My grandfather drove a boat of a car, so long that you had to nudge the front bumper up against the wall of the garage just to make sure the garage door didn’t hit the back bumper on the way down.
I spent a lot of time in that car, but I can only recall hearing two cassettes playing on the tape deck.
The first was a homemade recording of my grandmother singing Hungarian songs. The audio was grainy, likely recorded using the cheap internal microphone that came standard on tape decks of the day, and the sound was otherworldly, as if she was speaking from somewhere far, far away. She had died of lupus in 1983, just shy of her 55th birthday.
When that tape was playing, my grandfather was usually silent. Sometimes, it would come on automatically when the car started, and he’d quickly reach to shut it off. I was never sure whether he was embarrassed, or if the tape represented something too private to share. As the years wore on, so did the recording, and by the time my grandfather was too sick to drive, you could barely make out my grandmother’s voice through the static.
There was no mistaking the voice on the other cassette in his car, a recording of Jackie Mason’s The World According to Me.
My grandfather never got tired of those jokes, some of which – “A controller in the trucking business.” “No kidding! I look like a hooker?” “Too Jewish.” – became running gags in our house.
One joke stands out: “I went to a psychiatrist… he took a look at me.
Right away he said, ‘This is not you.’
I said ‘This is not me? Then who is it?’
He said, ‘I don’t know yet.’
I said, ‘Then what do I need you for?’
He said, ‘To find out who you are. Together we’re gonna look for the real you.’
I said, ‘If I don’t know who I am, how will I know who to look for? And even if I find me, how will I know if it’s me? Besides, if I want to look for me, what do I need him? I can look myself. Or I can take my friends – we know where I was.’
“‘Besides,’ I said to myself, ‘What if I find the real me and I find that he’s even worse than me? Why do I need him? I don’t make enough for myself, I need a partner?’…
He said, ‘The search for the real you will have to continue. That will be $100.’
I said to myself, ‘If this is not the real me, why should I give him the $100? I’ll look for the real me – let him give the $100.’”
As his 14th yahrzeit approaches, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about how those two tapes defined my grandfather’s life. He must have been haunted – by my grandmother’s untimely death, and by the Holocaust he barely survived. Still, he found a way to laugh through the pain. I guess he didn’t need a psychiatrist to tell him that was the only way to keep on living.
