Original subtitles

On the first day of Rosh Hashanah,

after the afternoon prayer, we go to a lake, river or sea

and recite the Tashlich prayers.

Wherein, we symbolically cast our sins into the water

and leave our old shortcomings behind us.

Thus, starting the New Year with a clean slate.

So beautiful.

Talk about atonement.

Banner year, huh, you must have been really

racking up the sins this year.

Was that enough?

Is God going to reincarnate me into the Book of Life now?

Reinscribe, Jonathan, not reincarnate.

Nana, are you sure I can't give you my shawl to wear?

It's getting awfully chilly.

I've never been sick a day in my life.

Come on, have a heart.

Atone for something.

Josh, Olivia?

Yes, Marin.

What do you need, sweetheart?

Why were your suitcases packed?

Because I am going to live at my nana's house for a few weeks.

Did you and Olivia have a fight?

No, but they're living in sin.

Jonathan, our rabbi was uncomfortable with the fact

that Josh and I shared a bed before my conversion

to Judaism.

So we told him we would live apart from the day of my mikvah

until the wedding.

So for the next three weeks, Josh

is spending nights at our nana Claire's house.

Why don't you just buy another bed?

Marin and me have two beds.

That is a really good question.

And the truth is that I need some quiet time

to get ready for my bat mitzvah next week.

I gotta study up for it.

Where's sin, is it in New York?

I don't want you to move far away.

We're never going to be far.

Don't worry.

It's all part of the cleansing process.

Were your sheets really dirty?

He's just going to ask you more questions.

Modern Orthodox, what happened to the modern part?

If Olivia had been Jewish all along,

and your rabbi knew you shared a home together,

he still wouldn't marry you?

Correct.

But he came up with a loophole.

The conversion was a reboot.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the only Jewish woman

who's never sinned.

Immaculate.

I knew her when she was a mere Catholic degenerate.

The irony was I was ready to convert two years ago,

but we weren't ready to marry.

I can't wait to be Jewish.

You loved being in love.

Some people convert to marry.

We're getting married so she can convert.

It's just so much black magic.

On Fat Tuesday, I'm buying each of them voodoo dolls.

Shush up.

Jimmy crack corn and I don't care.

It's OK, Jonathan, just a little family ebb and flow.

Plus deep down on the high holy days,

he's the guiltiest Jew I've met to date.

Let us cast away the sin of deception

so that we will mislead no one in Word or deed,

nor pretend to be what we are not.

Let us cast away the sin of vain ambition, which

prompts us to strive for goals which

lead to neither true fulfillment nor genuine contentment.

My first boyfriend, he took me to synagogue one afternoon.

He just liked to go.

And they sang "Adon Olam."

No one looked alike.

No one sounded alike.

But the look of sheer happiness and understanding

was shared by everyone.

So this conversion is something so real and purity

of the highest order.

What is that?

I'm so embarrassed.

Please don't reject me.

Crazy shiksa, I'm talking about that mole.

You should have it looked at right away.

The first time I ever attended a synagogue by myself,

I was so nervous.

I thought everyone will be able to tell just by looking at me

that I am not Jewish.

I won't know what to say or what to do.

I won't know what page we're on.

And then I get there, exactly on time,

and I realize I am the first person there.

Despite all my worries, I still felt like I belonged somehow.

I still felt that this was the right path for me

so I kept pushing through my nerves,

went back to different synagogues,

and learned more and more about Judaism.

Pretty soon, I caught onto a few things.

I learned to show up a little late.

That it's perfectly fine to ask what page we're on.

And that if someone can tell that I'm not Jewish just

by looking at me, I don't really care.

Because I know in my soul that I am.

Jonathan, Elijah wants to look at your penis.

Marin, stop terrorizing your brother.

What did your mother say when you first

told her you were converting?

My mom was never very religious.

But when I told her I was considering it,

it took months, maybe years, for her to accept it.

I thought about it for years before I met Josh.

Judaism was just something I never

wanted to stop learning about.

Got under my skin, like reading a great novel over and over

again.

How long did it take to become a Jew?

About a year.

One full cycle of holidays.

I just had to take a class at the synagogue once a week,

observe Shabbat, be a regular attendee at Shabbat services,

and prove I kept a kosher house.

There were five people in the class with me.

And then the mikvah.

So the bat mitzvah wasn't compulsory?

No, that was for me.

It was important to me.

Come on, Josh, the truth.

Would you have still married Olivia if she didn't--

Well, yeah, I love her.

But we did discuss raising our children Jewish

even before we got engaged, and well before Olivia definitively

decided to convert.

We don't keep kosher and we're Jews.

But we're Orthodox, modern Orthodox.

And you were born Jewish.

That's something that's never taken away from you.

Catholics, on the other hand, can be excommunicated.

Does your mother keep kosher now, too,

in an act of solidarity?

Oh, my god, no.

The first time she came to visit our apartment, she had a fit.

She'd brought something from this gourmet food shop

as a gift.

We said she couldn't bring it into the house.

Yeah.

Her mom loves me.

Christianity always felt like an exercise

in crime and punishment to me, with the accent on punishment.

It's drilled into us from birth that we are all born impure.

I wasn't born impure.

When I was baptized that made me feel impure.

I was complicit in a lie, a conspiracy.

And then you have to confess sins.

And God help you if you hadn't committed any sins.

We're all sinful.

That was work, conjuring up sins.

And then someone told me about Timothy 6:20, "vain babblings."

Vain babblings.

Just the sound of it cracked me up so I used that for weeks.

Then I threw in adultery one Sunday as a change of pace.

Got in big trouble for that one.

I love that Jews don't offer up hell.

It's enough I have menopause to deal with.

Hot flashes, hell fire.

Potato, potato.

Then you have to do penance.

Just nothing made sense to me.

Everything was bleak and joyless.

Passover is a holiday about liberation.

It's a thrilling Hollywood movie about escape, freedom.

So you're not going to celebrate Christmas anymore?

I'm a Hanukkah girl now.

Josh, what's modern Orthodox?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I find conservative Judaism really a failure,

like--

OK-- like the decision to not allow Jews to drive on Shabbat,

it decentralized and weakened the Jewish community.

And without community, Judaism cannot survive.

And I found no community of conservative Jews.

Yet when I go to an Orthodox synagogue, even one

that I don't like, there is a strong sense of community.

But you don't believe in God, my friend.

Well, no, but I do believe that everything in modern orthodoxy

is good without the need for it to be divine.

Do you believe in miracles?

I'm not sure that I do believe in divine miracles,

but I believe that if people think

that there are no limits on what is possible,

then we can be surprised by things that are

outside of our expectations.

Yeah, I think miracles happen.

I just don't call them miracles, and I

don't believe that they happen because of divine presence.

So no burning bush?

No, I think there could have been a burning bush.

I just don't think it was burning

because God made it burn.

I think the sea could have parted.

I just don't think it parted because God wanted it to part.

They were like natural phenomena that

happened at the right time.

Yeah.

And when we say it parted, I don't necessarily

believe it actually parted.

Like I think there was--

there was a way, there was a way made for them to go through.

Call it an aberration of nature, if you like.

But not divinely.

Not necessarily.

Though I'm not opposed to that philosophy.

Not necessarily?

You're an agnostic.

Like your father.

"The New Yorker Magazine" is like catnip to that girl.

Your son's playing Candy Crush.

Talk to him.

I just don't feel the need to ascribe

divine intent to miracles.

Do you believe that Moses brought down the Ten

Commandments from Mount Sinai?

Does it matter?

Though, I do believe they're worth following,

the 10 commandments.

Who wrote them?

It doesn't matter who wrote them.

What matters is that they were adopted by the Jewish people.

So it renders much or all of the Old Testament

fiction rather than fact?

Yes.

Doesn't mean I don't believe in them.

Olivia is the one who believes in God.

Yes, but I agree with much of what Josh said.

Do I believe that God parted the Red Sea

and you could see fishes swimming right next to you

when you were walking on the sea bed, no.

But do I believe that we all have instances of faith

and we're in the right place at the right time

and this happens?

And we have a path we might not know about but that God does.

I believe in that.

What about the Jewish rite of burial versus cremation.

How?

Why?

What is the religious basis in that?

I don't really have an answer.

I can only tell you why I believe in it.

It has to do with the natural progression of things.

I think to be cremated is unnatural

and we were meant to nourish the earth.

But we don't utilize that Earth under which we're buried

for the benefit of mankind.

I don't believe in cemeteries.

I hate cemeteries.

So what should we do with our corpses?

OK.

Maybe we crossed a line.

I say bury them in the woods at night with a lantern.

In a box.

No, I'd prefer not to be buried in a box, but maybe

a cloth bag.

Anyway, the Jewish preference is not

to be buried in a casket or a coffin.

Enough with the macabre shit, Josh, all right?

What about the miracles in the Old Testament?

Hanukkah miracles, Passover miracles.

Josh told me he didn't believe in God

the first day we met at a Passover Seder at my friend

Andrew's house.

You remember my friend Andrew, don't you?

Sure.

He plays cello, like you.

He sure does.

Not as good as you.

And he teaches, like you.

He sure does.

What's an "o-bit-u-ary"?

Obituary.

It's something you write as a tribute to someone

when they die.

Describes all the wonderful things they've ever done.

All the wonderful people they ever knew,

and all the wonderful people in their family, past and present.

So that everyone in that person's family

knows how many people will miss them.

It's kind of a mitzvah, even for people who aren't Jewish.

You guys waiting for your grandma?

Great grandma.

She's cute.

She really is.

Nana, I knew you'd make it.

You're early.

I'm always early.

It irritates the hell out of people.

Is it too hot for you?

No, vitamin D is good for you.

Nana, did you remember sunscreen?

Oh, my doctor, before he died at the age of 52,

used to scold me for my Vitamin D deficiency.

Now, you want me to wear sunscreen?

I'm surprised you've ever seen a doctor.

It's a miracle.

I've finally surprised you, finally took your breath away.

Enough with the third degree.

I just came from the dermatologist.

I showed him my moles.

He likes to look at moles.

He wanted to lance them.

I think he must be in love with me.

Why else would you perform such a procedure

on a 92-year-old woman?

I saw doctors when I was younger, much younger.

Fear not, I will survive these moles.

There are so many ways to die, but only one way to be born.

Those were the first German words

I've spoken aloud in almost 70 years.

I miss it.

I'm just tired.

Nana, you never complain about anything.

What's wrong?

What's wrong?

I experienced a momentary lapse in judgment.

I was seized by a bout of nostalgia.

The very word is uncouth.

Anyway, at my age, I'm not supposed to worry.

Worrying takes years off your life, and, well--

You sure nothing's wrong, Nana?

It's all because of mahjong and sex.

Knock it off!

Grace, one of the women I play mahjong with

was visited by her grandson yesterday, a very uncouth

youth.

He told me I smell.

Oh, wow.

That's it?

That's all he said?

Maybe he meant it as a compliment.

Maybe, yeah.

Maybe.

Perhaps.

Yeah, but you know it made me think about papa and sex

and all the places he used to love to kiss and to lick.

Nana, you're delirious.

The area behind my earlobes, my eyelids, beneath my breasts.

Now it all smells like I'm decomposing.

When I was young, I smelled better

than any woman in Poland.

Nana, you're hilarious, morbidly funny.

Poland?

What do you think I smell like?

Like my grandma.

And she's the most beautiful thing in the world after you.

Morbidly funny.

Morbidly funny.

I don't think I've ever said anything

like that before in my life.

That wasn't me.

Who was it if it wasn't me, Olivia?

What are some of the things you're most proud of?

That I'm not a hunchback.

That I'm not a caricature.

How about you, what are you most proud of?

Wow, me?

I don't know.

What made you think of hunchbacks?

Oh, dear.

Europe was lousy with hunchbacks when I was growing up.

Nana, why did your dad leave your mom?

She left him.

He was a self-made man and a self-absorbed man.

How did he die?

Natural causes.

Did he die peacefully?

No one dies a peaceful death, Olivia.

I have an abnormally low resting heart rate.

It sets off alarms when I go to the doctor for a checkup.

No one dies a peaceful death.

What?

You went to a doctor again?

Why did you go to a doctor again?

Why did you go to the doctor again?

Listen, you used to tell me ghost stories.

You used to terrify me.

So stop terrifying me.

You have me for the entire weekend.

Where are you taking me tomorrow?

Jana's wedding is next month, remember?

You and me and Jana are going to sample desserts tomorrow.

And then we're going to choose our favorite shade of purple

for the bridesmaids dresses.

Our favorite hue.

How many shades of purple do they offer?

More than varieties of desserts.

Oh, invent one then.

A hue previously undiscovered.

In fact, make it a contest for your students.

Some of the kids composed a song for our wedding last semester.

I don't want them to feel exploited.

Only a song?

Well, why stop there?

That's what slave labor is for.

That's how it starts.

Where are her parents?

Next thing you know, she'll be walking through plate glass

windows.

I have to confess, I was a little nervous

when I thought about negotiating the beach for myself today.

It's a chink in my armor.

Imagine, it's almost half a century since I

sifted sand between my toes.

Imagine that.

I took the subway to Penn Station today, too, by myself.

I miss riding the subway at 7:30 a.m.

and watching those sly smiles on the faces

of those otherwise professional career women.

Especially on the days when they turn the clocks backward

to standard time and the women get

to spend an extra hour in bed.

What is that?

I have a tiny headache.

Alert the media.

The woman who's never been sick a day in her life

is battling a headache.

Can I see the pills?

Nana, this is strong.

This is a big pill.

Yeah, well, the bigger the better.

Chink in your armor, huh?

Here.

You love these.

What are you even doing here?

You shouldn't be here.

We would've come to pick you up for lunch.

I've never broken my hip.

Ironic if it should happen today.

What did you say, sweetheart?

I said, what are you doing here?

You shouldn't be here.

We would have come to pick you up for lunch.

I brought pictures.

You bought a cell phone.

No, I brought pictures.

Pic-tures.

To show you, to give you, vintage photographs.

I stopped by the bank today.

I've been keeping these in a safe deposit box.

These photos have survived three banks--

Lincoln Savings, Chemical, and now JPMorgan Chase.

Imagine that, I've survived two banks.

Yeah, and just a few years back, I

thought for sure I'd outlive the third.

What does that tell you about bankers and personal security?

Is that your diary?

No, they're mostly my mother's diaries.

They've always been my bedtime stories.

For decades, you paid monthly rentals for a safe deposit box?

Could have bought a Maserati by now.

Look at that serrated edge.

Oh, is that you?

No, that's my mother, Marta.

She was the happiest woman in all of Berlin.

How old is she there?

Fifteen.

Black and white puts a few years on your life.

Who are these people wearing swastikas on their sleeves?

The man on the left is Dr. Carl Clauberg.

Who is the other man?

Dr. Horst Schumann.

I prefer not to discuss him.

I never understood him.

He was evil.

And the woman?

That's me.

Later.

No, not later, Nana, you're wearing--

A nurse's uniform.

Where was this taken?

Auschwitz.

What?

People today don't talk about the Germany

from the first part of the 20th century when--

Germany was utterly beautiful and musical and happy.

It was all gold and green.

So modern.

Best apples on earth, better than New York.

I always wondered whether there was a connection my two lives

where the best apples were.

My mother was born in 1898 in Hamburg,

but moved to Berlin when she was two months old.

Her parents had rented a little two room

flat behind the Wintergarten theater.

She never knew what her parents did for a living.

Most days they left her alone from noon

until well past midnight for as long as she could remember.

They never sent her to school and she

didn't learn to read or write until she was in her teens.

But she understood numbers.

Strange.

And horticulture.

Her mother grew tomatoes on the window ledge of their flat,

and so every morning when mama came down for breakfast,

there would be fresh gooseberries on the kitchen

table.

Next time you're in Germany, you should try them.

As lonely and solitary as her early years were,

my mother loved Germany.

This is a full half century before 'homeland'

became an ugly word.

She writes how her parents were always

holding each other's hands, strolling through the Altes

Museum holding hands, gazing up at the splendor

of the Brandenburg Gate holding hands.

Picnicking in the Zoogarten, dining with another couple

holding hands.

And her parents always returned home from work smiling.

It was as if smiles were their silent language.

And so, of course, they had a special smile reserved just

for her the same way that I have a special smile for you.

And now, of course, one for you, too.

When my mother was seven years old,

her parents began staying away for several days at a time.

By the time she turned eight, they were gone for good.

Gone.

Simply one day never returned from work.

But my mother never ran away from home,

and no landlord ever came knocking at the door for rent.

There was something blessed about that hovel.

My mother was almost a feral child.

But it was the music that kept her sane.

She especially loved operas, because they

were sung in so many different languages

and she understood that the audiences were responding

not to the words, but to the humanity.

There was a lot of opera sung at the Wintergarten in those days.

And my mother memorized them all.

So one morning a few weeks after her parents had disappeared,

she left the flat and went into the back of the theater

while all the porters were away working,

and she explored every one of the nooks and crannies

until she could no longer stand.

So she found an empty dressing room,

and she made herself a bed.

Well, a feather nest, really, from some discarded costumes

she found.

So she fell asleep.

And she lived in that theater for a few years.

Like Eloise at the Plaza.

The other things she loved about the theater,

about everything on Potsdamerstrasse

about everything in Berlin, were the buildings.

Carolingian, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance,

she loved the gables, the gargoyles, the art,

the mathematics of the architecture.

She thrilled to that.

But architecture took a back seat to the lure of the music.

In the alley behind the Wintergarten,

there was another theater.

Well, it's a cabaret, a nightclub,

more like a burlesque.

It was called Susse Fruchte--

Sweet Fruit.

So a famous teenager named Claire Waldoff

performed there once.

And after the performance, she introduced herself

to my mother.

My mother wrote that she was the only celebrity she'd ever met,

and she was the nicest teenager she ever met.

That's when she decided to name her firstborn Claire.

So one day, the manager of that little club

came to the Wintergarten to attend a birthday party.

And there was a man there, an executive

from Deutsche Grammophon named Herr Sebastian Hennicke.

Lovely mustachioed larger-than-life

homosexual gentleman.

So only men attended the party.

They all smoked.

And that frightened my mother.

So she did what she always did when she felt anxious or alone.

She sang.

Her voice moved Sebastian to tears.

And after that, he found any excuse

to come to the Wintergarten just to hear Marta sing.

So Marta was just 13 years old the day

that Sebastian asked his old friend, the manager

of the Susse Fruchte, if Marta could be allowed to sing

at his cabaret that evening.

All the other singers, they were older women in their 20s.

They all wore red lipstick like a uniform.

My mother thought they looked like harlots, predators.

But they could sing.

Now, Marta had the voice of an angel.

But by the time she'd sung almost 300 smoke

suffused nights in this cabaret, her voice was deteriorating.

She thought it was due to puberty,

but Sebastian knew better.

Her vocal chords were gone, shot.

But he didn't want to shatter her confidence,

so he told her it was time to make a record.

So for seven consecutive nights, they

went to the Deutsche Grammophon Studio

after it was closed for the evening, and Marta

and Sebastian and some down on their luck musicians whom

Sebastian was paying out of his own pocket.

Sebastian engineered a recording on state-of-the-art cylinders

of four songs.

It was Marta's first and only record.

She was about 15 when it was completed.

She only found out just before she

died that Sebastian had bought the only copies, four of them.

Then the war-- World War I began.

Sebastian feared for her life, so he

arranged for her to travel to southern France.

The trip took four weeks.

Yeah.

Germany to France, four weeks.

But war is noisy,

And on the way my mother lost the hearing in one ear.

That's when she decided that she would never again be ill

a day in her life.

So in France, she wound up living

in a small town called Angouleme.

She took odd jobs until she ended up at a patisserie.

She was 18 years old.

I always wondered if it had been my mother who

took these photographs.

Ha-ha.

My mother loved bread.

The men called her bread belly.

But she wasn't insulted, and it wasn't insulting.

When the war ended in 1918, she stayed on in France.

She didn't want to witness what had happened to the country she

so cherished.

Especially the Wintergarten.

So by the time she turned 21, she was fluent in French.

She became a little too French.

She was lonely.

Then she became pregnant.

She didn't want to have a French baby.

She wanted the child to be born in Germany.

But she became ill during her second trimester.

All the French doctors told her she

was too ill to travel so she finally

found a third doctor who said she could make it.

She lost the baby along the way.

But she continued on to Berlin.

And she found that by some miracle,

her childhood flat had survived the war intact.

She found it deserted.

She moved in.

She was home.

She became a prostitute.

One customer made her pregnant...

again.

Bruno, funny name.

Once she told him, he began coming

to see her every day, not for sex, but to bring her money.

Then he married her.

Funny Bruno.

The marriage lasted two weeks.

She left him.

In her third trimester, she came down with dysentery.

A friend told her about some brilliant young gynecology

student at the University of Bremen named Carl Clauberg.

So she departed for Bremen that evening.

She wrote two entire paragraphs about his smile.

She died from complications two weeks after I was born.

Carl couldn't save her, but he saved the baby.

Me.

It's all there in her writings, all of it.

It's what made me want to become a nurse, the fact that Carl

tried to save my life.

Well, that and I love children.

Carl had promised my mother that he would place me

in the only decent foundling home in all of Germany

in Leipzig, and he kept his promise.

I mean, that alone was a miracle.

He came to see me every week.

Once, he brought a record player.

It had a beautiful stylus and the wooden box gleamed.

He loved to play records for the children, especially for me.

I remember once when I was three years old,

I asked Carl how did all these different voices come out

of the record player?

He explained to me that there were miniature versions

of all the great singers living in the compartment

beneath the turntable.

And when it was their turn to sing,

they all stood in front of this microphone so tiny

that it was almost invisible, and they sang exactly the song

that you wanted to hear, just like a jukebox.

Well, how could it have been anything else?

But my mother wasn't in that box!

By the time I was 7, the Weimar Republic was finished.

And the Nazi party became Germany's legal government

in 1933.

Carl adopted me legally when I turned 12,

but I remained in the home in Leipzig.

This was the safest place I could be.

I stayed there for two more years.

I was changing.

Germany was changing.

Then Carl arranged for me to enter nursing school

when I turned 14.

14, it was unheard of.

Carl was my mentor.

He really wanted nothing more than to help

women who had been diagnosed as infertile to--

he was a pioneer in progesterone studies.

1942, he had the chance to go to Auschwitz where there would

be an unlimited number of women he could sterilize

for the purpose of his studies.

He begged me to come.

Of course, I said, yes, it was the safest place I could be.

I was 16.

It wouldn't have been so terrible if anesthesia had not

been in such short supply.

It was war!

The SS officers and their wives and their mistresses,

they all trusted Carl, and so the women trusted me, too.

What was their alternative?

The only alternative were Jewish doctors, and soon

Jewish doctors, well--

and Carl made sure that no one touched me.

I was still a nurse.

I saved Jewish lives.

I really did.

Some.

That part's not in the history books.

But soon after we arrived at the camp,

Carl was paired with that man, that Horst

from the photos, that man who had no vision.

New Year's Eve 1943.

Remember that date.

There was a ball at the villa of one of the SS captains.

Everybody drank so much.

Carl made love to me that evening

in one of the villa's bedrooms.

The first and only time.

The wallpaper was green.

Three weeks later, he told me I was pregnant.

And I told myself that I would never allow

another man inside me again.

And I never did.

He knew then that sometime very soon

that he'd never see me again.

He knew by the spring that the Reich would lose the war.

So once I made it through my first trimester,

he made arrangements for me to flee to France to Marseilles,

and then to Greece.

And from there, to America where I'd

be known as a Jewish refugee from the war until the day

I died.

I learned Hebrew, Yiddish, English in Auschwitz.

Well, I have a faculty for languages.

I never bothered to learn Polish.

I don't know why.

Was your daughter a Nazi?

My daughter, Rosalie, your grandmother,

was born in New York City and I made her promise never

to tell her children about my past.

What about Papa Moishe?

My husband, nice man.

He was like me, a member of the party.

But he escaped Austria one year earlier.

Ours was strictly a marriage of convenience, prearranged, never

consummated.

I kept my vow to myself.

Did Harry and Melody know about this?

Not until last night.

How could you do that to mom?

It wasn't about moles, and it wasn't about a dermatologist.

And you're so smart, my beautiful great grandchildren.

I have brain cancer.

And at my age, it's inoperable.

The oncologist says six months.

I say it's more like a week or two.

And I will not endure pain.

I have a paralyzing fear of pain.

I am not my mother.

But I can't do it by myself, alone.

So I met a young doctor, a female doctor,

last Thanksgiving at a party.

She's from Oregon, Corvallis.

And even though physician-assisted suicide

is legal in Oregon, all the physician

can do is to write you a prescription.

After that, you're on your own.

This woman, this doctor, she believes

that assisting means assisting.

I'm flying to Oregon.

I'll check into a hotel.

She makes house calls.

I've outlived a great many people.

And so now I'm back in control of my own life.

How do you like them apples?

I know you two, you're going to get pregnant in Israel

during spring break.

I thought of hanging on for one more

year just so that I could see my first great-great-grandchild.

But then I remembered what my friend

Hilda, my first American friend, she

told me the worst thing about having cancer

was that she was in so much pain she couldn't

hold her own grandchild.

Her own grandchild.

I'm coming with you to Oregon.

Do you still hate Jews?

Oh, nonsense.

So much of what happened, it was personal to me.

It happened to me.

Jews were simply the enemy of the Germans, among others.

And in war, you eliminate the enemy, whoever he is.

You vanquish the enemy regardless

of religion or age or sex.

Are you completely unrepentant?

Seriously, are you completely unrepentant?

Why did you tell us this...

at all?

The last time I confided in family just my daughter knowing

what I'd done destroyed her.

Then my son-in-law.

That's what I did to them.

I'm telling you because there are two sides to every story.

Because I am history.

It's a history that nobody talks about anymore.

And because you share my DNA.

So I thought it was important that you know before Corvallis.

I think you're lying.

I'm just not sure why.

There are diaries in there, along with the photographs,

as well as my own medical records.

But not the part about your moth...

about your birth.

Carl contributed the final chapter and the epilogue

to my mother's diaries.

I keep a diary, also.

It's in there.

Mine starts with my earliest memory.

I went to see Bambi.

You were sexually abused by Carl.

Yes?

We never had time to discuss such things.

There was a World War going on, remember?

Nobody had personal problems back then,

certainly not the Naz...

certainly not the Germans.

You'll have to recompartmentalize

how you remember me, Josh.

How you'll describe me to your children.

God, you'd let me stay up late and I'd

sneak down the stairs in my Luke Skywalker pajamas

and hear mom's choir rehearsal.

And you would put your hands over your ears

until I made you understand how angelic Melody's voice was.

Your mother had the voice my mother never had.

It's all interconnected, isn't it?

I need you to know that I was not just a wife, an immigrant.

I need people to know--

I need my family to know that I was

a member of the Third Reich.

What?

Nana, you're rambling.

She's losing it.

Its third person now, huh?

Is my great grandmother a Nazi still?

Oh, Josh, yes, no.

I still consider myself a member of the party.

And like it or not, you're my blood relative.

We all thought you would choose to teach American history.

Historians know there are two sides to every battle.

I am a loose fragment of history.

So does it really even matter any more.

How could you afford passage--

safe passage out of Poland?

Carl gave me gold.

There was an abundance of gold in the camp.

Oh, god, no.

Carl had friends in Vienna who had been members of the Office

for Jewish Emigration in the '30s.

They still wielded influence.

They knew sponsors in New York and...

after I'm gone, study what's in the bag,

the evidence is in the photographs.

It's in the notes.

Maybe not every diary inside still has a spine,

but the contents are still true, and the photographs.

They're not photoshopped.

They're-- you can have them authenticated.

May I see your mother's diary?

It's in German.

What happened to him?

Who?

Carl, to Carl.

Carl?

Did you ever contact him after the war?

Stop it.

That's enough.

Six months to live, you should just kill yourself now.

That's the plan.

But not now, next week in Oregon.

No, that's not the plan.

I have a friend who knows an attorney in Dortsmund, Germany

who used to investigate war crimes.

I'm going to find out what our next course of action

should be.

Don't be stupid.

Really?

Really, what?

You'd really have me extradited to Germany for trial?

Germany, Israel, the Hague.

I've never been so certain of anything in my life

as I am about this.

Think of the cost, Josh.

There is no statute of limitations.

Are you going to take me to Nuremberg, to the Hague?

Honey, what do you think we should do?

I say we pool your folks' frequent flyer miles, add them

to my mom's miles and our own, we buy first class tickets

to Norway for the three of us.

Book hotel rooms nearby a glacier and Viking totems,

and read books with Nana until God takes her

from us in his own good time.

I'm not even Jewish.

What are you going to do?

I'm going in for a swim, or to throw up.

Probably just a swim.

You know that's not what I meant.

Obviously, I'm going to convert.

Shouldn't take more than a week.

Suppose you could convert.

You were going to wear a hat and a wig

in public so that only your husband would

be entitled to gaze upon you.

I changed my mind.

Yeah, but someone as enlightened as you, you did still

consider doing it and you considered it

because you believe in God and you're not

even made in God's image.

In my image maybe, but not in God's.

Your father-in-law claims he's agnostic.

Playing both sides of the fence, that's what he said.

That's what the Jews did in Germany and Russia and Austria,

they played both sides of the fence.

I was toilet trained at 2, reading by 4.

At 6 I kissed a boy and at 8 I fell in love

for the first time.

Life is short.

And I am enlightened.

When you and Josh returned from Israel from your honeymoon,

you told us you'd seen a Jewish woman

being stoned for revealing too much of her shoulders

in some ultra Orthodox neighborhood

someplace near Tel Aviv.

That was only a year ago.

Was that when you changed your mind?

The final solution?

Carl said it was the only way we could win the war.

The Jews were smarter than us.

Their science was stronger.

Not by much but enough.

He was your Svengali.

He saved my life.

So I fled Poland a pregnant woman.

I took the train to France.

I arrived on the hottest day in five years.

And the first thing I went looking for

was a synagogue, to get the lay of the land, a head start.

I thought God was making me burn in hell on earth.

That was before I learned that Jews don't have a hell.

Score one for the Jews.

Despite the heat, my hands were trembling

when I walked into the temple.

So it was empty, deserted.

Then a little 6 or 7-year-old Orthodox child

came in, walked right past me as if I didn't exist,

as if I were a ghost, and he disappeared.

So I followed him.

So he led me to a sukkah that was

being built for the holiday.

I heard laughing.

I heard singing.

Made me think about my mother.

And I knew then that I'd survive the trip.

The boat to Greece left from Marseilles the following day.

The first thing I put in my mouth

in the United States of America was a stick of Black Jack gum

that an Orthodox Jewish boy sold to me on Ellis Island.

Weren't you taking a huge risk bringing

those photographs, those diaries back from Germany?

I mean, who was your sponsor?

I left my Nazi armband behind.

Why did you risk it?

Keeping those photos for 75 years,

you could just as easily have been

accused of committing crimes against humanity if they'd

been found, even without Josh's help.

Why?

The only photograph I had of my mother?

The only photograph I had of Carl?

The actual father of my daughter, my only child.

You don't have to come with me.

Come where?

I'm going with you.

I don't want to be a burden.

Funny.

I'm going.

You're not making a case for exoneration.

No.

It was war.

You're not even a Holocaust denier.

I hate that word.

It's a misnomer.

Holocaust.

It's a bastardization of the English language.

Once you married Moishe--

Jesus.

I remember the unmistakable naches

in your voice telling us about your weekly dates

with him to the automat, to Horn & Hardart.

Your cream cheese on date-nut bread sandwiches

and butterscotch brownies and milk trysts at Chock Full

o 'Nuts.

Sorry.

What about when the war ended and the '50s came, and films

from the liberation of the camps began to surface, how did that

make you feel?

That I wished we'd won the war.

So that Carl could have delivered his own daughter.

So that I could have placed flowers on my mother's grave.

When you hug your mother tonight or when

Olivia goes into labor for the first time,

just think about what I just told you.

It's too bad your victims couldn't

bask in those sentiments.

It's always the Jews, always the Jews.

Where's the compassion for the 5 million Germans who died,

or the 15 million Russians, the 400,000 Americans, 3 million

Japanese, 15 million Chinese?

I'm Jewish!

I'm German!

There are no movies of the liberators raping and murdering

German women.

I'd have been one of those women, one of those victims,

pregnant or not, with your grandmother,

had it not been for Carl.

It took a lot less than an hour to kill a Jew with Zyklon B.

Took a great deal longer than an hour to gang rape

a German woman, shoot her six times,

and then leave her bleeding to death.

You know the Watergate expression, follow the money?

That's what Germany did.

Until the Jews and their money abandoned us

and ended World War I in a blaze of cowardice.

Jews understand money.

They understand science and medicine,

but they don't understand politics.

There will never be a Jewish president.

They don't understand American anti-Semitism.

Black Americans get it.

Race hatred.

It's ironic.

Initially, it was the Jews who were the Holocaust deniers,

even when they were rounded up in the ghettos,

they refused to believe--

Where should they have gone, Palestine?

America.

Papa never did kiss you in those places, did he?

Those sexy hidden--

Yes, he did, each and every night in my dreams.

What are you doing?

I'm going for a walk.

Across the sand?

Be bold.

Josh, your 92-year-old great grandmother

has terminal cancer.

Fuck you!

This is where I'm supposed to say he doesn't really mean it,

but I actually think he does.

Dad, what are you doing?

What is this?

My ship coming in.

I was going to call it "History Refracted."

It's a classic story of good versus evil.

I'm going to have to embellish a tad.

Embellish?

I don't believe half of Nana's story.

She has photographic evidence.

She's paid monthly rentals on a safe deposit box since 1949.

She has cancer.

She could be cornering the market on psilocybin

for all we know.

You're going to make money from this.

As much as humanly possible.

I'm going to make her a cottage industry.

I want to see her put on trial in the Hague--

or Nuremberg, if that's still a thing but somewhere?

You could call your novel, "How Do You Like Them Apples?"

Too long.

It's got to be called "The Last."

The last Nazi?

Sure.

But so much else.

Where's Melody?

Bedroom.

She hasn't come out since--

She hasn't come out in two days.

Her birthday's Friday.

I've known that woman for over three decades.

Every morning and every evening since we

met, she flossed her teeth, even when she was sick.

I kissed her this morning and I was thinking, foreplay?

I tasted a woman I had never met.

That's how I knew she hadn't flossed.

Nana, what are you doing here?

Go back to bed.

I was feeling a little lightheaded.

What are you playing with?

I have an Instagram account and so

I'm posting some images, recent ones.

Nana, you're peeking through.

So the thing about being hospitalized and bedridden

with tubes running in and out and bags needing

changing and IV fluids needing replenishing

is one loses one's natural predisposition towards shyness

and modesty.

It fades.

Who is she?

Hospice worker.

I need to keep nana alive the full six months.

She's going to pass away next week.

Pass away.

Kill herself, you mean.

I'll change her mind.

I'm going to guilt her out of it.

That's why Bethany is here.

Quash any pain that pops up, prolong her life.

I stayed up all last night reading "Mein Kampf."

It's persuasive in certain respects.

You read "The Satanic Bible?"

A lot of it reads persuasively, too.

I'm an agnostic.

We're all headed in the same direction.

The most Jewish person in our family

is the woman who once would have had a crucifix carved

into her headstone.

Olivia, here's my lawyer's information.

You're going to need it.

Ha!

A Jewish lawyer.

Did you know him?

Did you meet him?

Hitler?

Yes, Hitler.

No, but I was in Nuremberg in 1934

and I was at the nighttime torch rally outside his hotel.

I saw him standing on the hotel balcony.

I was only eight years old, but I remember it to this day

vividly.

It was electrifying.

I felt as if I knew everyone there personally.

'You must be both peace-loving and strong.'

I had fallen asleep.

I was so tired amidst those tens of thousands of people.

And when I woke up, I thought the torches were fireflies,

like lightning bugs.

And those were the first words I heard.

You must be both peace-loving and strong.

That's it.

It's vain babblings.

I shouldn't--

I'm sorry.

Forgive me.

And that rotund teenager you're drawing now?

It's a graphic novel inspired by true events.

It's not a biography.

My Claire will be a physical exaggeration, a Nazi anomaly.

My Claire will be riding down the Totie Fields highway.

Is that in Germany?

Were it only.

I can never come up with a superhero or a super villain.

Nana is both, ergo.

Is that me?

You?

No, but I could make you a character.

No, you can't use Liv's likeness.

Her name is Heldin.

In the latter chapters she returns to contemporary Germany

to deal with the refugee problem of the 21st century.

What does Heldin mean in English?

Heroine.

One million Muslim refugees are welcomed in, and 99 % of them

are good, decent souls.

That leaves 10,000 bogeymen.

Math is exact.

Terrifying.

Leaves no margin for error.

So this woman will be doing battle with 10,000 monsters.

Monsters trying to bring down her homeland.

Don't excoriate me for this.

Consider it war reparations.

This family was struggling for survival

the first time your Nana unburdened herself to her kin.

And your mother was still fresh from a miscarriage--

your sister-- and she always will be.

Your mother will always be seeking closure.

Nobody ever finds closure.

It's a myth, like religion.

Sorry, Olivia.

So Nana's found a way to provide reparations through me.

It's only logical.

She worked at Auschwitz.

She's a mass murderer.

How privileged are we?

We will never again know an actual mass murderer so

intimately.

Few people ever do.

But through "The Last," your nana's going to make amends.

She will find ways to atone, to right 6 million wrongs.

Reparations.

Our black friends want reparations, too.

Jews went running off to Israel after the war.

But African-Americans, descendants of slaves,

they wanted nothing more to do with Africa

apart from adopting tongue-twisting African

surnames.

And for wealthy African-Americans,

a birthright sightseeing trip.

A very expensive safari.

In "The Last" my Jewish superhero, my Heldin,

will attempt to bring blacks and Jews together.

So you see it's as much fiction as it is fact.

I provide the fictions.

Nana provides the facts.

Yeah, European Jews were cowards.

They abandoned Germany in World War I.

And the Bolshevik Jews in America,

they didn't even recognize what was going on

with their brethren.

What are you picking on black people for?

Don't worry.

Spoiler alert.

Superhero Nana will fail in her quest

to unite blacks and Jews, Asians and Latinos.

Best ending since "Planet of the Apes."

Native Americans will reclaim this country for their own.

Talk about your reparations.

I got your vengeance right here.

Your nana's pretty remarkable, though.

Almost a century old and a photographic memory.

She can remember the minutia of 1944,

and she can tell you what she ate for lunch yesterday.

Nana, Jews weren't responsible for Germany

losing the first World War.

That train, looks like something out of 19th century

New Orleans, not 20th century Europe.

I went on a train to Auschwitz.

It was beaten up.

The wooden floorboards, they were no better than tinder.

But still, it was the Orient Express compared to--

see, I was imagining the trains delivering

the Jews were the same as--

it wasn't guilt, it wasn't shame.

Sanity, maybe.

I don't know.

All I know is that it was one of the few times in my life

when I felt like I was out of control.

You know what I learned today?

Israel is the first country to ban commercials

starring underweight models.

It's number two in the world in book publishing.

The USB stick is an Israeli invention.

Israeli women hold more academic degrees than men do.

Highest concentration of start ups in the world, outside

of Silicon Valley.

Solar energy water heater was invented there.

Cherry tomatoes were invented there.

Auschwitz is now a tourist attraction.

Josh, even you went to Auschwitz.

I remember I had so many questions for you

when you came home.

Ask me now.

Now there's not nearly enough time.

Maybe I should call it "The Pious Piper,"

and the Jews will be her rats.

Fear not, it's all allegory.

Dad, please, find someone else's black sheep.

Harry?

Harry?

I never had bad dreams, and now I

have every night the same dream, same dream.

Josh and Olivia have a baby.

Please don't dream about our baby.

Olivia, are you pregnant?

Soon.

Nana, is Carl dead?

Funny you should mention Carl.

You know, there's this website that

posits the theory that Carl--

forgive the informality, but he feels less venal to me

if I refer to him by his first name--

that Carl, who was shipped off to Ravensbruck concentration

camp after his experiments at Auschwitz,

after he made provisions for your great grandmother

to flee Western Europe, he was arrested by the Russians

and then later released when it was

discovered he was the father of artificial insemination.

And then turned over his records and his samples,

including the sperm of Herr Hitler to his Russian captors.

And that's not the fantastical part of the legend.

That comes when Russian doctors then

made Carl bring Gretl Braun, Eva's younger sister,

to communist East Germany to be inseminated

with her former brother-in-law's sperm.

An experiment that in fact produced a child.

And that her name today is Angela Merkel.

Chilling.

Is that going into your novel, too?

Chilling but hilarious.

Too imaginative.

My story is poignant and all too plausible.

Your nana's the real deal.

I'm going to milk her for everything I can.

I've already got calls out to friends

at Vanity Fair and People.

I should've mentioned that earlier.

You don't need the money, dad.

No, I don't, but you never got anything from your grandparents

and I'm going to make sure that doesn't

happen to your children.

I'm the only one in the family who

always laughs at your little jests,

even when I'm the butt of them.

Now, I know what the expression I wouldn't want to be there

when the laughter stops means.

Olivia, do you remember on your birthday two years ago,

I told you that no one had ever made

my son as happy as you had?

That I'd do anything for you.

I'm doing this for you.

And for Josh.

Why does it have to be autobiographical?

It's biographical.

And all great writing is autobiographical

to some extent, even the best science fiction

is neither all science nor all fiction.

Dr. Clauberg was a pioneer in artificial insemination.

Nana.

No, it's the only part of his comic book that's true.

Answer the question, is Clauberg even--

I mean, gerontologically speaking it is possible.

Is Clauberg even dead?

Yes, he's dead.

He died in 1957.

Thirteen years after Auschwitz.

Great fodder for numerologists.

Yeah, and Gretl died in 1987.

Peacefully, no doubt.

There really was a Gretl?

Nazis who survived their captors, who

survived the Nuremberg trials and their verdicts,

they all lived long lives.

I would think that warrants somebody's thesis.

Why do you have Heldin lurking around each frame?

She's like some spy in Mad magazine.

What are these little things she's dropping?

Gooseberries.

Sometimes she sings.

And then there will be no words in the frame, only

musical notation.

I would like you to help me with that, Olivia.

Other times, she smuggles anesthesia into the surgical--

You said the camp was depleted of anesthesia.

It's all rubbish, Josh.

It's actually an anesthetic placebo.

Emollient or psychological warfare.

Everything she does is out of love.

Josh, don't stop thinking about me as your family.

So what do you reckon?

Is Nana an anti-hero or an anti-villain?

I want her out of my house.

I can't sleep while she's in my house.

I took two Ambien, I still can't sleep.

I want her out of my house.

Melody, come on, let's go for a drive.

You outlived your own daughter by almost 35 years.

You committed infanticide.

35 happy years.

How is that even possible?

My daughter died of breast cancer.

Of stress.

Stress.

And my father died of heartbreak, you told me that.

Your father died from eating too many Pop Tarts.

You need to be fed to the dogs and have your entrails ripped

from your carcass.

She needs to be tried in a court of law by a jury of her peers

in Germany or Israel.

She needs to go, Josh.

Melody, come on, now, let's go.

That's perfect.

That's perfect.

Seriously, it was quite the unexpected summer.

We spent three weeks in Haifa, Israel,

where I attended a panel on stochastic music.

I know.

What's stochastic music?

Well, when I was a student at Columbia,

we used to play blackjack every Friday night.

Some of the math heads could count cards.

Pretty well, too.

And some of them were cute.

Very cute.

You girls know what I'm talking about.

So I devised a cheat, whereby, I would

reinsert a card we'd already played back into the shoe.

But this summer, I learned for the first time

what I had stumbled onto way back then.

A stochastic process, a series of random variables.

It has applications in so many fields--

biology, chemistry, ecology, computer science, cryptology,

and music.

So I began listening to the results,

and it's a little bit mind blowing.

So I'm going to partner with an MIT professor

to further explore this process and how

it applies to music to see if there is an end game that

is important to us.

If anyone wants to assist, if you have the time, let me know.

Who's that woman?

Pass this around.

I want all cell phones, iPads, you can't hold onto your PDAs

right down.

I'm serious.

It's not obligatory, but if you insist on holding onto them,

you'll have to spend the period in the student lounge.

I'm serious.

That woman's name is Claire... I don't even know what her last

name is.

She's my great grandmother by marriage.

She's 92 years old, and she's complicit in the deaths

by genocide of tens of thousands of Jews in 1943 and 1944.

And she's directly implicated herself

in the murders of scores of Jewish and gypsy children.

Nothing neo about her.

Nothing stochastic about her.

She's an original.

She's singular.

The real McCoy.

She is history.

Was Hitler the worst human being ever born?

No.

I call bullshit.

Guilty by word but not by deed.

I'm not a philosopher, but--

History refracted.

Hey, how's it going over there?

Where are you now, you still at school?

Nana's taking a bathroom break.

My kids not so much.

Bathroom breaks, that is.

They're riveted.

And I'm not so sure that's a good thing.

Where are you?

At school.

Hey, so do you miss anything--

anything at all about being a Catholic now?

Yeah, one thing, the pealing of church bells.

It's what first made me fall in love with music.

That's not even a Catholic thing, is it?

Baby, why are you still at school?

I was fairly dark today.

My mood, somber.

And after lunch one of the kids brought me

an apple dipped in honey because he said I was sad.

Three years I've been teaching special needs kids.

I guess today, I was a special need kid.

Eat it.

You're sad.

I love you.

Hey.

Flavorless, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, my bad.

Where are you going?

See my parents.

No, no, no, no, no, you're too upset to drive.

I'm not driving.

I don't even know where my keys are.

Melody?

You were the product of an unclean man.

An uncircumcised man.

You know, in my entire life,

I've never seen an uncircumcised penis.

Did you?

It never occurred to me to ask you that before now.

Would you have told me the truth?

I'm in rhapsody with the music of Israel,

harmonizing with other voices who support

the vocal talent you gave me.

Mom, when I was 11 years old and I

went to Jewish sleepaway camp, I got

lost with a couple of girlfriends, two other campers

in the woods, really lost.

And I had to go to the bathroom so bad.

And you had so obsessively admonished me

growing up about washing my hands after every bowel

movement, cleanliness is next to--

well, maybe it was next to the business end of your belt.

Yeah.

Daddy, she did it once.

Not bad, but in front of my friend?

Where was I?

Oh, yeah, humiliation.

You made me so anal I soiled myself

while I was running because I couldn't find a bathroom.

And the thought of squatting outside

in the middle of nowhere and taking a dump, of shitting,

and of you finding out and of me having to tell you I

didn't wash my hands.

We were on our way to a make out session

with a couple of other boys from camp

so I couldn't tell my friends, and I definitely

couldn't tell you, and there wasn't any toilet paper.

So I called Daddy and I barked at him

to come get me out of camp.

Daddy came right away with a clean set of clothes,

even though I had plenty in my bunk.

And he drove me directly to the local synagogue

and to Rabbi Fuchsberg, an old friend of Daddy's, Rabbi Sara

Fuchsberg, so we could talk about the incident.

And she told me I should own it, that I should

go right back to camp and tell everyone

I knew exactly what had happened to me

and ask them if anything humiliating had ever

happened to them.

So I did.

Make an unexpected doody, make some new, unexpected friends.

She actually said that.

So I marched right back to camp and I

told everyone exactly what happened,

and I became one of the most popular kids at camp

in a matter of what seemed like mere hours.

Good popular.

And I counseled other kids and it

made me brave enough to sing in the camp pageant.

Singing in public for the very first time and all

because I took a dump in my pants.

So I guess I owe it all to you.

And I wanted you there so badly to hear me sing.

You and Daddy drove up and you came backstage.

And I had all this impeccable stage makeup on.

And you took one look at my red lipstick

and told me I looked like a prostitute.

I was still 11 years old.

So the next year when I got my first period,

I denied you that information as punishment,

but I couldn't wait to tell Daddy.

And that betrayal left a hole in my stomach to this very day.

I betrayed you, Mommy.

But I never soiled myself ever again.

Then taunting you became a favorite game of mine.

I would leave the kitchen faucet running, loud, hard.

You threatened to put me into therapy.

Then I stopped flushing the toilet.

You went into therapy.

Then I started really crushing it at school.

You?

Couples therapy.

Why?

Why, Mom?

I was getting As.

Now I know why.

But why didn't you confide in me?

Tell me it wasn't my fault. Worry killed you.

Stress killed you.

Nana killed you.

It wasn't breast cancer.

So who's more responsible, me, grandma?

I've never written fiction, ever,

in my life, not even in school.

And I won't start now.

I wrote grandma's obit eight years ago.

The best writing I've ever done.

Pure, biographical, family fiction,

as fabricated by--

I gotta remember to add that little codicil to my byline--

as fabricated by.

Well, I can't write the real one now.

I won't.

It would take too long and it might drive me to--

There's such charm and humor in the story of grandpa's candy

shop and grandma's meat market.

And how they traded their kiosks the very day

they exchanged rings, engagement rings.

Lies.

Lies.

Lies.

I read the obit to Harry once, aloud in our backyard.

I placed a bowl of peaches on the picnic table.

It was warm, humid.

There were fireflies.

There was so much love that night.

Harry loves that obit.

Harry loves me.

I could make money penning a revised obituary,

sell them both to "The New Yorker."

I always wanted a byline in "The New Yorker."

In the print edition of "The New Yorker."

They could run them side by side, point, counterpoint.

You knew.

You knew.

Who should I tell?

What should I say?

She doesn't even want to be forgiven.

We can't even bury her here!

What am I supposed to do about that now?

What were you thinking?

I'm coming back for you next week.

The only thing I can keep down is ice cream.

Sorry.

That was never my desert island food.

That was pizza.

It's very good.

You haven't lost a single ray of your genius.

But if you move forward with it, we'll have problems.

Come on.

Take me to bed.

Make love to me.

If we were conservative Jews, we'd

simply allow her to kill herself and burn the evidence, right?

You can't erase knowledge.

You can't burn what we already know.

Time would take care of that.

Do it for us.

We don't tell our children.

We die of old age.

The secret dies with us, the knowledge, that is.

Then justice isn't served and dad's cash cow

provides no milk, and mom continues

to blame God for her mother's breast cancer.

Josh?

Olivia, may I come in?

Yeah, Mom, come in.

Olivia is just taking a bath.

No.

I'll be uncomfortable.

Today.

This makes you uncomfortable?

You know my grandmother would never

let my grandfather buy a Mercedes or a BMW or anything

German.

He was so pissed.

About the war.

It's ironic, huh?

So you're really escorting her to--

What about you?

Will you go, too?

I can't.

I'm getting circumcised this week.

Again.

Honey, I was there at your bris.

And you know I gotta tell you I know there's no foreskin.

No, it's just a drop of blood that's necessary this time.

Really?

Josh doesn't want to go.

I can understand that.

You'd think keeping a secret for 75 years

would be life-shortening.

She made it to 92.

She could still make it to 93.

Yeah.

Consider the possibilities.

Like torturing a POW.

3,000 miles to try to talk her out of it.

So, Olivia, how does it really feel

to be a member of the most oppressed tribe of people

in history?

I was looking at the obit I pre-wrote for Nana earlier.

Now, it will never be printed.

Now, it'll never be read.

And it's the best writing I've ever done.

You're not going to update it?

I also found the first obituary you ever wrote.

You, too?

The glue that keeps this family together is saturated in death.

Mom, don't, please.

Now, Josh was only seven years old when he wrote this.

Bear that in mind.

The obit is for the late great Donald Duck.

Mr. Duck is survived by his nephews Huey, Louis, and Dewey.

Dumbo was supposed to read the eulogy,

but he couldn't come because he had an ear infection.

The surprise of the day was when the ugly duckling arrived,

since Mrs. Duckling had proposed marriage

to Mr. Duck as a much younger mallard,

but the proposition was rejected.

Walt Disney had promised to engrave Donald's final words

on his headstone but, sadly, no one

could understand Donald's final words.

Not even his nephews.

I love you, Josh.

Hey.

Why have you stopped talking to me?

Olivia?

There's a disdain for me in your gait.

You've begun walking ahead of me.

Slow down.

How do you know my disdain's for you?

How do I know Superman can fly?

Sorry I'm going to miss the bris.

Piece of cake.

Better be.

Me like cake.

I texted you the address.

Should we expect the feds to come crashing through the door

just before Nana bites the poison apple?

Call me.

We still have to figure out the burial arrangements.

Harry will still have a story to sell.

Your mom needs you.

I need you.

What if she changes her mind at the last minute?

Be well.

Be safe, my love.

Be a good Jew.

Take care of that baby maker for me.

I just wanted a few days by myself with my own thoughts,

with no thoughts.

I'm cursed with too many thoughts.

Sorry.

No, no, no.

I want to see a different ocean.

I'm glad you're here.

You know, at first I thought I didn't want anyone

to watch me die.

But now I wish--

I will call him right now.

No.

He would want you know what you just told me.

What you just thought.

No, no, no, please don't.

Why, Nana?

Because the three happiest things in Josh's life

are his family, his faith, and his Olivia.

And I don't want to make him unhappy.

And I-- let me out of the car.

Let me out of the car.

OK.

Let me out of the car.

Let me out of the car!

My oncologist said to eat just a little bit of it...

Ladies and gentlemen, from the flight deck, First Officer

Rodriguez.

Once again, we have begun our final descent

into Portland, which means unfortunately the seat belt

sign's going to have to remain on for the rest of the flight.

If you're up and about, I'd like to ask

you to return to your seats and fasten your seat belts

in preparation for landing.

On-board computer says we're just about 80 miles northeast

of the airport.

We should be on the ground in about 10 to 15 minutes.

We'll be parking at Gate B76.

Right now, the weather in Portland, they've got--

OK.

'Twas noontide of summer, And mid-time of night;

And stars, in their orbits, Shown pale,

thro' the light Of the brighter, cold moon,

'Mid planets her slaves, Herself in the Heavens,

Her beam on the waves.

I gazed awhile On her cold smile; Too cold-

too cold for me-

Their pass'd, as a shroud, A fleecy cloud,

And I turned away to thee, Proud Evening Star,

In thy glory afar, And dearer thy beam shall be;

For joy to my heart Is the proud part

Thou bearest in Heaven at night.

And more I admire Thy distant fire,

Than that colder, lowly light.

This is the first piece of jewelry I ever owned.

My father gave it to me for my eighth birthday.

I want you to have it.

I want you to wear it.

But why wouldn't you continue to wear it?

It's inappropriate.

OK.

Hello.

This is a sedative.

Calm your belly.

It's not necessary.

Nana.

OK.

Half now and half after Scrabble.

Nana, did you ever want to have more children

after you arrived in New York?

Married Papa.

No.

Why?

Well, it took me a few years to feel safe.

And I already had one child to protect.

Olivia, how many children do you plan to have?

Five, maybe six.

Seriously?

I'm really sorry.

I have an Instagram account.

Did I ever tell you that?

Yes, you did.

I don't.

When I came to Oregon last month for my first appointment,

I spent two days in Portland.

I attended a magic show.

The magician's name was Bill.

Just Bill.

He was a magician and an escape artist.

Quirky fellow.

I never liked quirky.

After the show, I went backstage to meet him,

something my mother would have done in another world,

in another time.

Anyway, I told him why I'd come to town

and he promised that he would come here to see me off

when that day came.

And on that day, he would reveal to me his secrets, his tricks,

about performing.

How's that for distrust?

He said it would be a great relief to him to finally tell

someone his secrets with the absolute certainty knowing

that that woman would carry those secrets to her grave.

Oh, I don't know how I feel about that.

I've got to let my friends down at security know

and then Claire.

It's time.

We have to wait for the magician.

Have you changed your mind?

You still can.

It's all right, you know.

No, it's just that it's a bit of a shock.

I've never been stood up before.

Sit tight.

I'll be right back.

You don't want to play anymore?

There's a beautiful yellow meadowlark perched

on the limb of that tree.

I think that's the state bird of Oregon.

Really?

Well, what time is it?

Maybe Bill will still show up in the nick of time.

You posted his picture and some drivel about him

on your Instagram page.

I tracked him down last week.

I told him you weren't coming to Oregon after all.

What are you talking about?

Vain babblings.

Nana, you really are a coward.

Olivia, stop it!

Listen!

I changed my mind.

I don't want to die.

Think of Josh!

Olivia--

Baby, you OK?

Yes.

Long night.