It's that time of year - unbelieveably nine years have passed, and I'm of course thinking about Sylvia Kacal, z"l, my mother in law, whom I knew for too short a time and who will always be with us.
And I'm thinking about connections and about a piece a friend posted on facebook, about unfriending someone before facebook. Many people found this funny, but I found it sad.
I feel like the greatest blessing in my life is that I continue to have people from all parts of my life and all kinds of connections with me. That I can quote something I said 25 years ago in my status and have my friend say "I remember that moment." I want every day to be worthy of this blessing, so I work to stay in the game when things get difficult with friends, or when I'm going against what is easy to build connections with my Israeli relatives. When I realized my 3rd cousin was living here in this town, and when my kids' 4th cousin was born here, I felt like G-d was somehow bringing things back together again.
It's my lifetime wish to find out where my Uncle Jack is buried and to be able to go to his grave and say I'm sorry for the break in our family. And when I connect on facebook with my young cousin Jake or my cousin Andrew who brought us so much information about our family tree, I feel like all my ancestors are smiling on me. It is such a huge privilege to be part of this world where we can be reconnected and where people don't have to disappear.
As hard as it may be sometimes to stay in the game - with family, friends and community - I don't want one more disconnect. I want this whole life to be about connecting the dots, about keeping the strands woven. I can see the past - quite a few miles back - and I am grateful for this present.
About the verse - Eleh Toldot Shamayim VaAretz - these are the generations of heaven and earth - I said last week that these are the people who are in heaven, who are always with us, and the people who are here on earth. Let us always be connected.
Showing posts with label uncle Jack. Show all posts
Showing posts with label uncle Jack. Show all posts
Sunday, October 14, 2012
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Thoughts after one year - in memory of Lucas
Today is Ash Wednesday. Yesterday was Mardi Gras - Carnival Tuesday - the day that Lucas died.
I can't believe it has been one year. My heart is with Sophie, Eddie & Kayleigh and all the family.
Thank you to everyone who has helped Alen & me and our kids during this year.
Two books I read this summer and fall helped a lot. One was "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" - a book of interviews by Studs Terkel. It's lots of different perspectives on death, loss and faith. The other is "Does the Soul Survive" by Rabbi Elie Spitz.
I spent almost two weeks in California at the end of January and beginning of February. I had not been there in 30 years. Everywhere I went I was welcomed by people I know from all parts of my life - from grade school, from my college days, from my first year in Israel in '83-'84, from rabbinical school and from these past 11 years in Israel. I also met new people - including my 3rd cousin and 3rd cousin once removed and his wife.
My cousin Andrew the genealogist gave me a gift - the marriage certificate of my great uncle Jack. It turns out my uncle Jack married his wife Edith exactly two weeks after my grandparents got married, on Sunday, April 28, 1929. (Or maybe it's the 23rd - the date is hard to read - the 23rd would make more sense if it was a civil wedding at an office not open on Sundays.)
My grandparents were married April 14, 1929 in Sharon, MA. In California I saw several people who are connected to Sharon and decided that all roads lead to Sharon - the place where my grandparents married and are buried.
I also saw and felt many other things connected to the past - to the Holocaust especially.
I came back feeling that if I can go 9000 miles away to a place where I have not been for 30 years and experience so many amazing connections from so many times, then there really is no time and no space and no distance.
When Lucas died the song that kept coming to me was the Sweet Honey In the Rock song, Listen More Often. You can find it on this blog if you search the Lucas tag - it's the first song I posted when he died. I'll probably make a new tag for loss as well. The song says "The dead are not under the earth" and it's something I believe more every day.
Sending lots of love to everyone who reads this.
Gail
I can't believe it has been one year. My heart is with Sophie, Eddie & Kayleigh and all the family.
Thank you to everyone who has helped Alen & me and our kids during this year.
Two books I read this summer and fall helped a lot. One was "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" - a book of interviews by Studs Terkel. It's lots of different perspectives on death, loss and faith. The other is "Does the Soul Survive" by Rabbi Elie Spitz.
I spent almost two weeks in California at the end of January and beginning of February. I had not been there in 30 years. Everywhere I went I was welcomed by people I know from all parts of my life - from grade school, from my college days, from my first year in Israel in '83-'84, from rabbinical school and from these past 11 years in Israel. I also met new people - including my 3rd cousin and 3rd cousin once removed and his wife.
My cousin Andrew the genealogist gave me a gift - the marriage certificate of my great uncle Jack. It turns out my uncle Jack married his wife Edith exactly two weeks after my grandparents got married, on Sunday, April 28, 1929. (Or maybe it's the 23rd - the date is hard to read - the 23rd would make more sense if it was a civil wedding at an office not open on Sundays.)
My grandparents were married April 14, 1929 in Sharon, MA. In California I saw several people who are connected to Sharon and decided that all roads lead to Sharon - the place where my grandparents married and are buried.
I also saw and felt many other things connected to the past - to the Holocaust especially.
I came back feeling that if I can go 9000 miles away to a place where I have not been for 30 years and experience so many amazing connections from so many times, then there really is no time and no space and no distance.
When Lucas died the song that kept coming to me was the Sweet Honey In the Rock song, Listen More Often. You can find it on this blog if you search the Lucas tag - it's the first song I posted when he died. I'll probably make a new tag for loss as well. The song says "The dead are not under the earth" and it's something I believe more every day.
Sending lots of love to everyone who reads this.
Gail
Saturday, November 5, 2011
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.
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.
Monday, July 18, 2011
The 17th of Tammuz - Repairing the Breach
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.
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.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Uncle Jack found
For those of you who followed the family history thread, I do feel I have been remiss in not reporting that my new found cousin Andrew (from my grandfather Julius's side) found my missing great Uncle Jack (from my grandmother Zena's side) in a 1930 census, living in New York, and married to an English woman named Edith who had a son, Robert Anglin. Oh how I wish I could find Robert - he was 6 in 1930 - he would be now 87 if he's still alive. Edith was from England, probably not Jewish, thus perhaps the reason for the estrangement.
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Great Uncle Jack - gone but not forgotten
My grandmother had a brother who disappeared. His name was Jack - he was older than her, her closest age sibling. He had three sisters, of whom my grandmother was one. My aunt Lil was the oldest, next came Vera, who died at the age of 46 I think, the mother of my dad's cousin Clifford, then was Jack, then my grandma Zena.
One of the last times I saw my grandmother I wrote down some of what she had to say about Jack, but I'm not sure where that got to - I think it's with the stuff I left in the states because I could not bear for it to fall off a boat and instead I have no idea where it is.
What I remember - Jack went out west to fight Pancho Villa. He "fell in with a bad lot", according to Grandma, and at some point became estranged from his family. My dad says my aunt Lil was in touch with him up until about 1935 - he would have been born just before the turn of the century.
I've thought to look and only just recently tried to look - for some record of him, with no luck. There are just a few death records for Pezrow I could find online - only my aunt Grace and my great grandparents Mendel and Pearl. Not even my uncle Ken. I don't know if Uncle Ken remembered Jack - Grandma certainly did but she never expressed to me an active desire to know what had happened to him. That is, she never went looking for him.
If you know more about Uncle Jack or have ideas about how to look for him, let me know!
One of the last times I saw my grandmother I wrote down some of what she had to say about Jack, but I'm not sure where that got to - I think it's with the stuff I left in the states because I could not bear for it to fall off a boat and instead I have no idea where it is.
What I remember - Jack went out west to fight Pancho Villa. He "fell in with a bad lot", according to Grandma, and at some point became estranged from his family. My dad says my aunt Lil was in touch with him up until about 1935 - he would have been born just before the turn of the century.
I've thought to look and only just recently tried to look - for some record of him, with no luck. There are just a few death records for Pezrow I could find online - only my aunt Grace and my great grandparents Mendel and Pearl. Not even my uncle Ken. I don't know if Uncle Ken remembered Jack - Grandma certainly did but she never expressed to me an active desire to know what had happened to him. That is, she never went looking for him.
If you know more about Uncle Jack or have ideas about how to look for him, let me know!
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