munger

Received a letter from Fule
with some details of His last
days, How he suffered,
God give me strength to
enable myself to help my
stricken family,

They are all poor and
broken and need my help
so badly, and oh how I
want to help them while
at the same time I am
without means to do so

However I will tomorrow
try to get a loan of $100, and
help them, and this shall
bring me comfort in my
great bereavement.

—————-

Matt’s Notes

Fule (pronounced “Full-ya”) was Papa’s youngest sister and the only other sibling besides Nettie and Clara to make it out of Sniatyn, though she emigrated to Palestine just before World War II and was never part of New York’s Lower East Side community (Papa’s brother Isaac and sisters Gitel and Ettel were killed along with Sniatyn’s other Jews during the Nazi occupation). We can only guess at how Fule described the decline of Papa’s father in her letter; perhaps he developed an infection or contracted pneumonia after sustaining a bad fall back in February.

Papa must have found this letter overwhelming. He would have been hungry for information about his father, but details of his pain or sleepless nights or insensate, feverish mutterings would have been bitter sustenance indeed. Still, Papa is no longer the helpless mourner he was while sitting shiva a few days ago. He’s developed a way to deal actively to combat his grief: he’s going to take on personal debt and send home even more money than he normally did.

His true generosity of spirit is on display here in its most admirable form. Even while feeling every bit as “stricken” and “broken” as his family, he privately decides the best way to deal with it is through difficult self-sacrifice and service to others. How many people in this world become genuinely less self-interested under painful stress? He’s the real thing.

I have decided to send
home at once $50, $30 for a
tombstone and 20d. to live
for a few weeks, I will
Endeavor to get a loan
of a 100d. and leave $50
for myself to live on as there
is a slack season ahead.

My many worries are
slowly ebbing the strength
out of me

Is this an inheritance of
my father who throughout his
life worried fighting for his
and his familys very existence

——————–

Matt’s Notes

Just yesterday, the chance to shoulder his family’s financial burdens seemed like the best way for Papa to fight his deep, absorbing grief over his father’s death. As might be expected under such emotionally trying times, his feelings now swing the other way as practical worries about his own precarious finances blur his perspective on the benefits of self-sacrifice.

Something else is going on here, too. As his feelings about financial charity oscillate between resolve and apprehension, so, too does he experience the up and down side of his wish to be like his father. I think Papa hopes to keep his father close by emulating his steadiness and resolve and by stepping into the role of family provider. In effect, he keeps his father with him by trying to become him.

With this, though, comes a down side, and Papa seems overwhelmed by its discovery and the attendant questions: If I am like my father, am I not like him in every way? If I am charitable, wise, and tenacious, am I not also burdened, struggling, prone to exhaustion? (Remember that Papa’s father was, in Papa’s own words, “a cripple” with a paralyzed arm who must have demonstrated many moments of “ebbing” strength throughout Papa’s life.) I don’t think it’s unusual for people to ask such questions of themselves, but it must have been difficult, even shocking, for Papa, an idealist who idealized his father, to contemplate the unexpected complexities of his legacy.

—————

A sad(der) footnote to this post: When the Nazis occupied Sniatyn during World War II, they made the Jewish residents of the town pull headstones out of the Jewish cemetery and lay them down as paving stones in front of Nazi headquarters. The headstones are still there today. Is the tombstone my grandfather mentions above, the tombstone he went into debt to pay for, included among them? Does every one of the tombstones in Sniatyn have a story like my grandfather’s behind it?

————

Update 6/9

Reader Aviva sent this link to an article in The Guardian about a snapshot of a Nazi execution in Sniatyn.

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,11710,1131825,00.html

I wonder if my grandfather ever saw this picture. He almost certainly knew the people in it. They may well be members of his family, and mine.

In these my darkest
days, to relieve my
monotony, the Kempel
boy from next door, sleeps
with me nightly in my
rooms.

There can be no greater
devotion from a father than
that of my own whom I lost
He showed me the right
path of life, how to help fellow
humans and the mental
satisfaction we get out of it
He was the wisest of the men
in Israel,

Had he lived in Israels prime
he would have been an out-
standing figure

————–

Matt’s Notes

The pendulum swings the other way. Yesterday Papa questioned whether his father’s capacity for caring and tenacity was really just a propensity for worry and endless struggle; he wondered, in a dark moment, whether his beloved father’s legacy was a blessing or a curse. Today, as if to make up for this lapse, Papa casts his father in almost biblical terms, compares him to the wisest men of Israel and extols his superhuman devotion.

In the emotional crucible of mourning, people indulge themselves in all sorts of behavior because they are allowed to and cannot help themselves. This behavior, the face revealed when all defenses are down, tells a lot about about the mourner’s true character, and, when someone has lost a parent like Papa just had, even more about the mourner’s inheritance. So we ask: How will he pay tribute? What has he learned from the parent? Will he act selfish? Caring? Helpless? Furious? In Papa’s case, the thread running through his mourning tribute is devotion to his father’s belief in altruism, the power and resiliency people get from helping “other humans.” He does not waver on this principle, and it keeps him steady, as it would for the rest of his life, even though it did not necessarily prevent him from struggling with bouts of sadness.

Speaking of sadness, I think Papa’s description of how the “Kempel boy from next door” slept in his room during this period may be one of the most difficult, deeply sad moments in Papa’s diary thus far. Papa has demonstrated on many occasions his tendency to get deeply depressed and feel hopelessly lonely when alone in his rooms. I think this depressing loneliness was rooted, to a great extent, in his chronic, incurable homesickness, and it must have become nearly unbearable in the wake of his father’s death. And while I’m sure the Kempel boy was happy to stay in Papa’s apartment (his parents must have offered since the boy probably shared a bed with half his family under normal circumstances) the thought of Papa resorting to a child’s company for want of any other solace is so melancholy it practically defies description.

5 P.M.

After morning prayers
at the synagogue I spent the
afternoon at home, assembling
the precious letters from my
father .

I shall make a little shrine
and worship in his memory.

—————–

Matt’s Notes

It must have taken Papa the whole day to go through eleven years worth of letters from his father, opening, reading, refolding, pausing between each for long silent stretches, blinking away tears, walking around the block. He would have handled them carefully, gingerly, as if they could break apart in his shaking hands.

And what would the “little shrine” to his father have looked like? I picture a stack of letters on Papa’s mantle or dresser, flanked with a candle or two, and, propped just behind them, the ceramic-mounted, oval photograph of his father and mother now in my possession:

I have a couple of other thoughts when I read this entry. One, totally selfish, is: God, I’d love to have those letters. The other is: What would Papa’s shrine to his father have looked like if this story took place today? Would he have scanned the letters, posted them to a Web site, and written a little thought about each one?

————————

Note that Papa once again uses an abbreviation of the Hebrew expression Olam Haba in this entry. As noted before, this literally means “the world to come,” and Papa uses it in reference to his father to say “I’ll meet him in heaven.”