Dark Humor

My grandfather, Samuel David Gameroff, died seven years before I was born. But his presence remained thick in my grandmother’s Montreal home. When I’d visit Nana throughout my childhood, his large portrait over the fireplace would greet us, silently watching over us. Dressed in an elegant dark suit and perfectly knotted tie, he stood with his hands carefully folded over the back of a stately armchair. The well-appointed home was always in perfect order. The only missing element was the heartbeat of its main character.

I nodded a silent hello each time I walked past his portrait in the formal living room. His handsome face stared straight back, distinguished yet not unsmiling. Having died of blood cancer at age 61 in 1959, he was equal parts legacy and mystery.

What I knew best about my grandfather—beyond his title as the first Jewish alderman on Outremont’s city council—was that mention of his name brought tears to my mother’s eyes. This happened as long as I knew her, which was not very long. Dying of blood cancer at age 59, following in her father’s footsteps, she confided that she adored him as a child but never felt closer then when she shared his diagnosis and prognosis. I was in my 20s at the time, in 1995, and could not fathom what she possibly meant by this connection.

Living with my own blood cancer for the past 14 years, I get it now. Being 58 is harder than it looks in my family.

Gathered around Nana’s enormous dining room table at holidays, our family of master storytellers was in peak form. Bottomless bowls of steaming cabbage borscht preceded platters of meatballs, spare ribs, sweet kugel, and melt-in-your-mouth brisket. Passed around and piled onto gleaming white china, delicacies were placed before us as offerings alongside tales of triumph and tragedy. At Nana’s table, I learned love was a darkly delicious medley of food, family, and storytelling, and those factions got complicated and entwined, served in hot combination.

Dark humor was our family crest. Landing a punchline was nonnegotiable. Together, we laughed through illnesses, hospitals, deaths, funerals, and shiva houses. New material presented itself every year. Faced with a family legacy of cancer, we refused to let our family legacy of laughter die.

I had no idea how my grandfather Sam’s legacy fit in around that dining room table. I was keenly aware that our Ashkenazi-cluster blood cancer was handed down from his DNA, but I’d never heard the sound of his laughter. His portrait hung in utter silence just six feet from that boisterous table. I’d peek up from my chicken soup, between spoonfuls of matzo ball, trying to catch a side glance, a fleeting wink or wee smirk, but he remained stubbornly static.

My grandfather’s rebbe was Rabbi Aryeh Leib Kramer (1918-99), an old-school, twinkly eyed, tiny Hasidic rabbi from Chelm, Poland. When WWII broke out in 1939, his yeshiva was forced to close and all students were sent home. That chaotic moment was the last time he saw his father. Letters state: “Following the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s instructions, he attempted to smuggle himself into Lithuania among a group of friends but was discovered by border personnel. However, since he had a bent-over posture due to prolonged yeshiva study, and the snow had turned his beard white, the officers mistook him for an old invalid and allowed him across the border into Lithuania.” From there he fled to Shanghai, safely setting up a yeshiva, which he directed for many years.

My mother connected deeply with Rabbi Kramer and, after her father passed, turned to him at key life moments for spiritual guidance, as both confidante and posek. I’d sometimes run into his wife at Montreal’s kosher bakery picking out fresh gefilte fish, countless children swarming around her knees in a blur of fiery red hair and soft-spoken sweetness. I marveled at her double stroller, holding her youngest child and oldest grandchild side by side, both almost the same age.

An old friend in Montreal recently alerted me to a biography of Rabbi Kramer that mentioned my grandfather Sam, a supporter of his great work. Unsuccessfully searching online for an out-of-print copy, I stumbled upon an 11-minute silent film from 1955, featuring old footage of a historical milestone. I clicked, watched, and froze, searching for recognizable faces as the voice-over began:

On the afternoon of Friday, Oct. 3, 1941, nine European yeshiva students arrived in Montreal under the instruction of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, by way of Shanghai, where they had fled for refuge during WWII. As they were directed, the following Sunday, Oct. 5, 1941, those nine students founded a rabbinical college of Canada. Rabbi Leib Kramer, one of the nine students, assumed responsibility as the director of the school.

On Dec. 12, 1955, the school had grown to 500 students and was celebrating the monumental event of its first semicha ceremony, the first rabbinical ordination ever documented to take place in Canada. With joy and pride, a festive meal and celebration was held at a local synagogue, attended by much of the Jewish community of Montreal, a testimony to how far the community had come in such a short time.

A vibrant Rabbi Kramer was seen smiling, shaking hands, and schmoozing the crowd while ushering fresh-faced rabbis-to-be into a fancy ballroom for an official ceremony. The nine young men who survived the horrors of Europe by escaping to Shanghai before finding safe passage to Canada had successfully taught the next generation in a new land. Their young students marched in beside their teachers, pulling up to their fullest height despite undeniable boyishness. These next-generation rabbis would be responsible for carrying a legacy of knowledge into a new world. Their teachers’ hearts carried memories of lost family members—and an entire lost universe—as the lone keepers of centuries of ancient tradition. Their students were charged with receiving their Torah teachings and passing its wisdom down intact. To begin again from smoldering ashes, to breathe new life into the embers of vanished ancestry.

Holding my breath while hungrily searching the crowd, I realized the timeline was perfect: My grandparents could have attended this event. I saw the flash of a familiar dark suit, that perfectly knotted tie, carefully combed back hair. But maybe my eyes were willing what they wished to see in a blur of monochrome 1950s couture? Amid a sea of black hats and long beards, my blond, coiffed, and freshly manicured maternal grandmother stood out proudly. Strategically placed smack in the center of the banquet’s dais, she sat in self-possessed glory. Poised in a small fashionable powder blue hat and a practiced smile, she wore a navy dress with silk powder blue piping adorning the collar and cuffs. Nana knew how to accentuate the striking ocean blue of her piercing eyes. She was flawless at power dressing.

Standing up at the microphone was my maternal grandfather, the charismatic emcee of the evening. As chairman of the charitable fund hosting this milestone celebration, he embodied pure grace. I stared at my first glimpse of him, blurred by tears streaming down to my keyboard.

Although the film was silent, it spoke volumes. I sat quietly, lost in time, replaying the clip, mesmerized by this unexpected gift: precious sight of my grandfather moving in real life. Though his framed portrait hung center stage in my grandmother’s house, here he was alive, in full motion. I’d always wondered about the sound of his voice. I never thought to imagine the way he cradled a glass for a l’chaim, smoothly slid a hand into his suit pocket, laughingly slipped his wristwatch back on after finishing speaking, leaned over closely to whisper a bon mot in an awaiting ear.

Wiping away tears, I closely studied his face: clean-shaven, round cheeks, smiling, big dark eyes, a huge laugh that you could tell filled the room. He was joyful, buoyant, lively, quick with a joke. There was the charming slide glance to his left when making a crack about a fellow trustee; the mischievously raised eyebrows as he looked down to chuckle; his ability to pivot to seriousness, speaking meaningfully and powerfully, driving home an important point. He was all confidence, versatility, and pure comfort in front of a crowd. The man knew how to work a microphone.

At the turn of the century, Sam sailed to Canada at 11 years old with his older brother, having left their parents back home in Lithuania. In Montreal, Sam built a successful real estate business on nothing but grit, integrity, and a disarming smile. I’d heard tales of his generosity, diplomacy, and wisdom. His handshake and his word meant everything. My mother remembered late-night meetings held in his study when he was president of his synagogue, desperately strategizing how to raise more, donate more, save more children from Europe’s nightmare.

My favorite tale was how he legendarily promised the local city council—when complaints were filed—that the wooden huts in his Jewish neighbors’ backyards would be torn down within eight days. He personally guaranteed it! But made no mention that eight days was the exact length of the Sukkot holiday. Sam was cheeky.

His portrait was quiet and eerily still. In muted tones, he was all business in his serious suit and distinguished expression. Now I know better: That was not who he was in motion.

It was Sam’s legacy we embody as storytellers and lovers of laughter. I not only shared his blood cancer. I shared his public speaking skills, gift of gab, love of community, deep connection to family and faith, and the way to hold a microphone. It all came from this man I never knew.

Why did they forget to tell me how big his laughter was? How warmly his smile shone across a packed room? The confidence of his movements, fluid and flowing, full of stature and power. I think that’s where you’d begin, if telling a story of ancient, unseen ancestors, lost worlds and the mad hope for survival. You’d start with laughter, especially when rebuilding from nothing, when planting new seeds in the shadow of ashes.

My mother, Maxine, and her younger sister Sandy carried that legacy of laughter. Even as adults, they had to be seated separately at funerals to keep a modicum of decorum. On their daily phone calls, I remember hearing only a few words uttered before peals of laughter brought on gasps for air, as the cycle repeated. Both needed to rest in bed every afternoon. We kids thought it was just boring middle-aged tiredness, but it was disease, softly simmering in both of them. Laughter was more than mere medicine. It was the best way to win a lost cause.

I am now searching for the sound of my mom’s laughter to share with my children. Buried somewhere in old family videos, there must be footage of a birthday party or family brunch, any scrap of film holding the key to the soundtrack of our family’s joy, gathered around the piano, giggling while singing the Happy Gang theme. I need to share that sound with my adult sons, who never met their grandmother Maxine, who died two years before their birth. They hear me with my cherished cousins, Sandy’s kids, filling my soul with laughter during our weekly marathon phone calls, sharing life’s sweetness, sorrows, and old family recipes. But alongside Nana’s dark honey cake, I need them to taste the music of their past.

There is a surprising amount for me to laugh at while facing my own incurable yet treatable cancer. Participating in an experimental clinical trial with drugs never before taken in combination, I laugh in both disbelief and relief that treatment is actually working. Humor is how I was taught to navigate rough waters. I am passing that tactic down to the next generation. The most challenging parts of life are often the pieces we never chose, the hardship rained down without our asking. But the far greater parts of this mysterious ride consist of what we choose to do with what we’ve been given. I refuse to be twice screwed: once by disease and loss, and secondarily by my own bitterness, resentment, anger, and self-pity. Choosing to laugh is choosing life. Disappointment may hover, but never room for despair.

Sitting alone in waiting rooms before receiving test results, I hear my deceased sister’s hysterical running commentary as she lovingly whispers jokes in my ear. Meeting new specialists to address new complications, I recall my mother’s secret nicknames for any depressing physicians (Hellooo, Dr. Death!). My kids understand that the sicker I am, the darker my humor gets. Hospitalized during COVID, my son heard me yelling through the phone, “DARKER!” while watching Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. I imagine one day having to account for all this bold laughter in the face of the unthinkable. I vow to fully own it, daring to call to my defense our matriarch Sarah, who did not suppress giggling at uncertainty or chuckling at impossibility. She knew the power of roaring back. Indeed, we laughed.

To inherit it all, future generations must understand our undying legacy of laughter, and the powerful hope and promise of humor. If we can laugh at it, then it has not yet beaten us down entirely. Even in the face of unimagined challenges and global threats; even on the brink of existential danger and darkest times; even in the valley of the shadow of death. Comfort can be found. In food and laughter and family and love, there is promise. Even in moments of utter disbelief, indeed we laugh. Our strength lies in our laughter. It is our vow to never give up hope.