To his credit, Jeremy occasionally enacted his own revenge. When it came time to vote on a new patrol leader in our Boy Scout troop, Jeremy orchestrated a coup that placed himself in the leadership position that I had once held and left me powerless to stop him. For a time, I despised him for making me look like a fool.
But when you grow up with siblings, you learn to forgive and forget. You have no other choice. As an only child, Bengi lacked that ability. Instead of forgiving, he would rank his friends on lists according to how he was feeling about them that day, which made things difficult given that we shared many of the same friends. His inability to forgive made it difficult to be around him at times. Sometimes impossible.
Then salvation. One night we were sitting in the living room of the Heavy Metal Playhouse with friends, waiting for The Simpsons to come on, when things finally came to a head. Voices were raised. Heated words were spoken. In a fit of anger, Bengi stormed out of the house and into a downpour. He told us he was going for a run.
Bengi was not a runner at the time, and he suffered from a paralyzing fear of water. He couldn’t swim, and he wouldn’t even consider going out in the rain without a hat to keep the water from his eyes.
Yet he was off, hatless and frantic. He left me sitting along with our friends in the living room, contemplating what might happen when he returned. I wondered if Bengi and I might stop being best friends. He was ideal in so many ways, but I worried that his insistence on holding grudges might be the wedge that would eventually drive us apart. It saddened me. I sat on that couch and resigned myself to the idea that this might be the beginning of the end for us. Eventually my friends and I returned to watching television as we awaited his return.
Less than an hour later, the door burst open, and a dripping, panting, red-faced Bengi entered the house. He looked different. Waterlogged clothing and plastered hair, but he was also smiling. Really smiling. He looked relaxed. He looked happy. Then he walked over to me, bent down, and kissed me on the lips.
It was gross. He was wet and panting and hot. And it wasn’t a peck. It was a real kiss. His yucky man lips pressed against mine.
Then he took a step to the left and kissed Pat, who was sitting beside me. He moved in to kiss a third guy, but by now everyone was on alert and able to get the hell out of the way.
We stared at him, wide-eyed, wondering what had happened.
Something important had happened. Something enormous. On that run, Bengi had somehow found a way to let go of every grudge he had ever held. Somehow he had decided that it wasn’t worth holding on to them anymore. He was a new man. He was a better man. He has been that new, better man ever since.
This is Bengi’s story of transformation. It was a momentous moment in his life. A life-altering experience. One of his big stories.
When I told Bengi that I had told the story to a workshop full of students, he said, “So you tell my stories now?”
“No,” I said. “I told my side of your story. It was a story about a friend who saved my life, and yet he was also a friend who I didn’t think would be my friend forever because of this terrible hang-up about grudges. Then one night, my friend went for a run and somehow changed himself forever. That terrible part of him went away. He left it behind in the rain. Then he kissed me. I thought it was disgusting, but I also knew in that moment that we would be friends until our dying days.”
“That’s a pretty good trick,” Bengi said. “You should include that in your book.”
So I did.
Don’t tell other people’s stories. Tell your own. But feel free to tell your side of other people’s stories, as long as you are the protagonist in these tales.
My wife and I work with Voices of Hope, an organization dedicated to preserving the stories of the Holocaust. We work with the children of Holocaust survivors, teaching them to tell their parents’ stories.
But these second-generation survivors don’t really tell their parents’ stories. They tell their own stories, dipping into the past somewhere in the midst of them to show how the experiences of their parents have changed their lives too. They share a bit of their parents’ histories, but the stories are grounded in the storytellers’ lives. The reason these stories work so well is that they are not history lessons or biographical sketches. They are the stories of the people telling them. The storytellers are the protagonists, so they are able to bring their own vulnerability, authenticity, and grit to the tales.
There is the woman whose story opens on a living-room couch. Schindler’s List is coming on television, and she wonders if tonight will be the night when she finally watches this movie. She’s Jewish, and the child of a Holocaust survivor, and yet she’s never watched the film before, mostly because she worries that watching it will bring the stories of her father into greater focus. Her finger hovers over the power button on her remote control, paralyzed by indecision. Then she tells about some of her father’s experiences during World War II. She explains the horror he witnessed and the suffering he endured. Then she returns to the couch. The movie is about to come on. Will tonight be the night she finally watches this film? Can she finally bear witness to the horrors of her father’s youth? She ends the story by leaving the audience to wonder if this will be the night she finally finds the courage to watch.
It’s her story, filled with honesty and vulnerability, but embedded within her own narrative is the story of her father.
There is the woman who drove to her father’s apartment after he had fallen on the living-room floor and hurt himself. Waiting for an ambulance to arrive, she searches the freezer for something frozen to put on his back. The freezer is packed from top to bottom with food. “Not the Lean Cuisine!” her father yells from the living room.
Why is her father’s freezer jam-packed with food? He nearly starved during the Holocaust. As she tells about dealing with an aging parent, she dips into her father’s experiences during the war, making us understand how his life today is still dictated by the past in so many ways. Then she returns to the present and closes the story at her son’s bar mitzvah. Her father, still in great pain from the fall, has made it to the temple despite that pain. A man who was once a starving Jewish teenager in Nazi Germany is now witnessing his grandchild’s rite of passage. This would have seemed impossible to that starving boy. Our storyteller talks about how happy she is to have her dad present at such a momentous occasion. “He can have all the Lean Cuisine he wants,” she says. “He’s earned it.”
She’s telling a story about her own life as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, but through her telling, we learn much about her father as well.
Then there is the woman who returns to the concentration camp where her mother was once imprisoned. As she makes her way through the camp, she juxtaposes what she sees on that day with what her mother witnessed during the war. The storyteller is standing at the front of her story, talking about what she sees and feels in the present, but her mother, now deceased, is right behind her, casting a long shadow over everything.
Each of these storytellers does a brilliant job of telling their own stories, complete with all the elements of a well-crafted tale, and yet at the same time, we come away with a greater understanding of their parents and that terrible period of history.
A story is like a diamond with many facets. Everyone has a different relationship to it. If you can find a way of making your particular facet of the story compelling, you can tell that story as your own. Otherwise, leave the telling to someone else.
The Dinner Test
Lastly, the story