How do you write about someone who had no connection to even the slightest gesture of fanfare?
How do you capture humility?
Survival?
Love of G-d?
The real item is, typically, not leading the charge as volunteer, politician or professional, not standing at the pulpit, not thinking about his good works at all.
What makes a person feel like a million dollars?
Flattery? No.
Awards? Maybe.
Actually earning a million dollars? No doubt, it doesn’t hurt. But what about a gift that is intangible?
How about merely being in a person’s presence and for that, and that alone, you feel like a million dollars?
Like a king.
Somebody who counts.
What must that person do to make you feel important, anyway?
In the case of Uncle Meyer Friedman, practically nothing.
He had a twinkle, a self-deprecating, soft laugh.
He was short.
Not physically commanding in any way.
His considerable and lifelong devotion to Talmudic study he never gave a hint of, not in the slightest. In fact, one had to know him for years before finding this out.
He just was.
Complete in himself, his family, his faith, his very simple and unadorned love of people.
Invariably, he was full of good humor — easy, alluring, infectious.
He was a “godol in middos,” it was said, a “giant in character.”
It is one thing — a very high thing — never to act inappropriately to anyone.
But it is higher still — infinitely higher — never even to have a bad feeling about anyone.
On this level, it takes practically nothing to make someone feel on top of the universe.
You could be a child, an adult, any age: Uncle Meyer’s effect was the same.
He survived the Nazis, who took his wife and four children.
He survived the communists in Hungary, which he escaped with his second wife and two sons born after the war.
Not a ripple of suffering, of loss, emanated from his simple, beautiful visage.
By trade he was a designer of curtains, fabrics and home decorations, proud of his creativity and handiwork — much of which he did himself, cutting, matching and sewing.
And while he was sewing he was singing niggunim — spiritual tunes accompanied him wherever and whatever.
Whatever?
He survived Auschwitz.
That speaks for itself.
He survived imprisonment in 1949 when he was caught by the Hungarian communists trying to escape to Israel.
He survived the Hungarian confiscation of his textile business in 1952.
He survived the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, when he finally got to America.
This man, with this history — with the number tattooed on his arm — was singing in peace, humming niggunim as he sewed.
He died at 99, and until the last minute was lucid.
For almost a century he prayed, faithfully.
For almost a century he studied Torah with relish.
And with this he held a deep appreciation for Torah scholars. He had what we call kevod ha-Torah, which usually translates as “respect for the Torah,” that is, respect for something and someone outside of oneself. In his case, there was no barrier between the Torah in himself and the Torah outside himself.
A beautiful unity bodied forth from him, so gently, so humbly.
Unlike the Nazis and the communists, many of whom ultimately destroyed themselves and not just others, Meyer Friedman left behind two sons and many grandchildren and a large flock of great-grandchildren.
The most recent of whom was born during the shiva for him, and named after him.
How do you capture that?
And how do you capture this: His entire life after the war he never mentioned his previous family, not a single time. When he was interviewed by a grandchild about his life and war experiences, he never mentioned his previous family. He didn’t remember them? He didn’t mourn? Their loss didn’t affect him? After his death a tzava’ah, an ethical will, was discovered, written when he was 80. Among other things it said, to this effect: I never mentioned my previous wife and family, not once, because I never wanted my wife and my two sons to think they were any the less by the comparison.
Then he named his wife and four children, and how they were killed.
How do you capture this?
The long and short of it is: you don’t.
The only response is really something else: gratitude.
That you had the opportunity to witness this, to know this, to catch the by now closing glimpse of the world of piety in European Jewry before the Holocaust.
YOU had the opportunity to witness a marriage of two individuals, the one in many senses a mirror of the other, to see in Aunt Faige the same character and joi de vivre, bodied forth so gently, astutely, humbly.
Uncle Meyer had a zest for life, an embracing personality, a smile that effortlessly left its imprint on the soul. Aunt Faige took great delight in welcoming family into her home, but if she sensed that you took time away from your own children to visit her, she let it be known she’d be happier still if you tended to them.
Uncle Meyer and Aunt Faige were so comfortable in their own selves that they had no need to see themselves acknowledged by or mirrored in others.
Translation: They gave and gave and gave, and had no need for anything else.
In Aunt Faige’s case, that giving included her “secret ingredients” that enabled her to shower her friends and relatives — certainly not least her grandchildren — with unbelievably delicious creations, a seemingly unlimited menu of kokush, makosh, cheese delkelach, toytot kaposta, kreplach, stuffed cabbage, intergeshluggen milchig soups, baby gouda cheese, chremselach, csoroge (pronounced chertiga), butter cookies, kneidlach, and the list goes on.
Along with the food came a special sensitivity. One of her grandchildren remembers:
“Throughout my elementary school years, whenever I didn’t feel well, I got to spend my day off at Zaidy and Bobbi's house. Bobbi would constantly tell me to eat something in typical grandmother fashion. As a child, though, I was very uncomfortable eating at other people’s houses. Therefore, I would always refuse Bobby’s offers and say that I just wasn’t hungry.
“That's when Bobbi showed me that she was not the typical grandmother. After asking, prodding and begging me to take a bit, she would fill up a plate of delicacies — pinwheel cookies, kokosh cake, orange juice cake and put it near me in the other room.
“When I was sure that she was busy in the kitchen and wasn’t watching me, I quickly snuck in cookie after cookie, bite after bite.
“Bobbi understood that it was impossible for a child not to get hungry the whole day. She portrayed her love and care in a creative way so that I’d eat something without feeling embarrassed.
“To this day I still appreciate it and realize that sometime small acts can mean so much to a person.”
Other grandchildren remember:
“She didn’t like to take credit for anything.”
“I remember one of the last times I visited Bobbi on a Friday night. She was extremely weak and could barely keep her eyes open. The two words she built up the strength to say were “lechem mishnah” [two challahs]. She wanted to make sure that Zaidy had what he needed for Shabbos. Once I said ‘yes,’ she relaxed and fell back to sleep.”
AUNT Faige returned her soul three months ago.
Uncle Meyer returned his soul last week.
With them departs an entire universe of style, of perception, of understatement.
Anyone who thinks that what we achieve now, by way of human relations and by way of relationship to G-d, can surpass previous generations, given our advanced psychological insight and unprecedented scholarly resources, never saw Meyer Friedman.
Or Faige Friedman.
It was incongruous for us to learn a few months ago, only at the very end of her long life, that Aunt Faige saved countless Jewish lives in Auschwitz by deceiving the Nazis, switching out real bullets for fake ones in their weaponry.
This soft, gentle woman, whose supreme delight was in children — her own progeny or someone else’s — a hero?
So it was.
And Uncle Meyer, too. In January, 1945, the Russians liberated Auschwitz, but the Nazis took Uncle Meyer to other camps and torture centers. By March or April of 1945, Uncle Meyer found himself with a group of Jews imprisoned in a school under Nazi watch. One of his grandchildren recorded the tale:
“My grandfather started sweeping. The Nazi started screaming, ‘you’re making dust.’ He then offered to go pump water to wash the floor. He was granted permission. He went to the pump and motioned with his mouth to a villager there to get him food. He couldn’t talk because the Nazis were watching so that he not escape.
“The villager brought him two slices of bread. He tied them into his shirt and went back in. He kept on ‘needing more water’ for the floor and went out many times to get bread for everyone. One slice of bread meant another week of life.”
“Uncle Meyer and Aunt Faige” — what an honored position to be related to them.
The real items.
Amidst the deep sadness, the deep void, is this consolation: the vivid memories of two people whose lives seemed to be in sympathetic vibration with the Holy One, Blessed be He, who seemed to pull down the holiness above to the mundane below.
My gratitude to Blimi Frank, a granddaughter of Meyer and Faige Friedman, for the valuable information she collected about her grandparents over the years.
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