Do if you can, respond to Rabbi Bermans narrative, and to mine. It matters. Preface In 1963 I turned twenty-three years old and was a graduate student of English literature at New York University. I lived with my parents in Bergenfield, New Jersey, after moving back from a rented apartment in New York. I was looking for another apartment. There wasn’t room in my parents’ apartment; my two sisters shared a bedroom, my parents had a bedroom, and I slept on a sofa bed in the living room. It was a good garden apartment, two stories high, and we had the second floor. My Mother was apologetic about me sleeping in the living room. My Father, after many years of working for Gates Rubber Company and being, apparently, wretchedly underpaid, had taken a much better position at Goodall Rubber Company, and we now had two cars (one of them the company’s) and ate out at good restaurants. His job required frequent short trips around the United States and, although he had always dressed well, also required some truly upscale suits. In March I broke up with my long-term girlfriend and so spent more time at home. I read constantly as I always have, and formed an idea for a novel of college life. It never really came together in my mind, but I told friends I was writing it, perhaps hoping that they would ask to read some of it and I might be pressured into writing. My graduate courses were interesting and really did not pose any kind of challenge as far as succeeding in them was concerned. I had some money I’d earned as a mailman over the previous summer, had met a girl I was much drawn towards, and except for my lack of an apartment, things were going well. But that month, on a business trip to Texas, my Father had a heart attack. My Father was treated in a hospital in Texas, given pills, and took a plane back the next day. His doctor in New Jersey assured him it was a very mild heart attack, and he could, after a week’s rest at home, return to work. My Father was, of course, worried. A month after his first heart attack in Texas, he had a massive attack at home. His doctor was on vacation and the doctor supposedly covering for him decided, on the basis of my Mother’s telephone call to him, that treatment could wait until morning. I called my Father’s cousin in New York, an internist, who rushed out to Bergenfield, but about ten minutes after he had arrived and ordered an ambulance, my Father had another attack and died. My Mother and I were awake throughout this. My sisters were asleep and for about two minutes refused to believe that our Father was dead. Then there were many telephone calls, many tears, and great confusion. My Father was only forty-eight years old when he died. It remains difficult for me to write about a man so complex. In a way, he seems very young, seen from my own seventy-plus years. He grew up and matured in a world drastically different than mine. Our children cannot really imagine a world without computers, the internet and their offspring. My parents grew up without air travel or automobiles for the middle class. Telephones were to be used sparingly, and private telephone lines were very expensive. There was indoor plumbing in cities. Radio existed, but not in people’s homes; the first commercial station went on the air in 1920. The world was much quieter. The rate of material change in the past two hundred years has certainly resulted in a great widening of the always present intergenerational gap, and the arguments and disputes between first and second generation Jewish immigrants have been well recorded. It is too often attributed to secular American culture and not explained enough by sheer technical change. My Father’s family, like most Jewish immigrant families (his parents arrived from the Ukraine in 1900), settled in New York City. My grandfather had been a shoemaker in the Ukraine, apparently a successful one, and was able to start a slipper manufacturing operation and make some money. He and his wife were cousins; it was not a brilliant marriage, by all accounts. Old country Judaism was entirely abandoned. There were no mezuzahs on the doorposts; my grandmother’s religious observance consisted of spitting in the street whenever she saw a priest or a nun. But until he was in his teens, Father’s family was well off, and Father and his sister attended N.Y.U. Their younger brother grew up after the family had lost its money in the 1930s and attended CCNY. I don’t know if my Father graduated from the university, but think not. He was widely and wisely read, and an excellent writer. It was a time when everyone had to take whatever work was available. Judging by the college texts in the oak, glass-doored bookcase that moved about with us, he had studied history, sociology and literature, and taken a course in short story writing. He worked as a salesman, and met my Mother, who worked as a bookkeeper, when he entered the office she worked in. It was 1938. They were married quietly and had to live apart for months because my Mother’s salary was crucial to her parents and she and they lived in Camden, New Jersey, and my Father worked out of New York. They were together weekends. Father did have college credits and somewhere learned enough about electronics that, when war came, he, at twenty-nine, joined the military as a radar technician of some sort and was sent to Greenland and later Britain. He had a courtesy officer rank in the navy and learned, in England, to drink tea with milk, and warm beer. After the war, Father worked for Sperry Gyroscope, an extension of the war work, and then for the Gates Rubber Company. He worked from a desk in the dining room, and so was home often. He sold industrial rubber products to industry. We lived, then, in Camden in the midst of my Mother’s family. It was the closest I have ever come to experiencing the community of an extended family. We lived towards one end of the one block long Belleview Avenue. At the other end lived my Aunt Min, Uncle Adolph, and their two daughters. In the middle, in a small apartment house, lived my grandmother and her second husband. Around the corner lived my Aunt Jerry, Uncle Herb, and their son Michael. Across from Aunt Min and Uncle Adolph’s house was Congregation Beth El, a large Conservative synagogue where my Mother worked as bookkeeper and secretary to the rabbi. The Orthodox Sons of Israel synagogue was half a block away. The neighborhood was very Jewish. In this milieu, my Father was the village intellectual. None of my Mother’s family had gone to college. My Mother and a few others in the area read popular fiction – romances and mysteries – and the newspaper. Uncle Adolph was the only one left who read the Yiddish paper. My Grandmother was unique in observing dietary laws. Father could write clear and well-balanced English. He read history and politics. He knew nothing at all about Judaism, but neither did anyone else, including those who went to religious services. It was easy for Father to catch up. He went to services, served on the synagogue board, and was elected and reelected President of the Men’s Club. As such, he sat on the stage with the Rabbi, Cantor, synagogue president, and generally someone else, perhaps the donor of the week. After a few years of this, he was named chairman of the synagogue’s education committee and was in charge of the religious school, hiring teachers and approving curriculum. At that point, he decided to learn the Hebrew alphabet and how to sound out words from printed texts. Many years later, when I was teaching at Bar Ilan University in Israel, a colleague who taught linguistics invited me to his apartment for a drink and showed me a letter he had saved from my Father discharging him as a Hebrew School teacher. My Father taught me a great deal about Judaism. He enrolled me (and my sisters, but they did not attend more than absolutely necessary to avoid punishment) in Hebrew School, which he always insisted be called religious school so as to minimize any conflict with Americanism. I loved it, as I generally love schools because I am very good at school. As a result, I learned Jewish history and the content of much of the Bible. More importantly, I learned to listen at the front door at six in the morning for the knock of the shammas who was rounding up a minyan, a quorum, for morning prayers. This only happened once a month or so, generally the quorum was present without us, but I learned that community and taking care of the needs of others mattered. As part of Americanism, my Father also revived the synagogue’s dormant Boy Scout Troop. He was scoutmaster and took the troop on two-week camping trips in the summer. That is how my Father used his two-week vacation each year. Just as he bought us t’fillin (phylacteries) for morning prayers, he bought us Boy Scout uniforms. It was the 1950s. Americans were religious and American boys joined the Scouts. I liked Hebrew School and hated the Boy Scouts and running around in the woods and sleeping in a sleeping bag. (Ironically, I was, as very temporary acting scoutmaster to take the same troop, years later, on a two-week camping trip).
Posted on: Thu, 13 Feb 2014 08:15:42 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015