The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [23]
These three would be my guides as I neared the end of a long, winding journey that had led me from my home in Detroit, where I’d raised two sons and worked as a teacher and journalist, to today’s destination, Blagovschina Forest on the outskirts of Minsk, in search of my father’s, my grandmother’s—and ultimately my own—history. The impetus for this journey was my discovery, a decade after my father’s death, of documents in a box of his papers and letters—my first solid clues to the fate of his Austrian Jewish family.
But in truth, my journey to wrest my father’s history from the shadows had commenced long before I discovered the box of his papers. Growing up with a single mother scarcely out of her teens, I’d known my father only through his letters that arrived, sometimes daily, throughout my childhood. These letters revealed nothing personal about my father. Instead, they were entreaties that I renounce the materialism of my childhood world and pursue what he called “the Spiritual life.” My father’s letters were bitter diatribes against that slough of evil that comprised my young world—the schools, the churches, books; my mother, teachers, friends.
My father, Otto Kraus, had escaped to America in the ’30s, a few years before his widowed mother and the rest of his Viennese family were exterminated. He’d given his first name at Customs as Proteus, the Greek god of prophesy and sea change. As Proteus, my father had earned a doctorate in German literature at Berkeley and had taken a teaching job at a college in Florida. After the war, in what I imagine to have been a tumult of guilt and sorrow, my father tucked Proteus the Shape-Shifter away behind an initial and, as Otto P. Kraus, embraced the rigid, ascetic personal brand of Christianity that he would preach for the remainder of his life. Denouncing this earthly swamp of mortal error that seethes below a plane of pure ideas became his obsession, ultimately replacing even his class curricula and leading to dismissals from first one university, then another.
Defrocked as an academic, my father, by then past forty, had lit out for California with the fifteen-year-old girl who would become my mother. The younger sister of one of his students, the teenager had sat in on one of his classroom sermons and had listened intently. A year later I was born, but before my second birthday, my father had wandered off to begin a new life, taking his message to the streets. I’d been in his presence only twice since I was a toddler.
Both times I’d gone looking for him in the Los Angeles neighborhood where he rented a room in someone else’s apartment, I’d come upon my father scavenging through the alley Dumpsters and piling into his shopping cart the old sweaters, dog-eared magazines, and broken toasters that he would later haul to the Salvation Army. During each of these visits, my father had insisted that, despite the barrage of letters he’d sent me throughout my childhood, given my mother’s worldly ways, he likely wasn’t even my father.
When I’d tried to engage my father in conversation, he drifted off to that higher plane, and soon—launching into the same lecture I’d received as a child in his countless letters—he was speaking of the life of the Spirit. “This is your true father,” he’d concluded during my last visit, wagging a crooked index finger that, I noticed, matched my own. Soon, he was trundling his shopping cart back down the alley. With a hollowness in my heart, I watched him disappear—a small, dark figure in a cracked leather jacket and his head in a book.
Soon after my second visit to Los Angeles, my father died. “I want my body burned,” he’d stipulated in a will discovered after his death. “I want my ashes taken out with the trash.”
For years my father’s instructions had haunted me, and I’d sought in vain to uncover the source of his all-encompassing