Hesped For My Father

My father was the shofar that kept on blowing

In times of grief and anger

We turn to our texts of comfort

For relief from the anguish And unbearable pain

Despite years of anticipatory grief

Never knowing whether this might be the last time

As I alighted the plane home

The fact of the ending… the end of this life.. makes it no less painful

Grief is grief.. however much, the anticipation of it.

Dad kept surprising us all!!!

Bouncing back from this or that setback!!!

He surprised us because he was a Prussian man, a disciplined man, a man of routine and moderation and undeterred by anything around him. I never saw him drunk., he always left something on his plate, he always rose early, in the british winters with no central heating all he had to do was to uncover the sheet from my big toe for shacharis…then he would see the condensation on the car window and claim “selichos weather”.. only once I saw him tucked ill in bed with the sheets over his head when I was 15…I was mortified…he never cried….he never emoted….

Not just 2 days ago he was still actively walking between his two stalwart soldiers Balu and Manjou

Rochelle ever sending us camera-ready instant videos documenting his ongoing life.

He surprised us waiting like the gentleman he always was allowing us to finish the shloshim ceremony for his mechutenes in NY Sunday

And surprising us by leaving this world on the exact yearzeit of his mechuten my father in law.

He surprised us because his life was that shofar that kept on blowing..

If I may paraphrase Batya who midrashically composed a shabbat zemir that tickled Dad ever since…yismach Shlomo bematnas.. Yismach shlomo bematnas, bematnas chelko…it captured his core…his deep satisfaction with life…his survival as testament to his victory over Hitler…the love of his life he adored ,the exotic beauty from India… his children’s accomplishments, the grandchildren and greatgrandchildren that visited him and mum on their perch…then him alone..

Despite his difficulty with verbal expression his facial gestures said it all…they never diminished…his sardonic sense of humor manifested itself with raised eyebrows, impish smile, and if he did not like something he pulled up his nose..showing us all he was all there until the end…looking down upon the world like a true Vienna schnitzel…

sometimes I would show him Mum’s picture and he looked at me forlornly..her absence tearing out his heart…other times Rochelle would show him a group black and white picture of mum becky and eric in Trafalgar square circa 1948 and he would point to Eric….and say ‘Erich” with a thick vienese german…Rochelle would refer him to that album of his life daily…page by page pricking his memory like a Megillah.. each chapter another unique historical fragment that made the mosaic of his amazing journey. That book was his sefer the sefer shel Shlomo.

He did not approve of my morbid fascination with the dark side of life and texts…why delve and kvetch …he was the survivor not me!!! He went through the war having been saved by an angel 3 times….not me!!

He always chided me after one of my dark toirahs….why do you read the pshat this way?

Why do you need to resort to midrashic fantasy…

Julian I am a happy man….no complexes …no reading into the text anything but Peshuto shel davar…in that he was a simple man…and the pashut…does not imply simplicity…it was a choice in everything he did….be straight..ramrod straight…be satisfied with what life gives…above all survive!

Shlomo yedaber Shlomo decided everything in his life

Work play communal service retirement Aliyah

Vehaelokim yaanenu bekol///////God was his partner

He survived the war…he survived a generation after the war..his life was a testament to his determination and vigor strength and vigor….

Born in a different distant epidemic

100 years ago

A survivor for a century

Surfing on the aphorisms of classical wisdom

As if we learned what he felt was necessary through his pithy wisdoms alone:

Si takuisis

Panta re

Those summers in europe in the Westminster overdrive…

Where I swear I learned in those 2 weeks from his nonstop commentary on history geography and life more than I did all year in the Hasmonean!!

Mum singing Oh the white cliffs of Dover when we returned on the ferry from Calais..

The song he composed in the Austrian tirol the zemering “baruch hashem Yisborach”

The top of the Jung Frau Yoch…he went outside alone in the thick clouds and suddenly the blue sky opened up and the brilliant sun shone down on him…he returned and told us that he had a religious experience…so uncharacteristic of him to indulge in such spiritual excesses!

Always with humor. Always looking on the bright side of life…

His humor was continental.. not British.. he could not fathom my love of Monty Python….

His friends were mainly survivors…Uncle Kay, his partner Ernest Strauss Max Landau..Mr Wolf…the Viennese gabbai who taught him to be a world class gabbai….people would come ot him with their problems…even his co-Gabbai Rozenthal would accompany him home despite living in Woodside Park,

His sense of right and morality earned him consistent promotions from gabbai to VP to President of the shul…to national prominence in governing the Federation on their board and running the kashrus branch that made the name KF respectable to all.

His courage in hiring the first ever Chabad Rabbi to a British synagogue pulpit in Rabbi Telzner for whom his love never faded..because he saw in him the erlichkeit…never mind the trappings of nusach…or even ideology…

His ability to handle the unruly and offended in shul,,,,and in the box during anim zemiros listening to the president tell him off color jokes with his thick cockney accent and Dad trying to hold back the giggles…

His work life and his adoring employees who he had earned their love by secretly paying for their debts, his honesty in business and where his competitors were getting cheaper plastics from Germany he resisted…

I would come in to England on my way to work in NY from Israel, he always picked me up from Heathrow never ever complained and took me back after the weekend with them…no matter what was on his plate..how can I ever repay that kindness….

His adoration and tolerance of Mum who was not an easy personality!!!!

And the two of the on their perch in trumpeldor….always hand in hand…he admired her violin fingers!! Worthy of a Michalangelo sculpture,

On this perch …Where all the world would come ot pay homage

Surrounded by mostly their artwork on the walls

Dad helping mum with her bookbinding, the leathers the quality the color the thickness calligraphy and whatever new craft she happened to choose…

Music saturated the home….Mum a virtuosi would listen to you-tubes of various performers

Critiquing them…and dad would look o dutifully…for he had his own choice pieces..

His favorite melodies he responded to even 2 weeks ago

Eric would play La Campanella …I sang… he nodded

Torselli!! Heinrich Heine…de Lorelai..these never left him

Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten,

Dass ich so traurig bin;

Ein Märchen aus alten Zeiten,

Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn.

Having born witness to Hitler’s march into Vienna

Kindertransport

Internment

The love of his life

Starting a family

Communal work

Synagogue warden, President,

National prominence, VP federation of Synagogues

Aliyah

Scrabble with Rivkie

Calisthenics with Ganady

Hot chocolate with Rochelle

How to thank those who cared for him

Balu Manju

Devorah whose skill and sensitivity to his needs kept him alive

Dr Simon,,,whose clinical judgment and balanced understanding of medicine and halacha equals anything we have in the US..

Dr Djemal…a general practitioner who reflects the best of the NHS and whose care and love of her patients is legendary…

My brother who took care of the finances and weighed dad measured his body flluids and indeces on a spreadsheet that is worthy of publishing! Keeping us all up to date with variations in fluid intake output, weight HB HCT etc etc etc….

His Friday visits to Dad with the weekly foto of Dad emerging from the shower in his Harrods white robe looking regally into the camera …said it all…

Debs who would fly in and swoop down with her medical experience in helping those with cancer in Memorial Sloan Kettering would wake us up to complacency and usually correctly remind us of this or that medical change. It was easy for Debs and I to come in and then leave on our visits..it was a different story being there for the daily grind…

But beyond and beyond and beyond is my darling twin sister Rochelle…whose place in Gan Eden is assured….who loved Dad despite his stubbornness, his obstinancy…who pushged him to eat and get nourished,,,who knew every change in his condition before it happened…who worried incessantly about this or that…it was Rochelle we owe his longevity…insisting on taking him out for hot chocolate with a mountain of whipped cream 5pm every day…who knew his likes and dislikes…

I know not when he began to blow shofar

In Tatura British Internment camp?  Autsralia

Prior in Vienna?

But at 101 he continued to blow

He loved to entertain his guests

(despite Mum calling it “showing off”)

Even when `cognitive articulations fail

As if his shofar blowing

Represents his will to breath

The serpentine shofar bending to his will

As if he finally tamed the inner snake of desire

And the outer monster of this century

 

The power of his sound

The power of his Prussian will

The power of his survival

 

Memories of his blowing in  Finchley Central shul in the 60’s

Those last few kolos

We were on tenterhooks as kids

Carrying the shame of his failure

And the pride of his success

What began the century

Now ends it

The shofar heralding its onset and its end?

The jubilee of his life now bookended?

 

How he survived all of this,

This horrific century

Doggedly refusing to surrender

To the rules of others

His own iron will

Of moderation

Health, exercise

Care of the body and mind

No extremes mind you.

 

His Aliyah as a final arrival to the field of dreams

His delight in walking the streets unabashed of his yarmulke

“I never have to look over my shoulder again” he quipped

Impossible in Europe

A microscopic reflection of what has taken place in the miracle of Zionism.

 

But also, an inner protection, a survivor’s immune response to tragedy

Through walling off the emotions of loss

And the price one pays for that!

 

And the demands of discipline and results from children

No room for failure

No expression of emotion allowed

Especially crying….my earliest recollection was in Stamford Hill N16 around 1953 yom kippur?

I must have been crying during the kedusha

Will never forget that stern look…

 

As I watch him blowing

It is as if he is telling me

I may not express myself

I may not tell you my feelings

I may not divulge my inner thoughts, I never did,

But here is my legacy

Listen to the power

Listen to the cadence the pitch the perfection

Here

This is what I leave my children

The memory of this sound

The sound that grows stronger and stronger

The sound of the jubilee

In this land of Jubilees

The optimism of the survivor

This spiritual immunity I give to you

 

To survive.

This deep hole in the heart

The pit in the stomach The deep sadness

There is some comfort in these texts The ones that arise…

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

 Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.