July 3, 2019--Tale of Two Cemeteries (Part 1)

Mt. Lebanon

Shuttling between two cemeteries is the way I spent a significant part of my childhood.  One was Mt. Hebron, my father’s family’s place of final rest; the other, my mother’s family plot at Mt. Lebanon.  Just three miles apart, in the borough of Queens.  It felt like being pressed between two grim pincers.

My mother’s family, the Munyas, arrived in America in about 1912 from a shtetl in central Poland, Tulowice.  Her father, Laibusya Munya, was a paymaster in a forest.  This was a job for Jews—they were trusted with the money but not the physical labor of cutting down trees.  That was for the goyim. 

Grandpa Laibusya travelled to Warsaw each week to pick up 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, my eventual grandmother, he lived in a log house with his six children, including my infant mother.  When the pogroms became more frequent and bloody, he began to make plans to leave. As with so many before him, he went first on his own to the New World, established himself as a baker on the Lower Eastside, saved money by existing on rye bread, and then when he saved enough 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.

They moved from apartment to apartment whenever the landlord raised the rent, but once they were all huddled safely in America, they found a more permanent place to live (a rent controlled third-floor walkup in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn), a store for groceries (Beckman’s, down the block), a butcher (Fleishman’s, next to Beckman’s), a fruit store (Willy’s, across Church Avenue), and of at least equal importance, they formed a burial society—a Landsmanshaftn, or a hometown association.  There was no time to waste—as my grandfather would say in Yiddish, one never knew when having a plot would come in handy.  

And through the years it turned out to be as he predicted--before I was of legal age more family members resided in Mt. Lebanon than Bensonhurst. 

Even before finding suitable burial sites, the members of the Landsmanshaftn elected officers—a president, vice president, secretary, and especially a treasurer.  Especially, since the treasurer was responsible for what little money there was—money to pay the cemetery the annual maintenance fee and to write checks for the “perpetual care” for the grass around and on the graves. Also, the treasurer, because of these fiduciary responsibilities, was the only one who was compensated.  At first five dollars a year.  And thus it was a coveted honor and contested fiercely, particularly as time went by and the annual stipend was raised to $25. Real money when a dollar was still a dollar.

The Tulowice Landsmanshaftn somehow managed to strike a good deal with Mt. Lebanon in spite of great demand-side pressure: Jews were arriving in New York in such numbers during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and dying at such a rate thanks in part to the unchecked diseases, that more and more dairy farms in Queens were being converted into cemeteries and plots were gobbled up as fast as pastures could be converted to graves.  

Mt. Lebanon was established in 1919.  Perfect timing for the Tulowicians who were able to get in on the ground floor during the year of the most virulent and deadly flu epidemic.  They were able to buy a reasonably contiguous cluster of thirty or so plots in a desirable, hilly, shady corner.  It came with a pine tree and a view of the new Interboro Parkway.  As evidence of how desirable a location, Richard Tucker, the famous cantor turned Metropolitan Opera star came to occupy a nearby plot of his own as did Nathan Handworker, founder of Nathan’s Famous in Coney Island.  So the family was in good company and assured of eternal upward mobility. 

Exactly what they had come to America for. The streets may not have been paved with gold, but to forever be across from the “biggest” tenor and the hot dog king showed that they had “arrived.”

Concluded Tomorrow