Numbering Our Days

In Each Direction

March 27, 2024

Dad,

Last Friday, March 22, marked 41 years since a heart attack blew you out of this world in an instant on a cold, early spring morning.  Here one minute, gone forever.  I was 20 then and am 61 now, numbering my days as a Jew differently than you did, which, as far as I can tell, are the way things are supposed to be.  You counted the meaningful moments of your life in ways that diverged from the counting done by your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents – a privilege we all enjoy; a celebration, if you will, of our uniqueness, our singularity, of our own way-making in the world – and yet in my counting it seems, especially since you died, I am always counting backwards.

Back from me to you, to Grandpa and Grandma, to Chaim and Rebecca, to the nameless, faceless masses of our families who fled, were dispersed, assimilated and were lost, who were shot and buried in pits or whose souls rose up in the putrid flames and smoked offerings of the Holocaust.  Counting backwards.

Even as a child I can remember the realization that looking “forward” to something meant counting in reverse.  Ten days to go, nine, eight, seven and so on.  “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a wise heart,” wrote the Psalmist.  Whichever direction one counts, the real direction is found in the soul’s pursuit of wisdom.  The more years, the more wisdom, Rashi says.  The evidence of the timeline, to paraphrase Adin Steinsaltz, gives us enough material to work with when we are choosing right from wrong.

I often think back to you lying there on the ground, waiting for help to come, numbering your days.  I wonder if time moved slowly, if your whole life played before your eyes like those brilliant paced old movies we watched at the Oriental Theater on Farwell Avenue in Milwaukee, memories, like film, saturated in nostalgia; or if, as your heart collapsed, so too did your abacus of memory:  did everything go to pieces without a moment’s notice, never to be reassembled except by those of us who survived you?

Dad.  Father.  Pop.  Abba.  Monas.  Monas!  Monish in Yiddish, your great-grandfather’s name, your grandmother Rebecca’s father.  I’m not even sure you knew that and if you did, you never told me. To your friends growing up in the 1930s and early 1940s you were Monie and then Tony.  Only to your parents and your cousins were you Monas.  Your cousin Eileen, Billy’s sister, used to join us at our table at Benji’s and over salami and eggs tease you lovingly about your name.  “Monas is my favorite cousin,” she’d say to me.  “The smartest, the funniest, the most handsome.”  You rolled your eyes and shook your head.  Everyone knew you preferred Tony.  It felt so American, which was one of the ways you numbered, away from Jewish wisdom and toward your parents’ new country’s promise of individuation and success.  

But alas, you were already on the way down.  Down from the heights of network television ad-man and golf club partner; down from season tickets to all your favorite teams; down from marriage and the familiar hearth of home.  But you loved us, your teams, your Jewish food, your cigarettes and coffee, your ease with a puzzle and the respect of all your children’s friends who revered your wit, warmth and interest in their lives.  Even after hitting the bottom, working retail in a mall, my friends would stop by the store for advice, a joke, a pat on the back of encouragement because growing up anywhere is sometimes not that much fun.

When you died, my friends showed up to mourn you.  They all had fathers of their own whom they loved but you offered them a different paternal kinship they also cherished.  Receiving their support was testimony to the idea that your memory would live on; as recently as a few week’s at a friend’s son’s wedding, we told stories about you.  You are always in our hearts.

But in the time machine of my own building, I am also cognizant of a collective memory that could have died with you but did not.  And that’s because in spite of your own decision not to educate me in the ways and memories of our people, the Jewish people, I endeavored to educate myself.  Perhaps this was a decidedly late twentieth century thing to do.  Sociologists have long recorded the yearning of the fourth generation to recover a lost past.  Chaim and Rebecca fled to America with Grandma who raised you.  What you may or may not have known about our family in Kopyl, outside Minsk, who were among the 2965 Jews slaughtered by the Nazis and their collaborators in August 1942, was left for me to discover on my own in the summer of 2016, decades after you had died.  Whatever traumas Grandma bore and you may have inherited were mine to find for myself, shuddering in grief while saying Kaddish at the killing site on a maddeningly beautiful summer day.

I had already learned to count backwards in order to live looking forward.

I’ve kind of made a life of this.  My daughters needle me about my love of cemeteries.  Wherever I travel I find these burial grounds, walk their perimeters and interior spaces, reciting names of the dead, the dates they lived and died, and pay respect with prayers of loving-kindness that their rest has meaning.  It’s another kind of counting backwards to those you knew and didn’t know that you never told me about because you wanted me to be American, valiantly optimistic, eyes forward to a future washed of its blood-stained past.

I traveled to Vilna this winter to see M, the namesake you never met, who is studying Yiddish, a language your mother and grandparents spoke but which faded into silence on your own lips.  But as Isaac Bashevis Singer is purported to have said about a “dead language” when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, “There’s a long way between dying and dead.”  Born exactly 20 years after your death, your namesake learns the language of our people in Vilna, the Jerusalem of Lithuania, emptied of its Jews by the Nazis and the Soviets but sustained, counted backwards and forward by a new generation that numbers days in order to obtain wisdom.

M and I schlepped along through snow glazed streets and icy river banks, wrestling with history, arguing about Israel, saying Kaddish at killing sites, eating great food, drinking hot coffee and coming face to face with our people’s numbered days cut short by totalitarian regimes, by antisemitism, by brutal violence and complicit silence in the face of the vast machinery of mass death.

Many images continue to haunt me from that trip, my second to Vilna;  one stands out:  the Old Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of town that the Soviets plowed under.  Both the Aryan and the Communist ideal sought to erase the Jew, a fact of history some today choose to ignore at many points along the political spectrum.  Tucked into the edge of a beautiful urban park, with Lithuanians hiking and skiing on the softened hills, God’s call to Cain rang in my ears: 

וַיֹּ֖אמֶר מֶ֣ה עָשִׂ֑יתָ ק֚וֹל דְּמֵ֣י אָחִ֔יךָ צֹעֲקִ֥ים אֵלַ֖י מִן־הָֽאֲדָמָֽה׃

“What have you done? Hark, your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground!

The rabbinic commentators note that “brother’s blood” is actually rendered in the plural, making a more accurate reading, “What have you done?  Your brothers’ bloods cry out to me from the ground.”

The ethical question emerges, always demanding of us our moral responsibility.  The murder of one person is never just one killing; rather, the killing is of an endless potential number of subsequent lives to come into and inhabit the earth.  The rabbis in the Talmud would later say, “He who kills one life is considered as if he killed a whole world; and he who saves one life is considered as if he saved a whole world.”

We are all responsible for one another.  I for you, Abba; and you for me.  Backward, forward, this way and that.

I am grateful for what you taught me in your life and I am grateful for what you taught me in your death.  

On a lighter note, opening day was rained out for Milwaukee today.  We’ll have to see how things look tomorrow.  I’ll write to you again then.

With love

Andy