Shelter Rock Jewish Center

Dear Friends,

Just recently I’ve been writing to you about fairly heavy topics—about prisoner exchanges and dual loyalty issues, and about some Shoah-related matters—so I thought I’d change gears this week and tell you an amazing story about something that happened to me just this last Sunday. And it really is amazing, or at least I think it is! It involves a woman who once had been my mother’s best friend.

When I was born, my parents were living on 68^th Road in Forest Hills. Coincidentally, there were also two other women in our apartment house who were pregnant at the same time and all three of them were due to have their babies around the same date. They became friends—these were first children for all three of them—but, because none of our families was too content living in one-bedroom apartments, all three families eventually chose to move on by moving out. (This all happened in 1957, when I was four years old.) The other two families relocated in Bayside. My parents took a two-bedroom apartment just a block away in Forest Hills. Occasionally, the three families got together. All had children exactly the same age, of course, but it was the women who were really each other’s friends; the men, as often happens, turned out merely to be the husbands of friends. Now and then, we visited in each other’s homes. But mostly it was the women who saw each other. And one of these women, whom I knew as Lee, remained my mother’s very good friend for the rest of my mother’s life.

It was Lee that I met, or rather re-met, a year or so ago. This part of the story isn’t that amazing. She was invited to the Shelter Rock bar-mitzvah of a great-nephew of hers…and there she was! (Slightly more amazing is that she recognized me. But she had seen me now and then through at least the middle of my teenage years, so I guess once she heard my name and looked closely she was able to recognize that it was me. Once she greeted me, I recognized her immediately; I looked completely different, but she was really just the older version of the younger version. If my mother were alive, she’d be 93 years old. I later found out that Lee was eight years younger, but I didn’t know that at the time. At any rate, she looked great for her age.)

We didn’t stay in touch. We didn’t have any real relationship to build on and, after all, my mother died almost thirty years ago. I wished her well. She said she might come back to Shelter Rock to visit, but I don’t believe that she did. I put the incident out of my mind. I meet a lot of people, after all!

Anyway, Lee died last week. One of her daughters, the one who was exactly my age, had phoned me a week or so earlier and asked if I’d stop into her hospital room to visit. I was touched to be invited. I went. She wasn’t very responsive, but I tried my best to give her some solace, to make her aware of my presence. Whether she really knew I was present, who knows? But I did my best. And then she died. Her former rabbi came out of retirement to do her funeral; I decided the right role for me was to pay a shiva call on her daughters.

And now for the amazing part of the story. It was strange enough visiting that house on Corporal Kennedy Street in Bayside that I had visited in, maybe, 1961 or 1962. But when I walked in and the daughters said they were glad I had come because they had a gift for me, I was surprised. A gift for me? What kind of gift could they possibly have for me? Could I have been mentioned in the will? That seemed, to say the very least, unlikely.

It turned out that my grandmother, my mother’s mother, was also friendly with Lee. She—my grandmother—visited with us often, sometimes staying for a couple of days and I suppose she must have gotten to know my mother’s friends. And so, when Lee and her family moved to Bayside, it must have struck my grandmother as natural for her to give them a housewarming gift. She was quite a good artist, my grandmother. She was quite adept with water colors and charcoal. But her favorite medium was oil paint, and it was an oil painting of hers that she gave to Lee for her new home. Of this, of course, I knew nothing. How could I have? (I was four years old!) And so, this painting of my grandmother’s hung in that house on Corporal Kennedy Street for fifty-one years. In those years, I grew up, became a rabbi, got married, moved to Israel, then to Germany, then to British Columbia, then to southern California, then back to New York. I moved around a lot in that half-century, but my grandmother’s painting didn’t move even an inch from its spot on the wall on Corporal Kennedy Street. The rest, you can guess. It’s a very nice painting, a landscape, but Lee’s daughters felt they could part with it…and that they thought I’d probably like to have it. They were right! I brought it home, showed it to Joan, and hung it up. It’s hanging in my living room right now!

Just when you think the dead are totally gone, they occasionally show up in ways you could never have imagined they would or even could. If my grandmother were alive, she’d be 125 years old. (She was born in 1883, when Chester A. Arthur was president.) She died a few months before my bar-mitzvah, though, and has been slowly fading from the world ever since. You’d think that by now she’d have vanished entirely, but the dead aren’t ever quite as gone as we imagine. This painting I have just acquired is a good example. Embedded in its brushstrokes are some after-echoes of my grandmother’s creativity, her artistic talent, and (in some ethereal way) her intelligence. Those things are evidenced in the picture, I suppose, but they also transcend the category of mere evidence and somehow also exist as physically real relics in a world from which they "ought" to have vanished decades ago. It’s hard to find the right word, actually. ("Relic" isn’t quite what I mean. Maybe "trace" would be better. Or "vestige." "Residue" sounds a bit too clinical, but in some ways it’s exactly what I mean: the part that’s left over when the crucial part—the "real" part of something—vanishes down the drain or up the chimney.)

People die slowly, after all. The first step, obviously, is the big one. But after that we fade from the world slowly, and incrementally, over many, many years. Just when I thought my grandma, whom I loved very much, was as gone from the world as anyone could possibly be, this picture—this physical evidence of her artistry, thus also her personality—appears in my life to represent her not within the realm of recollective memory—or not solely within that realm—but also within the physical world of real, wholly existent things. Gone and not gone! When the Bible (in the 146^th psalm) says of the dead that "their breath leaves them, they go into the earth / on that day, their very thoughts vanish" it is, really, only telling part of the story. Yes, of course, breathing ceases with death, as does thinking. But the dead are only gone physically into the earth. And there’s an entirely different trajectory they follow into oblivion as well, one related to the slow disappearance of the trace elements of their intellectual and emotional, even perhaps their spiritual, aspects over many, many years. Who know, even, if that process ever really ends? Perhaps this is what ghosts really are: not the friendly or unfriendly specters of horror movies, but the ever-present trace elements of the non-physical parts of the dead—their personalities, their characters, their talents and their imaginative abilities—that continue to exist in the world for as long as does anyone with the ability to recall the deceased individual in question…and to be aware, even slightly, of their enduring, if ethereal, presence in the world.

To complement this story, I could tell you all about the gift my father sent me a year after his death (and precisely on my birthday!), but that would be a whole different story. Maybe another time!

Sincerely,