I've made some progress looking for Uncle Jack. It's not very pretty and somewhat chilling.
I was never able to learn Uncle Jack's real story. Grandma said he "fell in with a bad lot." I think my father told me Jack's father wanted nothing to do with him but that Aunt Lil kept in touch with him in the 1930s.
Uncle Jack was arrested in Boston when he was young. Drove a car in a robbery, which he claimed he was not connected with.
In 1930, he was living with a wife and stepson in NY.
I found the stepson who died in 2005. His widow spoke to someone who is helping me, and said that he grew up in an orphanage and then on the streets before he joined the Navy.
This stepson had a son, who is not mentioned in his obituary.
That's three generations - father estranged from son, stepfather estranged from stepson, father estranged from son.
In a letter to the stepson's widow I wrote:
I think that, if my great-grandfather Mandel had everything to live over, he would have tried to find a way to reconcile with his son, and that in some way I am carrying the desire to make some healing of this breach.
Today, the 17th of Tammuz commemorates the day the Romans breached the walls of Jerusalem. Only today I realized that when we gave Sasha the middle name Yakov, we were also naming him after Uncle Jack (Jacob) Pezrow/Pesarevsky.
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In the Torah and Haftara readings today we read several things relevant to this post. Among them, from the Torah portion from Exodus 34, the thirteen attributes of G-d, ending with the idea that conduct is visited on future generations. But in contrast, the Haftara from Isaiah 55-56 ends with the notion that all who are scattered will be gathered. The woman from Georgia who is helping me wrote to me that we will find Uncle Jack's grave and his stepson's son. I pray this will come to pass.
ReplyDeleteWe found the stepson's son as she said. Now we are still looking for Uncle Jack's grave and to know when he died.
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