Monday May 26

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Eventless day, in afternoon
visited friends, and the
Zionist office, wrote there
an article for Dos (?) Yidishe Folk
critisizing the Z.Z.

Every morn. & eve, includes
now prayer service at the
synagogue with Kadish

————-

Matt’s Notes

The newspaper Papa refers to above, Dos Yiddishe Folk (The Jewish Nation) was an organ of the Zionist Organization of America (Z.O.A.), the group for whom Papa did most of his fundraising and recruiting work. The offices where Papa wrote his article were at 114 Fifth Avenue between 16th and 17th Streets, a healthy stroll from Papa’s neighborhood but one I’m sure he was glad to take — he was just starting a week off from work and would have wanted to stay occupied to keep depressing thoughts of his father’s recent death at bay.

The Z.O.A. published a number of other periodicals, including, according to the 1923-1924 American Jewish Yearbook, The New Palestine, a weekly, Hatoren, a monthly in Hebrew, and Young Judean, a monthly for Jewish youth in English. Dos Yiddishe Folk was the oldest of the bunch, having first appeared in 1908 when the Z.O.A. still called itself the Federation of American Zionists. (The group’s only earlier publication was a monthly started in 1901 called The Maccabean, but it looks like it was defunct by the 1920’s.)

Here’s a little more on Dos Yiddishe Folk from its own masthead:

Dos Yiddishe Folk, published weekly in the interest of Americas Zionists, by the Zionist Publishing Corp., 114 Fifth Ave., New York.
Telephone Chelsea 10,4000. Abraham Goldberg, Editor; Simon
Bernstein, Managing Editor. Subscription Rates: Payable in advance,
U.S. for 1 year, $2.50; Canada, for 1 year, $3.00; Foreign, for
1 year, $3.50. Single copies 5 cents. Entered as second class matter
February 26, 1909 at the post office at New York, N.Y. under the
Act of March 3, 1879.

In one of the happier moments I’ve had since starting Papa’s Diary Project, I was able to find the article he mentions above on microfilm in the Dorot Room of the New York Public Library.

Praises Editorial in “The Jewish Nation” Concerning the Youth of Zion Convention

Esteemed Comrade Editor,

Allow me to express in our “Jewish Nation” a few words thanking you for the editorial in your most recent edition, about the Youth of Zion convention which recently took place in Buffalo.

As someone who has been well acquainted with the aforementioned organization since its establishment, as well as with its activities, I know what harm they are doing with their separatist policies that are of no use to anyone. Everyone knows the truth, that they do nothing for their own organization as well. In the beginning, a few ringleaders, who were looking for publicity, tried to convince members of Zionist clubs to join them, and they even tried to break up these clubs. At first, some Zionists believed that they would be able to do something in order to appeal to young people with the Land of Israel ideology. But soon everyone saw that this was nothing with nothing. They created a little club in which they could play the roles of “leaders,” and they intoxicate people, encouraging them to fight against the Zionist organization. They prey upon young, recently arrived Zionists from Europe and tell them stories, the Zionist organization in America is too chauvinistic, capitalistic, etc… And the naïve young people, who sincerely believe what they are told, then find themselves unemployed: they are torn away from Zionism and they are given no other work to perform. I am convinced that the honest members of the Youth of Zion organization will have to do what many of their comrades have done for the past two years: they left the Youth of Zion organization and joined the “General” Zionist organization where, whoever wants to, can find their own place and their own tasks to perform.

It is worthwhile to mention that even the “Jewish Nation” greatly exaggerated the amount of money the Youth of Zion raised for the Pioneer Fund. Here, we saw a small group of young Zionists, who are regular members of the second and third districts, collecting money for the World Pioneer Center. There were perhaps not fewer of them than there were members of the Youth of Zion, and they went about their task with no ceremony or publicity, without “leaders” or “national executives.”

And is it not just awful when people organize a so-called convention, and they send a telegram to President Coolidge, and a cable to Prime Minister Macdonald? Do these young people not understand what the Jewish public thinks about such comic and irresponsible actions? Therefore, I offer you my sincere congratulations for your excellent editorial.

With respect and Zionist wishes,

Avrom-Zvi Sheyerman

Tuesday May 27

by


[no entry]

————-

Matt’s Notes

This isn’t the first time Papa has left a page of his diary blank, but under the current circumstances — he’s still mourning his father, has a forced week off from work due to the slack summer season, and is generally prone to depression when idle — his silence seems more loaded.

Still, I’m sure he read the papers that day, so here are a couple of headlines that might have caught his eye:

These were the only two articles in New York Times that day about the upcoming Presidential election, even though 1924 was an election year and the Democratic National Convention was coming to New York in a month. Quite different from the amount of campaign coverage we see in May 2007, even though the election is over a year away.

Some other items of interest for Papa would have included a blurb on the installation of new officers at the American Jewish Historical Society (a group that’s been helpful to this project, by the way) baseball coverage about a Giants win and Yankee and Dodger losses, and reviews of the films Cytherea and the now-legendary Sherlock, Jr. with Buster Keaton.

Wednesday May 28

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My Fathers Farewell to me

A beautiful Spring night at the
foot of the hill where my hometown
Sniatyn lies, at the Railroad station
early in June 1913, my father went
to bid me farewell on my long Journey
to America.

The train is waiting, a long
embrace a kiss, tears streaming
down from his eyes,

Did he have a premonition that
we would see each other no more?

The train is moving out slowly
and by the light of the moon I
could see through the window in the
distance my father [olam haba] weeping
and wiping his tears.

———-

Matt’s Notes

I hesitate to intrude on Papa right now, but if you’re interested to know, here’s what comes to mind when I read this passage:

Somewhere around 1977 or 1978, my fifth grade teacher assigned my class a project called “Where Are My Roots?” for which we all had to write a report on our family histories. (The T.V. miniseries Roots, about an African-American family’s enslaved ancestors, was all the rage back then and had touched off a bit of a genealogy craze.) My report was about Papa’s emigration from Sniatyn, and though I don’t remember much about it, I know the centerpiece was a photocopy of the above entry. (My mother picked it out and my father “Xeroxed” it at his office, whatever that meant).

This sad, sweet passage was my first introduction to Papa’s diary, and though I didn’t quite understand its context (I hadn’t read the whole diary and didn’t know Papa wrote it in the wake of his father’s death) I was fascinated with its structure and scope: It seemed soaring, lyrical, surprisingly literary in the way it switched tenses, familiarly cinematic in its description of Papa’s last, dwindling look at his weeping father from the window of a moving train. From my young perspective, these words felt epic in scale, like they opened onto infinity, and until I transcribed them last year I thought they went on for pages.

When I was a child I used to imagine that Papa’s ghost was looking out for me, hovering just out of sight over my shoulder. I was, in fact, terribly afraid of ghosts and spent many nights awake, under my covers, hiding from them. But to fear something is also to acknowledge its existence; was I willing, I ask rhetorically, to believe the world was full of ghosts just to convince myself Papa’s could still be with me? (It occurs to me now that I also used to think the ghosts in my house lived in a chair my grandmother gave us, a chair that for years occupied the apartment she shared with Papa.)

I mention this because I think it helps explain why, at eleven, this passage felt so important to me. I would not have been able to articulate how much I missed Papa or how much I longed for the lost feelings I associated with him. But to read his words was to hear the gentle murmur of his voice; to become lost in his prose was to feel his warmth; to see him wonder at his father’s “premonition that we would see each other no more” was to experience his idealistic optimism (anyone else would have known that he was saying goodbye to his father for good that night in Sniatyn, yet even eleven years later he chose to interpret the inevitable as a sign of his father’s wisdom).

Though it is, in reality, just one small page of an old pocket diary, this entry has indeed kept Papa with me for the last thirty years. I have hoped to revisit it, I have hoped to understand it more fully, I have hoped it might hold something more for me. I have hoped, each time I sit down to write, that I might one day compose something as spare and perfect and beautiful. But mostly I have hoped to be like Papa because I will never see him again. I will never see him again, even if he is just behind me, over my shoulder.

Thursday May 29

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I had hoped to go there
and see my beloved
people on the other side,
But the World War, and
my bad luck kept me
from it.

It is now my sole aim
to keep my dear mother
comfortable for the rest of her
life.

——————-

I’ve wondered before if Papa’s father’s death would “spoil” the idea of visiting home for him, and the resigned tone of this entry makes me think that might be the case. Without his father to anchor the image of his “beloved people on the other side,” his thoughts of home cannot sustain him as they once did.

It’s unusual for Papa to hold outside influences responsible for the course of his life, so I think we can see how profound and jarring it is for him to be stripped of the prospect of a family reunion in Sniatyn — only a global upheaval like a World War or an unseen force like “bad luck” could be responsible. I think this notion may actually help him feel less guilty about not making it back and not being able to do more for his family, though such resignation doesn’t suit him; perhaps his vow to take care of his mother is a way for him to withdraw from his foray into helplessness.

Friday May 30

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[no entry]

————————-

Papa was at the tail end of a forced week off from work on this day, a prospect he had dreaded since it gave him little more to do than think about his father’s recent death. Perhaps, though, the week off was good for him in a way; he wrote some beautiful words about his father a couple of days ago and, the next day, started to get a handle on his sadness by redoubling his commitment to helping his mother.

A bright spot on this day might have been the publication of an article he wrote the previous Monday for the Zionist weekly “Dos Yiddishe Folk.” I’ve discussed the article extensively in a previous post, but here’s the cover of the paper once again:

Meanwhile, the English-language New York Times ran a short wire story that Papa would have been far less excited to see in print:

HITLER WRITES A BOOK WHILE IN PRISON CELL; Tells Interviewer His Uprising Saved Germany From a Stinnes Dictatorship.

Papa obviously didn’t know Hitler was writing Mein Kampf or exactly what this article’s description of “postcards on sale everywhere with Hitler’s picture and evidence of the prisoner’s immense popularity” would one day mean. Still, it does remind us that whatever capacity for resilience he cultivates in the wake of his father’s death will be severely challenged twenty years hence when everyone else in his family dies at the hands of Nazi soldiers and, a few years after that, when one of his surviving sisters commits suicide. It also raises again the question of how someone could go through so much and remain, to the end, as generous of spirit, as forgiving, and as serene as Papa. The answers lie, perhaps, between the lines of his coming weeks’ entries, so we’ll have to watch them closely.

Saturday May 31

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Death (by John Donne)

Death be not proud though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so:
For those whom thou thinkest thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death; nor yet canst thou kill me
From rest and sleep, which but thy picture be,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow;
And soonest our best men with thee do go —
Rest of their bones and souls delivery!
Thou’rt slave to fate, chance, Kings and desperate men
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke. Why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we woke eternally,
And Death shall be no more; Death thou shalt die!

————————–

Matt’s Notes

Papa has tilted back and forth over the past few days as the urge to give in to despair over his father’s death has attempted to erode the integrity of his essentially optimistic, altruistic character. He has written, movingly, of his last moment with his father; he has suffered a bout of self-pity, but he has also countered with a surge of resolve; and today, he shows the clearest sign yet of his desire to master his grief, exploring and challenging death itself with the help of John Donne.

I don’t pretend to have any scholarly knowledge of Donne’s work (when I saw the T.V. adaptation of the memoir “Death Be Not Proud” in the 70’s, I thought the phrase was a statement of fact — “death is not proud,” whatever that would have meant, as opposed to a direct challenge to death’s pride — and even though I’ve since learned otherwise I’ve never been able to shake my “wrong” impression) though I certainly do think the famed poem above indicates a mixed relationship with the idea of death; does Donne truly mock it or does he kind of want to give it a try himself?

In any case, I think Papa reads Donne’s poem, at this moment in his life, as a rallying cry, paying more attention to its final line “Death thou shalt die!” than to its more ambivalent sentiments (the sure, bold hand with which he transcribes the poem conveys a sense of assertiveness, too, as opposed to tearful midnight weepiness.) While Papa is certainly not done mourning, this entry is a good sign, and shows us an interesting moment in his struggle to grieve without giving in to despair. He is deciding, bit by bit, that the best way to honor his father’s life is to live his own life well, and he’s letting us watch.

Sunday June 1

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Death (by Walter Savage Landor)

Death stands above me whispering low
I know not what into my ear;
Of his strange language all I know
Is, there is not a word of fear.

Remark

(Not thoughts of suicide prompt
me to write the above poems on death
I want to live and have no death plans,
But death claimed my father my
dearest friend and adviser,
so I copied the poems from my
book of lyrics.)

————-

Here Papa gives us another look at the deep and complicated process unfolding within him. Since his father died, feelings of despair and resolve, self-defeat and self-preservation, have sloshed back and forth in his head, combining to create something new, unfamiliar, and volatile. In the last few days, we’ve watched him slowly separate the mixture and attempt to put its more destructive components back where they belong, though in the process he is often surprised by their potency.

Papa’s need to deny any suicidal interpretation of his poetry choices is one by-product of his efforts. It never would have occurred to me to think he has “death plans,” yet he goes out of his way to assure us he doesn’t. Perhaps Papa doth protest too much? Did he, in transcribing poems that acknowledge the seductive temptations of eternal sleep, briefly think he’d prefer it to living with his own sadness? Was the notion so shocking and therefore so obvious to him that he thought it could not but occur to his readers as well?

Several days ago, Papa had a quick brush with pessimism and bemoaned his own bad luck and helplessness in the face of the world’s unfairness. Moments later, though, he recovered himself and vowed to keep his mother and family safe in his father’s absence, thus regaining a sense of command over his own life. I think the same kind of thing has happened over the past few days. He quoted Donne and Landor’s poems as rallying cries against death’s potential power to ruin our lives with fear and sadness, and in so doing forced himself to look at his own fear and sadness, to test himself against it.

The wording he uses toward the end of this entry — “I want to live and have no death plans, But death claimed my father my dearest friend and trusted adviser, so I copied the poems” — demonstrates a growing mastery over his grief. Not only does he literally say he wants to live on, it’s almost as if he says it as a counterpoint to his father’s death: “My father is dead, and though I loved him, I must remember I’m still alive.” It’s another demonstration of how he learned to steer himself through dark and unfamiliar waters by the light of his essential optimism and resolve.

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