I pen this with tears. I have never been one to “celebrate the life.” Death is death. Deep loss. Never to be replaced.
Perhaps the sharpest stabs come from the pictures seemingly on every available surface in the apartment of my late mother-in-law, Mrs. Lila Silberstein, about whom I received the call at about 4:30 a.m., Aug. 19, “it’s all over.”
These pictures are all doubled, so to speak, pictures of who is there, silently hiding the pictures of who isn’t there. Pictures of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, some quite recent and some more than 60 years old — and some delicious in their mirrorlike quality.
For example, as my nephew brought his three young daughters to my mother-in-law’s apartment, where the children were sitting shiva, the five-year-old daughter reminded me of the picture of my nephew when he was under three three years old. He had long curly hair, as his daughter does now. Besides which, their countenances (he, then; she, now) are strikingly similar. I took the picture of my nephew down from the far wall and showed it to his firstborn daughter and said, “here’s what your Abba [father] looked like when he was your age.” She, of course, in her innocence, was bewildered and we all had a chuckle comparing her at age five with him, now a tall adult, at age three.
That is the way it is in a shiva house, the laughter, the oh so sweet, and so bittersweet, laughter, punctuating the somber silences.
So it goes, generation to generation. The pictures of all these descendants of Lila Silberstein, at various stages and milestones, were crowding the shelves and lamp tables in Apt. 2H. Mixed in with these family photos were photos of other children, whom we barely recognize, or perhaps don’t remember at all any more — photos lovingly given to my mother-in-law by former neighbors or — who knows? — other young people my mother-in-law befriended over the years, or counseled, or lent a shoulder to; people who reciprocated with these precious photos of children who used to romp around her house, their pockets and mouths duly filled with candies or her own baked goods.
But these are not the doubles, the other, silent, hidden pictures I am talking about. The doubles, one has to imagine; these are the blank photos of people who had children but no grandchildren or great-grandchildren. These are the pictures of the people cut off, talked about sometimes, but more often merely hinted at, people about whom a hint was more than enough to tell their story. These pictures give an infinitely enlarged luster to the faces we recognize smiling in their various stages and milestones. The blank photos hiding behind the visible ones were of the many siblings of my mother-in-law, and her own mother, not one of whom lived beyond 1944. They were cut off 70 years ago this season as the evil ones worked their trains from the hamlets of Hungary to those unspeakable places, those horror sites that beggar all belief.
These pictures too hovered and crowded seemingly every available surface in Apartment 2H.
I begin with the pictures because as one enters the apartment one sees them seemingly everywhere. They create the illusion of sameness, of everything’s OK, of nothing’s changed, when, in fact, nothing will ever be the same again.
It seems such a sacrilege to enter my mother-in-law’s room. This is her room, her private chamber. What am I doing here? How can we wedge open that bottom left compartment of the breakfront where she stored all the candies and baked goodies under lock and key — it being well known that if the baked goods were readily available they would be consumed on the spot, absolutely too delicious to save for their intended moment on Shabbos or at a birthday party — how can we simply open that door at will, now?
It’s all so strange, this business of death. Of coming after. Of remembering before. Of a past now fixed and a present so fluid, with past and present flowing into each other in a confusing melange.
Of the remembering, there is so much; some that must taken on trust, some that we witnessed first hand.
Remembering…
How Mom, alone, on perhaps the last boat out of Europe, lovingly taken to the dock by one of her older brothers, never to be seen again; arriving in the land of freedom shortly before World War II began.
How Mom, without the language, met Dad, of blessed memory, in night school in the Bronx; how they were separated as he, who had arrived a year earlier, was drafted into the armed forces of the US.
How his last station was in Los Angeles — a beautiful piece of Eden, but spiritually not yet developed enough to continue the Orthodox Jewish traditions as my mother-in-law knew them in her home back in Hungary.
How they, pretty much bereft of resources, turned down the generously offered blandishments of distant cousins in the South and opted for Boro Park in New York City so they could raise an Orthodox Jewish family.
How Dad prepared for hours each week to chant the Torah in a small synagogue in Boro Park founded by the Lisker Rebbe, Rabbi Friedlander, also of Hungary.
And how Mom did her own preparations, her own prayers, especially on Shabbos. And here I pass from the memories received on trust to what I witnessed myself.
What I witnessed amounted to the perfect resolution of the phrase in Exodus 20:15 relating that the ancient Israelites at Mount Sinai “saw the sounds” of the revelation of the Ten Commandments by G-d Himself. One hears sounds. One does not see sounds. Not so, however, at Mount Sinai. And not so in Apartment 2H and for all the decades before that at 1571-46th Street in Boro Park.
On rare occasions just after a refreshing rain or just before twilight, in late afternoon, the sunlight renders the visual world crystal-cut, each bend in each leaf, each ripple in each shingle, each blade of grass and gnarl on a twig, each shape and hue and color precision-cut, perceived more beautifully and individuated than even the greatest of the masters could paint. Light at such a moment discloses the wonders of creation and of the Creator.
Ever so rarely a sound discloses the same clarity, beauty, wonder and Creator. And that is how, more than anything, I shall remember my mother-in-law, via the sounds of her prayers, each word enunciated clearly, sounds of the prayers per se, of the Pslams, of the techinot, recited steadily, yet often punctuated by deep sighs and tears, the words always precision-cut, their sounds full of disclosure so that one could see them, just as it records in Exodus, “they saw the sounds.”
The most perfect verse in the entire Torah for this unique spiritual quality of Mom’s is in this week’s Torah portion. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the key word, the first word, of the verse is impossible to translate. This is the Hebrew: tamim with the L-rd your G-d” (Deut. 18:13). That word tamim combines innocent, wholehearted, accepting, simple, faithful, and also connotes integrity. Yet tamim transcends all this — and is shorter, quicker, more succinct. Whatever the translation, that was Mom. She was tamim with the L-rd her G-d.
Mom worked hard. Her managers attest to the fact that she never wasted a moment, taking her responsibilities to her employer seriously. She was straight just like Dad. They were a perfect pair.
When she retired in later years, she went to work again, this time as a volunteer at Maimonides Hospital in Boro Park. She took care of “old people” who in many cases were younger than she. She sustained this volunteer effort, for which she received high commendation from the city of New York, until she was about 90.
She received good training for it, no doubt, through the countless times she devotedly took care of Dad personally every time he was hospitalized in his later years.
For Mom, volunteering in the hospital meant more than visiting strangers and cheering them up. It meant doing the often unappetizing work that others flee from. At her funeral I met a couple I did not recognize, the grateful children of one of the hospitalized patients whom Mom had taken care of.
Mom lived for 20 years as a widow. She was filled with grief and longing for Dad, but filled just as much with smiles and with a certain hard to define pleasure at the ironies of life, the foibles to which we are all heir; a certain pleasure in, for want of a better term, the human condition. Where others would complain, she would smile.
I can remember all these moments and moods and foods and prayers and years so sweetly, and bittersweetly, but neither I nor any of us can ever have any of them again.
We were privileged for all the years, Mom.
We loved you.
Copyright © 2014 by the Intermountain Jewish News
