Life-Cycle Events, Part 2

The first time I entered the synagogue was to attend a shiva minyan for a recently dead relative of one of Rachel’s friends. This is a service that attempts to comfort the mourners by gathering their community around them in prayer. Almost invariably it takes place in a mourner’s home, and usually people will recount some stories that celebrate the departed’s life. These tales often include things that your friend or acquaintance didn’t think were important enough to pass on to you. Later, I will retell some of those stories, but before that, back to this first experience...

Even twenty years later, it is quite the strangest thing I have yet seen in a synagogue, and it took me years of thought to work out how it may have happened.

After we sat down, I was distracted by the realization that I was the only man present without a head covering. As it was too late to do anything about that, I tried to look invisible and just blindly follow the service...

At the very front of the sanctuary sat the two main mourners, the two ex-wives of the departed. I’ll call him Joe and the wives Aleph and Beth. It was obvious that the ladies loathed each other, as they couldn’t have sat further apart without leaving through the side door or breaking out of the windows. It seems the minyan was in the synagogue, as neither one of them would let “that woman” into her home. Rather than speak for themselves, they gave the neutral Rabbi the job of detailing Joe’s life and illustrating the sort of person he had been.

His problem was that it seemed the only person the ex-wives disliked more than each other was Joe, and they couldn’t bring themselves to say anything good about him. Determined that Joe’s life would be presented in as good a light as possible, he had kept at them, first pumping Aleph for some good thing that she could mention. Despite his repeated best efforts...

“Some acts of kindness?”

“Happy memories?”

“Gentleness?

“Warmth?”

There was nothing. She kept schtum, no matter how often he asked. All she would give him was a basic biography.

Later (and obviously separately), he had pumped Beth for the same sort of thing and got the same sort of replies. He insisted, begged, and cajoled until Beth couldn’t take it anymore, finally dredging up from her memory just one thing that might make the audience know that Joe was someone that they could relate to, someone like them.

As that was all he could get, that is what he had to go with, so the account of Joe’s life went like this...

He was born, attended school, studied somewhere or other, worked at something and then met Aleph. They married and cohabited for some time, during which he continued to work, eat meals and sleep. Then, like the sea in front of Moses, they suddenly parted, and like Pharaoh’s chariots, any good feelings were swallowed up.

Life continued until he met Beth, married her, and they cohabited until, mysteriously, the parting and swallowing-up were repeated. After which he continued to eat, sleep, hydrate, and breathe until the end.

Only at the end of this did the rabbi tell us what Beth had revealed...

It seems that Joe had been loved... by Spencer, his dog.

Here is a selection of accounts told at the graveside (or the minyan) by the children, grandchildren, and friends of some of my friends who are still missed. They all have two things in common: they didn’t think their experiences were worthy of comment while they were living, and they were exiles.

Albert’s family lived in North Africa for generations. He grew up speaking Arabic and French, and got his first degree from a French university. When the state of Israel was declared, the neighbors would no longer tolerate the Jews among them. His entire family was forced to flee. Rather than go to France, they came to Australia and Albert had to learn English. According to his daughters, he did this by reading the works of Zane Grey. His English was perfect.

Fred was a Soviet refusenik. Only at his funeral did we find out that he had been a rocket scientist, a friend of Yuri Gagarin, and had a major role in designing the Apollo/Soyuz linkup. Once he suggested he wanted to leave, his Soviet life was over.

Rachel and I knew Adele as an ex-teacher whose family came from Poland. Her pupils would come up to her in the street to say “Hi,” and she remembered them all until she started to get Alzheimer’s. At her funeral her children mentioned that she had been born in exile in Uzbekistan in 1944 as her family hid from the Nazis. They returned to Poland but found that neither their neighbors nor the Communists wanted Jews around. So they had to move again, coming to Australia when Adele was six.

Roman and Klara lived in Minsk. Somehow, despite the wartime devastation of Belarus, they survived, married and set up home with their two children. At their funeral the children told of growing up playing on the town dump. The communists had put the dump in the Jewish quarter as a message to the inhabitants. Roman and Klara got that message and fled as soon as they could with their children.

Lastly, Renee was a friend of Rachel’s mother. She seemed to have lived an uneventful life with no great dramas, but, at her minyan, we heard this story from her grandchildren:

She lived in Vienna with her parents. After the Nazis took over Austria, her father hoped that all would be well and waited far too long to decide to leave. One evening, he came home very upset, as he had heard that there was going to be serious trouble that night. He decided that they would lock the door, not turn on any lights, and stay completely quiet so that it would appear they had already escaped.

They waited silently in the dark as their apartment block was invaded by a large gang of armed men. Chaos broke out. The noise was appalling, the sort of thing that is often said to be loud enough to wake the dead. Truncheons banging on doors, screams of terror, truncheons hitting heads, yelling, things and people being thrown downstairs, breaking glass, screams of pain — the Third Reich in full flight. Eventually, silence and a fitful sleep in the darkness.

In the morning, they opened their door to find that all the other Jewish families in their building were gone. Now fully aware of what was going to happen, Renee’s father rushed out and bought steamer tickets to America. He came home full of confidence and assured the family that they would soon set sail and make their escape.

That night they went to bed hoping to catch up on lost sleep, but in the early hours Renee’s father woke to find his father standing at the end of the bed speaking very forcefully...

“You must not get on that ship.”

“Leave earlier and get on the next possible ship.”

“Listen to me”

“Remember, NOT THAT SHIP!”

Renee’s father was incapable of speech. The sight of his long-dead father haranguing him was too much, and he passed out.

That morning, scared witless, he rushed to get new tickets. Suddenly they were much more expensive, but he managed by selling the ones he had. The family immediately left to get to the port and were just in time to catch their new ship. When they left port, they thought they were saved. But after their voyage, when they could already see Liberty’s torch, they were told that they would not be allowed off the ship.

America neither wanted nor needed any more stateless Jews.

Renee’s children, grandchildren, and by now great-grandchildren, along with the hundreds of other Jews on that ship and their descendants, owe their captain a debt that could never have been repaid. He searched for somewhere to land them and managed to get the British colony of Trinidad to take them. Renee got to grow up in something like a tropical paradise surrounded by a community of around eight hundred survivors.

The Jews on the next ship were returned to Nazi Germany. There were no more ships.