When a teenage Clark Kent, in the original Superman1 movie, first arrives at his Fortress of Solitude—a kind of arctic tree-house—he inserts a large crystal shard into a receptacle, and the face and voice of his father emerge with all the glory of the dove descending on Christ, declaring, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”
Clark, a refugee from a long-dead planet, has never met his father but now encounters a virtual being with whom he can converse and explore all the unanswered questions a teenage boy might have.
Living today in a world of emerging AI, it’s not hard to imagine a technology that could not only emulate the face, voice, and mannerisms of one’s father but also reflect his years of accumulated wisdom and present them as dynamically as if he were alive.2 Maybe I’ll make such a one for my own son some day. I know I would love to have had one of my father.
Instead, all I’ve got is a 120-minute BASF audio tape that, miraculously enough, twenty years after his death, allows me to replay a handful of conversations I had with my dad.
My father, to quote the apocryphal “Chinese curse,” lived in “interesting times.” A Jew born in Budapest in 1921, he survived the Depression and the Holocaust. After the War, he fled communism with the help of Zionists, landed in Austria where he met my mother, emigrated to Canada and worked for a brief time as a lumberjack and an upholsterer, did his first year of medical school in post-War Germany where he suffered a near nervous break down from trauma-induced paranoia, completed his medical degree in Canada, emigrated to America, and worked from the 1960s to late 80s as an anesthesiologist before retiring.
He always knew he had a fascinating story but was never able, really, to tell it.
The closest he came was sometime in the 1990s when he and I did a series of interviews about his life, much in the way Art Spiegelman interviewed his own Holocaust surviving-dad for his graphic novel Maus. But I did not have Spiegelman’s success at capturing, much less transmitting, history, perhaps because of my dad’s difficulty talking about his life, more likely because I was too wrapped up in my own life to devote myself fully to an exploration of his.
He wanted me to write his autobiography. I wanted to write the Great American novel. I did neither. Instead, I spent the 90s pursuing a graduate degree in literature, conning myself this would somehow facilitate a writing life. But somewhere along the line, during visits home, I did manage to capture nearly two hours of my father’s voice.
We would talk at the kitchen table, in his home office, in his bedroom. Sometimes, he would tell me what seemed like an innocuous story and then, after five minutes, say with apparent exhaustion, “I think that’s enough for today.” Other times, he went on for twenty minutes or so.
Almost none of it touches on the Holocaust, at least not directly. We didn’t discuss the death of his father and brother, his aunts, or any of the other relatives and friends he lost in the War. We didn’t talk about how he escaped the Arrow Cross by pretending he was not Jewish. We didn’t talk about how he survived the last three months of the war, which remains a mystery to this day. We didn’t discuss his imprisonment after the War, or his escape from Hungary, or his time in the refugee camp. Over the years, I discussed with him some of these topics off the record, as it were, but the tape touches on none of them.
Instead, he told me about running black-market cigarettes after the War to pay medical school fees, about the grandmother he loved and who, he said, would have looked precisely like a witch if you put a broomstick between her legs. He talked about a day when watching Jesus Christ Superstar gave him some much-needed emotional relief. He talked about his old boss, Artusio and told a joke that still makes me smile but which good sense tells me not to repeat online.
It’s not Art Spiegelman’s dad telling the tragic story of survival; it’s not Jor-El passing along intergalactic wisdom. It’s certainly not the Holy Ghost descending upon His son like a dove.
But it is my father’s voice, a late voice, the voice of his old age but not so old he had lost his faculties. It’s a voice full of nostalgia for times gone by, a Hungarian voice full of mispronounced words and ESL grammar mistakes one might not expect of a physician who had lived and worked in English-speaking countries for most of his adult life.
The last time I listened to the recording, I made an important discovery—my father’s Hebrew name.
In Judaism, you’re often called upon to give your father’s Hebrew name because it’s part of your name. A man is X ben (son of) Y.
When I got religious, I gave myself a Hebrew first name, two, actually, Moishe Yirmiyahu. But I didn’t know my father had a Hebrew name, and I was advised to use his English one instead. Thus, I became Moishe Yirmiyahu ben Lazlo. But “ben Lazlo” never felt right among all the “ben Dovid’s” and “ben Shmuels” that got called out on Saturdays. But what could I do? There was no record of my father’s Hebrew name.
Until there was.
A couple of years ago, I revisited the audio tape and discovered a conversation in which my father mentions his Hebrew name, Eliezer. The very next Shabbat, I proudly got an aliyah as Moshe Yirmiyahu ben Eliezer.
But I still didn’t know my father’s full Hebrew name because that would require me to know his father’s Hebrew name. Sometimes, you need a parent’s full Hebrew name, for a yahrzeit prayer or a dedication for a donation. In such a case with my dad, I’d write or say “Eliezer ben Avraham.” Because “Avraham” is the father of all Jews, it’s customary among converts to use that patronym when necessary. But neither I nor my father were converts, so this never felt right.
And then, whaddya know, this month, I go back to the tape and notice that right after my father reveals his own Hebrew name, he gives his dad’s, Eliyahu.
I hadn’t picked this up the first time because I was so focused on discovering my full Hebrew name. This last time, I was able to discover my father’s full Hebrew name.
You can hear it for yourself here:
When the listener is ready, the tape will reveal its teaching. Makes me wonder what I’ll discover next time . . . .
This last go around, I also came across a charming domestic momen. Near the end of the recording my mother comes into the room and asks my father what he would like for dinner, rotisserie chicken or Hungarian pea soup, and he says, “vatever is easiest and wouldn’t bother you much to do it.”
She opts to make the pea soup, which isn’t hard but isn’t the easiest. Her voice is full of solicitude for the once powerful man with whom she used sometimes to argue so violently. They had come to some sort of detente in those last years, the aging lioness and the defanged lion.
My mother’s voice. My father’s voice. I wish I had recorded more of them. I wish I had carried around that tape recorder every day of our lives together. I wish I could call them both forth the way Clark calls up his dad when whenever he needs him.
I have a video of my mom speaking to an audience about her experience during the War. I have the cassette of my dad talking with me. Other than that, it’s just the voices in my head, the echoes of long-ago conversations etched only in the uncertain imprint of memory, so much less reliable than that old BASF tape. I know it’s not enough to come close to capturing who they were. Their voices are lost to me except in snippets. That is the way of the world—for now anyway, until we each get our own Fortress of Solitude and personal Jor-El.
There were Superman films before 1978, but actual first or not, it is the definitive Superman film of all time.
In truth, some version of this technology has existed for a long time. Back around 2006, I encountered such a being at a Wired technology convention in Chicago, where sat an android programmed with all the printed knowledge of Sci-Fi writer Philip Dick. The creature reclined in a recreated Philip Dick library where visitors could pose it questions. I don’t remember what I asked it, but I do remember it was eerily lifelike. Sometime after that, strangely enough, the android’s head containing all its eerie knowledge was stolen and never recovered (I swear, I had nothing to do with it), and perhaps even more strangely, it recently been rebuilt.
Thomas P. Balázs is an essayist, fiction writer, professor of English, and perplexed jew. His nonfiction has been featured in Tablet Magazine, Quillette, Commentary Magazine and elsewhere. His fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Horror Library 8, The North American Review, and The Southern Humanities Review. The author of Omicron Ceti III, he teaches creative writing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Look for his biweekly musings on Substack.
I feel this post so very deeply! Except that that my mother is still living, she just cannot speak. 😞 She has aphasia. And at first, it was just that she couldn't get the words she wanted from her brain to her mouth. But she still has a voice and when she tries hard enough she could express exactly what she wanted to say. But now that is gone and it left so quickly that my siblings and I are just shocked! I'm impressed by my Dad, while he can get frustrated with her, he just knows what she is trying to communicate better than the rest of us. God bless him!
At first, not hearing her voice didn't bother me very much. I had it in my head from a lot of fights we've had and I was almost grateful not to be having those fights anymore. But then my 10 year old daughter said she couldn't remember what Grandmas voice sounded like and asked if I had anything she could listen to. And I don't. And now it's devastating to me. Not because I don't have it to hear, but because Sophia doesn't have it. And my 8 year old Gianna doesnt have it. The relationships kids have with their grandparents is so important
And while on the subject of grandparents, I'm fortunate to have a video interview thaty Grandfather gave. The topic is his Air Force service during the war. He was a navigator and participated in the Bikini Atoll bomb testing and the drop on Hiroshima. He talked about these things quite often, as though they were his most significant contribution to the world. And while they ARE significant, I wish I had something form when he was teaching me about Chemistry, Physics and Astronomy (He taught those subjects to high school students). As a four year old, I had the pleasure of him taking me into his school lab room and showing me chemical and physics experiments! He had me lecture to one of his classes about the moon. I have no recollection of what I said, but those students remember (I have run into a few over the years).
He also used to read to me. Mary Poppins, dinosaurs, a boon about a dalmatian fire dog, and many others. That is the voice I miss the most. His reading voice. I am fortunate to be in possession of the rocking chair that we always sat in when he was reading to me and rocking me to sleep. 🙏🏽 And the oil lamp he used to read by as a boy.
And let's not forget my two grandmother's. One quiet and encouraging. The other strong and take charge. I would give anything to have all these voices for my children to hear. And I am grateful that they still have the voices of three grandparents. And now I should think about getting those voices recorded for when my girls will need them later.