New York Times-Metro Section March 1999, by Lisa Lipkin

To the viewing public, Roberto Benigni’s Oscar nominated film, Life is Beautiful, is about the Holocaust. To savvy film critics, it’s about a father/son relationship within the context of war. But to the children of Holocaust survivors, the movie’s underlying premise is as obvious as it is familiar. It’s about rewriting our family’s stories.
Half the kids on my block in Flushing Queens, in 1967, were the offspring of survivors.On the surface, we acted like all the other youngsters. We wore polyester bell bottoms, rolled our hair in banana curls, and hung Bobby Sherman posters on our walls. Our local heroes were Tom Seaver, Mayor Lindsay, and Mr. Geitlitz, who always threw us Yodels from the back of his Drakes delivery truck as he rode along 34th Avenue.
The only difference between us and all the other kids was that while they were dreaming of the future, we were dreaming about the past, about our parents’ pasts. While they were playing kick the can and stick ball on one end of 171st Street, we were saving our relatives from the Nazis on the other.
In Benigni’s fantastical version of a concentration camp, he sues the public address system to declare his love for his wife, camouflages his son under blankets and in storage bins, and even gets the boy a five course meal by passing him off as a German. While Benigni’s depiction of the camps may be totally unrealistic, it echoed my childhood play. I can hardly remember a Sunday afternoon in Flushing Meadow Park when I didn’t pretend to outwit the Gestapo and ease my mother’s pain, or feed her sisters, or save her brother. Although my uncle Moshe didn’t survive the war, in my mind I rescued him time and time again. Like Benigni’s character, Guido, who cleverly concocts ways to hide his son from the SS officers, I hid with Moshe amongst rats and urine under his bed in the camps, transforming a park bench into his rotting bunk. In one game, my friends and I turned the New York City Building from the 1939 World’s Fair (now the Queens Museum) into barracks, and I pretended to hide my uncle from the guards until we escaped through a hole in a non-electric fence. In another, we fled to safety by digging a tunnel under the length of the park and ending up on the pitcher’s mound at Shea Stadium. My mother’s father perished at Auschwitz. But that didn’t stop me from rewriting his script in grand cinematic style. Each time my mother and I strolled down Main Street to the bakery, I would fantasize that every old man that walked past us was my grandfather. “it’s all a big mistake,” I could almost hear him say, “I’m alive.” He would then tell us how, like Guido, he had gotten a job in a Nazi kitchen and charmed the officers into letting him live or how he had bribed them with the candy he always carried in his pocket before the war. I picture us hugging outside the Gertz Department Store just before he came home to live with us forever. My most memorable dream still recurs. I’m at a party with Hitler and he’s taken with me. I like him too. I flirt with him and try to seduce him into letting my mother go. I get the feeling he’s going to listen to me. But he never says what he will do, and I always wake not knowing. Not all of our fantasies ended in hope, but they did give us some small sense of power. Benigni, whose father was imprisoned in a labor camp, must have felt that way too. Those of us who grew up without a tangible way to ease our parents’ pain found other ways to come to their rescue--through fanciful New York narratives which, for a brief moment, ended happily ever after.

The Forward January 1998
God and DNA Over Coffee by Lisa Lipkin

Once again, my father and I squabbled over God at breakfast. “I just don’t understand how I could have emerged from you!,” I said. “DNA” he replied, as only a scientist could. “ But why must everything be proven?,” I asked him. “Can’t God exist without the lab reports to back it up?” “it depends what you mean by God,” he said. “To me. God is the sum total of all the intelligence in the universe. To others it’s something else, something more emotional perhaps. Pass the danish.” “But what about faith, dad? Can’t you ever just take a leap of faith?” “Faith, kiddo, is anything where the evidence is missing. You got any Sweet and Low?” He was in a hurry to eat, he had to get to his lab on Second Avenue, where malignant tumors in glass vials were waiting for him. “Then why be Jewish dad?” He dunked his jelly donut in his decaf, submerging it throughout his reply. “It’s about belonging to a group. A family of man, As for the Torah? I certainly don’t believe God came down in a cloud or anything. Moses went up there and scribbled it out. It’s a nice set of moral laws. Get me my coat from the closet, will you?” I could see his mind was turning to other things, to electron microscopes and Bunsen burners, his bio-chemical mistresses. In a last ditch effort to elicit a morsel of abandon from him I resorted to using a familiar Jewish ploy, guilt and suffering. “But dad, you married a Holocaust survivor. Your mother’s youth, here entire family, was stolen from her by the Pogroms in Russia. Does this mean nothing to you?” He lowered his head for a moment. When he raised it, however, I realized he’d actually been looking for a token in his top pocket. “Kiddo, it means that somehow mankind still has potential for goodness. After all, the fact that you’re here is proof of that.” Is scientific imagination really so different than religious faith? I wondered, but knew not to ask him any more questions. By now he had already started to mumble equations to himself. He was somewhere in the clouds, with satellite technology or God depending on your DNA. “Don’t forget your umbrella,” I said, and stuffed it in his raincoat pocket, although I’m not sure he notices. Just then my phone rang. I ran for th receiver and, from the kitchen, I could see him preparing to leave. He buttoned his coat collar, pulled a wool cap over his ears, and through no fault of his own, kissed the mezuzah in the doorway as he headed for the elevator.

PRESS

“When Ms Lipkin tells a story, any story,
the listener hears her carrying us forward, not merely
freezing us in some past tableau...”
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“A Modern Shaman”
The Village Voice

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Toronto Globe and Mail

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