My father never told me he had committed a crime and gone to jail.
My brother told me — I was 21, and we were huddled outside on a winter’s afternoon in the interior of a Long Island park where no one could hear us. I never repeated my brother’s words to another family member, nor asked my father to corroborate or explain them.
I, too, held onto his secret: In 1948 my father, an immigrant Jew from an Orthodox family, had been convicted of bigamy.
In 1999, safely 15 years after my father’s death and five years after my mother’s, I finally carry myself to the UCLA Law Library — for my father’s divorce and illegal, bigamous second marriage had involved extensive litigation-yielding case law.
A UCLA librarian, clicking his way through a new legal software, uncovers my father’s case almost immediately, and we proceed to the shelves. There, in an old bound book, is my father’s 1949 appeal to a state Supreme Court, and that court’s final decision: guilt upheld.
At home, I turn instinctively to the Internet and search under the name of the attorney who filed the brief. A Web site appears. The attorney, Jewish and now deceased, eventually becomes a prominent judge.
The Web site’s author is identified as another legal librarian, and one e-mail later, he declares he has a verbatim transcript of my father’s courtroom testimony. An original court brief with testimony arrives in California several days later, after having sat for 50 years in a library folder.
There, on the time-worn page, my immigrant father from Jerusalem, with his misspelled name and his incorrect English, comes alive. And in his testimony is his defense, that which I have wanted to hear my entire adult life.
Abba, how and why could you have done such a thing?
“They fooled me, that’s the whole trouble,” my father tells the judge. The “they” is his original attorney, a man who counseled him that it would be valid to acquire a mail-order Mexican divorce — without his wife’s consent — and a rabbi, who worked in cahoots with the attorney and performed the second marriage knowing full well of my father’s shady Mexican divorce.
The court never inquires about a Jewish get.
“He [the rabbi] told you it was all right [to re-marry]?” the judge seems almost to scream at my father. He is annoyed, incredulous.
And my father says, “I was with him [the rabbi]…when he had some other customers and he married them too, with Mexican divorces.”
“You call them customers?” the judge rattles.
And so, like TV courtroom drama today, it continues until the judge finally arrests my father’s vivid explanations with: “If you talk too much you might get yourself in a lot of trouble.” The judge further scolds my father’s attorney, saying “If you represent the rabbi, maybe you had better tell him all who aid and abet in this crime are also guilty.”
This is 1948 New York, and my father is correct about one thing: Divorce is definitely a business, and divorce-seekers are “customers.”
He understands the contours of his new country, and is probably too confident he can maneuver cleverly through it. People — not only my father– go to great lengths to end marriages at that time because divorce in New York is almost impossible to obtain legally. Adultery is the only allowable cause and must be proven
In the end, my father brings lasting harm to himself and everyone around him. His life falls apart.
My father was sentenced to six months in jail because the judge recognized that he had no “criminal intent.”
All through my childhood every night and on weekends, he played repeated games of solitaire at the dining room table, after the dishes had been cleared, silently mesmerized. Was that a jail-acquired pastime I wonder? Did he relive those six months every day for the rest of his life? Was that why he was aloof, sarcastic, an enigma?
I am guilty of never having asked my father any questions. If he was ashamed, I did not want to uncover his shame.
There is the story of Noah’s son, who made fun of having discovered his father drunk and naked and reported it to his brothers, rather than covering up his father’s nakedness and remaining silent.
Yet if my father was guilty, I also did not want to “share” in it, to have it come between us, to be labeled by it. My father, no doubt, did not want his sins inherited, and my mother — his third wife — kept his secret dutifully as well.
It is easy to consider my story a Jewish aberration, as there are probably a relative handful of my peers whose fathers served time. But, in other ways, it is probably more representative than not.
The postwar Jewish period, brilliantly depicted by I.B. Singer in his book “Shadows on the Hudson,” was rife with anger, turmoil, expectation and grief. The lives of Singer’s fictional characters, like my father’s, were in chaos — the ground below these immigrants shifting from the war and its aftermath.
Adulterous marriages, for Singer, were almost a norm, or at least a moral symptom of their time. This era, almost like my father’s crime itself, became buried in the 1950s conformist consciousness that followed, and like Singer’s Yiddish serialization, it remained “untranslated” until now.
What is a successful Jewish generation to make of the collective bedlam upon which it historically rests? Is it our responsibility to uncover the travails of the past, however shameful, or should these be left as is, resting in our parents’ and grandparents’ graves?
Many more postwar Jews than I have family members whose lives were impacted harshly by economic hardship, anti-Semitism and the destruction of European Jewry. Yet my generation was made to be different — unburdened by immigrant tsuris, pleased and certain of the American ground we walked on.
And we are different: We are naive, and our problems today complicated by our vague understanding of the immediate past. In its tumultuousness lies the roots of our Jewish assimilation and estrangement. And in our not knowing a new kind of burden.