Saturday May 17

by


Again Sniatyner Shul,
evening sat down shivah
again

———–

Matt’s Notes

As mentioned yesterday, the Sniatyner shul was likely a congregation of Jews from Papa’s home town of Sniatyn that shared a house of worship with many other such immigrant congregations. Papa’s father was a teacher at the Talmud Torah (religious school) in Sniatyn, and would have been as well-known a figure as any small-town school teacher.

How many people in New York’s Sniatyner shul had known him, questioned him, admired or feared him? How many had heard stories about him from their parents, or had their own stories to tell of his advice, methods, and habits? How well did they know the tones of his voice, the look of his hand as he pointed at a page, the way he positioned his paralyzed arm? How many had sat beside him while he explained a difficult concept, nodded their heads, met his gaze? As Papa sat and said kaddish there on the Lower East Side, how many people consoled him, or kept their distance, or stole glances at him and thought to themselves, yes, I remember his father’s face?

photo of Papa's parents

—————–

Since Papa’s diary deals with sitting shiva at the moment, I should again mention that The Lower East Side Tenement Museum Web site has a good depiction of what the home of a mourning Jewish family would have looked like in the early 1900’s. Papa lived alone so his place wouldn’t have looked quite like this, but maybe it’s a closer approximation of what his sister Clara’s apartment looked like a few days earlier.

———

Update — May 19, 2007

A couple of editions of the American Jewish Yearbook from the early 1900’s say the Congregation Sniatyner Agudath Achim was located at 209 East Broadway between Clinton and Jefferson Streets. Papa would have walked about four blocks south from his apartment on Attorney Street to reach it.

Further update: 209 East Broadway is currently the location of the Primitive Christian Church. Reverend Rivera, the lead pastor there, tells me the spot used to be occupied by an establishment called Broadway Manor, a reception and meeting facility that catered to the Jewish community. I imagine that’s where Snityner Agudath Achim, among other congregations, held their services.

Image source: “Khaim Lib, the Talmud Torah [talmetoyre] ‘melamed’ [teacher] with his pupils.” Courtesy of the Yivo Institue for Jewish Research’s People of a Thousand Towns site.

Sunday May 18

by

Had Miriam in the house
due to the efforts of Badiner
got up from Shiva.

I had to go to the Barber in
order to appear at the Bris
that Nettie should not notice
and guess of our great loss.

Attended Bris with Badiner
and Philip, and dear fathers
name was given to the baby boy.

I am all upset and
can hardly find any
comfort.

———

Matt’s Notes

For seven days, Jewish law has sanctioned Papa’s immersion in his grief. For seven days he has nursed an icy emptiness in his stomach, felt his limbs tremble, his eyelids drop of their own accord. For seven days he would go for hours without moving, then suddenly be struck with the urge to jump up, outrun the fact of his father’s death, pace around his apartment, only to realize he could not escape his loss and, weeping, set himself back down on a wooden box. For seven days he has scratched his unshaven cheeks, opened his door for friends and relatives, accepted their hugs and looks of concern and trays of cakes and plates of chicken and pots of soup. For seven days he has prayed, reflected, allowed himself to be borne away on waves of feeling and memory. For seven days he has buried himself with his father.

Today, though, the shiva ends, and it is time for Papa to rejoin the living. Incredibly, in a moment that would seem metaphorical if it were not real, he emerges from his week of dark mourning, gets a shave and a haircut, and welcomes his newly-departed father’s newly-arrived grandson into the world. Has Papa’s sister really been in the hospital with a newborn baby all this time? Has the baby really been waiting to take the name of the man who has been the object of Papa’s prayers? Could a week of shiva have a more unlikely, appropriate, or poignant ending?

On a more personal note, while I know Papa’s sadness is not over and his mourning will go on, I hope that I, too, can return to the real world after this week of shiva. I’ve noted before how, in spending so much time with Papa every day, my own moods often mirror his, and it’s never been more true than this past week. There is no way to read and think and write about the death of Papa’s father without thinking about the death of my own, no way to avoid comparison.

Like Papa, I was separated from my father in the years before his death, but not by an ocean, not by emigration forced on me by political and social circumstances. My father was separated from me by Alzheimer’s disease, a form that struck him early in life and removed him, by degrees, from himself and me before his condition had been diagnosed. I was young when his transformation happened, and in confusion and shame and frustration I forced myself to forget him, pretend he didn’t exist, until one day I learned he was dead and suddenly found myself wanting to mourn him properly, gather his friends, say kaddish by his grave, find some way to remember who he had been and not who he had become. By then it was too late, though. I’d become too good at forgetting to learn how to remember all at once.

And so, to dwell with Papa during this week of shiva, to witness his fitting and proper behavior, to watch him pay tribute to a father he struggled to remember and longed to see, reintroduced me to my own improper mourning, awakened the memories of a father I struggled to forget and loathed to see. Is there a way to properly mourn him now? Is that what this last week has been? Have I watched Papa mourn, mourned alongside him, immersed myself in grief in an attempt to learn how to do it right?

Monday May 19

by


Ran around this evening
to find and attending woman
for Nettie

—————-

Matt’s Notes

I’m not sure why it fell to Papa to find a nursemaid for his sister Nettie and her newborn son, but I suppose he was the best candidate since Nettie’s husband Phil didn’t speak much English and Clara, Papa’s other sister in New York, was busy with her own baby and didn’t have such a great relationship with Nettie, anyway.

While Papa’s willingness to help out Nettie wasn’t odd, this day’s circumstances certainly were — Papa still hadn’t told Nettie about their father’s recent death for fear of taxing her delicate, postpartum constitution. As he “ran around” that evening in search of her attendant, did he think about when he’d tell her, how he’d tell her, mouth the words as he rehearsed them in his head?

In any event, I expect it was pretty easy and relatively inexpensive for Papa to hire Nettie’s attendant (“I’m 100% sure that Papa paid for everything,” says my mother, adding “Poor guy, everyone depended on him.”) His neighborhood would have been full of women who were qualified midwives and nursemaids, since many Eastern European Jewish immigrants of the early 1920’s still adhered to the at-home birthing traditions of the old country (hospital births, while not a new innovation, wouldn’t be considered de rigueur in the immigrant Jewish community for many more years.) 1 Papa probably found someone just by knocking on a few doors or getting a recommendation from one of the landsmanshaftn.

——————

References

1 – “Modern Obstetrics and Working-Class Women: The New York Midwifery Dispensary, 1890-1920” by Nancy Schrom Dye. Journal of Social History, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Spring, 1987), pp. 549-564

Tuesday May 20

by


Took Nettie home from
hospital, She is suspicious
that our father is no more
but for the present I’m
trying talk her out of it.

I hired a woman for
a week to attend Nettie
at home.

Last night and tonight I
said Mishnayes at the
Synagogue across the street
I’m broken in spirit.

——————

Matt’s Notes

Papa’s efforts to keep his sister Nettie from learning about their father’s death continues to be a strange subplot in this story. Nettie had already, at their mother’s request, named her newborn son Josele after their father (Joseph) and traditional Jews don’t name children after the living — there’s absolutely no way their mother would have suggested it if their father were alive. So, I’m not sure how Papa explained their mother’s wishes to Nettie, unless he told her some other relative — a distant cousin in the old country with a similar name, perhaps — had died.

Still, if she was “suspicious” she must have asked Papa flat out if their father was dead, so it’s hard to imagine how he could “talk her out of it,” especially since he was feeling so disoriented. Maybe they had a mutual understanding (he knew that she knew that he knew, etc.) and decided not to acknowledge it. She did, after all, have a newborn child.

————-

Update 5/21

Carol, a reader, writes:

I , too, was puzzled about the fact that Nettie did not know that her father had died, but yet they named the baby after her father. One thought that I had was that at that time I think that it is possible that the mother was not present at the actual Bris and naming…that it was done by men with no women present at the ceremony. If that was the case, then they could have kept the news and the actual name from her. Just a thought.

Wednesday May 21

by

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.

Thursday May 22

by

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.

Friday May 23

by

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.

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