August 9, 2017--World of My Uncles

I've been rereading Irving Howe's brilliant World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life they Found and Made.

I read it when it was first published 41 years ago, but now, at this late(r) stage of my life, it is more meaningful.

My maternal grandparents made that journey in 1913 from Poland to New York City. Years later, still a child I heard harrowing stories about their life of struggle in the shtetl of Tulowice and the bloody pogroms that swept over them and convinced them it was time to leave before it became more than just bloody.

I knew my grandfather came first and managed somehow to save enough money working as a baker to send, two years later, for my grandmother and their five children, including my then five-year-old mother.

I knew they began life in America in a cold-water, one-bedroom apartment in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and then after a number of years moved to a more wholesome and spacious flat in pre-hipster Brooklyn.

I knew that two of my aunts were active in the garment workers union and as suffragettes marched proudly and frequently in support of women's right to vote. This finally was possible as the result of the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.

I knew that my mother trained to be a teacher and with "Mooney" as her last name (Mooney, substituting for Munya, was assigned to them at Ellis Island by an Irish immigration officer) and with her blue eyes, she was able to "pass" as gentile and thereby find a teaching job in the NYC public school system, at that time controlled and largely populated, again, by the Irish.

But I knew nothing of their inner lives, especially what they believed and hoped for other than that their children and grandchildren would have "a better life." If by that they meant economically, all managed to do so.

But with World of Our Fathers echoing within me, evoking memories I had not for decades revisited, more of those inner realities are becoming clearer to me. Including my own spirit as, I suppose, I too have been passing.

For example, I learned from Howe how most immigrants experienced three simultaneous dislocations--they left their homes and emigrated to new ones in America; they needed to find ways to support themselves--most had lived rural lives and now needed to become viable in a city of strivers; and under pressure to Americanize they largely abandoned religious orthodoxy and over time even the embracing and comforting culture of Yiddishkeit.

And so what were they left with beyond hoping for better lives for their children?

Taking the place of Judaism itself and the security that Yiddish culture offered, they turned to Zionism (calling for a homeland for Jews in Palestine), unionization (to improve working conditions), and then Socialism and for many Communism (to heal the world).

And they also began to shape a new culture for themselves that centered around Yiddish poetry, folk stories, and theater.

On reflection I now understand better what my extended family, especially my Uncle Morty was urging. This was not always easy to infer as he spoke mainly Yiddish, English haltingly, and I spoke English, with a little halting Yiddish.

He would place me beside him on his collapsing sofa and read in Yiddish Sholom Aleichem stories that appeared in the newspaper, the Jewish Daily Forward (affectionally referred to all as the Forverts). He knew of course that the Yiddish was beyond my capacities but I am certain now that he cared more that I absorb the sound and comfort, the soul of that hybrid language than follow the thread of Aleichem's simple narratives.

And then, in his halting English, he would read to me from the other paper he took, The Daily Worker. In this instance he cared less about the intricacy of its Communist orthodoxies than he wanted me to take in some of its fervor.

So now, rereading World of Our Fathers I understand better Yiddish critic B. Rivkin, who Howe quotes--

A huge mass of potential readers was gathering in the cities. Even if they hadn't wished to, they really had no choice but to learn Yiddish. It was the only language that could gradually lead them into the life of the new country. . . . They felt themselves lost in a "desert" where men seemed like grains of sand and the new language, English, was difficult to learn. So they naturally turned back to Yiddish. . . . Even complete illiterates--and there were quite a few among the early immigrants--as well as the many half-illiterates, who could spell out a few words in the Hebrew prayer books, now troubled to learn the alphabet in order at least to be able to read a daily Yiddish paper. 

Even more, I now understand Howe--

Is there anything comparable in the whole modern period? An uprooted people, a broken culture, a literature releasing the crude immediacies of plebeian life, a once provincial in accent and universalist in its claims. As their lives fell into routine, the Jewish immigrants displayed strong if primitive cultural appetites. 

And especially the final word from Rivkin--

Poems and stories helped them to understand their new environment . . . and most of all themselves. They sought in literature the same thing they wanted in a newspaper: a way of becoming somewhat less of a "greenhorn," a way of escaping a little from their loneliness. And when a poem and story gave them a certain enlightenment about mankind in general, the greenhorns began to feel they were becoming a little Americanized.

In a different mode, tomorrow I will post a story I wrote some years ago about Uncle Morty's other life.

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.