What Dad Wrote Me in 1983

Here's some excerpts from two letters I treasure that Dad wrote me in 1983, when I was in Israel for the year. The letters are on two airletters, so there aren't really paragraphs:

My grandfather Burstyn was, I suppose, nominally Orthodox (he was once a mashgiach (is that the word? Kashrut supervisor) on Hamburg-America line ships to the U.S. But I don't recall that they even kept a kosher home when I knew them or went to services. My father essentially gave up Jewish ritual after his bar mitzvah, moving instead into the kinds of Jewish socialism that led to the State of Israel (Mapai) as well as to Bolshevism. He was, I believe, a member of the Arbeiter Ring in his youth in the US. I never heard him utter a word of Hebrew (except maybe the Shma), and I doubt that he would have even joined a synagogue had my mother not come from a religious family. So the religious behavior of my family was conditioned by my mother - - I expect this is true for most families. We did not belong to a synagogue until after my grandfather died in 1940. Before then holidays revolved around the Pezrow...house.

Remember that Aunt Vera lived downstairs with her husband Henry Goldsmith and their son Clifford, in what had been a one-family house, and that Aunt Lil, unmarried, lived at home, as I guess did Uncle Ken until he was married in 1939. My grandfather was a pillar of one of those small, Orthodox synagogues that had never built more than the basement, as short a walk in one direction from his house as his grocery store was in the other. I'll show you the neighborhood sometime if you like. The synagogue had no rabbi in my time, because, my grandfather told me, any of the men could conduct the service and the rabbi was needed only to teach the children, who were then (ca. 1938) all grown up. They did have a cantor, who probably had another occupation. Though I have only the vaguest recollections of going to that synagogue (one of Sukkot where I and some other little boys, also grandchildren, went into the succah with my grandfather who draped his huge tallit over all of us while he read something from a scroll or prayerbook), I obviously imbibed a lot of ritual behavior at that impressionable age...


...I can't remember where I left off. I guess I wanted to say that the rigid, unyielding, narrow orthodoxy of my grandfather could not survive the decline of persecution. And considering that he lost his eldest son (cut off for marrying a shikse [yiddish word for non-Jewish woman- ed.], a story so painful that my mother never told me about it-- [your mother] found out from my aunt before she died), it's not clear to me that his religion did anything for Jewish survival, thus rendering practically as well as morally dubious what I take to be the principal argument for Orthodoxy....

There's more which I'll put in another post. If you are reading this, please pray for more to be revealed about my great-Uncle Jack - the oldest son mentioned above. We've learned so much about him this year and understand more that this was a complicated story. I truly believe that my great grandfather Mendel Pezrow of blessed memory would have done it all differently if he had it all to do over again, and I pray that the coming year will reveal more - G-d willing leading us to know when Uncle Jack died and where he is buried. His birth date was August 1, 1898, and he is remembered in the names of my son Alexander Yakov and his second cousin Jacob. Thanks to the kindness of cousins and strangers, we know the name of the woman Uncle Jack married, Edith, that she had a son, and I've made contact with that son's son. May my great grandfather and Uncle Jack's memories be for a blessing.