My great grandfather, Arnold Hoffman, died in World War II after risking his life jumping on a grenade that never exploded. He was unceremoniously shot through his femoral artery and died hopefully before realizing that what he had shielded his brothers from was, in fact, a fallen canteen—his own canteen.
He was survived by his pregnant wife Nora and young son Alexander who would both go on to immigrate to the US in the early 50s with Nora opening up a hattery. Alexander, my father’s father, took up whaling in Alaska for a short while before it was banned for good. He did make a killing out of the fashion in which he dispatched cetaceans for blubber and oil, but he above all else made a passion out of killing polar bears. He made sure that all mammals, of the sea and of the land, feared him as God.
Losing his father in the war and his mother later in life “turned his brain ass backwards”, as my father put it. Alexander, before he had his only son, killed polar bears not for sport, definitely not for food, and not for self-defense. Rather, he would disembowel his prey and snuggle within the damp abdominal cavity left behind, as it reminded him of his mother.
My father’s mother, which is to say Alexander’s wife, was kept mostly in the dark about his proclivities throughout their marriage until her untimely death at just 37 years old. Alexander too would die when I was a little girl, his request to be buried inside of a polar bear being denied with little deliberation.
