The Good Doctor by Barron H. Lerner Page B

would eventually be a historian, I was not one yet. I don’t recall ever asking Ben for tales of his life in Poland or while struggling to make a living in America. Writing this book, I have realized what a pity that is.
    Mannie, my mother’s father, was the next to die, in 1975. He and Jessie, who we called Poppa and Nana, had moved from Framingham in 1972 and joined us in University Heights. Soon after their arrival in Cleveland, Mannie began experiencing memory problems. The cause was probably a series of small strokes, as opposed to Alzheimer’s, but after a while, he could no longer go unaccompanied to the nearby Cedar Center shopping area. His confusion gradually worsened. The cause of Mannie’s death was never officially determined but it was likely due to a piece of intestine that had died, leading to septic shock and then the failure of the kidneys and other organs. It was the first family death that I would observe my father manage. At the age of fourteen, I assumed his therapeutic choices for his father-in-law had been entirely straightforward, but after I became a doctor, I realized that the situation had been more complicated. More family illnesses and deaths were on the way, including those of two of my grandmother Pearl’s sisters. There was actually such a spate of deaths during the late 1970s that my sister thought that a man who was present at all the services—the director of the local Jewish funeral home—was our cousin.
    But Meyer’s death was by far the most jarring, and not only because he was still in his sixties. When we moved to Cleveland in 1966, we had actually lived with Meyer and Pearl for a few months while our new house was being readied. And during the next eleven years, we saw them often. Pearl was sharp-tongued, forever arguing with her sisters and fond of Yiddish slang. Meyer, by contrast, was a calm and gentle presence. He wore a shirt and tie at all times and a fedora hat when he went outside.
    Despite their devotion to Judaism, Meyer and Pearl had never been to Israel. Part of the reason may have been the expense. While my father and his brother would gladly have helped them pay for it, their Depression mentality caused lifelong frugality. Of Pearl, my father wrote, “It’s alien to her nature not to worry about money, and she’ll never change.” There were also, of course, safety concerns, especially prior to the 1978 Camp David treaty between Israel and Egypt.
    My father had not been to Israel either. So when he was invited to be a visiting professor in, of all places, Shiraz, Iran, he decided to begin his trip with a week in the Jewish homeland. And, in an inspired move, he asked me to come. The first two weeks of his trip corresponded with my two-week spring vacation in eleventh grade, in March and April of 1977. The plan was that I would go with him, then fly home from Iran by myself, returning through Israel.
    The trip was remarkable for a number of reasons. For one thing, it was an intense father-son bonding experience. My father was still displeased with my academic performance, but the trip was all about exploring our cultural heritage and seeing exciting tourist destinations. We rented a car in Israel and split most of our time between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, with day trips to places like the Dead Sea and Masada. Particularly powerful was a visit to Kibbutz Dafna, near the southern border of Lebanon, where we stayed with relatives who had moved to Palestine before World War II.
    And, of course, there was Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. My outwardly unemotional father was, I found out later, profoundly moved and disturbed. After I read his journals, I understood how this experience rekindled the feelings of guilt and the sense of good luck that had crafted his personality and helped guide his career in medicine. “The pictures at Yad Vashem,” he wrote, “are the pictures of my family, if only circumstances had been a little