Responsibility; or, My Brother and I (and Leonard Cohen) Go to Summer Camp

We present here the third chapter from the memoirs-in-progress of the renowned scholar and author Ruth R. Wisse. Earlier chapters can be found here. Further installments will appear over the next months.

The hero of my childhood was my brother Benjamin, five years my senior. When I first came upon the term “parentification,” I did not have to look up its meaning. Children in immigrant families tend to acclimatize much faster than their elders, and Ben may have begun to function as a co-caretaker for our family even before the summer of 1940 when we left Romania for Canada. In one of our passport pictures taken in Bucharest, he stands, nine years old, leaning protectively over Mother and me—the same position he would assume in other photographs over the years.

Ben’s bar mitzvah in May 1944 is the first day of my life that I remember almost in its entirety. In the way our family marked the passage of time, the ceremony took place after the liquidations of the ghettos of Vilna, Bialystok, and Kovno and a year after the Russians fought off the Germans at Stalingrad. Anxieties must have been running high that morning because Mother, who had brought me by the hand to the synagogue, forgot about me after the service. I hadn’t been told about the congregational kiddush, and with no one to ask when the synagogue emptied, I walked back home alone. It turned out that no one had noticed my absence, but being so suddenly on my own may account for why the rest of the day stayed sharp in my memory.