I Now See the Writing on the Wall
It took the massacre on October 7th to understand what my father tried to tell me years ago
By Francie Arenson Dickman
My dad died a year ago, at age 91. When he was alive, he and I would walk together—through the Loop in downtown Chicago when we both worked, or home from the train when I was young. We’d talk, he’d tell me stories—fabulous, fabled childhood stories—and all the while we’d keep our eyes peeled for pennies in gutters or the crevices of sidewalks. He said these were signs from my grandmother, his mother, in heaven or wherever the soul goes when it leaves the earth. We’d see one and he’d stop, point, and smile. Then he’d direct me to bend down and pick it up.
“Hello, Glady,” he’d say. He’d chuckle and demand I put the penny in my pocket.
During his funeral, I ended my eulogy to him with the sentence: I’ll hear your voice in my head everyday and I’ll see you in every penny I find at my feet. As we walked out of the funeral home, lo and behold, there it was in front of my feet. A penny. A shiny one, too. I picked it up and pocketed it. Hello, Dad.
When my daughters and I wear his sweaters, I’m certain he knows and takes pleasure. When I wear his ring, I believe he laughs. When I sit at my dining room table—formerly my home base for writing but, in the wake of October 7th, a refuge where I maniacally knit to relieve my anxiety—I believe he sees me.
When I say in my head, “You were right,” as I count my stitches and try to discern how, one by one, they are going to turn into a shawl, I know he can hear me.
I can hear him say, “You didn’t want to believe me, did ya?”
The nice thing about communicating with the dead is that you don’t have to explain too much. I don’t need to apologize for decades worth of dismissing his warnings and claims about the world being rife with antisemitism.
I spent years calling him narrow-minded or old-fashioned and a lifetime laughing at his stories, which were colorful and innumerable and followed a reliable trope. Every story involved my grandfather or my dad fighting back after an insult or provocation. The humor came from my dad’s delivery. From the hyperbole. From my inability to conceive of a childhood so draped in physical violence.
Only now do I notice the reasons for the fighting, which never seemed relevant before. The garbage man had called my grandmother a dirty Jew. So did the kids who chased my father and his friends off the ball field at the park near his home on the Near North Side.
“You see that guy,” my dad once said to me, this time in Manny’s Deli. I looked and nodded. “He once heckled us for being Jewish when we were hanging around Division Street. We chased him down, and let’s just say he never bothered us again.”
From where I sat then, and up until a month ago, these stories amused me. The time in between was the golden age of the American Dream. The New York Times recently used this phrase to refer to 70s and 80s suburbia.
All these years, I thought we were progressing. Onward and upward. I considered my father to be of a bygone, unenlightened era. I figured I was free to laugh. As a child of the golden age of the American dream—of Big Wheels and Snoopy and “Free to Be…You and Me”—I thought I had that luxury.
“Don’t laugh so fast,” he’d say. Maybe he was wearing the powder-blue sweater I wear now. The one that matched his eyes. “It ain’t funny.”
He was right.
“What I tell ya,” he’s saying now. As I stitch and stare, wondering how this pattern will unfold. Wondering whether we should get a gun. I hear Jews everywhere are lining up at ranges. “Jeff hits the target every time,” my neighbor told me. “Good for Jeff,” I wanted to say. As if Jeff’s hand-eye ability is going to matter in a pogrom. Where are we going to flee, I want to know. My friend Beth and her husband are looking into buying property in Portugal. Liz’s husband is stockpiling supplies and cash.
“We’re sitting ducks,” I tell my husband when he emerges from his office every so often, increasingly less and less—I can’t imagine why.
He tells me don’t worry, everything’s going to be okay. I married the only Jewish person on earth who assumes the best until circumstances prove otherwise.
I’m slow in many areas. I got a D in geometry. I have no spatial awareness, or understanding of planes or patterns, evidenced by my free-form style of knitting. But when it comes to anticipating disaster and bracing for the worst, I thrive.
I’ve always thought that ability was genetic or a result of being bullied in sixth grade. If only I’d been better at patterns, I might have been able to connect dots all along, beginning with a car ride in 1974, when my parents first explained the Holocaust to me. I was in the back seat, standing on “the hump,” that coveted spot between my parents’ seats. Seat belts weren’t a thing, so I was in danger of flying through the windshield. But not of being killed by Nazis, because that had just happened and, according to my mother, could never happen again.
My mother told me not to worry, the world had learned its lesson. My father was never as reassuring. I remember asking why people didn’t run, didn’t leave. Some did, I was told. A litany of families on our street were offered as examples of German Jews who’d seen the writing on the wall.
Right then and there, and with a bit of self-righteous arrogance that I now regret, I committed to never being one of those who failed to see the writing on the wall. A commitment I gradually and naively let go of, as time went by.
All these years, I thought we were progressing. Onward and upward. I considered my father to be of a bygone, unenlightened era. I figured I was free to laugh.
The other day on CNN, I heard Mandana Dayani, a Jewish woman, and creator of the organization I Am a Voter, explain to some talking head that, “When you say words like genocide, colonization, apartheid all incorrectly and inaccurately, they have real-life consequences for people, and the rate of anti-semitism has very real consequences for people who’ve inherited years of generational trauma.” There it was. A penny at my feet.
I’d heard the term generational trauma before in the context of alcoholism or abuse. I’d never have thought to apply it to myself, an otherwise happy person who grew up in a mostly happy house on a happy street in the golden age of the American Dream. It never crossed my mind that having a father who bombarded me with stories of rampant antisemitism or a grandmother who Holocaust-hoarded dollar bills and doggy bags in her freezer, wasn’t normal.
In Florida, where we spent Christmas vacations when I was young, plenty of grandparents had numbers tattooed on their forearms. This wasn’t normal, either. I knew what they were. I knew the people with the numbers were among those who’d somehow been able to escape or survive. I knew not to stare. Instead I shoved them out of my mind. So far out of my mind that I wrote an entire novel set in Florida and never once mentioned that detail. I was writing a comedy. One can afford to laugh when you believe “Never Again” means never again.
As I child, I consumed Holocaust books like Starring Sally J Freeman as Herself, A Bag of Marbles, Mila-18. I saved them and, as a mom, lined them on my daughters’ shelves, like normal parents do with favorite dolls. And just as other parents aren’t surprised when their children forego those dolls for current models, I wasn’t surprised when my daughters chose Harry Potter over When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. For them, I figured, the Holocaust was truly history. But now, as they traverse college campuses amid chants of “There is only one solution,” I fear history is, again, repeating itself.
l might be slow to comprehend, but it’s all coming together. I see how I got here. I see how it can happen. I see the writing on the wall. I even see, as I am, where I am, (to borrow words from Fiddler on the Roof, another childhood favorite) how it can be hard to leave.
I get it, I say to my father. I now see what he had understood all along.
Francie Arenson Dickman is an author and essayist from Chicago. Her essays have been published in places such as Huffington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Week and have been used for performance material for TEDX and The Moth, among others. Her novel, Chuckerman Makes a Movie, was released in 2018 and received several awards, including Book of the Year by the Chicago Writers Association.
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