Evolution-- my parents' and mine

Mrs. Yid and I visited my parents last weekend at their new house. It's in a retirement community, a mock-Italian village in the middle of rural California a few hours from the city. The combination of the hills, tile roofs, massive construction projects going on and imported vineyards and olive groves give it a quasi-surreal feeling, like a cross between the Truman Show and a West Bank settlement. I've taken to calling it Kiryat Geffen.

Anyway, the weekend was nice. It was easy to chat and read Saturday afternoon and avoid TV (still working on the no-screens on Shabbat thing), and after dark Mama Yid's new Jew-Bu friend Shoshana came by and we all did Havdalah. This also coincided with my mother saying she wanted to look into possibly going to services at some point and asking whether I would recommend she check out the Reform place or "this Chuh-BAD thing." Oh, Mom.

It's been a rather intense summer for them. For all of us, really. My parents moved from their house of 25 years to Kiryat Geffen. The move has been in the works for 2 years and we've all been working hard to get them out on time. The last few weeks of June I was over there every day, helping to pack them up. In the process I went through a lot of old family trinkets, too. The very last day, I went by and gathered up a few odds and ends. I also had one last thing to take: the family mezuzah. I pried it off the door and took it home, to keep for future generations. I'm the chronicler; it's my job.

This past Sunday, Mrs. Yid and I put up a new mezuzah on my parents' door. Baby steps, always baby steps.

The other night Abbot Yid was in town and took me out for sushi. When my order came (mackerel plus an assortment of sushi), I noticed that one of them was a shrimp. I asked him if he wanted it. While he was chewing, I could tell he was mulling something over.

"I have a question," he said.

"Shoot."

"I'm still trying to figure out what's going on with you and Mrs. Yid. You know, with the clothes and keeping kosher and all that. Because, not to be judgmental or anything, but in my mind, someone keeps those rules because they believe they come from God, and you guys don't strike me as believers."

I had known this was coming, and I was actually happy to have a chance to explain in a low-pressure setting.

"Well, lots of people describe Judaism as a mixture of belief and practice. We've been in the process of learning a lot ABOUT belief and practice and we decided we wanted to start trying some of it on. We're in the process of digesting theology but it seemed like if we were going to give it a real try, we would need to take on some practice, too. Because if we're going to try to live Jewishly and raise Jewish children, we need to have some idea of what that means.

"If you look at it on a continuum, with 10 being totally religious and educated and 0 being totally secular and ignorant, if you're starting at a 10 and you decide to only practice on a 7 or a 5 or whatever, you have the knowledge and the background to make those decisions and adjustments-- you know HOW to scale down. But if you're starting at the other end, it's a lot harder to find a right medium for yourself if you don't try different elements of practice.

"And for me, it's also a mindfulness piece. Actually doing something, putting an action to the concept, is powerful. Keeping kosher, even if only in baby steps, not only has us think about the whole process of Jewish eating, but also about how we want to eat ethically (for instance, our recent decision to stop buying Empire products due to their environmental abuses).

He seemed intrigued. I continued:

"Similarly, I think it's really valuable for liberal Jews to be visible, as Jews. At first I was worried about doing something wrong or reflecting badly on Jewish people. But I think it's also an opportunity. If my students or neighbors or friends have good experiences with a visible Jew, a Jew identifying as a Jew, then so much the better. I don't want the only people with yarmulkes on being the Orthodox."

"Now you're sounding like a missionary." He grinned.

I shrugged. "If I can be a good example, so much the better." I didn't use the phrase Kiddush Hashem (Abbot doesn't know it), but that was the basic idea.

I still don't think he quite gets it, but I think he's getting closer. And there's something very nice about that.

Kippah Updates

When my family found out I was contemplating wearing my kippah full-time, they were not on board. Their primary concern was that I would "stand out" too much at my new job-- Abbot Yid kept saying, "especially since you didn't wear one at the interview!"-- as if me showing up with one would somehow be seen as some sort of bait and switch. I've finally decided to not wear one at school, at least to start,  to have one less thing to be self-conscious of (making them pipe down about it is a nice side benefit, though).

Still, that doesn't mean I can't start wearing one more in my free time. I haven't made any mental rules yet, but I've started wearing them intermittently at my parents' house and out in public, like to the movies. Mama Yid doesn't seem to really care, Abbot Yid can't seem to not comment on it. The latest one came as I was driving him and Deacon home:

"What I don't get is that you're not even religious!"

"Why do you say that? What religious litmus test do I fail?"

"Well you've admitted to me previously that you're not sure you believe in God."

"And?"

"So why would you want to wear a yarmulke and identify yourself as a religious Jew?"

"Well I don't see it as claiming religiosity as much as identity."

"Well I just don't get it."

"I know."

At this point I've progressed beyond being irritated by it, mostly because I know it's not specifically about me as much as it is a bunch of internal factors: first, there's Abbot's baggage with/ignorance of Judaism. There's also a generational issue( in Abbot's day, wearing a yarmulke was a specific religious identifier, and my post-modern take on it doesn't really compute for him), as well as his professional background, coming from the corporate world of the 80s and 90s where it was potentially controversial for him to even have a beard (apparently he always interviewed clean-shaven and would only "sneak" his beard in after his first few months).

I know he's coming from a good place, and as long as I remember that-- and refuse to be bothered by the side comments-- we should be fine. 

Change is a good thing

Or so I keep telling myself.

There have been a lot of changes lately.

First, I went to New York for Bubbe Yid's funeral. After almost four years of basking in self-righteous indignation over my uncles' misheggos, I decided that I was just going to act as if nothing had happened. As counter-intuitive as that seemed, it actually wound up working: I was civil to them (in fact I was even a little extra-nice, letting them know that at the end of the day, they had both stepped up to the plate in different ways, and that we all appreciated it), and, much to my surprise, they were civil back. It was a bizarre contrast that even while feeling sad (or at least feeling like I should be feeling sad), there was more family connection happening than had been going on in years-- and for the most part, it was overwhelmingly positive.

Bubbe Yid died on a Friday, and the funeral was planned for the following Friday. Being in aninut (pre-mourning) that long was a little strange, but I liked that it gave me time to make preparations at work. It was an interesting sociological process; I had heard about all these aspects of Jewish mourning but had never experienced them first-hand. Given that we were not going to sitting shiva, I decided that I wanted to experience as much of the funeral practices as I could first-hand.

The burial was surreal; there was an emotional intensity that kept coming and going, as if in waves. One minute I would be thinking of my grandmother down there, in a box, in the ground, and the next minute I would be focusing on the physical sensations of the moment. The weather was cold, gray and wet, which my family didn't like but I found appropriate. The funeral was near the airport and planes kept flying overhead during the rabbi's eulogy, making him have to stop and wait until they had passed, which I found both sad and kind of funny. The most intense part was actually burying the casket. As a resident cranky-pants, I find my generations' lack of engagement with the real world often embarrassing. I feel like we've gotten way too removed from the physical and emotional realities of life, as well as death.

Here, however was something entirely real and entirely physical. There was nothing virtual here. It was incredibly, almost painfully, simple and direct. Bubbe had died, and it was her family's responsibility to bury her. Unlike her end of life care, unlike the eulogy, this was not something that could be passed off to someone else, to some professional. This was our job, and I for one was happy that there was something uncomfortable, something intense, something hard, that we had to do, something to get us out of our comfort zones. Death shouldn't be too easy. Bubbe's four children went up onto the mound of dirt and each shoveled in a few scoops of earth along with the rabbi, standing precariously near the open grave.

After my father and aunt had a turn, my two uncles started shoveling as fast as they could, as if desperate to finally be done with it and get it over. After a while Abbot Yid and I took over from them. It was important to do that with him. I was there for me, I was there for Bubbe, but I was also there for him. I remember the heft of the heavy shovel, and the jarring thud of the dirt falling on the casket. As hard as it was, I was glad to be there, and I was glad to be a part of this. I was the only grandchild that helped bury, the only grandchild who asked for a ribbon to perform keriyah. I wasn't looking to punish myself, but I felt that it was important to fully participate, for my own sake as well as Bubbe's.

Afterwards, we went to a restaurant and spent hours talking and telling stories about the family. I thought how sad it was that it took their mother dying for Abbot Yid and his siblings to come together, and that after all the bad blood that had passed during the past year it seemed unlikely they would be spending much time together after this. Still, I had and continue to hold out some hope.

Another ongoing change has been our attitude towards Beth Elderly. Mrs. Yid and I have gone back to the shul again, and people have continued to be very nice to us. The services definitely aren't on par with what we like at Evil Minion, but everybody is always happy to see us afterwards, and that's a huge plus. Who knows, maybe with enough turnout we can wind up voting with our feet and have a Carlebach night once or twice a month. At least the old folks seem open to new ideas. I said Kaddish for the first time, and that was kind of heavy. I still haven't cried since I heard about Bubbe's death, and I'm not sure that I will, but when I said Kaddish and added her name to the shul yarzeit list, I came close.

Still another big change is on the job front. I had a long talk with my new principal after getting my contract letting him know that though I like the school and the kids, I couldn't rationalize being an assistant for a fifth year. Surprisingly enough, he wound up agreeing with me. Even better, he gave me some inside information about why I had been passed up for jobs in the past. Though I didn't agree with the criticism, it was nice to finally get the feedback (I told him that I thought it was pretty unfair that no one had had the guts to tell me any of this previously, though). The good news was that he said that past complaints about me from individual colleagues didn't match up with anything he had observed from me this year, and that as far as he was concerned, I was absolutely a viable candidate for a job they have opening up.

I've gone on a few other interviews at other schools as well. I haven't been super satisfied with my school over the last few years so if something else pops, I'd be happy with that. That said, I'd rather have a teaching job, even half-time, than no teaching job. Oh, and I got into the grad school program I applied for, so that's sitting on the back-burner as a backup as well. One way or another, next year I will be doing something different. As a way of nudging myself further towards this decision, I wrote a letter of resignation for the following year for the head of school-- and during our seder this year, burned my contract after Havdalah. No turning back now!

So here's to change and progress. This year we are slaves, next year let us be free.

Fire and Ice

When I was around ten, I somehow got it into my head that one didn't really count as a grown-up until both your parents had died. Under this "logic," I proudly informed my parents that Mama Yid was an adult and Abbot Yid wasn't, which of course was a bit surprising to my father. This may have been shortly after I referred to my mother as an "orphan" and got a very stern talking-to.

Yesterday Bubbe Yid died. Now both my parents are orphans.

One thing I'm noticing is a very strong disconnect between how I imagine might be the "correct" way to feel in this situation, and how I actually feel. In a way I feel nothing. But it might be more accurate to say that a lot of my emotions are fairly distant, subtle. I think a lot of this has to do with timing. With Zayde, terminal illness came on relatively sudden, and so even though he spent several months in the hospital, my memory is of the whole process being rather chaotic, at least emotionally. When he died I think much of what I felt was shock as much as it was grief. But some of that grief, too, was I think grief that the person I had idolized and built up so high, the person I had hoped to get to know better, was gone, and that all I was left with were a few meetings and letters. I've spent over a decade trying to get to know who my real Zayde was, and am pretty sure that had I known him more, I certainly would have idolized him less. Not that he was a bad person per se, though he did do bad things and make some terrible mistakes, but that by having real contact with someone, they become demystified.

In so many ways, Bubbe Yid was the opposite of Zayde. The metaphor of fire and ice seems appropriate. He was loud, she was quiet. He would demand to get his way, whereas she would plan. He was raised culturally Jewish by socialists and became attracted to the certainty of Hasidic life and the nostalgic aesthetic of klezmer and Fiddler on the Roof. She was raised modern Orthodox by American-born parents and didn't see religion as something that one had to make a huge stink over. Even their cultural geography seems to bear this out: Zayde's mother was from the park of Ukraine where Hasidic ecstasy had flourished, and he experienced all of life's pleasures and pain at an extremely deep emotional level. Bubbe's grandparents were Litvaks, and she kept her emotions extremely close.

I never really got to know my grandfather. But the sad thing is that if I'm honest with myself now, I don't think I ever really knew my grandmother either. There was so much of her personality and her life that she didn't want to share that as I got older, there was less and less of her available for me to interact with. If anything, her protracted illness only magnified this emotional distance. There's almost zero shock that she's died, because I've had almost an entire year to process that she was going to die. I'm actually more relieved than anything because she was so unhappy and impaired and the stress was creating so much bad feelings between her children. The real tragedy for me in all of this is that this woman who was so fiercely independent wound up losing everything that was important to her in her life and was trapped in an existence she no longer wanted. By nearly every metric, it is far better for her to not be here anymore, and whereas before I would have felt guilty saying that, I know that she herself had been saying the same thing back when she could still talk.

The other tragedy in this situation is that rather than her illness becoming a moment of unity or closeness for her children, it just underscored all the divisions between them. There has been so much hurt and resentment over the past ten months, and without anywhere productive to go it has been bouncing around in the family echo chamber. At this point most of the siblings are guessing that after the funeral most of them won't talk to each other again. Now obviously, my father and his siblings are grown adults, and they're responsible for their choices. But I also can't help put place a little responsibility for this mess at the feet of my grandparents-- my grandfather for his mental illness and bad decisions, and my grandmother for enabling him and not protecting her kids more. The end result is that none of the siblings seem to really be able to tolerate each other, and I have to assume that at least part of this is because the only things they have in common any more are their childhoods, which are extremely painful for them to think about. They don't know how to interact with each other, which makes sense when they've spent decades avoiding each other.

I feel like this trickled down to her grandchildren, too. Deacon Yid and I aren't close to our cousins-- they're basically strangers or acquaintances we happen to be related to. (As a genealogist, this is rather depressing!) And the whole time Bubbe was in the nursing home, I kept thinking I should go, I should go... but by the time I had decided to go, she was past the point where she could recognize anyone or communicate. I missed that chance, and I wonder if our relationship had been different, had I felt more, if that might have happened the same way.

Mama Yid asked me if I'm sad. The short answer is no. The long answer is that I'm sad about her life, and the way that she died, but not that she is dead.

I wish she had had a more chayim shlema, especially in her last days. I am glad she got the sof shlema she needed. And, as skeptical as I am, my greatest hope is that in letting her go, her children may finally get the refuah shlema they've needed for so long.

Glimpsing the End

Growing up I knew my grandparents were different from other kids'. The grandparents I saw on TV were friendly and spoiled their grandkids. They were always around for family occasions and holidays. Grandpas told their grandkids stories or helped them build things or play while Grandma plied everyone with assorted baked goods.

I came into the world already two grandparents short. The one who were left had suffered plenty of damage long before I was born. Zayde was a ghost and Bubbe was... well, she sure wasn't a TV grandma. She was definitely into crafts but what had started as a pretty normal "knit sweaters and socks" kick eventually morphed into crocheting ladies' hats from supermarket bags and making bookmarks out of cardboard and her old pantyhose. I guess when you're an artsy type and you live through a Depression it becomes hard to throw stuff away.

Bubbe had never been a good cook, either. She spent most of her adult life with severe GI problems which it took several decades to realize were caused by a gluten allergy. By the time I was born she had been living on her own (and only cooking for herself) for about ten years. Any possible culinary skills were long gone. The most complicated thing I ever saw her eat was a tuna fish sandwich on rice cakes.

Bubbe is neither particularly warm nor open, particularly when it comes to family matters. Predictably, this has led to a fair amount of tension over the years as I've continued to be interested in the family history of both her and my grandfather, a man and period she was never too keen to talk about.

Still, despite all her crotchetiness, a part of me did always believe Mama Yid when she'd sigh, shake her head and say, "I bet she'll outlive us all."

In the past few months, that white lie has been proven false. Bubbe has gone from being almost entirely self-sufficient in her Florida apartment to suffering significant brain damage, and is now living in a full-time nursing facility in LA. She can't walk; she's lost dexterity in her hands; she can't even go to the bathroom on her own. According to relatives on the ground her recurring mantra has become "I just want to die." The last few weeks have seen even more deterioration: apparently now she's attacking the staff and screaming that they're trying to hurt her.

We've gone from imagining her living well into her 90s into wondering whether she'll make it another few months to her last grandchild's Bar Mitzvah.

Mrs. Yid's father Habakkuk works in end of life care, so he and her have some strong opinions about this sort of thing-- opinions which I, for the most part, share. If Bubbe is suffering and has no real chance of "recovering," much less having any kind of quality of life she wants, I think it's appropriate to start considering palliative options or even hospice. Of course, this is made more complicated by the fact that there are four siblings-- plus an extra few in-laws all trying to talk, coordinate and convince each other of what the right thing to do is. This is not helped by the fact that none of the siblings like each other all that much-- to say nothing of their feelings towards Bubbe.

I want to be there with her-- but at the same time, I don't. I'm worried I'll regret not going to see her, but the idea of going is also pretty frightening.

The whole thing is very sad. I know that nothing I do is going to change the outcome-- Bubbe might go soon, or she might live on like this for several more years. It's hard to figure out what would be optimal. I suppose that if the way she is now is the best she's going to be then, as uncomfortable as it is to contemplate, I suppose, for her sake, I'd rather she go quickly.

But I have to confess that I'm a little scared about how I'll feel when she does.

Despite everything, she's the only real grandparent I've ever had. Though we aren't super close (no one in my family really is), it's scary to contemplate how things will feel without her-- how we'll all deal with it, and how we'll honor and remember her.

Family History vs. Family Facts

When it comes to genealogy, I have something of a personality split that pops up from time to time. On the one hand, as a researcher and historian, I try to be very cautious about what information I consider reliable and pass along to others. At the same time, as a writer and storyteller, I love the family yarns and narratives, and it's very hard to avoid speculating and "putting pieces together," even when they may not all be there.

An example: When I first started tracing the tree, one of the stories that kept coming up from my great-aunts about their mother's family was that their grandmother had been in a Tsarist prison. As I interviewed each one in turn, I kept getting more pieces of the puzzle. The story is that the grandfather was making his own liquor in their shtetl, that someone informed on him, and that when the police came to arrest him, he wasn't there-- and so his wife took the blame and went to prison for several years. Depending on the chronology, this may have precipitated-- or happened during-- the family's immigration to America. Now, despite there being zero documentation for this, it is one of my favorite bits of family lore, and I have repeated it to various cousins and relatives whenever I get the chance-- though always clearly identifying it as a story.

Given this background, I'm somewhat sympathetic-- though maybe the word "almost" is more appropriate-- to Sen. Marco Rubio's recent debacle with his family history. Rubio, whose star in the GOP has been steadily rising (at least according to the national news media) since his election to Senate in 2010, has made his parents' story of immigration from Cuba a major talking-point of his campaigns and political narrative. According to Rubio, his parents "fled" Cuba after Fidel Castro's coup and he was raised as a son of exiles in Florida. The story is compelling, powerful, and resonates with a lot of people-- both in the Cuban community and beyond it. It's a classic tale of coming to the United States to escape persecution, and it has the additional benefits of the "pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps" narrative, as well as a chance to emphasize how Cuban Communism under the Castros utterly failed, which are undoubtedly major reasons Rubio's story appealed to GOP voters.

There's only one problem with all of this: it's not, strictly speaking, true.

Researchers have found documents showing that the Rubios came to the US in 1956. At the time, Castro was not even in Cuba. He wouldn't take over for another three and a half years. Rubio's parents left Cuba not because of political repression but simply to make a better life.

Rubio has tried a few different tactics to defend his story in light of the newly revealed facts. The first thing he's done is to say that it's not his fault he didn't know this stuff:

In a brief interview Thursday, Rubio said his accounts have been based on family lore. “I’m going off the oral history of my family,” he said. “All of these documents and passports are not things that I carried around with me.”

So... it doesn't matter that I said things that weren't true because I never bothered to verify if they were true? Not the defense I'd go with. A much better version of this argument would be, "I'm as shocked as you are. I was always told, by this relative, that relative, and this other relative, that my parents came here in 1959. " That makes it sound like you actually care about the facts, as opposed to being involved in a tug-of-war between your parents' own documents and the fantastic universe you've created in your head where your Dad led his own anti-Castro militia group (Rubio's Rebels?) through the Cuban highlands, set Fidel's beard on fire, and then beat a hasty but heroic retreat to fight another day (or spawn a kid who would get elected into public office, whatever).

The other approach has been to claim that none of this matters anyway, because details are stupid:

"...It’s not like they discovered my parents were from Canada. My story is essentially the same one. My parents came to this country in search for a better life. They were prepared to live here permanently but always wished they could go back to Cuba," he said.

Again, nice try. There's a world of difference between going back for a visit when you're already established somewhere else and deciding, "Nah, I'll stick with Miami," and suffering actual political repression, to say nothing of the trauma of being a legitimate refugee having to flee a country with nothing and having to start entirely from scratch.

I'm not saying the Rubios had it easy. In a lot of ways their story is quite similar to many of my ancestors' stories. There's nothing wrong with your standard immigrant tale. At the same time, I would never identify my ancestors as political exiles or refugees. Of course, most of them were trying to escape increasingly tyrannical and discriminatory governments, but the vast majority's primary motivations seem to have been economic.

My take? Beware of politicians selling personal narratives as a way to appeal to a broader constituency-- their primary goal is not simply to tell a story but to make a connection, which also means that they may not care that much about the details. Rubio has clearly used the narrative of his parents being political exiles as a foundation-stone for his political identity, despite the fact that they were not. The fact that he's claiming this changes "nothing" only reinforces how he's much more concerned with protecting the image he was able to develop based on that story than the actual family history he pretends has shaped him so significantly. Not only is this a case of a politician not respecting his audience, but sadly also an instance of someone exploiting their family history in bad faith.

I can relate. Aunt Bozette has invented more than a few off-kilter theories about our family over the years, usually with precisely zero evidence. Among the best ones were that since one of her grandmothers was Hungarian, clearly her grandfather had to also have been Hungarian, and that this must have been how they met. Never mind that I had documents going back one hundred years showing that his family had been living in Czestochowa and that he and all his siblings had been born there, too. Aunt Bozette was "convinced," because, among other things, she clearly thought being Hungarian was sexier than being Polish. When I clearly wasn't budging, she accused the records of being unreliable because they spelled the family name differently than the American relatives did. (When I pointed out that name spellings varied in Poland, that many Jews of that period could not read Polish, and that members of our own family had been illiterate, she went into an e-rage, sputtering that we had "always" been very educated-- and offered, as proof, that her father and uncle had both gotten degrees from NYU.)

The reverse has also happened: there have been several occaisons when long-standing family stories have wound up being not exactly true. When this came up, my reaction was not defensiveness or anger, but excitement-- now we could find out the real story! There's nothing wrong with correcting the record or amending the stories. (Was I disappointed when I found out that great-great-uncle Nathan wasn't shell-shocked in World War One? Sure-- but then I got to find out about his actual record as a Marine stationed in Cuba during the Banana Wars.) There's also nothing wrong with qualifying the stories as stories-- which exist in their own right as a family commentary or gloss on the actual events. It's not "bad," they're just different kinds of data. Where you get into trouble is when you start giving the stories preference over the available, documented, evidence, because you think the truth isn't as interesting, scandalous, or beneficial to the greater narrative you want to tell. That's when you cross the line into being dishonest and verging on sleazy.

It's not necessarily Rubio's fault that, absent hard facts, that he made some embellishments (or repeated the embellishments of others)-- though given that he clearly was interested in his family history, I find it strange that he never bothered to ask for an actual date-- but everything he does as a response to it is all on him. So far, I'm unimpressed.

Family trauma and its ripples

This past spring my only living grandparent, Abbot Yid's octogenarian mother Bubbe, fell and hit her head. In the last few months, she has been in and out of hospitals and rehab centers. This culminated in her being flown across the country to California to a nursing home near L.A., where Uncle Milt and his family live.

Everyone in the family has been struggling with their feelings about this. On the one hand there are certainly feelings of family obligation. At the same time, Bubbe is just about the least friendly or warm person you'll ever meet. And there's the longstanding baggage of Zayde's craziness and abusiveness towards his kids that Bubbe, by all accounts, never really protected them from. At best, she was oblivious. At worst, she was an enabler. So there's a lot of conflicting emotions going on. (The fact that none of the siblings get along has not been helping things.)

I can sympathize with Abbot Yid and his siblings. I have never felt all that close to my grandmother. I "love" her inasmuch as I know I'm supposed to, and I care about her well-being. But the reality is I have not felt any real feeling of closeness to her (or from her) since I was a small child. Her general pattern has been to shift her attention to each new grandchild in turn, usually getting bored with us as soon as we start developing our own interests or stop being cute. (An example: Bubbe is really into arts and crafts, something I have historically been supremely incompetent at. Guess who hasn't been invited to do anything with Bubbe in 20 years?) Bubbe is just not all that good at reaching out to, or interacting with, people.

For a long time, I found the whole dynamic with Bubbe very frustrating. I tried to interview Bubbe on occasion  to find out more about her family, her life with Zayde, etc. She shut me down every time. She wasn't interested in introspection; she claimed she didn't remember any of the things I was curious about. She absolutely refused to discuss any "emotional memories" that I asked about. For a family historian, this was, to put it bluntly, hard to swallow. And there were times where I felt very angry about this. I was trying to connect with her the best way I knew how, and she wasn't interested.

Last year, however, something changed. Bubbe seemed to sense that her memory was going and that if she wanted to tell me anything about the family, it was getting to be now or never time. And one of the things she told me blew my mind:

"I was the oldest, but my sister was born right after me. My mother couldn't handle raising an infant and a young toddler at the same time, so she gave me to my grandmother to raise. I spent most of my time with her, going to the markets, chatting with the older folks. I even took vacations with her to the Catskills when my mother and sister would stay behind in Brooklyn."

I was floored. We all knew that Bubbe's grandmother lived with her three daughters in a 3-story house in Brownsville, but no one had ever known that Bubbe was actually raised by her grandmother, not her mother, for most of her childhood.

This couldn't explain away everything of course. Bubbe and her sister have fundamentally different personalities-- her sister is warm, emotionally engaged, and just generally a positive and fun person to be around (all the things that Bubbe, in general, isn't). But for me, the revelation that Bubbe's mother had not acted like her mother, and consequently had not taught or shown her how to be a mother, was powerful, and I started to process a lot of our interactions and my frustrations through this prism. If Bubbe's emotional connection with her mother had been that bifurcated, maybe that went a long way towards explaining her ambivalence with her children and grandchildren. (To say nothing of what emotional and family models her Old Country grandmother may have passed along to her.)

This model of mothers "abandoning" their children came up again for me recently when I found a new  genealogy record online for Mama Yid's Hungarian grandmother dating from 1888, the oldest record we have for the family in the United States. In it, the grandmother and two of her siblings (aged 6, 10 and 3) were being admitted into the Hebrew Orphan Asylum by their mother. Under cause, it said, "Widow, unable to bring up children."

The interesting thing is that we have a 1900 census record for the same family showing them all together, so the mother must have been able to get them out after a while. But still, the fact that Mama Yid's grandmother, a woman she could never feel any attachment to, and who engaged in some fairly dirty tricks with her siblings, in-laws and grandkids, had an extremely traumatic childhood, first losing her father in Hungary (according to family stories, from a farming accident) and then after making it to America, being given up by her mother to an orphanage.

Of course, all these tidbits really amount to is background information. I don't mean to imply that based on these new discoveries that I condemn the mothers who made these hard decisions, or that hard childhoods immunize the daughters from criticism. But it's hard for me to look at either my paternal grandmother, or my maternal great-grandmother, in quite the same way.

Trauma and alienation seem to have a way of repeating themselves. I hope I can do better.

Shopping and Conversation

Day 12- Last Day in Poland.

Our last day in Krakow was also going to be our last day in Poland so we wanted to make the most of it. We got up early and left before 10. We took a taxi to get to Old Town and saw the ancient clock tower, the last surviving remnant of the original Town Hall built in the 1200s. It was huge!

We went inside Sukiennice ("Cloth Hall"), a large ornate rectangular building. Inside was a giant market with around 80-100 booths. Merchants were selling leather goods, wooden carvings, dolls, boxes, glasswork, Polish clothes, and various tourist items. One booth had replicas of medieval Polish weapons and miniature wooden carved heads of famous Poles that could be hung on a wall. (One of them was clearly modeled on Pilsudski; I made a crack about mounting heads of state on your wall but as Abbot Yid knows nothing about Polish history, my brilliant wit was wasted on him.)

There were also, of course, lots of places to buy jewelry, especially amber. Mama Yid was in Heaven. Abbot Yid and I, not so much. Mama Yid insisted on seeing every booth and was incapable of "scanning," even when the booths were selling things she didn't want. We spent about four hours there, which was about three and a half hours more than Abbot Yid and I needed.

As a way of killing some time, I decided to walk around with my camcorder and film the place. One of the things I noticed, over and over, were the Jewdolls. For a town with not a lot of Jews left there sure were a lot of different kinds of Jew-dolls.

After finally finishing in Sukiennice, we ate lunch by a statue in the square. On the bench next to us a teenage girl sitting with her family decided she was tired of her sandwich and started scattering it to the birds, attracting a large flock of pigeons. Oblivious to our death-glares, she continued feeding them for about fifteen minutes, even laughing and encouraging her sister to take a picture when a few of them hopped into her hand. I wasn't sure if I was looking at a cultural phenomenon or just a moron who didn't know anything about disease transmission: were Polish pigeons not considered rats with wings?

During lunch I discovered my watch had stopped. We left the square, dragging Mama Yid away from the outer ring of shops around Sukiennice (though I did pop into one place to get a pair of pewter shot-glasses for Deacon Yid and me). We walked south through Old Town, marveling at the incredible buildings. Everywhere you looked there were old churches, houses, flats. Interspersed with them were the ugly modern structures (and of course lots of garish signs advertising shops, restaurants, money-changers and the always entertaining ALKOHOLE stores).

Next we headed to Wawel castle. Though I was sad we didn't have time to go inside, my parents were very good sports and consented to a quick walk around the outside wall. Outside I found a model replica of the castle. I wasn't a fan of the silly snow globe with a cartoony dragon inside it that came attached to it, but decided that I'd rather have something to remember the castle than not.

We went back to the flat for a rest and to start packing before taking a break for dinner. At this point my watch started up again, which was a real relief. (It also gave me a wonderful opportunity to tease Mama Yid that shopping with her actually made time stand stil.)

For our last night in Krakow we decided to go back to Kazimierz one more time. On the way we stopped at the Tourist Center to get a few more Jewdolls, angry American ladies be damned. Mama Yid bought for so she could have some fun table settings for Hanukkah. I got a couple as gifts for friends. I thought they were cute but was also disappointed that the sculptors' imaginations were so limited. If you had never met a Jew and all you had to go on was information gleaned from these dolls, you'd think all Jews did was count money, play klezmer or carry giant menorahs and the occasional book around. Since the only available dolls were men (we looked high and low for a lady Jewdoll for Mrs. Yid), one would be forgiven for assuming that Jews produced asexually, too. Or maybe Jews were like Tolkein's dwarves and men and women couldn't be told apart.

We ate dinner at an outdoor restaurant in the small square behind the bookshop and between three of the Kazimierz synagogues. I had cholent again, beef this time, and it was very good, though I think I still preferred the chicken one from the first night. Over dinner and an Israeli wine from the Golan Heights, my parents and I had a very nice conversation.

"I'm glad I came," said Abbot Yid.
"That's high praise coming from you," I said.
"I think my father would have enjoyed this. I think he would have been happy we came here."

This made me think about Mama Yid's father, who had been twenty years older than any of my other grandparents and died when she was only seven years old.

"If you could tell your father anything, what could you say?"
"I'd want to tell him that my sister and I turned out all right, that we both got advanced degrees and that we were successful."
"And is there anything you wish you could ask him?"
"I think just, 'Who were you?' I was so young when he died..."
I nodded. "It's crazy to think that he was born over 100 years ago. How different things are, all the things we have that he didn't. It's interesting to wonder what he would have thought about the world today."

I turned to Abbot Yid. "Is there anything you wish you could ask Zayde?"
He waved the question off. "I would have liked you to have a chance to spend more time with him. You could have asked him all the good questions."
It was a sad but happy moment at the same time.

I was sad to be leaving Poland but very glad we had come. In a way, I would have preferred to go home right then and had time to process everything that had happened. At the same time, how often did we go to Europe? We had been in touch with Mama Yid's British cousins for years and it was important that we finally have a chance to meet in person. I was also hoping London would be a little less intense and stressful than Poland had been. Maybe we could actually have a little bit more of a vacation there and it would give us some time to think and recover post-Poland.

(Trying to) Honor the Past

Day 11- Auschwitz & Birkenau

The day started off appropriately enough by raining throughout the morning. Since the previous day I'd had such good navigation luck, I decided to chart us a route through the town surface roads again as opposed to the highway. What I hadn't considered was that though both roads were the same distance, cars can drive about twice as fast on the highway. We finally got into Oswiecim around noon.

Polish signage is generally pretty bad as a rule, but something about the lack of signs for the camp seemed particularly strange. I understood why the town may have preferred visitors to come and visit things besides just the camp (there is a synagogue and Jewish museum, for instance, as well as some other interesting historical sights), but who were they kidding? The camp gets 1 million visitors a year. I'm sorry if you'd rather be known for your antiques or the awesomely-named Mieszko Tanglefoot, but let's face some reality, please.

When we finally did find the museum, it was jarring at how sudden the transition was (though we had been fairly creeped out at seeing stone highway barriers with an all-too-familiar curve on the top, complete with barbed wire attached). It wasn't like the town ended and then the camp was off to the left, standing dramatically by itself. The busy road took you right past the camp and if you weren't looking for  the wooden guard towers peeking over the walls, you could actually miss it.

The parking lots were absolutely packed, despite it being a Monday and raining. There was a large row of strip-mall-like stres on the outer edge. The visitor enter was in a small mall. There weren't any brochures in English (really, Auschwitz museum? really?) but my parents were hungry so we stopped for a snack at the only restaurant in the building, a bizarre hodge-podge of Polish buffet and half-hearted attempts at American and Italian-American food: Abbot Yid got french fries and Mama Yid got a crepe bolognese. We sat across from a carved wooden pizza chef. On the wall there was a sign informing us that "It is forbidden to bring and consume your own food and drinks." There was something about seeing orders posted on a wall that was a little off-putting here, even over something as banal as outside food. The radio alternated between Polish and American pop music. While my parents were eating I identified two songs: one by the reggae group that was famous for writing "Bad Boys," and that Katy Perry song about having romantic liaisons with an alien.

I wasn't sure what I had been expecting at Auschwitz, but this wasn't it. Instead of experiencing Arendt's banality of evil, so far this was the evil of banality.

We wound up spending almost five hours at Auschwitz and Birkenau altogether. Once we got into the museum proper things started getting surreal. The entrance hall and the busses were absolutely packed with giant, crushing crowds-- to the point of bringing up uncomfortable mental parallels. (We weren't the only ones commenting on this; we heard multiple groups of people discussing the "irony" of packing us in like sardines. One guy wondered if this was intentionally designed as "part of the experience.")

It was hard to connect the physical site of Auschwitz with the cultural image I had approached it with. Auschwitz has been built up in the Western imagination as the archetype of evil, but how can anything live up to that? Compared with its image, Auschwitz seemed not foreign, not evil, enough. Here was a prime example of the banality of evil. On first blush, the place did not read as specifically terrible. It had grass, flowers and birds flying overhead. The bad weather and pervasive gray skies certainly added to the moroseness but it didn't feel different from any other spot.

Areas that did have an emotional impact were ones that emphasized the massive scale of the extermination and destruction that happened there: the piles of hair, glasses, and shoes. A room full of suitcases, covered with carefully printed names and addresses of unsuspecting victims long dead. Standing at one end of Birkenau and not being able to see the other side because of how massive the camp was. These were the things that showed the planning side, the inhuman coldness that allowed people to separate out their immediate tasks from the reality that they were building factories of death.

Being inside the Auschwitz barracks was surreal-- the stone stairs were worn down from so many visitors that they had become curved in the middle and were hard to walk on. It added to the experience of feeling off-balance and that things weren't quite right.

We saw the basements of Block 11-- claustrophobic hallways, tiny cells designed for starvation and sadism. Particularly disturbing were the closet-sized punishment cells, where men were forced to stand for hours at a time without being able to sit. The sheer amount of thought put into being evil for evil's sake felt outrageous and obscene.

There were also some bizarre moments involving other people we were there with. A Portugese man with his family took dozens of flash pictures inside the buildings, oblivious to the signs telling him not to and the UV-protection film over the windows. Every picture he was taking was destroying historical evidence of Nazi atrocities, and helping the case of jackasses the world over who claim that Auschwitz is a manufactured fraud. I could have strangled him. There was also a family from Singapore who kept mugging for each other's snapshots, smiling in front of the train tracks, the execution wall and the iconic sign. It made me feel ill. Yes, I was glad that people from around the world visit this place, but going to Auschwitz is not like seeing the Grand Canyon or the Eiffel Tower. I hope to God that if I ever visit  Tuol Seng, someone will stop me if I start grinning like an idiot and taking pictures of myself in front of torture cells. The irony was that the family told us that they had come to see Auschwitz because "we've always heard about it and needed to see it with our own eyes." The impulse was admirable, but it was hard to square that away with how they were acting.

One thing people don't tell you about visiting Auschwitz and Birkenau is how much physical activity is involved: there is a lot of walking around, particularly at Birkenau. The road was composed of dirt and pebbles and was tough to walk on. The final stop is at the Birkenau memorial, surrounded by the ruins of the destroyed crematoria. It was pretty emotional. Abbot Yid cried, and I said Kaddish in memory of the 15 relatives of my mother killed there, the 45 others killed at Treblinka, Buchenwald, Gross-Rosen and others, and the 150 whose fates remain unknown.

We walked back to the gate with our Polish guide, a young woman named Maria. She was from Oswiecim, had gone to University, and then came back. She had been working as a docent at the museum for several years. She seemed proud of her home and mentioned that it dated from the 12th century and had been a large town before the war. We said it must be hard to live so close to the camp and its history.

"Someone has to tell the story," she said. "It's important."

Hearing such a sense of stewardship to a place and its history from a twenty-something was inspiring.

The experience was emotionally and physically draining, though I was glad we had done it-- particularly since we had come not just to experience something in the abstract, but to also see it through personal and specific eyes: this was the place where my mother's cousins had been murdered. We had their names, in some cases we even had their dates and tattoo numbers. This wasn't just about "The Holocaust." It was the grave of these relatives, who had been denied their identities. It felt like going there, saying their names, acknowledging them as individuals, if only in a small way, was a sort of tikkun. A healing.

That night we went back to Kazimierz and the restaurant. I had duck with apples (ok, but not as good as Polish cholent). Mama Yid had tzimmes, which she said reminded her of her grandmother's cooking.

The really interesting part came after the meal, when Mama Yid chatted up two English-speaking women at the table next to us. They were New Yorkers (of course!) and had also visited Auschwitz that day, but with a private guide. The older woman was in her sixties and had taken her 40s-ish daughter to Poland to look for their roots in Northern Poland. They had also had some powerful personal moments, including finding archival records and seeing places in the Old Country their relatives had spoken about for years.

We chatted for a while and then the question of Israel came up. "It's surprising to hear you've been here and not to Israel," the daughter remarked. Her mother started giving her impressions of Auschwitz:

"Our guide was very informative. One of the things that bothered me about the museum, though, is that the point of view is very Polish, everything is about the Poles and not so much about the Jews who died there. Like, they have that cell with the flowers for that Polish Pope who died," she said, referring to a priest, Maximillian Kolbe, who voluntarily submitted to starvation torture to spare a fellow inmate the same fate. "Why do they have a memorial for that Pope and not the Jews?" she asked.

I thought of the plaques and flowers inside the Auschwitz crematorium and the memorial statue at Birkenau. I saw the woman's point; it would be nice to have a personalized experience of some Jewish prisoners with names and faces that visitors could connect with, but at the same time the museum seemed stuck. Anything the museum did would be criticized. There was also the tricky point that most Jews at Auschwitz were killed within hours; the vast majority of the prisoners who were incarcerated there were Poles. I didn't think the Jewish piece should be minimized, but it was challenging to tell both of those stories simultaneously.

"In Israel, at Yad Vashem, the information is much more truthful. At Auschwitz everything is about all the prisoners experienced, but Yad Vashem talks about how little the rest of the world did. How few people helped the Jews. The Holocaust museum in DC is even worse. So politically correct!"

I held back a smirk. Yes, Yad Vashem was probably more unflinching with the details, but the idea that it didn't have a political agenda was either silly or naive. The Israelis had a Holocaust narrative just as firmly as the Americans or the Poles.

The woman continued. "Our guide told us there's still antisemitism around here, too. Like those dolls. Have you seen them?"

We nodded. While they were strange and stereotypical, on average the ones we had seen had tended more towards cute-sy than outrageous. The women shook their heads. "It's terrible," said the daughter. "All the Jewish dolls do is count money. The Poles buy them and give them to their children before they get married as a good luck charm, to help them be successful."

As bizarre and perhaps even cringe-worthy as that may have been, I found it hard to relate to their outrage. In the grand scheme of things I'd much rather see Jewdolls with money than bloody matzah, for example. It wasn't that I didn't think there was zero antisemitism in Poland. Hatred didn't seem to be as big an issue as ignorance and a lack of contact. In order to know about and understand Jews, Poles needed to meet more Jews! Which also meant Jews needed to spend part of their time in Poland meeting with and trying to learn more about Poles, not only focusing on Jewish sites or on things relating to the Holocaust. Two-way streets and all that.

As a counterpoint I told the women about my friend Pavel and his family and our guide Maria and suggested that the younger generation seemed interested in knowing more about and honoring Poland's Jewish heritage. The women nodded politely, as if they weren't sure how to bridge the gap of our very different views of the country and its people.

Walking back to our apartment, I was troubled. I was happy to meet more Jews in Poland but also sad that for so many people, it seemed that their minds were already made up before they got there and that they tended to look for proof to substantiate negative preconceptions. I also realized that for most "connected" American Jews Israel was "advertised" much more than Europe. As the US-Israel relationship has developed and most American Jewish movements have become more Zionist, Israel has been pushed as American Jews' second home, a place that feels familiar and culturally (if not always physically) safe. The irony, of course, was that our immediate ancestors and family had spent far more time in Europe, especially Poland and neighboring countries, than Israel.

Of course Israel had history and tradition and certainly a valuable connection that needed to at least be considered (if not taken) seriously. But at the end of the day a major connector for me was family, personal family history. While we had plenty of cousins in Israel (with interesting stories and history of their own, to be sure), it still felt like a bit of a stretch to claim that Israel was more my ancestors' home than Poland. Yes, our forefathers may have lived in the hills of Judea, but I had found my ancestor's tombstone and touched it with my own hand. That was far more tangible to me than semi-hypothetical connections to Biblical characters.

At some point I am sure I will visit Israel, probably with Mrs. Yid (and perhaps even with my parents). I am sure it will also be a moving and personal experience. But it was frustrating to feel that Poland's Jewish past or direct connection with descendants of Polish Jews had been minimized by a narrative that championed Israel and Zionism as a primary pillar of Jewish identity.

Meeting the family

Day 10- Cousins!

We had been very anxious that everything go well for meeting our Polish cousins. Initially we had wanted to take them out to a restaurant, but then we decided we didn't want to seem too flashy (and besides, Abbot Yid's food allergies kept rearing their annoying heads). So instead we offered to feed them at our apartment.

We met Mama Yid's third cousin, who I'll call Paula, her son Janusz and his wife Zofia. Paula was around 60 and only spoke Polish. Janusz spoke some English but mostly Zofia did the translating for everyone. They stayed about four hours, telling us all about their lives, their family, and their past. They said that before I had contacted them a few years ago didn't know they had any family outside of Poland.

Paula said her father's family had considered themselves very Polish before the war. They had gone to Polish schools, had Polish names, spoke Polish at home, etc. An uncle had even been an officer in the Polish army. They had known they were Jewish, of course, but it had been a part, rather than the sum, of their identity.

Paula's father Feliks had been in his early twenties during the war. His two brothers were killed-- one was shot and another may have been deported. His father died of a heart attack and he never found out how his mother died. He and his sister Eva had been hiding when the ghetto was liquidated and then they spent two years in one of the local slave labor camps. Conditions there were very hard. Once his sister got sick with typhus, and he stole an apple to give to her. Her was caught and severely beaten for it.

Janusz mentioned that he had been told a story when he was young about Feliks: during the war he had spent time hiding in a sewer. As a result he suffered from permanent claustrophia: anytime he came into a room he would open all the doors and windows.

Only Feliks, Eva, and their uncle the army officer survived the war. They came back to their homes but Poles were living in them. They moved to a nearby city and found jobs. The uncle died soon after the war ended from cancer, possibly caused by chemicals they were forced to use in the labor camp.

One of the things I was most curious about was why Feliks had stayed in Poland. So many other Jews survived the war and decided to leave, either for Israel, America, Canada, Australia, etc. But not him. Why?

Paula said he would have liked to leave Poland, but that her step-mother didn't-- she felt Poland was their home and that they should stay (I never found out whether she was Jewish or Catholic). Feliks and his sister were very close, but she wanted to go to Israel, and moved in 1956. She wanted to come back and visit but the Polish government wouldn't let her in. When Paula went for a visit in 1967 the war broke out and she flew back immediately. The Polish authorities were suspicious and interrogated her three times to make sure she wasn't a spy. They only stopped after her father paid them a visit and had "harsh words" with them. After Communism ended Eva visited several times. Paula proudly told us she had been on seven trips to Israel.

I asked the family about Jewish identity, but they seemed confused by my questions. They saw no difference between themselves and any others Poles. Yes, there was some antisemitism, they said, but nothing significant. Paula said she hadn't known she was Jewish until she was a young adult, but that it didn't make her feel different. Janusz agreed.

I commented that in America, people often felt like they had an epiphany when they found out something important or hidden about their roots, but that maybe things were different in Poland. Abbot Yid later suggested that maybe this had something to do with the cultural legacy of communism, under which people were encouraged not to stand out or to focus on things that made them different from each other-- the common culture was what was important.

While it was wonderful to see all three of our relatives, Paula was a real hoot. She immediately invented pet names for both my parents, and when I commented on the similarity between her and Mama Yid's haircuts and that they had both worn red shirts, she harrumphed and smiled. "Of course we look alike," she said in Polish. "We're cousins!"

We told them that the next stop on our trip would be Krakow and that this would include a visit to Auschwitz. I said that even though I knew it would be hard I thought it was important that we had spent time understanding how the family had lived before seeing how they had died. I added, "And something we have, which I am so grateful for, and which I know most people don't have, is the first-hand knowledge and perspective that this was not the end, that both the family and Jewish life did not end at Auschwitz. I know that we are still here, in Poland."

To see the family right in front of me, to meet meet living, breathing cousins on Polish soil, made the years of dry research in archives and on computers really come alive. I wouldn't have traded it for anything.

Making Connections

[Although I've been back home for a few days, I will be continuing to post excerpts from my trip journal.]

Day 8- Cemetery Day!

We woke up early and Abbot Yid and I headed into town to try to find a better map of the area at the tourist center. This became its own adventure as the major boulevard of the city (which runs west-east from the monastery) was undergoing renovation work, and most of the north-south streets are either tiny or have a bad habit of suddenly becoming one-way streets or dead-ends. We finally got to the tourist center and got a better map. Coming out of the center, we ran smack-dab into a statue of a famous Polish poet, next to the high school named after him. This school was where Pavel had attended as a student, along with several of Mama Yid's distant relatives in the early 1900s. Looking at the school was bittersweet. On the one hand, it was nice to see that some traces of our family were still there in the town-- that some of the places they had touched and spent time had lasted. At the same time, I couldn't look at the building without thinking of what happened to those cousins:

One of them, Lolek, had done quite well in school. He graduated from high school with a certificate in Biology, then attended the University of Vilna in Lithuania as well as the Sorbonne in Paris, eventually graduating as a Surgeon. Lolek had easily been the most educated of anyone in his family, and was the first to enter the medical profession before Mama Yid many decades later. Had he stayed in France, or immigrated to America, who knows what might have become of him? Instead, tragically, he returned to Poland, to work in the Jewish Hospital in Cz. He lasted most of the war in one of the labor camps in the town making munitions, but was transferred to Buchenwald in early 1945 when the Nazis liquidated them ahead of the Soviet advance. He died just a few months before Soviet liberation, and his widow died in Los Angeles a few years ago.

So much promise, so much potential... a healer, a man who had devoted his life to helping people... and it hadn't mattered.

The big goal for the day was to find the Jewish cemetery and to see if we could find my great-great-great-grandfather Hirshel. GoogleMaps had made it sound like it was a straight shot once you were on the right road, but once we were driving out of town we realized it was a little more complicated than that. We drove until the road ended, in a mud slick by the outskirts of a small suburb. I checked the map. The problem was that the cemetery was in the middle of the forest, and the forest was growing between the road and the cemetery. I said it looked like we could just walk from there, but Abbot Yid wasn't interested in leaving the car in the middle of nowhere. So we got back in and tried again, this time sticking to the paved road. We took that road as far as we could until it dead-ended by an aluminum shop next to the river. According to the map the cemetery was on the other side.

Abbot Yid and I got out and chatted up a worker who had come out from the shop to see what we were up to. He looked like Wilford Brimley in overalls and a trucker hat. Using my extensive Polish skills plus the fine art of pantomime, I asked if we were close to the Jewish cemetery. He nodded, and proceeded to give me a two-minute animated speech in Polish. (Since I couldn't understand a thing I just watched him for body language.) We established that the cemetery was walkable from there, and also asked if we could leave the car there. He nodded and waved cheerfully.

To cross the river, we had to duck under gigantic water pipes (Pavel later explained that these pipes took water from the river and heated it to provide steam to the apartments in the city) and cross a railroad trestle. Abbot Yid remarked that only I would consider something like this a vacation.

We came to a clearing and saw a young Polish man walking from the left with a wheelbarrow with some wood stacked in it. I said Dzien dobry but he ignored me and just kept walking away, whistling to himself. We followed the way he had come and after a minute the trees gave way into another clearing, this time with a stone wall. We had found the cemetery! There was a small bus by the gate and I said Dzien dobry to the driver, who responded, "Hi!" He said he was there with an Israeli tour group that was there cleaning up the cemetery. I said we were looking for a grave. A number of years ago I had the good fortune to find part of the cemetery data online. It had been recorded by a researcher from Israel named Binyamin. He had the grave number and even a picture of Tzvi Hirsch's grave. I had been amazed and excited-- though this diminished slightly after I showed the picture to a friend and he pointed out that I had been holding it sideways the whole time and that the tombstone was on its side.

I had printed out a picture of the tombstone along with a map of the cemetery. I figured since we had the number of the stone and we knew what it looked like, it couldn't be all that hard. The driver pointed us in the approximate area where it might be, and went back to his bus. "Good luck," he said doubtfully.

As soon as he left us, I realized what he had meant. I had been in cemeteries in New York and they were challenging to walk through, but it was nothing like this. The forest had literally taken over the grounds. In places the trees were so dense you could barely see the sky. Still, I started hunting. I knew we were looking for a distinctive grave that had a round top but pointy side-corners, with a three-petaled flower on the side. And we had the grave number, that would help, right?

As we started looking, though, I started feeling a small pit in my stomach. There were no numbers on any of the stones. Only about a third were left standing. The others were  jutting out at impossible angles from the ground, if they weren't lying face down and being grown over by weeds and grass. It looked like a hurricane had whipped through the place. There weren't even any paths. You could only get from one place to another by walking on the toppled stones. Every step I took, I was either stepping on someone's tombstone or their grave itself. It wasn't creepy as much as sad-- that this was all that was left.

Mama Yid's family were Kohanim, so I tried to look for Kohan hands extended in Vulcan-salute. But even then, I realized there was no way this was going to work. There were just too many graves, and too much forest. The pointy-cornered stone was not much help-- the style had been a popular choice, as had the three-petaled flower. We found some Kohanim, but none were inside the distinctive shape-- curved but with corners, almost like a policeman's badge-- that was on Hirshel's stone.

"I didn't realize it would be so hard," I said. I felt embarrassed. We had come so far to do this, and I hadn't had any sort of plan for finding the grave! I just thought it would happen. It had been stupid of me. "You'd need a miracle to find him here."

Mama Yid said she was going to ask the students for help. I was resistant, at first. It sounded like some of them were speaking Polish. Maybe the Israelis were working with local Poles? But in any case, it was good they were cleaning up the place, but that didn't mean they could help me find a grave. And if the Polish kids couldn't even read Hebrew, how could they even know what was there? It was hopeless. Part of this was also that I felt embarrassed that we couldn't find it ourselves and that I hadn't thought about how hard it might be. I was also a little nervous about talking to the Israelis. What if they didn't want to help?

Still, Mama Yid went and asked. We went up to a student and said hello. They weren't super confident in English so they went and got their teacher, Dina. She was in her early 50s and was direct and brash in a way that made her both slightly intimidating as well as immediately likable. She said they were from a high school in Jerusalem and had been coming to Poland to clean up cemeteries and to archive the data. My ears perked up.

I told her we were looking for a grave that had been catalogued by Binyamin years earlier. She sighed. "He had no system. You'll never find it that way. No chance. But, if you're lucky, we might have already documented it. Let me get my laptop."

As she fired it up, Abbot Yid said this was an incredible coincidence. Dina shot back immediately, "I don't believe in coincidences." As we made some small talk I mentioned my involvement with different genealogy organizations focusing on the Cz area.

Dina nodded. "Yeah, I have some problems with them. Then again, they have some problems with me. They charge people to look at cemetery data, and I think that's wrong. How it a 90-year-old lady looking for her family's tombstones supposed to pay that? So I do the same work and give it away free, and they don't like that very much." She also had some harsh words for the landsmanschaft organizations. "I've asked them for donations-- this whole project is all run on donations. The kids raise money in Israel to get here. This is their break before they go into the army, this is what they want to do. And so when someone tells me they'll give me 50,000 dollars, and then I call them ten times and never hear from them again, yeah, it's frustrating. I'd rather they give $100 and follow through on it." I made a mental note to send her a check when all this was over.

Dina asked me to repeat the name and found a match. "I've got him." She read off a plot and grave number. "He's in the Kohen section."

We followed her back to where we started, but this time went much further left from the main path. As we walked I stayed close to her with my parents following behind. She told me more about Binyamin and his methods. "He just started from the front and numbered every stone he saw. There was no organization. Before he died he gave me his blessing to continue his work, but this time in a systematic way, so future generations could come back and find them again."

Dina started walking into the tall grass. She hunted for a while and then came back. "There's no way we're getting in there. It's just too dense. But that also makes me think it's not the right spot. If I have him recorded on my computer then it has to be an area that we catalogued a few years ago." She and I retraced our steps a little and then tried branching off again. I felt my whole body clench. The thought that after all this we still might not find him was too much to think about. We had to see him. I had to see him.

Dina stopped by a stone. She and I were far ahead of my parents now. "What number did you have on that picture?"

"702."

"Well I have 703 here."

I perked up. "So it should be nearby, right?"

As always, she wouldn't give an inch. "Maybe. With Binyamin, who knows?"

We searched near 703-- there was one grave to the right and another to the left, but both were too small to be Hirshel's. I again began to wonder if we would ever find the grave. I tried to stay positive without getting my hopes up.

We had come from the left, so I decided to take another look to the right. The trees were very dense there, so low I had to crouch. The ground was covered in brambles and thorns. On my right there was grass taller than me. I kept trudging. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a shape-- a stone lying on its side. With a corner. The stone was leaning against a tree, just like in my picture.

Somehow, I knew it-- I knew that this was Hirshel. Waiting for us.

"I think I found it!" I ran over, ducking under trees, hopping over roots. I could only see the back of the stone. I was totally focused on getting to the other side. Nothing else mattered now-- not the trees, not the mosquitoes, not the cloudy sky above us.

I came around the side of the stone and scanned it: the left corner with the small three-petaled flower we had seen on so many others; the angle of the stone against the tree; the symbol of the Kohanim with the fingers arranged into a V-- but unlike all the others, placed into a spiky sideways oval, like a policeman's badge.

Despite some lessons with a tutor, my Hebrew was still extremely basic, but I could sight-read enough to confirm the inscription: "Tzvi Hirsh ben Meir Hakohen." My ancestor.

"I found him!" They all came running. Dina read off the tombstone and confirmed it. We had him. I got to work scraping off the moss with a wireless card we had gotten from the airport. Dina had said I should have the honor of the mitzvah.

It took about thirty minutes. My parents made small talk with Dina but I stayed totally focused. I scraped and scraped and when the card couldn't do any more, I used my hand, rubbing the sandstone until my fingers were raw As a finishing touch, Dina gave me some chalk to rub on the inscription, making the iconography and lettering pop out.

I stood there with the stone, speechless. Dina said she had to get back to her students but that they would be there if I wanted to say Kaddish. I nodded and said we would meet them back at the gate.

Abbot Yid asked me how I felt and I honestly there were no words. I had gone from such highs to lows and then back again that I was totally overwhelmed. There had been times that I thought it was hopeless and impossible, that I would never get to Poland, never make it to Czestochowa, never cajole my parents to coming to the cemetery, never find the stone. And yet, now, amazingly, we were here, with Hirshel. Exactly where we needed to be. It was seemed so hard, and yet now it was incredibly simple. I ran my fingers along the edges, feeling the chisel marks on the edge.

Hirshel was the only one from my mother's family with a grave. The only physical proof that her family had lived on this soil, in this place, for over one hundred and fifty years. He couldn't bring any of them back, of course. Not the ancestors who died long before the war or the relatives who had been murdered during it. But he could testify to their history. They had existed. That had been there. They had lived, right there. A legacy people had tried so hard to erase from the earth, so fragmented and limited, but here he was, right in front of me. My roots, brought to life.

I wanted to say Kaddish for him right there, as a personal link between us. But the words wouldn't come. I leafed through the bentscher I had brought from home but it wasn't in there. I stood there and tried over and over, "Yitbarach v'yishtabach...", but couldn't continue. I was ashamed at my ignorance. We had come so far and achieved so much, but this simple act of saying Kaddish for my ancestor at his grave was something I didn't have the tools to do. I wanted so much to honor my ancestors and their heritage, was respected (if only begrudgingly) by the rest of the family for being "so Jewish" but was still lacking basic Jewish literacy. What would Hirshel think of me, a descendant so ignorant he couldn't even say Kaddish for him? For the first time, I felt like crying. Not for Hirshel, but for myself.

My parents tried to make me feel better, pointing out that it would still be respectful to say Kaddish at the gates. I nodded. Before we left, I said the only thing I could: the Shehecheyanu: "Baruch Atah Adonai Eloheinu Melech Ha Olam, Shehechayanu, V'Kiyimanu, V'Higianu Lazman Hazeh." Blessed are You Adonai our God, King of the Universe, who has granted us life, sustained us and enabled us to reach this  moment.

We walked back to the gate. The kids were gone, back working with the Polish men, who were collecting the chopped trees to take back to their homes for firewood. Yet when Dina called them back, they all appeared out fo the forest, like mythical creatures conjured up; Jews sprouting from the stones and trees to make a minyan, to do one more mitzvah, to try to make things a little better in the world.

Dina gave me a yarzeit candle. I lit it while she opened her prayer book and her kids made a wide circle. She handed me the book. "I can't read it," I whispered, too embarrassed to look her students in the eyes. "I'll lead and you follow," she said, without a trace of judgment.

That was exactly what we did, line by line, in the minyan of young Israelis, my middle-aged American parents, and one old Catholic Pole. Though I had wanted so much to say it alone, it also felt right to do it this way. In a minyan, as part of a community. The way Kaddish is supposed to be said.

We finished and I was so choked up I could barely speak. My embarrassment of my lack of Hebrew, my apprehension of being judged, all of it was gone. All that had mattered in that moment was the idea of family, of doing the decent and kind thing. It was incredibly powerful.

"Thank you," I said, wishing desperately I knew how to say the words in Hebrew. The kids nodded, as if it had been nothing and went back to work, doing on last mitzvah for those who could never say thank you.

We walked back with the students, some of whom were making a film for their class. Dina said they'd like to talk with us on camera. She remarked, "Just yesterday they were asking if anyone really cares about this stuff, if it really matters to anyone. And I told them, every trip, there's always someone who shows up looking for someone. They didn't believe me, but now it happened to them."

While the kids were setting up their shot, Dina explained their itinerary. "This is our last day here. Tomorrow we head to Lodz for Shabbat." I felt goosebumps popping all over my neck. Earlier that morning, when it had looked like it might rain, we had talked about going shopping that day and saving the cemetery for tomorrow. If we hadn't been there that day, they would have been gone, and I was sure now that we would never have found the grave.

We spoke on camera a little: I told them, "My mother's grandfather was from Czestochowa and his grandfather and namesake is buried here. What you have done for us-- what you're doing here-- is incredible." Before we left, Dina mentioned that were just five days away from Hirshel's yarzeit. One hundred and thirty-four years and we happened to come right before the anniversary of his death. We weren't the kind of epople who believed in fate of coincidence, but as Dina said, "Sometimes the separation between their world and ours is not so big."

As we left, we told Dina they had friends in San Francisco and that we would try to do what we could to help them continue their work. We couldn't explain what had happened, exactly. It wasn't logical. But someone or something had wanted us to find Hirshel's grave that day, and it happened.

The rest of the afternoon was relatively uneventful. One thing we did was find the monument at the Umschagplatz-- the site where the city's Jews had been deported to Treblinka. We drove until we found a spot near the end of town by the river and train tracks. The monument had been designed by a survivor from the city and paid for by the global Landsmanschaft. It consisted of a massive brick wall, with a large star of David on one side and a set of train tracks on the other, both made of iron. A giant crack broke the wall in two, symbolizing the destruction and trauma of the Holocaust. The plaques below, in Polish, English, Hebrew and Yiddish, spoke of the deaths of the 40,000 Jews of the city and concluded with, "Their memory be honored!"

I thought it was interesting that the plaque spoke of singular, communal memory, and that it was not phrased as a request, but a command, or perhaps, a commandment? (It made me think of Fackenheim's '614th commandment'- "Do not give Hitler posthumous victories.") Before we left, I had Abbot Yid take a picture of me at the monument. I stood right in the gap, one hand on each side, bridging the divide, re-establishing the connection. Yes, the break had happened, and we could never go back. Things could never be like they had been before (isn't that always the way of history?), and in some ways, that was a good thing. But to use the break as a rationale to shun the past, to denigrate our history and our ancestors along with it, was a mistake. If enough people took the time and made the effort, like me, like Dina, and even like my parents, we could be a bridge, a conduit between the Old the New Worlds, between the past and future. That was what my work in genealogy, and really the whole trip, was about.

We were supposed to spend time with Pavel and his family that afternoon, but after an emotional day we were all feeling drained. We had Polish-style spaghetti and meat sauce for dinner and went to bed early, exhausted. We all felt like we had been in a movie or something. The day had been incredibly powerful. We had started that morning optimistic and naive, not realizing how daunting the task would be. Then, faced with the reality of what we were trying to do, we had needed a miracle, and somehow, incredibly, we had gotten one. What else could we say.

A million thank yous to Dina, her students, and their ongoing project to clean and catalogue Jewish cemeteries in Poland. The only thing I can think of to sum up is to say this: They are doing holy work, and anything anyone can do to help them is a profound mitzvah.

Shame in Skver

Background: As I've spoken about before, my grandfather was a B'aal Teshuvah who became religious sometime in the mid-70s and spent time with several rebbes through the 1980s. This period coincided with his manic-depressive disorder becoming progressively worse, eventually resulting in full-on psychotic episodes. It also coincided with the disintegration of his relationships with nearly every member of his family, including his four children and several sisters. For a long time, my grandmother dutifully went along with his spiritual journey, tolerating one new "mitzvah" after another, including going to several rebbe's tisches with him. Eventually, however, they divorced and his estrangement from the family was complete. Or almost, anyway.

When I was born, this changed, a little. He and my father had always shared something of a bond despite themselves, and in some way I reflected this, too. I've been told that he and I "fell in love" the first time we met when I was an infant (I think). It was about this time that Zayde issued his ultimatum: the only "proper" way for this relationship to work (he was big on things being proper) was for my parents to move to New York and enroll me in a yeshiva.

Given my father's agnostic proclivities and the fact that neither of my parents had any particular interest in religion, this suggestion did not go over well. And, predictably enough, that was the end of any contact between Abbot Yid and Zayde for quite a while.

As a child I was fascinated by my mysterious absent grandfather. In 8th grade (a few years after Zayde's death), I read Potok's The Chosen and it was like a fire had been lit under me. I knew these people. My grandfather had been one of them. It sounds strange, but reading about that world in a book confirmed that it was real for me. I became interested in Orthodox, and especially Hasidic, culture, reading everything I could get my hands on. And I started leaning on the family for details about Zayde's Orthodox life. In particular I wanted to know which Hasidic community he had been a part of. No one seemed to know. Finally one great-aunt suggested it might have been Chabad, which made sense. So for a while Chabad was the target of a lot of my focus and ire. Looking back on it, some of that may have been unfair. While Chabad's got plenty of flaws as an organization, community, and belief system, I have to also acknowledge the contribution its individual members have made in reaching out to Jews across the world (the issue of what strings are attached is my big problem...)

Last year, however, I received a major revelation when I managed to make contact with one of Zayde's old Orthodox buddies, Dr. Jewman. It turns out that he hadn't been a Chabad fellow-traveler. Zayde had had a few rebbes, one of whom was the Rebbe of Skver.

All of which has made the big news coming from Skver over the past week particularly sickening.

Skver is interesting as it is one of the few American Hasidic communities to have created its own shtetl in the mid-50s (while the Satmar Kiryas Yoel sometimes gets more attention, New Square predates it by a good 25 years). So New Square is a kind of fascinating window into a Hasidic group not constrained by urban geography. And as the village is, AFAIK, entirely populated by Skver Hasidim it also provides a glimpse as to what the European shtetls might have looked like. Unfortunately part of that view, as recent events have shown, is the totalitarian nature that living in an enclosed Hasidic world can be. In a town that is controlled by one man, the rebbe, dissent can be a very dicey proposition, ranging from merely ostracism all the way up to, well, this.

Chaim Aron Rottenberg. Father of four. Plumber. Skver Hasid. A man who happened to be praying in the wrong minyan, as determined by the rebbe and the community. A man whose family had been targeted and harassed, their house and car vandalized, their daughter expelled from school.

This family, having committed no crime other than pissing someone off by having the temerity to pray in one building over another, was almost murdered in their sleep a week ago last Sunday. By the live-in butler of the rebbe, no less. The father confronted the thug outside his house and was lit alight. He has suffered burns over 50% of his body and is still in hospital. As he has been recuperating, his character has been slandered in New Square. It took the rebbe almost an entire week to even issue a statement condemning the violence, and even then he wouldn't refer to Rottenberg by name. What, were you talking about someone else who was almost killed for daring to pray somewhere else? How insecure are the great men of Skver that this is the response to someone who decides their services go too long?

It's absolutely crazy that this happened in America in 2011. This kind of insanity seems more appropriate to 19th century Ukraine, though maybe that isn't surprising since David Assaf's Untold Tales of the Hasidim has a whole chapter about the Chernoybler dynasty, of which Skver was an offshoot, vigorously persecuting Breslov Hasidim during the 1800s. One section, recounted by an (admittedly biased) Maskil and relative of Talner [another Chernoybler offshoot] Hasidim in Uman seems particularly instructive:

The Bratslavers had built themselves a separate prayer house in Uman... [A lone Breslov Hasid] was confined in this house of God. He was isolated there almost like a leper; if he ventured outside children would jeer and call out after him: 'Bratslaver dog!' and throw dirt at him. [During the Breslov pilgrimage at Rosh Hashanah] crowds of Uman residents used to surround the prayerhouse... we threw stones and broke windows per the hooligans' code... for so our teachers and parents instructed us. [When the old Hasid died the young men] did not follow his bier as was the custom; just the opposite: we remained standing where we were at the windows and our mouths were full of malicious laughter at his affliction. So great were the hatred and loathing that had been instilled in our hearts.

This was in the 1860s. Different time, different place, same absolute intolerance for anything the rebbes deemed out-of-bounds. If former Skverer Hasid (and blogger formerly known as Hasidic Rebel) Shulem Deen's op-ed in the Forward is any indication, neither my nor Mr. Rottenberg's examples are isolated ones, either. It's mind-boggling, and the fact that my grandfather was associated with this rebbe, that, in some bizarre alternate universe, I could have grown up in this same village, a Hasid of his like my Zayde... well it certainly puts the whole "idealized Hasidic fantasy" I envisioned as a teenager to rest.

There is a silver lining in all this, though. The more I read about Mr. Rottenberg and the more I see of his family, the more I admire him. Looking at TV reports, it looks like his son is a Hasid but his son-in-law appears to be Modern Orthodox. He has friends who are ex-Hasidic bikers. He personally seems to be a nice guy who isn't letting the frumer-than-thou crowds affect who he considers family or a friend. The sense I get of him is that he was a man living a Hasidic lifestyle who, though he may not have agreed 100% with all the beliefs or practices of his community, also wasn't going to leave or let the crazy zealots within it drive him out. For that he should be applauded.

I don't want to project too much onto Mr. Rottenberg here, but in a way I think this incident in New Square is a contemporary example of the tension many American Jews' ancestors went through, either in the US or back in their respective Old Countries. You had really modern folks, you had the really traditional folks, and you had everyone else who were somewhere in the middle. Sometimes they left and sometimes they stayed. While us descendants of grandparents or great-grandparents who went off the derech get flack from the frum world for our ancestors' choices, this incident makes me wonder: How much of that was really about people chasing materialism or assimilating into the American dream, and how much was about needing to get away from a medieval mindset that denied people the basic freedoms to choose their own lives? I'm thinking of books like Yoshe Kalb by I.J. Singer, himself the product of a Hasidic childhood and family, which is certainly none too kind to the frum world. (Sidenote: the narrative as presented is always that secular or non-Orthodox Jews' ancestors chose to leave. I wonder if that was always the case, either. Couldn't there have been cases where people were pushed, or perhaps even thrown out, of their communities or families for not being frum enough?)

I realize I beat up on the Haredi world a lot. And part of me really regrets that, because at the end of the day, I do believe in unity, and I do believe in brotherhood, and I do believe that most people, Jewish or otherwise, have more in common than we have that's different. Part of what turns me off about the Orthodox world I see today, particularly its Haredi wing, is how ridiculously reactionary it has become, and how much of its time is spent guarding its fences. I don't particularly want or need Haredim to become secular, or even to stop being Orthodox. What I would love, however, is to see more members of that world put the superficial stuff aside and reach out to their fellow Jews. (Yes, easy for me to say, but I'm also the last person who will accuse someone of not being Jewish.) What the Jewish people need are not more secular Jews, but more open-minded Jews, Orthodox and Haredim included. We need more Chaim Aron Rottenbergs.

Many, many hat-tips to Failed Messiah, who is keeping the story going.