"The Father I Knew (and Still Do)"

Behind his back, to his face, over the phone, in his store, in his house - my grandparents mercilessly ridiculed this most significant him in my life, the God my father, by calling him "the shvartser." That word means "black man" in Yiddish. But anyone who knows Yiddish knows it implies "nigger." And my mother's parents, who spent most of their white lives in the leafy Long Island suburb of Douglaston, lampooned their Libyan Jewish son-in-law with it anyway, preferring not to nullify an edgy ethnic appellation by splitting hairs over the specific latitude of my father's African origins.