October 22, 2005--Saturday Story: "A Tale of Two Cemeteries"

A Tale of Two Cemeteries

Between two cemeteries--that is the way I experienced much of my early life. As if enclosed by parentheses: one was my father’s family cemetery, Mount Hebron; the other, my mother’s family plot at Mount Lebanon. Just three miles apart, though they could have been located on different planets. I suppose I could have thought of this more expansively as a tale of two Mounts, but in truth it felt more like being pressed between the pincers of two parentheses.

My mother’s family, the Munes, arrived in the US in about 1912 from a shtetal town in central Poland, Tulowice. Her father, Laibusya Mune, was a paymaster in a forest. This was a job for Jews—they were trusted with the money, not the physical labor of cutting down trees. That was for the goyim! Grandpa Laibusya went into Warsaw each week to pick up the Zloties and brought them back to the forest to pay the men who cut down the trees and schlepped the logs to the river. With his wife, Frimet, he lived in a log house with his six children, including my infant mother. When the pogroms began in earnest, he began to make plans to leave. As with so many before him, he went on his own, established himself on the Lower Eastside, and then sent for the rest of the family. They settled within a community of other Polish Jews, most of whom came from the same part of the Pale of Settlement.

When in America, first they found a place to live, a store where to buy groceries, a butcher, and next, of equal importance, formed a burial society—a Landsmanshaftn, or a home town association. There was no time to waste—one never knew when it would come in handy. And indeed handy, so handy the cemetery has become through the years.

Even before finding suitable burial plots, the members of the Landsmanshaftn elected officers—a president, vice president, secretary, and especially a treasurer. Especially, since money would be involved—money to buy the plot and to pay for the “perpetual care” for the grounds beneath which the members would eventually reside. Also, the treasurer, because he had this great fiduciary responsibility, was paid. Perhaps as much as five dollars a year. And thus it was coveted and fought over fiercely, particularly as time went by and the annual fee was increased to 25 dollars (that was in 1978 dollars!).

The Tulowice Landsmanshaftn managed to strike a pretty good cemetery deal. Jews were arriving in New York in such numbers during the first two decades of the 20th Century, and dying at such a rate thanks to 1918 flu, that more and more farms in Queens were being converted into cemeteries. Mt. Lebanon, getting closer to the point, was founded in 1919. Perfect timing for the Tulowicians who got in on the ground floor. Actually, they managed to buy a reasonably contiguous cluster of 30 or so plots in a very desirable, hilly corner of Mt. Lebanon. Even with a pine tree nearby and a view of the new Interboro Parkway. To give you an idea of how desirable a spot, eventually Richard Tucker, the famous cantor turned Metropolitan Opera star came to occupy a nearby residence of his own as did Nathan Handworker, founder of Nathan’s Famous in Coney Island. So my family was in very good company. Exactly what they came to America for!

My father’s family, on the other hand, claimed they came to America from Austria, not from the Pale (although there are in fact no extant papers to prove this assertion). Of course from Vienna and well before those Eastern European shtetal Jews arrived with their cardboard suitcases. In fact, unlike the Munes, who had the good fortune to have an Irish immigration officer at Ellis Island convert “Mune” to “Mooney,” the Zwerlings needed no such transmutation—the German Jewish “Zwerling” was fine just as it was, thank you very much. Though hardly of the Our Crowd crowd, the Zwerlings prided themselves on the fact that they were born in America, owned their own house, and didn’t even understand Yiddish, much less speak it. So when it came to death and dying, they had a very different approach than the Munes.

The cemetery they selected and in which they bought real estate (and that is how they saw it—in real estate terms), Mt. Hebron, was formed by assimilated German Jews in the late 1880s. In contrast to the other Mount, where all the engravings on the original tombstones were in Hebrew, everything in Mt. Hebron was aggressively in English. The roads weaving among the graves were wider (Mt. Hebron families had cars), there were abundant parking places, the mausoleums were more elaborate and spacious, and they even had clearly marked and maintained bathrooms (I won’t begin to tell you about this situation at Mt. Lebanon).

However, though in all other ways they were such different kinds of families, they did share one thing in common—an absolute obsession with illness, dying, death, and above all their final arrangements. No one more obsessed than my father.

More about that in a moment—let me first tell you about how the Mooneys obsessed about their plot. During the spring and summer growing season, it felt as if we visited Mt. Lebanon almost every week. That qualifies for obsessive, particularly since at the time only Grandpa and Grandma Mooney were in permanent residence. You might well wonder why we went there so regularly. Simple-- to care for the grounds. True, there was “Perpetual Care” available, but neither the family nor the Landsmanschaftn as yet had the hundred dollars necessary to arrange for it. That would come later when Uncle Jake did well enough so that he could afford to underwrite it for all 30 plots. Even then, because of our shtetal-brains and experiences with pogroms and subsequently the Holocaust, we Mooneys were suspicious of institutions, including cemeteries (after all they too were businesses) and thus were congenitally incapable of trusting them to provide care perpetually (enough of us by then knew sufficient English to understand how long perpetual in truth was) much less trust the cemetery owners not to run off with the hundred dollars before the clock on perpetual ran out.

So that meant we had to care for the grave site ourselves. That actually meant I had to do it myself because I was the only male cousin lithe enough to work at ground level and handy enough to be trusted with the scissors and shears. In fact, I had a further credential—I was experienced in working the land, having arguably the most successful Victory Garden in East Flatbush.

In truth I loved this most important, first adult responsibility. And since none of us had the wherewithal to ever get to the Mountains during the hot weather, going to Mt. Lebanon was our version of a trip to the country. While I scooted among the tombstones, snipping away at the grass and weeds, my aunts (plural) and the uncle (singular) who drove us to the cemetery would sit on the bench nearby (that too took up a plot of its own and was thus a splurge for the family to pay for) and talked to Momma and Papa, telling them about what had transpired during the week. And there was a lot to tell since the family apartment was the site of a constant shuffle of relatives and friends from the Camps in Europe, the far country of New Jersey, and even the occasional refugee on the way to Palestine. For the latter, Aunt Tanna was always collecting money for their passage or to help them buy an ice box. All that was duly recounted. But since it all was in Yiddish (Mamma and Papa never learned more than a few words of English), I could gather only the gist of what they reported. My ears perking up, however, and my nearly non-existent Yiddish actually improving, when they talked about “That Rifka.” Not quite a relative, Rifka was something they referred to as a tramp. I was not at the time sure what that meant, but I did know it was not a good thing to be (until much later when I learned that it was in fact a very excellent thing to be!). This also represented my first delicious taste of schadenfreude.

My father’s obsession with his family’s cemetery was of quite a different sort. First of all, among the Zwerlings, he was in fact the only one fully preoccupied with the cemetery and related matters. To the others it was just “that place over there in Queens” where they might have to go, eventually. But to him it represented a very different order of reality. Again, in Zwerling tradition, it was more about real estate than visiting with the departed, reporting life’s quotidian events to their blessed souls. But real estate with a different twist. To him it was simply a matter of making sure there was a physical place for everyone entitled to be in the plot (him and my mother above all others—though he had no intentions of ever making use of his spot since he planned to live indefinitely). And that the arrangement of those places (read individual grave sites) were appropriately hierarchical. Proximity to the sire, Louis, his father, my grandfather, was, as it should be, where the hierarchy began, with the sons and their wives and the sisters and their husbands arranged in descending birth-order tiers. As the oldest, this of course meant my father would reside right next to his father, and so on.

If I could draw you a diagram of the full Zwerling Family Plot you would immediately see that the task my father set for himself was not so easily accomplished. If they had bought a plot with hierarchy and primogeniture in mind, they would have purchased something more in the shape of a pyramid. In the gridded-out reality of Mt Herron, purchasing a family plot in this anthropological configuration was impossible. So he had to work with what he was given, or was bequeathed by Grandfather Louis.

(In contrast, the grave-by-grave layout at the Mooney’s Mt. Lebanon plot was more vernacular, using some of today’s cityscape/landsite language, the eventual tombstones of the Mooneys, as more came to rest in peace there, were scattering among those of their landsman and thus represented quite faithfully how they lived their lives. And now how they would spend eternity--commingled together as well.)

Thus my father spent endless hours with the full plot outline inscribed on a large sheet of oak tag, and on it he drew a series of perfectly scaled grave-shaped rectangles, in various combinations and permutations until he had it as right as he could, considering the restraints imposed on his grand design by the unyielding parameters of the overall layout of the plot. (Thankfully, he had acquired the considerable skills required to do this as a former student at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute!) And when he had his plan worked out as appropriately as possible (appropriateness continued to be his goal), he made a final rendering, using a Tee Square, triangle, and draftsman’s indelible ink, and at a series of meetings with his brothers and sisters and their spouses, he got each to sign the rectangle assigned to them until all were duly filled in and signed off on.

And thus his work was done. . . . That is until his sister Madeline began to upset the scheme by marrying, killing off, and, most critically, burying her husbands in turn, one by one by one, in the Zwerling plot.

By the time Husband Number Three was interred, my father began to worry. Of course, as you would expect, knowing him as you do by now, he worried not so much about the perfection of his carefully crafted plan, but, in frankness, more about his own eventual fate. If Madeline kept up her current pace, by the actuarial time my father would need the full services of Mt. Hebron, if you get my meaning, there would no longer be room for him.

Thus, he convened a Zwerling full-family emergency meeting and laid out the issue squarely and frankly. Madeline was understandable distraught, having lost Murray just the previous week (he had jumped off the roof of their apartment building) and after all the shiva period had just ended (not that anyone observed it). But still my father was able to forge ahead and succeeded in mobilizing a majority of sibling and spouse votes to let Madeline know there were no more places for husbands. That is unless she was willing to relinquish her own plot. Or, perhaps she would prefer to have my father arrange to move one or two of her husbands to a different part of the cemetery. Considering her options, Madeline consented to no more husbands—more husbands to be sure, but no more burial places for dead husbands.

That should be the end of this story. I feel certain you will not be surprised to learn--not by a long shot.

As it turns out there was room for two more husbands and Madeline herself because my father, when his fateful time arrived, did not need his place in Mt. Hebron after all.

You may know that when a Jewish person dies, it is considered desirable that the person be buried as immediately as possible. The dust-to-dust imperative is very strong and thus the sooner the better. My father to be sure had arranged for a prepaid funeral, for him a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity during which he had the pleasure of shopping for his own casket and arranging for both the limos and the services (he wanted nothing involving a rabbi or anything whatsoever in Hebrew). But he hadn’t said anything prescriptive about Mt. Hebron—after all that was all taken care of: it was down on paper (or oak tag) in indelible black and white.

He hadn’t considered that my mother might have a very different plan in mind—something even more indelible: During their entire 60 years together she had participated in literally hundreds of endless sessions about their plans for Mt. Hebron (or to put it another way, Mt. Hebron’s plans for them). She had only hinted to my father how much she hated the idea of spending the rest of eternity with THE ZWERLINGS. She dreaded the idea that she would not be near her own parents and her real family. She also dreaded the idea that she would have to spend all her perpetual time listening to THE ZWERLINGS arguing, all talking/shouting at the same time, forever. Literally, forever.

And so she told her sons, and then the funeral director, “Let’s put him in Mt. Lebanon.” Luckily there was still room. Again, in the informal shtetal ways of the Tulowice Landsmanscahftn, without an oak tag notarized plan, she was able to get her own remaining siblings to agree to find a space for him and one beside him for herself.

The only thing she felt at all guilty about was that this new arrangement placed him right next to his hated brother- in-law, Harry. (Actually, all things considered, maybe she didn’t really feel guilty about this either.) She knew, as a result, that there would be an eternal fight right there. But she also knew she would be in the warm vicinity of Mamma and Papa. And, being one place away from Harry, who cares, let them fight.