The Holocaust Story I Said I Wouldn't Write

New York Times

06-04-2025

I learned that Mr. Lindenblatt was dying when I was in London this past November on business. I had awoken from a dream that his daughter Ilana, who is one of my oldest friends, was engaged. I called her up and asked if there was something I didn't know, because I inherited a witchy quality from my mother: I occasionally have dreams about people and it turns out that they're predictive or at least thematically correct. She laughed sadly and told me she wasn't engaged, no, but that her father was dying and that perhaps the thing I had sensed across the ocean was her sadness. He has cancer, she said. He was receiving a palliative chemotherapy treatment, and the doctors didn't have a guess as to how long he would live: weeks or months. Nobody really knew for sure, but the end was inevitable. And inevitabilities? In this story, they are everywhere.
I hung up the phone, and I thought about Mr. Lindenblatt — his first name was Jehuda, pronounced Yehuda, though it feels seditious to even say the first name of a childhood friend's father. I thought about how he was a runner, back when it was just called jogging; how he drank rice milk before alternative milks were the style. How he would walk through the house in his running shorts and no shirt, which absolutely none of the other dads did; how he thanklessly and happily took on the burden of driving Ilana and me both ways to our losing basketball games and our even losinger play rehearsals (we were in 'Brigadoon' together, don't ask) when my mother was pregnant with my youngest sister; how he taught me to say, 'Hello, how are you?' in his native Hungarian, which has proved useful in my life twice so far; how he walked around on Shabbat with a walkie-talkie because, in addition to working at his family's camera store in Midtown, he volunteered for the Jewish ambulance service in Manhattan Beach, near their home.
And I thought about the fact that Mr. Lindenblatt survived the Holocaust. In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, in the surrounding neighborhoods, too, it seemed as if everyone was a survivor. We all had the Holocaust in our past to varying degrees. We knew whose fathers were Holocaust survivors and whose grandmothers had numbers on their arms and whose aunts never made it out of the ghetto, all discussed as part of our Holocaust education at the yeshiva high school that Ilana and I attended in Queens.
And let me tell you: On the matter of the Holocaust, we were educated. I need to disclose to you that yes, I am hyperbolic and that I know that hyperbole combined with the way the brain rounds down when it has been trying to make a point for too many years is deadly, but here it is anyway: In my most bitter moments, in times when I realize how much of my foundational education was given over to the war and how little was given over to, say, gym or art or the other humanities that would have helped me in life or at the very least in work meetings, I say I went to a Holocaust high school, a magnet school for Jewish death studies. I say my school taught us masters-level World War II history and also just enough math and science to pass the New York State Regents exams. I'm joking, but am I? I left high school having read 'Macbeth' not once but Elie Wiesel's 'Night' three times over the course of my education. I can probably autocomplete any sentence from Anne Frank's diary if you start me off with three words. I have forgotten more about the Holocaust than I ever knew about the American Revolution.
(Again, I'm mostly hyperbolic here; lots of people hated their high schools and even more people of my generation have aged up to find that their formal education let them down in some crucial way or another. There were other yeshivas that were more focused on their students' prospects for success, and a few of my classmates became doctors and lawyers. Hey, maybe it was a fine high school and I was just a terrible student, which I absolutely was; I did fail several classes and had to take something called Business Math twice. But I recently joked to a group of fellow alumnae that one of the best parts of 'Hamilton' for me was not knowing how it would end, and nobody didn't know what I was talking about.)
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