A daughter's eulogy to her father

Arthur Kleinhandler

June 9, 1913-July 29, 2006

When I think of my father, the images that come most to mind are of his hands.  The fingers were short and wide and thick, even rather stubby.  Often machine grease would lodge under his fingernails and cuticles, and so at day's end, he would scrub them with a hard brush before sitting down to dinner.  The thumbnail on his right hand was flattened and indented where a drill press had punched a hole right through it when I was a child.  And the middle knuckle on his forth finger bent at an odd angle, as the fingertip was completely severed by a band saw in a second industrial accident that occurred when we were already living in California.  Miraculously, the fingertip was reattached and functioned, albeit stiffly.

In both instances, my father did not call home to report the mishap, but arrived from work at the usual time with his usual demeanor, hiding his bandaged hand behind his back, so as not to frighten my mother.  Once she had discovered the injury, it took a great deal of prodding on her part for him to explain what had happened.  And in both instances, he returned to work the next day, refusing to give in to the pain.  In fact, my father never took sick days for any reason.

My father's hands were precious since they were the source of his livelihood (and heroically, his and my mother's lives, during the war).  In fact, my mother used to say that he had "golden hands," as she held them in hers and kissed them.  He was industrious and inventive, often solving problems in the factory tool room by creating parts that had not existed before.  Frequently, after dinner, he would draw different approaches to the problem of the day on old napkins or scraps of paper torn from the flaps of used envelopes, and he would try to explain these to me or my mother although we only half understood.  I had always believed that my father would have made a fine mechanical engineer, had he had the opportunity for a high school and college education.

The palms of my father's hands were hard and heavily callused from his work.  I used to joke with him that they were made of rhino hide.  But even though his hands were hard, his heart was soft—filled with love for my mother, my sister, Mitch and our children and now little Rosie. He was always a fiercely devoted and generous father, a man of great integrity. In fact, he was honest to a fault—so much so that the several forays he’d made into the business world ended in failure. Loyal and totally incapable of manipulating or lying, he assumed that others shared these admirable traits, trusting business partners when he should have been more wary of their intentions.

***

From the time that I was able to climb out of my crib, I remember spending Sunday mornings in bed with my parents.  My father would whistle his special melody from their bedroom, signaling that they were awake and ready to receive children, and my sister and I would dash into their room and scramble up into their bed.  My father came alive when he talked about his activities before the war.  Indeed, in our house, life was divided into two eras:  Before the War and After the War.  (The interval that separated these periods could not rightly be described as "life" in the ordinary sense.)  And as a young child, it seemed to me that everything that gave my father pleasure had occurred during the prewar epoch.

Because he became so animated, so relaxed when recounting the exploits of his boyhood, my sister and I often asked him to tell us stories of his youth as we all lay together in bed.  We basked in the glow of his more cheery disposition at these times.

He spoke about his life as an eligible bachelor.  He had been born in Chmielnik, Poland in 1913, and had been an adult, twenty-six at the time the war erupted.  He had had many male and female friends--a whole life before the war.  He and his friends sang and caroused and danced tangos and Viennese waltzes.  They drank dark beer and discussed politics and socialism and Zionism, looking for solutions to the problem of being a Jew in Poland in the 1930s. 

My father had also been a corporal in the Polish cavalry, and described how he cared for his beloved horse, a sleek black mare, rewarding her with carrots and apples and sugar cubes. 

As he spoke, I busily tried to form mental pictures of Chmielnik and its surrounds, of the family factory, of the nightclubs and friends, of life in the army.  It was particularly hard for me to imagine my father having such fun. 

For inevitably his tales of a carefree life lead to other stories--those of war and starvation and cruelty and death.  He felt compelled to explain what had happened to this brother or that friend, to this uncle or that teacher.  He even described how a Nazi had bayoneted his little dog Asa who had barked at his approach.  He told these in a fragmentary way so that it was impossible for me to stitch them into a continuous narrative with a beginning, middle and end. Consequently, I could never quite remember a chronology of the events—only a series of brightly illuminated horror stories. 

Our sessions in bed often ended on a mournful note, as we all arose and prepared for breakfast.  "Oy, kinder," he used to say as he flung off the blankets with a shake of his head, "what's the use of talking.  It will not bring them back."  Nor would it bring back his whole world, so completely had it been annihilated.

***

My father suffered from his status as an immigrant.  Always a perfectionist, the thought that he could be mangling the English language was mortifying to him.  He asked my sister and me to correct his grammar whenever we heard him making a mistake, even if we were in public.  “No, Daddy,” I would say, “It’s not, ‘I’m going to wash me the car.’  It’s, ‘I’m going to wash the car.’”  And he would get it for the moment, but the next time the Chrysler became dirty, somehow “to wash” would once more become a reflexive verb.

His insecurities with English often kept him silent when among Americans, at work, or even at Temple.  He seemed shy and withdrawn among “strangers,” pleasant enough, but without much to say.  He felt that his foreign accent would hinder him in the world of business, and so he shrank from situations in which he would have to express himself.  His imperfection made him vulnerable, and I ached for his struggle and his pain.

How he longed for those days in Chmielnik when he was somebody.  When it meant something to be a Kleinhandler—a person whom others respected.  Animated and vigorous when speaking in Yiddish or Polish in the company of his landsmen he often sought them out—especially during our years in New York when we attended monthly meetings of the Chmielniker Sick and Benevolent Society.  It was there that the old social order reestablished itself and he could fully be himself.  And once in Los Angeles, he immediately reconnected with the few Chmielnikers who had moved here before us. He also joined the Holocaust survivor organization, The “1939” Club almost as soon as we arrived in 1963 and made many good and lasting friendships from among its members.

***

My father was a man of extraordinarily strong will.  Only how much became evident to me during his final illness. As you may know, he collapsed with end-stage congestive heart failure and a heart attack exactly one month ago today.  But once in the hospital, he was diagnosed with a whole laundry list of ailments—kidney and liver failure, blood clots in the lung and leg, a malfunctioning pacemaker, some problem with his platelets, a suspicion of an underlying cancer.  Yet, just the week before, we’d been out to dinner.  And only 4 days earlier, I’d taken him to a medical supply store to buy him a walker.  He happily scooted around the store relying on his new “Cadillac” to get him around more safely than with a cane alone.  In retrospect, it now seems that in the last 5 years, he got by on sheer will power alone.

Those first few days at Cedars, he became philosophical. Realizing how truly sick he was, he kept saying, “Well nobody lives forever.”  And to that, I replied, “Dad, would you ever have believed during the war that you would die an old man of 93 in your bed?”  No, he shook his head, never.

But then, he started to feel a bit better. Soon, he was saying to me, “Everyday, little by little I’m getting stronger.”  I knew that his condition was terminal and without hope—he was so shrunken and weak in his hospital bed, he couldn’t even lift a fork to feed himself—but those words brought home to me how he must have survived the war—everyday, little by little, pushing against insurmountable obstacles. A gitte givurah.

And, in fact, he experienced a bit of a renaissance those last two weeks in the nursing home.  He became relaxed, chatty, talking with the nursing staff and visiting hospice workers--people he would have shied away from before because he would have considered them “strangers.” He laughed at our jokes and was quick with repartee. In response to Christy Brinkley’s current marital woes, my mother teasingly asked him if he’d ever had an affair, and he shot back, “No, I never had the time. I was always working.”

Suddenly, he was with-it and charming in a way that I had never experienced him.  One day, I brought in a CD player with a disk of Itzhak Perlman performing Klezmer music. He loved it, tapping his finger in time to the music for 20 minutes, until he grew tired. On following days, I asked if he wanted to listen to the music again, but he declined saying he’d rather talk to me.  “You are my music!” he declared.  Always a concrete thinker with clear delineations of black and white, this was the first time I’d ever heard him use a metaphor, especially one that expressed so much love. I was floored.

Just last week, we met with the hospice chaplain and nurse, trying to understand this change in his behavior. Was it the continuous oxygen? Were they giving him Prozac?  Xanax? No, it was explained to us.  Sometimes when people near death, they return to some earlier form of themselves, maybe their true selves.

As a child and young adult, I always used to puzzle over who he would have been had it not been for the war. . . how had that experienced changed him?  But since I never knew him in the prewar years, I had no frame of reference and was always left to wonder without any hope of resolution.   Now, in his very last days, I had been given a fleeting glimpse into that other person.

It was his very last gift to me.

                                                            --Susan Kleinhandler Golant

                                                               August 2, 2006