We visited my mother on Sunday at Mt. Lebanon Cemetery. It was a little more than five months since her death. It was a beautiful, unseasonably warm day and she was at rest amid the graves of her parents, among her bother, sisters, and their spouses, and next to my father.
Being there reminded me of earlier times at Mt. Lebanon. In truth, often happy, secure times for me when I was a young child. I wanted nothing more than, in one way or another, to be with my family.
I thought to share again something I wrote a few years ago about her final resting place, the family plot in Mt. Lebanon Cemetery--
Shuttling
between cemeteries is the way I spent much of my childhood. One was Mount Hebron, my father’s family’s
place of final rest; the other, my mother’s family plot at Mount Lebanon. Just three miles apart, in the borough of
Queens. It felt like being pressed
between the pincers of two grim parentheses.
My
mother’s family, the Munyas, arrived in the America in about 1912 from a shtetl town 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 went into 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 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 the street), and of at least
equal importance, they formed a burial society—a Landsmanshaftn, or a home
town 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 ground 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 influenza, 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 into 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.”
On
the other hand, the Zwerlings, my father’s family, claimed they came to America
from Austria, not from the downscale Pale in Poland (although there are in fact
no extant papers to prove this assertion).
Full of pride they boasted they were from Vienna, spoke German, and
arrived well before those Eastern European shtetal
Jews showed up at Ellis Island with their cardboard suitcases. In fact, unlike the Munyas, who had the good
fortune to have had an Irish immigration officer convert Munya to Mooney, the Zwerling needed no such transmutation—the German-sounding “Zwerling” was fine just as it
was. 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 understand Yiddish, much less speak it. So when it came preparation for dying, they
had a different approach than the Malones.
The
cemetery they selected and in which they bought real estate (that is how they
viewed it—as a real estate transaction), Mt. Hebron, was founded by assimilated
German Jews in the late 1880s. In
contrast to the other Mount, there were no burial societies, none of the
carving on the tombstones were in Hebrew--everything in Mt. Hebron was
ostentatiously in English--the roads weaving among the graves were wider (Mt.
Hebron families had cars), there was abundant parking, the above-ground
mausoleums were more elaborate and spacious, and there were even well-tended
restrooms.
However,
though in all other ways the Zwerlings and Mooneys lived cultural worlds apart,
they did share one thing in common—an absolute obsession with illness, dying,
death, and above all their final arrangements.
And no one was more obsessed with final matters than my father.
But
first I need to say more about how my mother’s family devoted themselves to
their sixteenth of an acre of American soil.
First, with a name like Mooney they had to convince the Mt. Lebanon
authorities and that they were in fact Jews and thus eligible to be laid to
rest in ground consecrated exclusively for people of the Old Testament. With their Irish-sounding name they were
suspected of being goyim and had to
show not only their Ellis Island papers but also those they brought along with
them from Poland that identified them as Munyas,
and thus Jews.
After
successfully making that case to the Mt. Lebanon council of rabbis and being
allowed to erect a tombstone with the gentile name “Mooney” chiseled on it,
they then needed to consider how to care for the plot itself. There was the “Perpetual Care” option, but
neither the family nor the Landsmanschaftn
as yet had the hundred dollars necessary to arrange for it. That would come later when Uncle Jac did
well enough and could afford to underwrite the tending of all thirty
plots. Even then, because of their
experiences with pogroms and subsequently the Holocaust, the 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 them by
then knew English sufficiently 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.
Thus,
during the spring and summer growing season, we went to Mt. Lebanon every
Sunday. Not to visit Grandpa and Grandma
Mooney, who at the time were the only ones in permanent residence, but to care
for the gravesite itself. As the
youngest and most agile that meant I was designated to crawl around among the
tombstones to pull weeds and cut grass with the pinking shears my Aunt Tanna
always had in her pocketbook.
Sitting
on the bench to supervise, her sister, my Aunt Fay, would watch with pride as I
scampered from head- to foot-stone, kvelling,
“Look at him, look at how little Steveala is clipping Papa’s grass and plucking
Mama’s weeds. He has such hands. With those hands one day he could be a surgeon,
be rich, and make everyone proud.”
At
her older sister’s words praising my skills and predicting my promising future,
my mother would swell with maternal satisfaction and say to me, “When I am
buried here, Steven, with the family, I know you will come to take good care of
me. And you will tell me about your own
wife and your own children and grandchildren.
And about your patients and their appendectomies. Just like I talk to
Mamma and Poppa.”
Though
this was more than I wanted to contemplate, any aspect of it—I was already
burdened at school with spelling and the six-times table--I nodded and
continued to clip away. I moved among the grass and weeds as if born to the
task, wielding the pinking shears, which I was told were the only scissors in
the family with enough heft to cut through thistles. So when I had completed my pulling, chopping
and cutting with those slotted shears it looked as if the grass had been
Marcelled. As a result, the Malone wavy gravesite
was reputed to be the envy of the two burial societies that owned adjacent
plots.
In
truth I loved this first adult responsibility.
And since none of us had the wherewithal to ever get to real mountains
during the hot weather, going to Mt. Lebanon was our version of a trip to the
country.
While
I scooted among the tombstones, my aunts would sit on the bench and talk to
their Momma and Papa, telling them about what had happened during the
week. There was a lot to report since
the family apartment was the site of a constant shuffle of relatives and
friends from the Camps in Europe, distant New Jersey, and even the occasional
refugee on the way to Palestine. For the
latter, Aunt Tanna would collect money for their passage or to help them buy a
car or icebox. All that news was duly
recounted to my grandparents at rest nearby.
But since it was in Yiddish, I could gather little of what they reported. My ears perked up, however, and my nearly
non-existent Yiddish improved, when they whispered about “That Rifka. Not quite a relative but a distant cousin of a friend
of my grandparents, Rifka was someone they referred to as a nafke, which even with my limited
Yiddish I knew meant tramp. I made a mental note that when I was old
enough I would make an effort to meet that
Rifka.
My
father’s obsession with his family’s cemetery, however, was of quite a
different sort.
Among
the Zwerling, 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 Zwerling, 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 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 genealogy.
An
awareness of the shape of the Zwerling Family Plot would immediately see that the
task my father set for himself was not so 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
anthropological 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 triangle and ruler, 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
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 fate. If Madeline mainatined
her current pace, by the actuarial time my father would need the full 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.
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 Zwerlings arguing, talking simultaneously at the top of their voices, literally
forever.
And
so she directed the funeral director--“Let’s put
him in Mt. Lebanon.”
Fortunately 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 family tension 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 assertedly thought--Who cares. Let them fight.
Labels: Burial Societies, Family, Immigrants, Jews, Ladies of Forest Trace, Mothers, Mt. Lebanon Cemetery
