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unknown and unseen. Even when he sang in the synagogue, I was removed from him, exiled in the women’s section, apart. But there were times when my father entered my world, took his loupe out, shed the prayer shawl, and pulled me toward him. My joy was boundless—I had been “selected.” Only then, chosen, did I feel fully alive.
    It was my father who would make my bland food palatable. On special occasions, he would make me neat, yummy omelets, the way I liked them—the eggs anything but soft and runny. He would cut thin slices of potatoes and make crisp fries for me, slice cucumbers and lay them down in sandwiches with thick brown bread and butter. He was deft with a knife, and could slice potato finely, pare an apple peel into one long circle, drop M&M’s into my farina bowl without my noticing, one by one, making them appear to pop out of the gray sludge, a bit of sweet hope and color.
    He would also tuck me in at night, tight, like a mummy, which I loved—the covers tucked even under me, so that I felt snug and safe. Then he would call me by a pet name: Karaputzi. He told me it was a Slavic slang word meaning “cute little child.” I liked the sound of it. When I was sick with the croup, it was he who would stay with me all night, leading me from my bed into a bathroom steaming with vapors from the shower, waving the mist toward my mouth. At moments like this, as when he fixed watches, he was infinitely patient—and I felt loved.
    If I awoke in the middle of the night and called out for him: “I’m scared of this darkness, Daddy,” he would say, “Read the bedtime Sh’ma.” The Sh’ma is the prayer all Jews know, attesting to the oneness of God. “Hear O Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is one.” These words may have comforted me, but more comforting was the man who tucked me in again, assuring me that I was safe in the world, no matter what had happened in the past, or what time it now was.
    Still, it was hard for me to sustain that feeling of safety when the real world was so fragmented, not just Jews and non-Jews but my father’s doting love for his Karaputzi, and the more conditional appreciation he felt for my “specialness.” It was possible to please him, and it was also possible to deeply disappoint him.
    “God has given you something extra,” he’d say, “and these gifts have been there from the moment you were born. I could see them from the moment I first saw you. You are going to be a great lady.”
    These words were like an official coronation, with the accompanying sense of responsibility. I was required to do my share, under my father’s watchful approval. He would witness my deeds and affirm my extra-chosenness. Heavy is the head that wears the crown that a wounded, moody father imposes on his child. And such tributes, focused on a scrawny, black-haired daughter, would cause my mother to tighten her lips and show me her rare cold side. It didn’t help when, during a marital argument, her husband would drag me into it and draw a virtual bull’s-eye on me:
    “Gita! What took me ten hours to explain to you—and I still don’t think you will ever understand it—this little girl, this klayne maydel, she understood it in the very first minute!”
    It probably also didn’t help that these praiseful words made me beam, like the desperate, foolish child I was.
    He even liked my dark hair, which came from his dark, intense side of the family. The original Sonia Taitz had been beautiful, he told me, with black hair and deep, blue-green eyes. When I’d wish for blondeness, he’d remind me that I had a special beauty, an ancient Jewish charm. He comforted me with tales of dark, exotic beauties such as Queen Esther, who, long ago in Persia, had won a beauty contest, married a king, and saved her people. He assured me that dark eyes and hair were rare and desirable. In Lithuania, he told me, as in Poland or Russia, any peasant could produce a crop of illiterate towheads with dumb pale