Tribute to Henri Parens, M.D.

It is wonderful to have this chance to celebrate my father in all of his remarkableness.

To begin, I want to repeat what Dad often said: his life might never have been something to celebrate, were it not for our mother, Rachel. Mom and Dad were a wonderful parenting team, even if unsurprisingly, given the historical moment in which they raised their 3 sons, it was Mom who did the day-to-day labor. They were also a wonderful intellectual team. Dad enormously valued Mom's thinking, even though, and sometimes even because, it challenged his own. And they adored each other.

As much as Dad adored our mother, and was adored by her, so did he adore—and was adored by—his sons, his sons' partners, his grandchildren—and his grandchildren's partners. He never tired of saying how “lucky” he was.

And, of course, all of that love, and his gratitude for his luck, was set against his difficult beginning.

In his Meditations While Healing,1 which was a sort of addendum to his memoir,2 Dad refers to the question that God asks Adam, after Adam and Eve transgress the command not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. In Hebrew, the question God asks Adam is just one word: “Ayeka?” Literally, “where are you?” And as Dad says in his Meditations, forever after he—at his mother's demand—escaped from an internment camp in the south of France, he imagined his mother asking him “Ayeka?”

Because God is omniscient, He of course knew where, geographically speaking, Adam was. (He was hiding with Eve behind a tree in the garden.) So the reader of the biblical text has to come up with an interpretation of the question, “Where are you?” One interpretation of God's question is, “How will you take responsibility for what you have done?” And heart-breakingly, as Dad said in his granddaughter Sophie's documentary,3 he never completely escaped the idea that he was somehow “responsible for” his mother being sent to Auschwitz.

Fortunately for him and for us, that was not the interpretation