My father? Picture a cross between Albert Einstein and Captain Kangaroo, and you begin to get the idea. I remember him as a kindly man, soft-spoken and very precise in his speech. He recalled the Depression years vividly, and spoke bitterly of the humiliation of watching his father search desperately for work. During World War II he served in the Army, in Battery A, 136th Field Artillery, 37th Infantry Division. He spoke of the war occasionally, but only occasionally.

Like my mother, Dad grew up in a fundamentalist Christian home; like her, he started looking for answers on his own as a young adult. They met in a Unitarian Universalist church in Connecticut, and found they shared a fondness for the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson. They were married in 1958.

My father held a master's degree in literature from Wesleyan, and taught high school English for many years before moving on to a new career on the editorial staff of Choice Magazine - a position he held from my early childhood until very late in his life. He had an unappreciated gift for oratory, I think, and enjoyed reading aloud. When he spoke, he always chose his words carefully; losing this gift with the onset of Alzheimer's must have been a very cruel fate for him.

Both of my parents were liberals, but I think Dad was more of an idealist than my Mom, in the sense of being a perfectionist about the future. He didn't share my mother's driving rage (which could be directed against anyone, at any time), but he did have a deep-seated mistrust of anything that smacked of snobbery or elitism. (His war memoir recalls vividly his indignation at being evicted from the unoccupied officers' club aboard a certain ship; he seems almost to have taken it as a personal insult. That's my Dad.) He respected Senator Lieberman, but found him too conservative: "He votes like a Republican," Dad once grumbled.

Looking back, I do not know whether my father ever flirted with communism or socialism in his younger days, but it would not surprise me. From what I know of his life and character, he would have been just the personality type to be vulnerable to the seductions of the lady in red. Born in 1920, he was old enough to remember the Depression vividly, and the inexorable decline of his family's fortunes during those years. He would sometimes speak of some socialist politician with a secretive admiration. And not long ago, I found an old copy of Ten Days that Shook the World - John Reed's breathless account of the Russian Revolution, with an approving foreword by none other than V. I. Lenin - among his books. (To be fair, it was a book club edition.)

On the other hand, I know for certain that my mother was no friend of Communism. She was at least my father's equal intellectually, but she was also cynical enough about human nature to know how easily, and how badly, the loftiest dreams can go wrong. Like my father, she opposed the Vietnam war, but never sympathized with the enemy. She despised Jane Fonda. She loved Russian literature and admired the Soviet dissidents. A philo-Semite like my father, she was sharply attuned to anti-Semitism in the Soviet world: a typical title from her book collection is Arkady Vaksberg's Stalin Against the Jews. Her admiration for Solzhenitsyn evaporated when rumors of his anti-Semitic attitudes became persistent. One dissident she never stopped admiring, and whose name was often heard in our house in the 1970s, was a Soviet Jew then known by his Russian name - Anatoly Shcharansky.

I was the older of two children. My sister, younger than me by a year and a half, was an amazingly gifted writer whose poetry and fiction earned her numerous awards during her teen years. Stephanie never had any interest in formal religion, but her writing is deeply and exuberantly religious. (I often wonder what she would be doing if she had lived; her life ended shortly after her 28th birthday, from the accumulated effects of drugs, alcohol, and anorexia.)

Curious about religion and the Bible, I began studying Hebrew in my mid-teens. After a year or two, I started attending services at the synagogue, and so did my father. When I left home to join the Air Force in 1981, neither of us had officially converted but we were both leaning in that direction. I converted with a Reform congregation in Tucson in 1984, and eventually had an Orthodox conversion in San Francisco in 1988.

What we both saw in Judaism was a balance of opposites: nationalism and universalism, feeling and intellect, mysticism and rationalism, tradition and growth. For both of us, too, it was a gateway into a community, an older and richer one than we could have known otherwise. We liked the way social activism and Jewish values went hand-in-hand. My father was also interested in the theological debates: the encounter with modernity, the problem of evil. He devoured books on liberal Jewish thought by people like Jacob Neusner, with whom he corresponded. (Myself, I always found the scholarly stuff a bit dry. I loved Soloveitchik, but in general I skipped the philosophizers.) Dad's real passion, though, was Jewish music. He collected recordings of the great cantors (another taste I'm afraid I didn't inherit) and in the last few years of his life he became active in the choir at the Conservative synagogue. I'll always remember the joy it gave him to be involved in the community that way - and his sorrow at not having started earlier.

I'm hard pressed to say how much I'm like my father. I do not know whether I resemble him a lot or a little. Sometimes I think I take after my mother more. She was obsessed with the quest for truth. She wanted to peel back the layers of illusion and find the secret that lay at the core of reality. Not formally educated (but with an IQ most college professors would envy), she read books on science, history, Gnosticism, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. I believe she was deeply changed by the newsreels of Germany that she must have seen as a young woman. I don't think she ever forgave G-d for the Holocaust.

Illness came upon my father quickly. He'd been healthy all his life, but things started going wrong all at once: heart trouble, cancer, Alzheimer's. He had to leave a holiday performance in the synagogue because he was too ill to continue. He died quietly in his sleep in October of 2000, on the second night of Rosh Hashanah.

Mom lived on a little longer. She rarely left the house, being in poor health herself, but she enjoyed the company of her caretaker and her next-door neighbor, who also had an interest in Judaism. I don't know whether she ever made her peace with G-d. She died in 2003, on the second night of Passover.

After her death, I learned that she'd had her hospital records changed to list her religion as "Jewish".

Cross-posted at Dreams Into Lightning.