My Father, My Hero

King of the Kitchen Table

In the spring of 1954, my Polish immigrant parents took the final step in their 17-year march to the American Dream. For $15,000—payable over 30 years—they moved out of their tiny apartment and bought a spanking new tract home alongside other working-class strivers in Maryland’s tony Montgomery County.

My brother and I each got a room (mine was bigger, I crowed) while Mommy and Daddy, after years of sharing a lumpy sleep sofa, finally had comfy twin beds behind a door that locked.

A gifted European-trained dressmaker, she quickly turned our unfinished basement into a workshop to create dazzling gowns and chic frocks for a dozen private clients. Cooking was another story. How, after six blissful expat years with my father in Paris before coming to America, did she not absorb the basics of the local cuisine?

Fashion trumped food. She splurged on a new French Provincial dining suite--table, chairs, and a glass-front cabinet for the “good” china and crystal. But we almost always squeezed around the 1930s Art Deco kitchen table with a black and white metal top that my cabdriver father found at his favorite second-hand shop.

In a perfect world, he would have become a criminal defense lawyer but was forced to leave school at 12 after his father died. A news junkie, he found joy driving a DC taxi, his “ringside seat on the human condition,” as classical music played on the radio. And he loved talking politics with passengers, obsessed with bribery masquerading as legal campaign contributions.

Our cozy world blew apart in July 1958. Returning from camp, I saw my mother lying on the couch, her pale skin a frightening yellow. Six months earlier, my father opted not to tell his wife of 25 years she was dying of liver cancer. Jaundice was probably her first clue.

The next day, an ambulance sped her to the hospital, where Steve and I were allowed just one visit. On a steaming August Sunday, shrouded in white linen inside a pine box, Mommy was buried to the sounds of Hebrew prayers and wracking sobs.

I was 12. Steve was 14. It was hard to forgive Daddy for not telling her how little time she had left, robbing her of the chance to declare her love for her family a zillion times over and hear us promise we’d always take care of each other.

Aron Groer making Gefilte Fish at his Kitchen Table, age 91- Photo Annie Groer

Yet Aron Groer--53, grieving, and clueless--proved to be a heroic solo parent. Hours after the funeral, he led us to the kitchen table and in a thick Yiddish accent, vowed that “until you finish high school, I will not date. I will not re-marry. The last thing you need is a stepmother.” How did he know the children’s book of single parenting?

“Also, we will eat dinner together every night.” Thus was I elevated from heartsick pre-teen to hausfrau-in-training. Thank God for eighth-grade Home Ec, where I learned my way around an oven. I’d soon add sloppy joes, tuna casserole, mac ‘n’ cheese and snickerdoodles to Mommy’s rotation of baked chicken, frozen fish sticks, meatloaf, iceberg lettuce salads, shrimp cocktail on birthdays, overcooked roast beef on Sundays, and every few weeks, a divine apple brown betty.

One junior high afternoon--there being no grief counseling for a motherless girl acting out--I got caught with my tomboyish best friend MJ slipping a vulgar poem onto our study hall teacher’s desk. It read simply “You think you’re great. You think you’re smart. We think you’re a big, old fart.”

The call from the principal was swift. But Daddy made no mention of it, waiting an excruciating hour for me to confess over my uneaten dinner and write a groveling apology to the teacher.

In 1960, my father learned that his brother Moishe, presumed killed during World War II, had been freed from a Siberian jail. I remember it for the miracle of their Paris reunion-- bistro going, cigarette smoking, and Dubonnet drinking with Moishe and their sister Broncha—his only surviving siblings whom he hadn’t seen in 30 years.

He came home bearing my first gift of perfume, which smelled like lilies of the valley and made me feel very grown up. His natural alarmism ratcheted up as he sought to protect his impetuous daughter from unlikely abduction by South American Marxists and more plausible complications from “going unescorted to bistros.”

Desperate to escape his stifling rules after high school, I moved three miles from home into a University of Maryland dorm. He adjusted.

When not driving his cab, Aron—which is how I referred to him in conversations, though it was always Daddy to his face--became a prolific writer of letters. He cheered Jimmy Carter’s gas rationing, hailed FCC chairman Newton Minow for calling TV a “vast wasteland,” and saluted Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun’s op-ed on the erosion of morality.

By the time I graduated, Aron was also an accomplished ballroom dancer (he led me in a spirited father-daughter cha-cha at my wedding) and was dating two women at the same time. He regularly visited Broncha and Moishe, who’d moved to Israel, where the three of them had long Proustian discussions about their Mamma’s chopped liver and gefilte fish.

In time, he began hosting elaborate buffet dinners for his senior singles group. The least I could do was feature him in a pair of Washington Post stories.

https://tinyurl.com/nw7futnd and https://tinyurl.com/38bv77r4

In his late 80s, as the house and lawn became too much work, I put his name on the waiting list for a seniors’ building. His only requirement? Space for the beloved Art Deco table. The first available unit had a large, wheelchair-accessible kitchen, so attaching the screw-on meat grinder to the metal tabletop was a cinch. Soon, he was cranking out gefilte fish for his new neighbors.

At 99, against his will, I moved him and the table to assisted living next door to my DC condo. On his 100th birthday, he conceded I’d been right. “The machinery is wearing out,” he sighed. That spring, he fell and broke his arm. Unable to use his walker and confined to a detested wheelchair, he lamented, “Oy, I can’t even zip my own fly.” Three days later, he was gone.

His only parental regret was losing Mommy so young, his only boast was that he’d done his best for me and Steve. Despite our both becoming journalists, marrying Gentiles and not bearing him a single grandchild, he died happy.

As I do every Father’s Day, I’ll make chopped liver and raise a glass of Dubonnet to Aron Groer’s blessed memory. L’chaim, Daddy. And bon appétit.

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