Father’s Day

I suffer from a disorder that causes me to dissociate. It’s not that I split, which some people do, I take a step back and go on semi autopilot. I might go away, but Joel is always here.

I once explained to a social worker that I understood women who cut themselves because the cutting made them feel real. I didn’t have a lot that made me feel real. Mostly, I isolated.

I wish I could absolve my parents and instead, these days, I try and, at least, understand. I try and, at the very least, accept who they were. And to understand that they did the best that could with what they had.

This is a tribute to my late father, David Solomon West.

My late father was a Holocaust survivor. He survived the Holocaust intact and could possibly have lived well, albeit with scars, but he never recovered from the abuse and neglect that he received from other survivors and from other family members when he arrived here in North America.

The following story will suffice as an example:

My father was living with his uncle, aunt and cousin. He had somehow (the exact way he did was never made clear) made his way to North America. He hardly spoke English, had survived the Nazis and had been forcibly separated from his only living family member, his very pretty sister, by an opportunistic relative who was going to ‘marry her off’. Still, my father was working at something, paying rent, and going to school. The cousin, on the other hand, was involved with a less a savory element and was reputed to have connections to the local Jewish gangs and also had huge gambling debts. It is important to note that my father and his cousin had the same first name, which was “David”.

On the day in question, the police knocked on the door of my father’s uncle’s house, looking for ‘David’. My father’s cousin. David the cousin pointed at my father and said “He’s David.” The police asked a young immigrant man who barely spoke English if he was David and, not knowing what was going on, and not understanding the situation, my father said yes. The police then took my father away. After a day or so in jail the mistake was corrected. This type of treatment was not the exception. It was the rule.

I don’t think my father ever recovered.

As brutal as Hitler was, as brutal as the Nazis were, as brutal as others were, I think they only wounded my father. I think the people here in Canada, the people who supposedly rescued him, did far more damage.

My father loved his sister very much. When he arrived in Toronto, he was eighteen, or so, years old. His sister was younger than he was. I think that separation from her broke his heart in such a way that he couldn’t trust himself to become attached to people ever again. I don’t think that he ever did.

One more story about my father and then I will leave this tribute to him.

My father was honest to a fault. He signed contracts because that was the law, but his word was stronger than any contract. Because of his belief that everyone was also like this, on more than one occasion my father was swindled.

At one time we left a synagogue overnight because my father had been cheated of a huge sum of money by the synagogue president. My father believed in people and in things and ideas, often without reason because that is how the world ‘should’ work.

Toward the end of his life, my father, like the Japanese ‘sarariman’ who had been fired from his job and was too ashamed to admit it, would dress in a suit every day and, instead of going nowhere or to a coffee bar, my father would go to the office that he maintained for no reason. He distanced himself from me. My mom had acrimoniously divorced him several years prior to this. He was estranged, completely, from my sister and from other family.

He started to suffer from dementia and his estate and life was stolen before I could do anything about it. I discovered his whereabouts at a nursing home and I visited him as often as I could, even though, especially toward the end, he never knew I was there.

He died in February 2002.

His sister was at his funeral and so was I.

He is finally at peace.