Where's papa?

A shiva candle, with its emphatic blue Jewish star, burned in our kitchen for seven days and nights last month. My father-in-law, Max Horst Segall, died in Florida in the last week in May, and when my wife returned from the funeral she placed the candle on the stovetop (every home's holy of holies) and lit it.

This was unexpected; my wife is not observant, or in any outward way religious at all. Her parents, Holocaust survivors from Berlin, were courteous enough about the religious practices of others, but not believers themselves. In private, Max could be scornful of religious customs, especially if they smacked of superstition or priestcraft (rabbis were included in this category). But, then, Max was scornful of many things, from his perennially disappointing Chicago Blackhawks to the perennially disappointing Democratic party. I wondered what he would think of the shiva candle. I confess I rather liked it, but I have a cultic weakness for smells and bells and small pious gestures.

Max was not a sentimental or demonstratively affectionate man. God knows, he and his wife (who survives him, but struggles with Parkinson's) had been through nearly every imaginable horror during the war. I wrote the following lines for his obituary in our local paper: "Mr. Segall was deported from Germany to Poland by the Nazis in 1938. He was later joined in Poland by his wife and together they managed to avoid detection and capture during the Holocaust. Early in 1944, they returned to Germany under false identities. `I figured,' Mr. Segall said, `that the last place the Nazis would look for two Jews was in Germany.' "

Max talked about the war only occasionally, and he was always parsimonious with details. I surmise they survived thanks to luck, shrewdness, bribery, and help from those who hid them. He had a complicated regard for Germany and for Germans. One of the reasons he survived, he told me, was that he could, when questioned, pass as a "German." He could outwit the Nazis, he said, because he knew how Germans did things. He decided to return to Berlin in 1944 because he thought the Russians (then advancing across Poland) were "crazy" (one of his favorite designations), but he knew "how to handle the Germans."

One measure of how well he understood the Germans was his decision to make the trip from Warsaw to Berlin over the long Easter weekend. "I thought they would be more relaxed on Easter....They would be in a festive mood," he told me proudly, describing how he and his wife walked unquestioned for miles down the nearly deserted boulevards of Berlin that Easter morning in 1944.

Max's Easter reprieve is a sobering irony, to say the least. We talked about Christianity and the Holocaust a few times. He did not hesitate to credit individual Christians for helping him and his wife. Institutional Christianity was another matter. I made the argument that Christianity was not intrinsically anti-Semitic. He was skeptical. "Just tell me," he said, "who killed Christ?" I responded by contextualizing like mad. He listened, patiently, but remained unpersuaded. "As long as Christianity teaches that the Jews killed Christ," he concluded, "Jews have a problem."

I don't pretend to have a very good answer to Max's challenge--my answers always seemed too abstract and idealized. I thought about the conundrum of Christian-Jewish history many times as the shiva candle's light cast its shadows across our kitchen at night, and I've thought about it every time I've had the nerve to answer my children's predictable questions with the astounding assertion: "Papa is with God now."

God talk, it is often said, is at best a way to speak about what we cannot finally comprehend.