Al was an introverted techie-geek newshound with a sunny smile interrupted by frequent grumpiness, who practiced an American suburban version of the shtetl Judaism he was raised with in Berlin. At the funeral the rabbi commented how he would run into Al in the locker room of the swim club and discuss Torah and politics. Year after year their house was the center of the family's Pesach seder, where he and my dad would compete in davening the service in their Old World accents. Al met my aunt, also an immigrant, shortly after our family arrived in the States during the war. They raised 2 intelligent, handsome, successful sons, travelled all over the world, skiied, played tennis, biked and hiked well into their 70s, always enjoying each other's company. They were married 54 years.
My mother had no siblings. My father had one sibling. Both my grandfathers died before I was born. I have one brother and 2 first cousins (Al's sons). All grandparents are gone, both parents, and now my only uncle. An entire generation, which grew up under Nazi persecution and managed through wit and luck to flee to America, is passing into history, and because they often reacted to questions about their past with discomfort, and because my generation was reluctant to push and felt we had a lot of time, we have less of their history than we could have. We have lots of stories and old photographs and second and third cousins, which is more than many people get to keep of their parents' generation. But it isn't enough.
When did the naked anti-Jewish slurs begin from your public school teachers in Berlin? How was your first-generation Warsaw family treated by German Jews? How long did it take to decide you had to leave, and whose decision was it? How did you, a teenager, choose what to put into that one suitcase, when the family left for Paris in 1936 on a one-week visa, knowing they would probably never return again? How did you find a place to stay as illegal aliens in Paris, and how did you find work? What was it like to walk from Paris to Marseilles, sleeping by the side of the road and begging food from farmers, dodging bombs from German planes? During the long months after you had contacted the distant relative in Houston, TX, did you ever despair that the papers to emigrate to the United States would come through? If the Nazis hadn't arisen as a political force in Germany, would you have come to the States anyway, do you think? Was your father still religious during this time, and did you try to observe any Judaism, or did you put it all to one side until you were safe again?
When did you first hear about the extermination camps, and what did you believe? When did you see your first direct evidence of what you had escaped?
Did your ship actually get fired on in the Atlantic, or did you lay over in Trinidad on the strength of reports of mid-Atlantic fighting? Did you ever think about settling there, or were you determined to make it to New York? Did you come in at Ellis Island? What did you think when you first saw the Statue of Liberty? What did you think of American Jews? Were you worried about the cousins still in Paris? As an American soldier back in Europe with the Occupation forces, how did you feel about the people you had escaped and then helped conquer? Did it bother you that you never got to see any fighting, or did you feel you got enough action as a kid? Did it bother you that huge chunks of your childhood and youth were stolen by persecution and war?
What went through your mind when - as a prosperous American tourist long after the war - you travelled through checkpoints to see your old apartment block in what had become East Berlin?
During my father's illness 2 years before, and for some time after his death, I kept Leon Weiseltier's memoir, Kaddish, by my bedside and dipped into it at random (which may be the best way to approach that dense and ornery journal). I'll let Weiseltier, whose father was also a Holocaust refugee of Polish Jewry, have the last words:
An elderly gentleman with a fine mustache was called up to the Torah. He uttered the blessing in a thick Galicianer accent. It was exactly my father's accent. These accents have a kind of talismanic effect on me: they whisk me to another time and place, they mark my distance. These accents are a shorthand for displacement and destruction, for resilience and a multiplicity of resources, for the span of the Jewish journey. I cannot imagine Jewish life without the music of these accents. But soon they will be gone. Soon we will be entirely on our own. Then we will see.
[Weiseltier visits his father's grave for the unveiling.] It was not the sight of my father's grave that caused me to lose control of my sadness. it was the sight of the old men huddled against the wind, the old men in their caps and coats, who had come to bury one more of their own, to hearken to one more prayer for one more dead, the firm, selfless old men with the accents and the histories, my exhausted and inexhaustible elders, unmoved agains by the gusts. They are getting to their end, I thought, and I loved them, and I wept.
Alfred Weiss, Aryeh ben Moshe v'Pesha, zichrono livrachah.
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