June 24, 2014--Cousin Henry-Hank-Henri

Cousin Hank ran out of lives on Sunday and his funeral is this morning.

He faced death so many times, including over the years being placed in hospice care but then reviving, that we came to take for granted every time he was sent to the ICU that this was just another example of Hank being Henry.

When he first joined the family, marrying Cousin Nina, he was introduced to us as Hank, a familiar form of his real name, Henry. But years later, when I came to know he was in fact Henri, these name variations made perfect sense. They were just another iteration of Jewish immigrant life--get anglicized so one could try to "pass," avoid quotas, maybe get into college, attempt to slip through life unscathed, and, if possible, eek out some measure of happiness.

Henry-Hank-Henri managed to achieve all of this while growing more in love with Nina over nearly 65 years.

To me, coming of age in post-World War Two Brooklyn, he was the only family exotic.

There were members of the family who came from Europe--my mother included--but they were Middle-European shtetl Jews, and we lived in a neighborhood among so many others that neither their Yiddishkeit, foods, customs, nor consciousness seemed out of the ordinary. Indeed, they and the lives they led were the ordinary.

Henry-Hank-Henri was to me anything but ordinary.

His English was German inflected, not Polish-Russian-polyglot English. He was from Austria, not an obliterated village "near Warsaw." He drank espresso black, smoked unfiltered French cigarettes, and during the din of family gatherings remained non-judgementally detached, puffing and sipping, taking it all in as if we were the exotics.

For a kid dreaming of getting away, of making something different of my life, I was not thinking about wandering around in the Pale of Settlement searching for my Polish-village roots but wanted something cosmopolitan. Not that I at the time knew what cosmopolitan was, but Henry-Hank-Henri had the aura of that difference and I spent a lot of time studying him.

Secretly, I tried black coffee (hated it) and, with candy cigarettes, practiced holding them between my second and third fingers as Henri did. I also took to ordering Compari and Soda--or as he would ask for it, "Compari-Soda," as an homage to him.

Sad to say, the last time we were together, for the first time I asked him questions about his earlier life, a life up to then I had only imagined and shaped for my own transgressive purposes.

What he shared did not diminish my own version of his life and genealogy.

He indeed was Henri.