. She stood in front of her loveseat, sighed deeply and dropped herself next to me. “I’ll tell you what really happened. I did save his life. I did. I swear to this on my mother’s grave.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

“I saved him by pointing right at his mother.” She slowly extended her arm toward the TV, as if it somehow contained the soul of my great grandmother. “There’s the Jew,” she said, still pointing, staring straight ahead. She turned her head toward me. “That’s what I told them. They shot her. And the baby. Right there.” She looked quizzically at her outstretched arm, as if puzzled that it had gotten itself in a pointing position. She retracted it and placed both of her hands on her lap. “You think I was a Nazi? A racist killer. Six years old?”

I hesitated, but only for a blink of an eye. “Of course not.”

“Of course not,” she repeated. “You see, I had a crush on your grandfather. Eleven years old. He would entertain me. Teach me about stones, about frogs, about edible grass, about earth worms. Important things from the woods where we played. I wanted a brother. I knew that if the soldiers killed his mother – by the way, do you really think a six-year-old girl can tell the difference between a Nazi and an Iron Cross killer? They had guns! – if the murderer shot his mother, he would come and live with me. That was my ideology. That’s what caused the death of your great grandmother and your great aunt. I wanted a brother. I wanted him.”

For some reason, I held my breath while she spoke. Then I exhaled as if I’d just surfaced from the bottom of a lake. “Why did he. . .?”

“Why did he tell the story the way he told it? Different to you than to my family? Different in America from Israel? Believe me, I have no idea. Who knows why people tell stories the way they do? All I can say is I was six-years-old. Five years later he testified for me. He gave me this life.”

She’d been narrating the episode softly, with a breathy, nervous voice just above a whisper. But the volume suddenly increased. She erupted like an air raid siren. “You think I haven’t paid for my sin?” she yelled. “I lost a grandson to this ravenous country. And now another one! My precious Heidi! We don’t suffer in this Jewish homeland? Is that what you think? Two grandsons I have in this land’s army. Two! Will they die also because of me? Will God take them too? I deserve this? Is that what you think?”

I shook my head. I was about to say “I don’t think, I just write. My analytical abilities weaken when missiles are aimed at my head.” But my phone lit up with my taxi’s text. I left without a word.

I wrote my grandfather’s story – the different versions, for different people in different places. I mixed it up with the Gaza war and the October 7 massacre in a series of five 750-word essays. The managing editor posted each episode near the top of the homepage. But after the last one, she took me aside, and managed to stay off her phone for the full two minutes it took her to tell me my writing lacked that certain “umph.” “It’s such a compelling, sad narrative,” she said, giving in now and checking her phone. “But after the fourth installment – barely any clicks.” She shoved the phone back in her jeans pocket. ‘You’re so much better at sports, particularly baseball. I think we’re keeping you there.”

The next day, I got an email from Alon, one of Heidi’s grandsons. He was still serving in the IDF, but was enjoying a few days leave. “I regret to inform you,” he wrote, “that my dear grandmother passed away this past Sunday. I know you will be saddened to read this. After the war, we plan to gather the family together and finally plant the tree for her at Yad Vashem’s forest of Righteous Gentiles. We hope you’ll join us for the ceremony.”

Philip Graubart: I’ve published six novels, including Planet of the Jews, Rabbis and Gangsters, Silwan, Women and God and most recently Here There Is No Why. I’m also a rabbi and a professor of Jewish thought at the Academy for Jewish Religion in California.