Sweet Sororicide

The Old Testament attests to myriad horrors we visit on one another. The broad index of mans inhumanity ranges from expelling a woman with a young child into the wilderness at a jealous spouses request to wholesale genocide of rival clans, beasts included. It always struck me odd that I was taught in Yeshiva that god’s mercy was bountiful. The evidence for this is scant. It seemed to me that the lord of hosts was more interested in meeting out the severest form of punishments, threatening the damnation of future generations and sanctioning genocidal vendettas rather than doling out mercy by the pound. At best, the old testament is evidence of god’s penchant for highly selective pity and measured forgiveness. The catalog of human crimes starts early in the Bible with the first two true humans bathed the ground in blood.

Contrary to common misconception, Adam and eve were not the first true humans. They had no human progenitors and as such the best they could be is a protohuman couple, a blue print, beta versions. They had no parents and thus we’re not subjected to repeat their parents failings. They never watched their parents make terrible mistakes which would impact their lives in ways big and small. They never saw their parents argue about money or infidelity. They never saw examples of words said in anger, they never feared a parents death or felt abandonment. They never had the misfortune of becoming their parents, neurosis and all. Their only parental figure was an intangible spirit who’s only guidance instructed them to stay ignorant of the ways of the world because they were more special than all other creatures. Perhaps their parent figure was a well meaning and over protective proto Jewish mother who doled out guilt and shame for all transgressions.

The very first pair of actual humans, version 1.0 if you will, were siblings who resolved their differenced trough death by bludgeoning. Anyone who’s have or been near children are not surprised by this. The only surprise is that it took them so long to do it. Having four children I have seen on occasion the viciousness siblings can display towards one another, especially when they think parents are not watching.

The other non surprising thing about Abel’s death is the reason for the Cain’s sudden homicidal urge. The details of the relationship between the archetypal brothers is not delved into very deeply in Genesis. We know some facts. Cain was older than Abel but Abel did a better job in his presentation to the lord. God told Cain to put a little more effort into it and Cains response was to beat his brother to death with a stone. We are not privy to the conversation between the brothers, but there is very little doubt that at some point Cain, the first born, may have said “ It was so much better before you came along and ruined everything.”

There are many apocryphal stories which have been spun around this first ever fratricide. They are all conjecture, which makes mine is just as valid, I suppose. I think Cain slew Abel not because he was jealous of his brother’s superior offering, but because Cain did not understand how parental ( or god’s ) love works. Cain must have assumed god had a finite amount of love and saw Abel as the thief who,without permission, snuck into Cains world uninvited and took 1/2 of the all the love available in the world. The only logical way to fix this was to make the loathsome interloper disappear. Cain wanted to annihilate every trace of the vile invader who shined brighter than himself in the eyes of the only being who mattered. Cain did not see gods rebuke and admonition to strive harder, review his own failings, reflect on the his own lack effort. Instead, he felt robbed of the totality of available love and in a rage he beat his brother to death with a rock.

I’ve seen Cain’s rage personified in my 3 year old first born, by all evidence a gentle soul, pushing his newly adopted 13 moth old sister down the three steps of the sunken living room soon after her intrusion into his world. Perhaps my parents saw that same rage in my sister when they brought me home form the hospital.

As sisters go I would have preferred Goneril for whom I would have gladly played Regan to her lead, to share some common cause, even had I known of the treachery to come. But I do not recall a time when we had common cause. So Cornelius to her Goneril I became.

There is a picture of the two of us as children. She is sitting on a sofa with me positioned precariously on her lap. We are both looking up at the camera. I am not older than three which would make her no older than 10. She has a broad but closed lip smile on her face, right hand holding my arm, her bent left ear poking out of her hair. My countenance is more reserved and pensive. Her arm is draped over my shoulder and around my neck. We are frozen in a gauzy black and white moment in time when taking a picture was a deliberate act of intention to hold the moment for posterity and not a spontaneous expression self absorption. I’ve looked at that picture a thousand times, and perhaps through the filter of the years of bitter enmity since it was taken, or perhaps because it was true even then, I always feel her smile to be a sneer and her arm about to lock into a deadly choke hold.

Jewish families of the USSR, perhaps necessarily given the political and cultural circumstances in which they’ve found themselves for centuries, are secretive. We speak in hushed tones of many things including hopes, auspicious events, finances, infidelities, pregnancy, illness and death. In my early teen years learned through such hushed tones that when I was born my mother shared the hospital room with another woman who immediately after giving birth relinquished parental rights to her newborn son. My mother nursed both newborns and was prepared to take us both home when my almost brother’s birthmother changed her mind. Perhaps the wrong newborn was brought home to my sister and she never quite learned how to love the one she got.

I don’t know if my sister and I were ever close. My arrival changed her world. She was seven when I was born. She, the only child in the family, had seven years in which to be the center of familial love, which upon my arrival had to now be shared.

Perhaps she blamed me for my fathers infidelity roughly around the time of my birth. I have no memory of those events and by the time the tones were less hushed, the events seemed ancient history. History best left unstudied, I was told. But some small parts of the history slipped past the silence.

There as a woman, who also had a son. Papa was going to leave mama for her but changed his mind, perhaps because of guilt or the new obligations of support due to my birth. Perhaps my sister implored my father to stay, if not for her sake then for her new baby brother. Perhaps that argument’s logical conclusion, when analyzed by an 11 year old girl, gave birth to the realization that he was willing to leave her but not me. Perhaps it was how my father’s decision to stay had changed him. Maybe he was kinder before I was born, maybe he had hope and therefore yelled less. Obligations, after all, are not nearly as good a kindling for loving bonds as one would like.

Perhaps it was my weak constitution as a young child, contracting meningitis and nearly dying, my the experimentation with hair pins and 220 volt sockets which also nearly killed me. Maybe it was all these things which took my mothers attention away from my sister. Or maybe it was the simple truth that I was my mothers son and she was her fathers daughter, pure distillates of two personalities which never should have been in the same room let alone a marriage. The concentrated and thickened reduction of everything our parents ultimately learned to hate about each other, poured into a broken pot that was our home, left to cook on high until years later, in a raging boil, it was simply inevitable that we would never speak again.

Our 7 year age difference was not uncommon in Soviet families. Very little thought was given to the impact age differences between siblings with resources constraints being what they were. Seven years is a lifetime between siblings. If maturity levels are factored the chasm gets even wider. I simply do not have recollections of us spending time together. I’m sure we had, but I cannot reach any moments of significance or familial intimacy. The moments I do recall are either comical or painful.

As preparations for her 12th birthday party were conducted, I had made it a point to tell all of my friends that on May 1st I was having my birthday party. I was born in January, so my parents were quite surprised to see several friends of mine at the door with presents for me in hand. I came clean and confessed that this was indeed not my birthday party, but my half Birthday party. I don’t recall my sister’s reaction, but there were definitely some tears.

When I was seven I contracted lice. My head was quickly shaved. It took hours for my mother to comfort me and make me feel human with the shaved head. Until my sister brought her friend to look at the Auschwitz outpatient in our living room. Then another one. And another one. I wanted the gas chamber to make it stop.

Those are the two best memories I have of our 8 years together in the USSR. All the other memories are simply of my sister being with her friends, our cousins and as soon as she was old enough her boyfriends.

With in two years of our arrival in the United States, by the age of 18, she was married. With a year of that she was pregnant. As immigrants are apt to, she moved into the apartment next door to ours. There were fights, accusations, recriminations, disagreements, silences, threats, tearful reconciliation, shouting, yelling, lawsuit threats, business dealings gone awry, joint investment, vacations, more pregnancies and poor parenting. All of the things that an 18 year old should be spared and a 11 year never wished to witness. Trough all of it I continued to soak up my mothers energy and my sister that of my father. Concentrating our parental essences.

Thirty years later my father battled stage 4 lung of cancer as we battled over his care. He lived in Florida with poor health insurance, no savings to speak of and his second wife. He and I recently reconnected after nearly a decade long silence. I tried to the best of my abilities to give his last days some peace and she, in her own confused way which undermined every one of my efforts and made everyone’s life incredibly difficult, tried to do the same.

In our ways we wanted to give some honor to our father. To repay him. I needed to repay his bravery and tenacity which moved our clan to the United States. A feat I can’t imagine myself doing. Without which I would have non of the things which make my life meaningful today. My debt was not paid out of love not even of respect. At least not for him. If there is place we go after we die and if there is even a minuscule chance that I will have to look my mother in the eye , she will know that despite all of the pain my father has caused me, all the humiliation, despite all the rage he inspired in me, and despite every cell in my body wishing to abandon him in his time of need, I did no such thing. I did my duty as a son. Perhaps without love, but with the honor my mother would expect of me and in the best interest of my dad. I even found a few kind words at his poorly attended funeral…

My sister also wanted to honor her father and she did. By being as obstructive, punitive, petty, loud, aggressive, accusatory, dismissive and narcissistic as he could have been at his absolute worst. Perhaps I’ll tell that story one day. For now, it’s enough to chart the origins of our disconnected accident of birth.

When he died, she coerced (or conned or blackmailed or threatened depending on how you view it) his pensioner widow cover the astronomical cost of flying my father’s corpse to New York, where all but I were invited to the funeral. She could not, as she said, accept her dearest “papachka” to lie in the ground so far away from her, where no one will ever visit. This was 7 years ago. The funeral long past gone, the vodka finished after the funeral, the mourners no longer there to watch her tears. It’s been 7 long years and my father rests in a Brooklyn Cemetery without so much as a name plate on his grave.