munger

Tuesday Oct 7

by


(Hebrew)

Stopped from work early, the
spirit of Erev Yom Kipur is spread
over the streets of New York,
sunset is approaching and so the
holiest of nights I just lit the
light for my fathers soul should rest
in peace.

I can hear now the prayers
and crying of the women in my
house as they are preparing to
go to the worship houses.

It is deeply touching.

I am so serious and embued
with a religious feeling.

May this year bring happiness
and joy to all of my family, friends
and all Israel, Amen.

I am off now to the Synagogue
to offer my prayers to the Allmighty.

——–

Matt’s Notes

Yom Kippur is a solemn, enthralling holiday for observant Jews, a day of fasting, prayer and, most significantly for Papa this year, open mourning for loved ones. The approach of this day and its attendant focus on his father’s recent death has, I think, embroiled Papa in a hidden drama for the last several weeks, a rigorous, taxing regimen of preparation and rehearsal, apprehension and anticipation, for a monumental personal test with no precedent or known goal. He has, both knowingly and in ways he cannot name, compared his lists of possessions and desires, rewritten his definition of home and family, and measured his capacity for hope at every turn of his sewing machine, at every subway ride, at every sip of coffee or forkful of food. It has been weeks since he has known a moment free of the question of how he might measure up.

His diary entries have reflected the effects of this exhausting, attenuated state. Perhaps, like a boxer training for a bout, he finds himself less willing to speak or waste energy on anything so impractical as speech. Then again, perhaps he has wanted to speak but could not. Perhaps his father’s death left a cavernous hole inside him, so dark and frightening that he had to keep it tightly sealed, and so the echoes of his thoughts and doubts and questions have remained trapped inside, crisscrossing, amplifying, canceling until they became an incomprehensible but unavoidable thrum.

Finally, though, Yom Kippur arrives, and Papa is at last allowed to see what happens when he ends his long wait, cracks open the seal, allows himself to mourn openly. The effect is instantly noticeable: He fills a page of his diary to its edges, waxes romantic in a way he has not for months, portrays a lovely image of a city cloaked in reverence, a neighborhood filled with cathartic cries, a moment free of practical cares. He could not have asked for more than this perfectly wistful moment, this perfectly Jewish moment in which pain and hope bind themselves together in a prayer for better times.

For the first time in months, Papa is himself again.

Wednesday Oct 8

by


Right after the prayers this
evening, I called the Dr. to
examine Yosale, and according
to him he is seriously ill,

—————

Matt’s Notes

As my mother noted a while back, Papa’s whole family depended on him for support even though he was the second-youngest of seven children. This entry gives us a small but matter-of-fact demonstration of his caretaker’s role: though he has been fasting and attending services all day for Yom Kippur, it still falls to him to call a doctor for Yosale, his sister Nettie’s infant son. It’s certainly understandable because Nettie’s husband, Philip, spoke little English and had recently suffered a debilitating injury to his hands, Nettie probably didn’t want to leave her son’s side for a moment, and Papa likely had the best line in to a decent doctor. (I would guess the doctor he called was associated with one of the landsmanshaftn, or mutual support societies, that immigrant Jews like Papa depended on for various essential services.)

I wonder, too, if Nettie asked Papa to call the doctor of if he acted on his own in this instance. Yosele was, after all, named for Papa’s father Joseph, who had died just a few months before. Since much of Yom Kippur involves intensive mourning for the dead (fasting and non-stop prayer ratchets up the emotion) Papa may well have emerged from services feeling especially compelled to protect his father’s namesake.

Thursday Oct 9

by


Yosale is a little better today
and gradually improving
Received 2 letters from home

———–

Matt’s Notes

Back in May, in one of the more dramatic episodes in Papa’s year thus far, Papa received notice of his beloved father’s death just hours after his nephew Yosele was born. I’ve always wondered if this confluence of events, along with the fact that Yosele was named a variation of “Joseph” after Papa’s father, made Papa especially attached to Yosele.

For example, the first thing Papa did yesterday after Yom Kippur services ended was call a doctor for Yosele, who’d been sick for a while. Is it possible, as we discussed yesterday, that having spent the day fasting, praying and mourning his father, Papa felt overly concerned for Yosele and called a doctor when it might not have been entirely necessary? Could it be that Yosele’s not really any better today at all, but, with Yom Kippur over, Papa’s perspective on Yosele’s condition is a little less exaggerated?

In that vein, I imagine Papa’s Yom Kippur prayers, so focused on his father, also made him think at length about his childhood, and the childhood home he missed so much. If that was the case, the two letters he received from the old country on this day must have felt especially welcome, as if, perhaps, a higher authority than the U.S. Postal Service had a hand in their arrival.

Friday Oct 10

by


Spend the evening with friends
at Nathan Zichlinsky’s house
until after 2 a.m.

————–

Papa’s diary features supporting appearances from three men named Zichlinsky: Jack, one of Papa’s closest, lifelong friends; Julius, whose full name appears only once but may be the same Julius with whom Papa enjoyed many an outing but only referred to by first name; and Nathan, whose home on Brooklyn’s Willoughby Avenue was previously host to a meeting of B’nai Zion, Papa’s fraternal order.

Your Papa’s Diary Project scorecard is surely too covered in scribbles and arrows by now to be of much use, but yes, I’ll confirm that you did, in fact, make a little notation about yet another Zichlinsky, this one named Jacob, and you made it in reference to my September 19th post in which I questioned whether Jacob, who is listed in the 1925 New York City directory as a leatherworker residing at 24 Hart Street in Brooklyn, was actually Papa’s friend Jack. At the time I assumed he wasn’t.

Ah, but how different I am from the headstrong, impetuous incarnation of myself who occupied this chair three weeks ago! Younger, yes, unbowed by experience, to be sure, but so presumptuous, so careless! Since then, I’ve done a bit of research on ancestry.com and learned that: three men named Nathan, Julius and Jacob Zichlinsky all hailed from the same town in Russia; they were all around Papa’s age; they all lived together for a time on Broome Street; Julius and Jacob worked in the same leather goods store together when they were younger; and, finally, Jacob eventually resided in the very Sheepshead Bay neighborhood where my grandmother could be relied upon to shout “Jack Zichlinsky lived there” when passing through. The evidence isn’t bullet-proof, but it certainly implies that these Zichlinskys were the brothers Papa palled around with and that Jacob of Hart Street was Papa’s friend and went by the nickname “Jack.”

Long live the Internets.

Saturday Oct 11

by

[no entry]

Note: Papa didn’t write anything in his diary from October 11 through October 15, but he accidentally wrote the following week’s entries on those pages instead of leaving them blank. So, his entry for October 18th appears on the October 11th page, his entry for the 19th appears on the October 12th page, etc., and he crossed out and changed the dates on the pages accordingly:

After a long series of contentious meetings with the Papa’s Diary Project Committee on Presentation and Editorial Integrity, I’ve decided to accept their recommendation and approach October 11-15 as if Papa left his pages blank, post what he wrote on the days he actually wrote them, and post the thumbnail images for all pages as they actually appear. That’s why there’s text on the thumbnail image for this page even though Papa didn’t write anything on this day. I hope this explanation will satisfy my legions of readers and stanch the flood of impassioned e-mail to which controversial choices like this inevitably lead.

Sunday October 12

by


[no entry]

————-

In my dream I am in Prospect Park and I sit on the ground beneath a tree. In front of me I see an electric fan much like the one I own. It has no plug or wire yet still it turns, the grass in front of it blows and bends. To my delight a rabbit turns up and stands in front of the fan. It is a curious creature, it does not look like a real rabbit it is more like something from the humorous cartoons I see at the movies. It hops up and down in front of the fan and smiles. It makes no sound and I am so happy just to watch. “This is what it’s like to have a rabbit of your own,” I tell it. I have a book in my hand and I open it and point to a page, I hold it out to the rabbit but of course it is too young to read.

————

—————-

Note: Papa accidentally wrote his entry for October 19 on the October 12 page of his diary; this is why the thumbnail image for this post shows handwriting even though there is no entry from Papa.

Monday Oct 13

by


[no October 13 entry; Papa accidentally wrote his October 20 entry on this page]

————–

It was long ago when I joined Jack and Julius and Nathan on Broome street, we dipped black bread in salt and sipped tea and talked late into the night of girls and our plans and of days to come. They kept leather everywhere, strips on chairs, bolts on their bed and the floor, it was a factory of their own. Jack and Julius always at work at the table, they passed each other tools and dropped rivets into cans and tea cups. Nathan joked would they give us a job when we got back from the war, he said the men at the registration office meant to send us right back to the old country to our old homes.

So much has happened since those endless days can it be I am still the same? What are these days then? They do not seem to me like memories to come.

—————-

For those of you just joining us, the above passage was not written by my grandfather; on days when he hasn’t written in his diary, I often write fictionalized interpretations of what I think might have been on his mind. Try the links below to see what he has to say about some of the major subjects he’s covered:

– “The 20th Century Girl”

– The New York Academy of Music

– B’nai zion, a.k.a. Order Sons of Zion, the fraternal order my grandfather belonged to

– Baseball

– The Capitol Theatre, one of New York’s great movie palaces

– Cars of the 1920’s

– Coney Island

– Calvin Coolidge

– The 1924 Democratic Convention, the longest and most contentious in history and the first to be broadcast live on the radio

– The Brooklyn Dodgers and Ebbets Field

– Fraternal organizations and mutual support societies, a.k.a. landsmanshaftn

– The New York Giants, 1924 pennant winners

– Keren Hayesod

– Silent Movies (1924 was a great year for movie lovers like my grandfather; several monumental films including The Thief of Badgad, The Ten Commandments, Sherlock, Jr., and D.W. Griffith’s America were out that year. I’m not sure if he saw any of those, but I do know he saw at least The Song of Love, The Unknown Purple, The White Sister with Lillian Gish, and A Woman of Paris, Charlie Chaplin’s first serious directorial effort.)

– The Metropolitan Opera

– Papa’s Father’s Injury and Death

– Prohibition

– Prospect Park

– Early radio (Papa was an early radio adopter and frequently wrote about what he heard on New York stations like WEAF and WNYC)

– Sniatyn, Papa’s Ukrainian home town (part of Austro-Hungary when he left in 1913)

– The New York Subway

– Telephones in 1924

– Tenement life

– Woodrow Wilson

– The New York Yankees

– Yom Kippur

– Zionist Organization of America