Here in the waiting room, he pulled out his Gemara and prepared to learn until his name was called. I wished I had something that could engross me, enrapture me, as the Gemara did him. He sat completely oblivious to the tumult, not straining as I did to hear if our name was being called, not fidgeting with his medical papers, not leafing through the stacks of coverless magazines, not listening to the beckoning of his stomach protesting its missed breakfast.

He passed the examination with flying colors. When the light anesthesia wore off, my father asked the same questions that most humans from 9 to 90 pose post-surgery: Where am I? Am I before or after? His wrinkled face broke into a smile when the doctor told him they’d found nothing suspicious.

My father was too groggy to take out his Gemara, so when an eager young American medical researcher approached us and asked if my father would answer a series of questions for a study, he readily agreed — my father particularly enjoyed helping Jews of the younger generation.

The young scientist had approached my father since he was researching genetic illnesses in Ashkenazic Jews. But he hit a stumbling block with just the second question: “When were you born?”

My father looked to me for an answer. “Should I give him the date listed on my American passport, which was copied from my forged Polish passport, or should I give him the date I think is more accurate, but that I’m not absolutely sure of?

“You see, the registrar in our town reported the births to the officials in the capital only every few months, so I am not sure of its accuracy.” We ended up giving him the American passport date, simply because the young man was American.

Questions about his family followed.

“Rabbi, did your father suffer from any illnesses?” My father didn’t know the answer. My grandfather had been killed by Russian peasant-soldiers when my father was only five.

“Rabbi,” the ardent researcher continued solemnly, “did your mother suffer from any illnesses?” My father didn’t know. In the heim, parents did not discuss such issues openly with their children.

“Well, do you remember what she died of?” he asked hopefully.

“She was murdered by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators.” My father sighed deeply but didn’t falter. “Together with the rest of the women of Kelm on the 29th of Av, 1941. They are all buried together in a mass grave. A few years ago I traveled to Kelm and said Kaddish at the grave.” Another sigh.

This earnest student was getting more than he had bargained for.

“Rabbi, don’t you have any siblings whose medical history you can recall?”

“I had one sister. Only one. She was interred in the Kovno Ghetto until 1944 when, in anticipation of the Russian and Allied invasion, the Germans demolished the ghetto and took the emaciated survivors on a death march. She died.”

The student rose up wearily from his chair, stared at the empty blanks on the questionnaire, and clapped his notebook shut.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t very helpful to you,” my father apologized.

“I’m sorry too, Rabbi.”

“And I am also sorry,” I screamed silently as we left the Gates of Righteousness.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 701)