Our Holocaust

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Grandpa used to say, “People have to die of something,” and refused to donate to the war against cancer, the war against traffic accidents, or any other war. To avoid being considered stingy, he would occasionally burst into exemplary displays of tremendous generosity. He put on these shows with such proficiency that if not for us, his relatives, no one would have known the simple truth: he was a miser.

In his home, parsimony was the law of the land. He zealously collected empty bottles for their deposits, and when one of them broke he glued it back together with great artistry. Like a cuckoo, he tossed his shirts into other people’s laundry hampers, staging stains when necessary. A wonderful ability to catch colds in tandem with us enabled him to use our cough syrup and conserve his own. He would declare the colds over prematurely, proclaiming, “We’re better now!” and stockpile the remaining antibiotics. A bottle of liquid soap stood in his bathroom, and whenever the soap level dropped below a finger’s width he watered it down in an endless process that ultimately produced a bottle of water convinced it was soap. But his most wonderful ruse involved a magical power over tea bags. Each bag, even upon its tenth descent into boiling water, yielded something of itself — the merest vapor of tea, just verging on physically tangible material. The hoisting of the bag out of the water was accompanied by an expertly suspicious look at the bag hanging off the teaspoon by its string. Based on signs perceptible only to himself, he would estimate the bag’s vitality and decree its fate. Selektion, he called this ceremony when he wanted to be cruel to Grandpa Yosef.

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