The Day Before Father’s Day

The day before Father’s Day, I found myself once again sitting in an audience listening to my father tell a story I’d heard before.

Or so I thought.

He was discussing his book, Leibisch’s Journey, in conversation with Joan Baum, whose thoughtful questions seemed to uncover not only the story behind the book, but the deeper story beneath it.

I’ve attended several of these talks over the past year. There was one at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons. Another at The Hedges. With his next book, Moments Out of Time, scheduled for release on July 22, this would likely be the last public conversation devoted to Leibisch’s Journey. Perhaps that’s why this one felt different. More intimate. More revealing.

Perhaps three times is the charm.

Each time I hear my father discuss the book, I learn something new—not just about my grandfather’s journey, but about my father himself.

The book traces my grandfather’s story as a twelve-year-old boy forced to flee Ukraine during the upheaval of the Russian Revolution. He left carrying the ritual objects his father had given him for the bar mitzvah he was supposed to celebrate the following year. His plan was to travel to America and join his older brother, Sidney. Instead, his journey took an unexpected turn, delaying his arrival in the United States by five years.

Long before I was born, long before my father became a father himself, there was a frightened twelve-year-old boy leaving everything he knew behind.

What makes the story even more remarkable is that my father didn’t learn all of this growing up. He discovered crucial pieces of it much later in life, almost by accident, after hearing his father speak Spanish in a Miami Beach bodega. A language. A conversation. A doorway into a history that had remained hidden for decades.

What strikes me most is how much remained unspoken.

My father often describes his childhood as one shaped by silence. His father rarely discussed what happened to him before arriving in America. Imagine spending decades beside someone and still not knowing the story that shaped them.

Listening to my father speak, I was also reminded of my mother.

She was an intensely private person. Growing up, she rarely spoke about her own childhood. Like my grandfather, she carried parts of her past quietly. There were stories she chose not to tell, hardships she rarely discussed, and questions that were never fully answered.

Yet somehow, she and my father created something entirely different for my sister and me.

Our childhood was loving. Warm. Stable.

Looking back, I realize how much my parents protected us from the burdens they carried.

As a child, I knew my grandfather simply as my grandfather—an older man with a thick Yiddish accent and a life I knew almost nothing about. I remember sitting in synagogue with my mother, grandmother, sister, aunt, and cousin while the men sat downstairs. I didn’t know the history he carried. I didn’t know the losses he endured. I didn’t know that so much of his life existed beneath the surface.

Children rarely do.

What struck me most wasn’t what my father had learned. It was the realization that he is still learning. Even now, after writing a book about his father’s life, he is still trying to understand the man behind the silence.

Now, years later, I find myself fascinated not only by my grandfather’s story but by my father’s continued search for understanding. Even after years of research, conversations, and discoveries, he still seems to be reaching for a relationship that was never fully available to him.

Perhaps that’s what happens when silence becomes part of a family’s inheritance.

We spend our lives trying to understand the people who came before us.

The next day was Father’s Day.

It was a beautiful day. We gathered at Devon Yacht Club overlooking the water—my father, my husband Peter, our son Matt, my sister Brooke, and her two children. The setting couldn’t have been more perfect.

As I looked around the table, I felt grateful. Here were three generations together, sharing a meal, telling stories, and enjoying a summer afternoon by the water.

And yet there was one person missing.

My mother.

The woman who made my father a father and, together with him, gave my sister and me the gift of a loving childhood.

My father seemed quieter than usual that day. Earlier, he had learned that a close friend of more than forty years had passed away unexpectedly. The next morning, we would attend the funeral together.

Perhaps he was thinking about his friend—a husband, a father, and a grandfather whose absence would now be felt by so many people. A wife left widowed. A son facing Father’s Day without his father. Grandchildren who would carry forward memories instead of making new ones.

Or perhaps he was simply feeling the absence of my mother.

I didn’t ask.

Some silences, I’ve learned, don’t always need to be filled.

This Father’s Day, I found myself thinking about inheritance—and about how fortunate I am that some things do not have to be passed down.

When I look at my husband and the father he has been to our son, I see openness. Presence. Kindness. I see conversations that happen around dinner tables and long car rides. I see affection expressed freely. I see a family where love is not assumed but spoken aloud.

It makes me appreciate what my parents accomplished even more.

Despite the hardships they each carried from their own childhoods, they created something different for us. They broke cycles I didn’t even know existed until I was much older.

And perhaps that is the real gift of Father’s Day.

Not perfection.

Not having all the answers.

But the willingness to confront the past honestly enough that the next generation can move forward with a little less silence.

As I listened to my father speak, I realized that Leibisch’s Journey is about much more than my grandfather’s journey.

It’s about my father’s journey, too.

His search to understand the man who raised him. The questions that remained unanswered. The stories that stayed hidden for decades. And the realization that even when we don’t have all the answers, the search itself matters.

Maybe that’s why I keep attending these talks.

Every time I sit in the audience, I learn something about my grandfather.

But more importantly, I learn something about my father.

And maybe, in some ways, that’s the journey still unfolding.