When a Jewish fatherless child cannot father a child

Sitting in downtown Jerusalem’s art deco YMCA, bereft of coffee and with no pastry tray in sight, author Elliot Jager compares his debut tome on childlessness and reconciliation to cake.

“It’s a marble cake,” Jager says. “It’s a marbled layer cake with chocolate frosting,” he laughs.

To any who know the intellectual Jager, the idea of this intensely private individual writing a deeply personal book delving into a troubled childhood and painful journey into failed fertility is counter-intuitive to the extreme.

“I’m a very private person,” he admits. “My first line of confidants didn’t know any of this stuff too.”

But the book was written in a luckily funded window of time between jobs as a journalist and academic writer. It was completed in just eight months with an acknowledged sense of mission.

“No man had ever written a book about what it feels like and means to their sense of purpose not to have children,” says Jager. In many ways “The Pater: My Father, My Judaism, My Childlessness,” is a work only Jager could have written. It’s also one whose sweetness lingers.

‘No man had ever written a book about what it feels like and means to their sense of purpose not to have children’

On the face of it, a book about an abandoned son navigating his own childlessness and crises of faith in adulthood doesn’t sound like an uplifting read. But as the author tells of his personal reckoning with his infertility — and his painful reconciliation with the father he hadn’t seen for 30 years — the story becomes one of cathartic later-life healing.

Family lore is only one layer of Jager’s “cake.” To begin each chapter, he navigates Judaism’s emphasis on being fruitful and multiply through interviews with other childless Jewish men. He recounts their struggles in the context of a larger Western society that idealizes the nuclear family.

And as frosting on top, the book concludes with a philosophical dialectic, a questioning of faith in a personal God. After successive failed attempts at IVF, Jager “comes out” of the Orthodox closet. Today he embraces a Judaism different from that practiced by his pious father, who himself turns out to be completely unlike the man barely remembered from youth.

Jager closes the book with a description of his now weekly visits to his father’s ultra-Orthodox world. The visits with the Pater, he says, continue to this day.

“The Pater I know as an adult is a frail elderly man — an aged zealot, still insistent in his piety, still unfathomable, but not ferocious, not without warmth, and even self-deprecating about his own feebleness,” Jager writes.

Elliot Jager author of ‘The Pater’ (Ariel Jerozolimski)

He says today that his nearly deaf father, whose age is estimated to be well beyond 90, communicates with him in a mixture of Yiddish and Hebrew. The English learnt during his short American chapter is all but forgotten. Jager “speaks” to him by typing in Hebrew on his smartphone’s large screen.

It is a relationship that even a decade ago would have been unthinkable: Jager’s Holocaust survivor father left his nine-year-old son and American-born bride for a life of simple piety in the Holy Land. By the time the Jager men reconnect, his father has lived for decades in the ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak with a second Persian wife, with whom he had two daughters.

In the interim, Jager’s stalwart mother, who single-handedly kept them out of poverty, raised Jager in New York’s Lower East Side in devout Orthodoxy. But his childhood there was not one of nostalgic fish shops, matza factories and pickle barrels.

“The neighborhood I grew up was moribund from a Jewish point of view — and dangerous,” he says today. During the 1960s-70s, in “his” Lower East Side (which is now one of the hippest areas of Manhattan), there were more people killed in the streets than during the entire Second Intifada.

Despite the adversity, or perhaps because of it, Jager and his mother had a close relationship and only after her death in 1997 did he follow his father’s footsteps to make a new life in Israel.

Their reunion was complicated by Jager’s childlessness and the Pater’s piety that had him perform almost superstitious devotions to bring Jager a son. Jager says his reconnection with his father is “this strange story of a man who left his son, didn’t see or speak with him for 30 years, reconciles, and first and foremost on his agenda is that I have a son of my own.”

‘What happens if you die without a kaddish’l?’

But his father’s almost oppressive — and slightly morbid — desire for a son to say kaddish for Jager after his death is actually well rooted in Jewish culture.

Jager describes the concept of the “kaddish’l” as the boy who is the embodiment of his parents’ “memorial-prayer insurance” after their deaths.

“This manchild can be counted upon to recite the Kaddish prayer for the dead — linking God, eternity and children,” writes Jager. He asks, “What happens if you die without a kaddish’l?”

In synagogues around the world, Jews have just finished reading the Book of Genesis, which includes several stories of matriarchs with difficulties in conceiving.

“In the Bible, all of these stories end with the heroines getting themselves pregnant. There are no stories without happy endings. There’s no ‘Oops, God says He can’t pull it off.’ There are worries, endless worries, but it all works out,” says Jager. In Judaism, “having children is a blessing, not having children is a punishment.”

There are no stories of men with fertility problems, he continues. In the Bible, “they always had concubines, women on the side,” says Jager, which puts an infertile Jewish man into an uncharted situation.

Cover of ‘The Pater: My Father, My Judaism, My Childlessness.’ (courtesy)

The feelings of failure for an infertile Jewish couple are compounded by today’s society which puts its faith into medical intervention such as IVF. (Jager notes that IVF fails more than it succeeds.)

Jager worries that if one only hears the bare bones of the story — abandoned boy reconnects with father after 30 years — it is “not unreasonable to think negatively about such a person.”

“I feel bad about that… but those who read the book see why he behaved the way he did,” says Jager.

He calls his father “a man who has no real interest in material things, who even to this day, what makes him happy is if he can give me money to give to tsedaka [charity]. It’s eye opening for those of us who are not a part of this world and only see it for all of its warts. When you have some distance, the situation is much more complicated. The haredi lifestyle is not black and white,” he says chuckling.

“It is an extraordinary gift that at 61, I can connect to my father, who is now in his advanced 90s. As infirm as he is, yes, he’s with it, and it’s a blessing,” says Jager.