Cod and chips? Plaice and chips? No chips? Different fish? Grilled? Fried? Large or regular portions? Eat here or take home? Any drinks with that? All of these were questions I was faced with last night when I left the cinema.
After seeing the Coen brothers latest film ‘A Serious Man’ I was suddenly aware of how many times during the course of a day I am faced with questions, probably thousands of questions. I was also aware of how rarely I am certain of answers and how little it matters. On waking this morning the film, its Jewishness and its overwhelming sense of melancholy, was still resonating with me.
As I grated potatoes for latkes, I was filled with memories of my parents, and realised again how much they were called upon to live with uncertainty, and indeed, genuine fear. The questions they had no answers for were real and disturbing. How lucky I am that the only uncertainties I live with now are usually about when the builders will finish, what to have for dinner or how to spend my days and whether or not to have chips with it!
Imagine, for a moment, what it would be like to arrive in a city 5000 miles away and have NO money in your pocket and NO job or home and to top it all off - you can’t even speak the language. Add to that you have just left behind the country of your birth where your grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends, were killed in horrific circumstances and then try to imagine how you would cope. Within a year of your arrival in this new place, you are married and shortly afterwards you have children and have to live a ‘normal’ life in this post-war land of opportunity.
What would you do? What would I have done? I don’t know how I would have coped, would I have thrown my hands up and just given up, would I have gone mad or would I become a fighter, an angry survivor with a burning need to be strong and carry on? I am the child of these people - the child of these heroes of a sort. No, they never saved the world, they never rescued anyone from a burning building or cured cancer but, goddamn, they sure rescued themselves. It is only as my adult self that I can acknowlege this in my parents and their extended circle of survivor friends. Whenever there is a Jewish festival, an eavesdropped upon Yiddish conversation I am suffused with longing and memories of my family. The film I saw last night reminded me again of the arbitrary nature of life and the gratitude I feel for my small portion of it.
Wow, all of this from going to the cinema, grating potatoes and hearing Yiddish spoken again. How I miss the days of childhood and the warmth of the kitchen in my mother’s house. As I get older I become more nostalgic and value my past and present more and more. It really is very simple.
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