Preface: Since the Yomim Tovim should be a time of joy, I am suspending political and social commentary for the next few columns in favor of (hopefully) uplifting Judaica. This column is dedicated to my mother a”h in (advance) memory of her yahrzeit on 11 Kislev. L’shana tovah tikatevu!
My maternal grandfather was a Torah scholar, as was his father, whose Hebrew name I bear, Dovid Leyb. They made their living, however, doing carpentry in the Polish town where they lived. In time, Zeydie’s brother, my great-uncle Hyman, emigrated to America and persuaded Zeydie to join him. After an unusual episode in which Zeydie went back to Poland to see his parents and was trapped by the outbreak of World War I – so that it was nearly a decade before his return to America, during which time my mother and her two younger sisters were born – he became an American citizen and brought over my Bubbie and their children in January 1930, scarcely a decade before the German invasion.
Besides the rigors of the Depression, life in New York was complicated by Zeydie’s delicate constitution. He could only digest white bread, for example, not rye or pumpernickel. Then he lost an eye in an industrial accident and was unable to work steadily. That was followed by a mysterious ongoing loss of weight. In desperation, Zeydie got dressed on a Friday afternoon and instead of preparing for shul, took a bus or streetcar (I forget which) to Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, determined to live for the sake of his three youngest daughters (including Mom) who were still in school.
When he arrived, he was encircled by physicians, first and foremost the renowned diagnostician Dr. Lurie, who examined him and pronounced the diagnosis of an inside goiter. He ordered the staff to feed Zeydie the most fattening food available so there would be flesh for the doctor to cut through in surgery, and spent the night after the operation on a cot in Zeydie’s room in case of emergency. (Which doctor would do that now?) And to top off his humility, when Zeydie was on the road to recovery, Dr. Lurie shrugged off credit, saying it was G-d who had healed my grandfather.
When I was four years old, Zeydie fell critically ill again and was hospitalized with an uncertain prognosis. The entire family was upset, especially since the attending physician took the philosophical attitude, “He’s lived his life” (Zeydie was seventy years old at the time), implying that everyone should prepare for the inevitable. My mother, the fifth of seven siblings, was not so inclined. When she went to visit Zeydie in the hospital, she found a disheartening sight. He lay in bed enclosed in an oxygen tent, the glass eye that replaced the one he had lost in the accident resting on the nightstand beside him. He looked thin and gaunt and could barely speak above a whisper.
Unlike the case of the inside goiter, however, this time Zeydie didn’t exhibit the drive to recover. Mom felt a special closeness to him because she was named Syma after his mother, and she determined to supply the incentive with a daring gamble. When Zeydie appeared noncommittal and resigned to his fate, she said, “Papa, I need to you to be at Richard’s bar mitzvah. If you’re not there, I won’t make a bar mitzvah.”
My strictly Orthodox Zeydie objected. “Man muss [One has to],” he said in a weak voice.
Mom was insistent. “If you’re there, I’ll make the bar mitzvah in your shul. If not, no bar mitzvah.”
Talking it over later with my father, Mom admitted that she wasn’t entirely sure it would work, but they both agreed that associating his recovery with shul, where his heart was, would restore Zeydie’s will to live. Sure enough, he did recover and lived another eighteen years, long enough not only to be there for my bar mitzvah, held in his European-style shul with a balcony for women and the reader’s table in the center of the sanctuary, but to attend, with Bubbie, my junior high school graduation at Brooklyn College’s Walt Whitman Auditorium a year and half later. (By the time of my high school graduation, we had moved to Phoenix and had to settle for telephonic communication.)
Our story doesn’t quite end here. There is an illuminating postscript: Several months after being discharged from the hospital, Zeydie returned for a checkup. While he was there, he and the family learned that the doctor who had essentially pronounced his life was over had himself passed away at a considerably earlier age. As Mom said, people don’t die in chronological order.
