July 4, 2019--A Tale of Two Cemeteries (Concluded)

Mt. Hebron

My father’s obsession with his family’s cemetery, however, was of quite a different sort.  

Among the Zwerlings, he was the only one preoccupied with the family plot.  To the others it was just that place in Queens where they might eventually have to be taken after marrying off the children and retiring to Florida.  But to him it represented a different order of reality.  Again, in the tradition of the Zwerlings, it was more about real estate than visiting the departed and reporting to them life’s quotidian events. To him it was a matter of being sure there was a physical place for everyone entitled to be there. And that the arrangement of those places, the individual gravesites, were appropriately hierarchical.  

Proximity to the family patriarch, Louis, his father, my grandfather, and mother-grandmother, Anne, was, as it should be, where the hierarchy began, with the sons and their wives and then the sisters and their husbands arranged in descending tiers by birth-order and gender.  As the oldest, the first-born male of a first-born father, this meant my father would reside right below his father and mother, and so on down the Zwerling family tree.

An awareness of the shape of the Zwerling family plot would immediately see that the task my father set for himself was not easily accomplished.  If they had been able to purchase a plot with hierarchy and primogeniture in mind, they would have bought something more in the shape of a pyramid.  But in the gridded-out reality of Mt Hebron, obtaining a family plot in this configuration was impossible.  So my father, the arranger, had to work with the rectangle that was bequeathed to him by his father, Grandfather Louis.

He spent endless hours with an outline of the full plot inscribed on a large sheet of oak tag, and within it, using an architect’s T-sqaure and triangle, drew a series of perfectly scaled grave-shaped rectangles, in various combinations and permutations until he had it laid out as appropriately as he could, considering the restraints imposed on his grand design by the unyielding boundaries of the family plot.  And when he had his plan worked out as much as possible in primogeniture order, he made a final rendering, using draftsman’s indelible ink; and at a series of family meetings with his brothers and sisters and their spouses, he got each to initial the rectangle assigned to them until all were duly filled in and signed off on.

And thus the responsibility his father bequeathed to him was done. . . .  

That is until his sister, my Aunt Madeline began to upset the scheme by marrying a series of husbands who in turn died shortly after each wedding, and, most critically, were buried, one by one by one, side-by-side in the Zwerling plot. 

By the time Husband Number Three was interred, my father began to worry.  As you by now would expect, he worried not so much about his carefully crafted plan, but, in frankness, more about his own eventual disposition. If Madeline mainatined her current pace, by the actuarial time my father would need the final services of Mt. Hebron, there would no longer be room remaining for him.

Thus, he convened an urgent Zwerling family gathering and laid out the issue squarely and frankly. Madeline was understandably distraught, having lost her third husband, Morty, just the previous month. He had jumped off the roof of their apartment building—it was well known that she was not easy to live with.  

But in spite of Madeline’s grief, with at least the appearance of sympathy, 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 at Mt. Hebron for subsequent 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 agreed that though there would likely be more husbands (that was not open to family discussion) there would be no more places for additional deceased husbands. 

That should have been the end of the story.  But again there is more.

As it turned out, there would be room for two more husbands because my father, when his time arrived, did not after all require his place in Mt. Hebron. Nor would my mother.

Read on.

When a Jewish person dies, it is considered desirable that the person be buried as quickly as possible.  The dust-to-dust imperative is very strong indeed and thus the sooner the better. As might be expected, to expedite the process, my father had arranged for a prepaid funeral. For him it was also an opportunity to shop for his own casket and arrange for the limousines and memorial service, including that there be nothing that involved a rabbi or any prayers in any language—he was an outspoken lifelong atheist. 

His place next to his father’s side at Mt. Hebron awaited, but my mother had a different plan in mind—something more indelible than the ink he had used to make the oak tag diagram.

During their 60-year marriage, she had participated in dozens of discussions about Mt. Hebron. Or, to put it more appropriately, my father’s plans for them at the Zwerling plot.  She had only hinted to my father how much she did not look forward to spending eternity with The Zwerlings.  It was an era when wives hinted at things that concerned them. She, in truth, dreaded the thought that she would not be with her parents and her real family.  She also hated the idea that she would have to spend her afterlife listening to the Zwerling arguing, talking simultaneously at the top of their voices, literally forever.  

And so she directed my brother and me, and then the funeral director--“Let’s put him in Mt. Lebanon.”  

Luckily there was still room.  Again, in the informal shtetl ways of the Tulowice Landsmanscahftn, without the existence of a notarized plan, she was able to get her remaining siblings to agree to find a space for him and one beside him for her.  

She did feel some guilty that this new arrangement placed him right next to his family rival, brother-in-law Harry.  They had been in a series of failed businesses together and had not only fought about money but about such things as how many spare light bulbs to have on hand—my father thought six were enough; Harry always believed in buying by the gross. She knew, as a result, that there would be an eternal fight right there at Mt. Lebanon. About light bulbs and also who was at fault for driving customers away from their last deli. (She personally blamed my father.) 

But she also knew she would be in the warm vicinity of Mamma and Papa. And, when her time came, being separated by my father from Harry, would bring her more peace than she was accustomed to in life. 

In any case, she assertively said--"Who cares. Let them fight."

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