The Roy Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

to America and was reunited with his son.”
    â€œDaniel is a real friendly guy,” Roy said. “I like his wife, Ruth, too, although she doesn’t talk much, just smiles a lot.”
    â€œIt’s an amazing thing, what happened to Ruth. She and her parents also were taken by the Nazis to a death camp, the same one as Nathan and Sarah. Ruth was younger than Daniel, three or four years old at the time. Her father, Mendel, died in the camp, but her mother, Esther, survived. How anyone survived in those circumstances I don’t know, but she did, and saved her daughter, too.”
    â€œAnd they also came to Chicago after the war.”
    â€œYes. For years, Ruth did not speak at all. She had been severely traumatized by her experience in the concentration camp. When she grew up she went to work as a seamstress with her mother. Then, as fortune—or misfortune—would have it, Esther and Ruth came to live in the same apartment building as Nathan and Daniel.”
    â€œDaniel and Ruth live in an apartment above the delicatessen,” said Roy.
    â€œThey all lived there, right across the hall from each other. It happened that Esther’s sister, Golda, had known Nathan in their home city of Vilnius, and she told Esther that Nathan had survived by cooperating with the Nazis; first in Vilnius, by identifying Jews in hiding, and then by supervising a brothel comprised of Jewish women for the exclusive use of German soldiers.”
    â€œWhat’s a brothel?”
    â€œA whorehouse, where men pay women to have sex with them; only in these places run by the Nazis, the soldiers didn’t have to pay.”
    â€œWhat happened to Golda?”
    â€œShe was murdered by a Nazi officer. Naturally, Nathan was hated by the other Jews. Esther confronted him after she and Ruth moved into the apartment here and she realized who he was. I suppose that’s how Daniel found out about his father’s betrayal of his own people. Esther later had a stroke and she was paralyzed for quite a while before she died, but not before Nathan, who could no longer live with his shame and guilt, hanged himself. It was Daniel who discovered his father hanging by a rope from a meat hook in the back room of the delicatessen.”
    â€œWhat’s the good ending, Pops?”
    â€œWell, Daniel had always had a crush on Ruth. As you know, she’s quite pretty and he’d fallen in love with her even though she’d never spoken to him. After her mother had a stroke and couldn’t work any more, Daniel paid their rent and gave them food. Ruth realized that Daniel was a good person, not like his father, and eventually she agreed to marry him.”
    â€œShe talks to him now,” said Roy. “I’ve heard her.”
    â€œYes, of course she does. But it took a very long time to overcome the terrible memories she had. It’s a miracle that Ruth is finally able to have a decent life.”
    â€œIt’s sad that Daniel’s mother died in the concentration camp.”
    â€œHe told Herman that he doesn’t even have a photograph of her. Daniel said that whenever he used to ask his father about Sarah, Nathan would tell him, ‘The best way to speak about the dead is to remain silent.’”
    â€œThat’s an unhappy story, all right. I heard Jimmy Boyle’s mother say once that what the Nazis did to the Jews was the world’s worst crime.”
    His grandfather nodded and said, “An Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, in a story called ‘Death and the Compass,’ has a character named Lönnrot say to the editor of the Yiddishe Zeitung newspaper, ‘Perhaps this crime belongs to the history of Jewish superstitions.’ To which the editor replies, ‘Like Christianity.’”
    â€œA superstition is something that isn’t really true, right?”
    â€œCorrect. It’s a belief that has no basis in fact.”
    â€œSo is Christianity a