My late uncle was a Catholic priest and Holocaust scholar. I always knew that growing up; his work was a thing that always lurked over our family. He is one of the scholars who blew the lid off the fact that the Catholic Church was fully aware of that the Nazis were doing in the concentration camps in World Word II, and chose not to intervene. And now, as an independent researcher in my 40s – the same age he was when he was compiling his work – I feel ready to tackle the questions he asked and conclusions he drew at a time when we are once again seeing moral institutions fail to help vulnerable people.
I felt fully capable of that. Determined, passionate, ready to assert that even though his arguments weren’t flawless, the questions he asked and the conclusions he drew are still poignant more than forty years later.
Then I started remembering the actual person – the summers we spent with him when I was a kid. The arguments I got into with him as a young adult. His impossible ego, the selective mentoring, his impatience and arrogance, the way everyone orbited him. Suddenly, I’m not just reassessing a historian. I’m encountering my uncle at an age when I can finally understand a part of him that I couldn’t when he was alive.
And what’s taken me by surprise is that there’s a particularly heavy kind of grief in becoming ready for a relationship after the other person is gone.
That’s not to say that it would have been a better or closer relationship. I suspect we still would have driven each other absolutely crazy. I suspect I would visit him with questions about his scholarship and the things he did and why he did them, and emerge three hours later infuriated because he had informed me, at great length and with the signature hand wave he used when something seemed ridiculous to him, why my ideas and interpretation were completely deficient.
But I’d be able to meet him intellectually now in a way I couldn’t when I was the college student fighting with him, or the young adult trying to figure out how to make my own way in the world.
More and more lately, as I wade through both his work and tangle with the family lore around how that work came to be, I just…want him to know that I’m thinking about him. Not just my uncle, but the scholar. I’ve reread his book twice. I’ve been startled by how questions he raised in 1980 are tragically relevant again today.
I’m not going back to this work out of family obligation. I’m not trying to preserve his reputation or defend everything he said and did. His critics were not without their merit, and his methodology was at times questionable. But I’m doing something I suspect would have mattered enormously to him (at least, deep down) – I’m taking his ideas seriously enough to challenge them.
And I’m documenting it. I’m going back to his critics and the scholars who built on his work, reading his personal papers, asking what drove him. I’m looking at what later evidence does to his conclusions, and even the questions themselves. Even though my uncle was the sort of man who was always very self-assured about his own intellectual superiority, I think some part of him would have enjoyed the fact that I’m wrestling with his work at roughly the same age he was when he published it.
The big difference between my uncle and I is that I’m not Catholic. I’m not even religious. I don’t believe in any sort of an afterlife. That’s what makes the grief so acute – I want to talk to him. I want to tell him what I’m working on. I want to tell him that I’m glad he asked those questions. I’m glad he asked them knowing that it was going to cost him, personally and professionally, to do so. That even though he was a profound pain in the ass, and even though I challenged him, I also deeply respect him.
I know there is no conversation left to have…and I wish desperately that there were. And so I go in circles with that. I interrogate his work, because I can’t talk to him. I seek out the ephemera of his life, hoping to discover parts of him I never knew. I talk to family members about what they remember and see how that aligns with my own memories.
The absence is giving this work an unexpected emotional charge. I honestly thought, when I began, that this would be a research endeavor, not a deep dive into my own complex relationship with him. In a few months, I’m going to the archives to read letters written by him as a younger man and a scholar, where I will inevitably encounter his thoughts without being able to turn to him and say, Okay, but what did you mean here? And do you still mean it? Did you ever change your mind about any of this? Did you ever regret it, knowing what the price of challenging the church was going to be?
And given his personality, that’s particularly maddening because he absolutely would have had an answer. Probably a long one.
I don’t think the process of writing about a man I both knew and didn’t, a man I respected yet fought with, is going to resolve this newfound grief. But maybe the quieter truth is enough: I wish he had known I’d come back to the book. He didn’t. I have to carry that.
But I am carrying it. I am going back to his words and thoughts from the 70s and 80s. I am examining what he said, and why he said it, and what lengths he went though to procure enough evidence to blow up the Church’s cover up – one they would later acknowledge and apologize for.
He would have scoffed, and corrected me, and probably torn me to pieces using a lot of big words, but I think he would have appreciated that I’m now wrestling with the same questions, even if he didn’t always appreciate me.
