The Centuries Pass: An Experiment in Intellectual and Spiritual Accounting
Welträson: Reason for Being in the World, Part 3
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Parts 1-2
We were all living in the same city for the first time in twenty years. Over almost that many years, Jeff, followed by Sharyn and me, and finally our parents, ages 82 and 77, had moved to Los Angeles from our roots in New York City. It had been eighteen years since the heart attack that nearly killed Mac.
I had gone to see him in Rockaway’s Peninsula General Hospital for the first time as soon as I was permitted, two days afterwards. He looked terribly weak. It was the same hospital where five years earlier Dad had witnessed me strapped to a stretcher and soaked in my own sweat and urine from my life-altering freak out on LSD – the sight he later told me took ten years from his life and produced the only tears I ever saw on his face. I had responded to my mother’s summons from my first apartment, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It was a small studio, for which I struggled to earn the rent driving a taxi on the nightshift before attending classes at City College during the day. Two days earlier, I had returned to it from an evening out with Mom and Dad for his birthday, to see The Godfather II and dine at Oscar’s Salt of the Sea. Dad had complained only in passing of “sticks” in his chest. When Mom called early the next morning, her voice was calm but urgent in her direction to come. The doctors didn’t know that Dad would live.
Because of their uncertainty, the doctors warned that at first, there should be no visitors but for immediate family. Helen asked them about Mac’s sister Goldie, and in reply to their questions advised that Goldie was a headstrong and volatile, excitedly emotional woman whose reaction to the sight of her brother near death couldn’t be predicted. Kinder and more loving than her mother Minnie, the golden-haired Goldie nonetheless looked much like her, weathered and stocky, a Brighton Beach immigrant to America who decades later looked and sounded still as if just arrived from Podolia. She was also mistrustful and controlling and had ruined many a relationship, including Mac’s reunion with his half-brother Jack when Minnie died and the new relationship with the Sherrels not long after they emigrated from Russia.
Definitely not, the doctors said in reply. I was already with Mom at my parents’ apartment when Goldie arrived and was delivered this news. She reacted as Helen feared and unleashed a torrent of abuse against her, with depths of history long before my birth, that eventually declaimed my mother “a bloodsucker” – at which point I had heard enough. Though Helen was steady in the face of it all, I ordered Goldie to leave the house. She did – and travelled directly to the hospital, where she talked her way past the nurses and saw Mac.
Everything Dad had lived through, Goldie had lived through with him, two children left by their parents in a troubled land amid tumultuous events, who lost their grandparents and somehow spent seven years afterwards making their way to the United States. I had learned that they spent the first four of those years in Poland. It was impossible to discover why. Survival had included Goldie’s finding work as a maid and sneaking Mac into the home cellar at night to sleep. The only extant photo of the two as children, in Ukraine, at maybe 3 and 5 years old, shows Goldie's arm protectively around her brother's shoulders. Theirs was a bond formed at the bone, the secret tale, known only to them, of what it took to make it from infant abandonment to a passage through Ellis Island at ages 17 and 19. In Goldie’s final months of long old age, nearly bald, barely conscious, nodding off in a wheelchair parked against the wall of a Brooklyn nursing-home corridor, Dad and Jeff, paying a surprise visit from Los Angeles, failed to recognize her and passed her by. Still, they heard the words from behind as they did – “That’s my brother” – and turned to see Goldie alert and staring.
The only child still living in New York at the time, I was the first when I saw Mac’s battered body and spirit in the hospital. He pressed my hand when I took it.
How do you feel, I asked.
He gazed up at me sadly. He croaked out words. I leaned in.
I see things differently.
He did. In recovery, guided and encouraged by his wife, a now retired Mac began regular exercise at a Jack Lalanne Health Club. He became a changed man.
For the remainder of his life, I never saw Mac lose his temper in anger again.
With our unplanned reconvergence in Los Angeles, the five Adlers experienced a second opportunity at family. Decades after the children’s individual challenges in becoming – the damaging implication of Sharyn in our parents’ unhappy marriage and my mental health dysfunctions – long after Mac and Helen, in devoting their lives to their children, had settled into a contented companionship, we all had the chance to try again. Now, our mother and father got to be recipients of their children’s devotion and the siblings happily became a regular part of each other’s lives again.
What enabled it all was the change in Mac. He had become the sweet soul it had been in him to be, if still the worldly man, shaped by fate, who knew too well the cruelties of life. He lived for simple pleasures, beginning with what he clearly felt to be the gift, now, of his being alive. Given the opportunity to reconcile with his daughter, he took the chance to show her the love she felt had been denied her in youth. Sharyn had the chance to love her father freely, without reserve. The men had the time to be boys together, spending Sundays at the gym, where Dad, Jeff, and I worked out, swam, talked politics, and cracked wise about the world from our perches around the pool. We spent every birthday together and all the national and Jewish holidays, with Jeff often hosting when we didn’t go out to restaurants all around L.A. If the laughter and pleasure in each other’s company could have been bottled and sold, we would have been a wealthy family.
People often told us how lucky we were to have received this second chance. We knew it, and we knew it would end. It seemed to last a long time – eleven years. Then it seemed to end quickly. That’s the way of it. Mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and from the last of her multiple hospital stays, she contracted a staph infection. We took her home to die and were all with her at the end. My partner, Julia, sat with her arm around Mac as they, Sharyn, and Jeff’s wife, Ann, watched Jeff and me help remove Mom’s body from the apartment.
Now we devoted ourselves to Mac only. Each of us spent time with him weekly if not daily, and when I did, I often returned to the subject of his childhood. At some point along the way, he presented me, after all those decades, with this photograph. There, with his thick peasant hands, is Zakiah Melzer, my great grandfather, the grandfather who protected the children Meyer and Golda from Cossacks. Seeing it, I saw for the first time, more vividly and personally than ever before, what I come from, so far from what I am.
How did that happen, I wondered? What does it mean? What, in some greater consideration, is Zakiah’s relationship to me?
He held the hand that held my hand.
After Julia founded The Julia Dean Photo Workshops (later The Los Angeles Center of Photography), she led, through the first decade of the century, twenty-five travel workshops around the world, to almost every continent. I accompanied her on most, and twice, in Paris in 2003 and Buenos Aires in 2005, we taught a joint workshop for students who wished both to write and photograph together. (Invariably, our local contact would comment to me that I stood out as the only one of perhaps 8 to 15 people on the trip who didn’t take photographs. I would always nod and smile and reply, “I observe.”) It was also in 2005, that Julia encountered Kathleen McLaughlin, a documentary photographer who had been working for some years on a project in Transylvania. They determined to co-lead a travel workshop there through Julia’s school. When I realized how close Transylvania is to Ukraine, I recognized that this was my chance. Though I still hadn’t found a single reference anywhere to Orynyn, or found it on a map, I knew from Mac that it was very near the city of Kamianets-Podilskyi, which is in southwestern Ukraine, near Transylvania.
On a trip to New York during the intervening months, I visited the Dorot Jewish Division of the New York Public Library, offering a “chronicle of the religious and secular history of the Jewish people in over a quarter of a million books, microforms, manuscripts, newspapers, periodicals, and ephemera from all over the world.” It offered the best hope I knew of so far of finding any information about the village in which my father was born. By this point, I didn’t expect to find much, but what was at stake for me was some external confirmation of the reality of my father’s past – and thus, too, my own – which had existed until then not even as stories but rather isolated sentences and phrases that I had had to construct as a story – the story of Dad.
Over a full day in the library, thumbing through catalogs, poring over indexes and bibliographies, speed reading through book after periodical after microform, I at last came upon two references to Orynyn.
It was real! It had existed – somewhere other than my father’s broken memory.
The first reference offered only a sentence about a World War I engagement, with cannon, that had taken place in Orynyn. The second identified an independently published book, in Ukrainian, titled One Hundred Shtetls, about Ukrainian villages that had contained majority Jewish populations, and Orynyn was one of them. The library possessed no copy, but the book could wait. Now I knew where I was going. Somewhere in the world.
I enlisted the services of a small company dedicated to guiding American Jews to their places of family origin in Eastern Europe and the old Russian Empire. We would have a driver and interpreter. The plan for Julia’s travel workshop was to fly into Budapest and then travel by railroad from there into Romania and on into Transylvania. At the end of the workshop, Julia and I would connect with our Moldovan interpreter for the trip into Ukraine.
One afternoon before we traveled, I sat with Mac on a bench along a dock in Marina del Rey. We gazed peacefully at the boats and sun-starred water. Life was this kind of peace, now, for the man who lad lost his wife of 63 years, alone with his thoughts as always, feeling the warmth of day on his skin, lifting his face to the sun. Talking quietly together, I managed to draw two memories from him.
Zakiah worked as a liveryman. He drove passengers back and forth between Orynyn and Kamianets-Podilskyi. There was a small lake at the edge of town where at the end of the day, the boy Meyer would take Zakiah’s horses to drink and swim to refresh themselves. He would lead the horses down to the lake’s edge, pat them on the rump to urge them on into the water. then grasp the last horse’s tail as he descended, to be pulled for a ride through the water.
Once, alone by the lake at night, a full moon looming hugely over him, Mac became frightened, and he ran through the trees to try to escape it, but each time he turned to look up through the branches behind him, he found the moon always still there following him.
In August 2005, the time had arrived. The night before Julia and I flew out, I drove to Woodland Hills to have dinner with Mac at home. He hadn’t been well. A month earlier, lunching with Jeff at a restaurant, Dad had used the men’s room after the meal. A man emerged from a stall and accidently bumped Mac in the chest with the door. A fragile, 94-year-old rib had fractured. After a brief stay in the hospital, Dad was now recuperating at home. I found him uncomfortable, belching a lot and unable to eat much. Still, he was excited for my trip. How unlike him it was to say how much he wished he could be going with me. I was going to the home of his youth, his birth – because Orynyn did still exist, and it had been eighty-four years since he had last seen it.
Anything more, Dad? Anything more you can remember to tell me, to look for?
Where in the town had they lived?
He said that in Orynyn, it was the Jews who occupied the center of town, the main street, and the Ukrainians lived on the outskirts and up the hills. His grandfather’s house had a stable for the horses, and it was attached to a barrel factory. A barrel factory? They made wooden barrels, he said. The house was off the main street, at a fork in the road. That was all he could recall to tell me.
Julia and I flew to Budapest the next day. We had visited once before, four years earlier, arriving by train from Vienna. This time, we took a hotel on the Buda side of the Danube. I had loved the neighborhood around Buda Castle and the view from Castle Hill the last time and wanted to see it again before catching the train out. Late in the afternoon that first day, I went for a walk on my own. I wandered the streets until the afternoon began to fade. I gazed eastward out over the Pest side and imagined the short distance remaining, the closest I had ever been to where my father came from and all that wondering in my life. I felt transported, as always, by my imaginings, soon to become real, a fulfillment so rare. I dreamily wandered down the hill streets in the gloaming back to our hotel.
When I arrived, Julia told me Jeff had called and that I should call him right away. I don’t remember anymore what I thought, if I anticipated anything at all, but Mac wasn’t dead. He was in the hospital. He had been in the hospital so many times, for rapid heartbeats and a pacemaker, was Jeff sure, it was only a fractured rib, was this anything more serious than before?
I was so close. I wanted it for him.
I can’t say, Jeff said. You have to decide. If you aren’t here . . .
I was in a taxi to the airport st 5 a.m.. This was a free Hungary, a miracle of history, and an all-night outdoor drunken dance party still rocked at the bottom of the hill, life vividly life in the remaining darkness. I connected through London, with all those hours to contemplate and wonder and worry and regret.
When I landed at LAX, I drove directly to West Hills Hospital in the Valley. Dad was still alive, Jeff told me by phone on the way, and when I arrived in his hospital room, with Jeff and Sharyn by his bed, he was conscious.
You shouldn’t have come, he said. I ruined your trip.
Dad.
Mac had pneumonia. His kidneys were failing. He was sleeping a lot, and the doctors were respirating him.
I lived on the West Side of Los Angeles, over the Santa Monica Mountains. Sharyn and especially Jeff, lived nearby, so Jeff visited Mac in the middle of the night the next two nights. The first night, Dad awoke and told Jeff about cash he had hidden away in the apartment. The second night, Dad’s eyes opened less alertly amid all the attachments to his body. He gazed up at Jeff, who was looking down at him, and he shook his head.
Jeff drove home to sleep but not before telling Sharyn, and when Sharyn told me in the morning, Dad unconscious all during our visit, we walked out the hospital entrance to sit on a bench. We had planned to place Helen in a nursing home before she died, but Mac, to no one’s surprise, had always adamantly insisted that he would not live if he could not live independently.
“You know what the worst outcome of this would be?” I said to Sharyn, beside me on the bench. “It’s if they’re able to keep him alive dependent on any kind of life support. He would never forgive us.”
Sharyn called Jeff after I left. All night, he tossed and wept, feeling that he, the last to assent, would now decide Mac’s fate. In the morning, Sharyn called me from the hospital.
“Come as soon as you can,” she said. “They’ll give us all the time we want with him. When we tell them we’re ready, they’ll disconnect him.”
I came. In the room, it was Jeff and Ann, Sharyn, and me. I still hadn’t been able to reach Julia by phone in rural Transylvania. Mac remained unconscious, his face puffy, his hands swollen and thick like Zakiah’s. We stood around his bed and spoke our love and held his hands. Then we sent for the nurses. They came and disconnected him and left again. We kept looking over at the monitors to check his vital signs. We kept talking to him, to send him on his way.
We love you, Daddy. We’re here, Daddy. It’s all right. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for everything you did for us. It’s okay now. We love you, Mac.
We stroked his hands and petted his arms. We love you, we repeated. We wept when we said it.
I could not swallow for the blades like razors that sliced from top to bottom the soft inner tissues of my throat.
And then our father’s eyes opened. They opened. He stared straight up above him. With open eyes, he stared up to the ceiling, and his eyes shone. Oh, the light that shone from my father’s eyes. They glowed. They glowed a long time.
We love you, Daddy.
Then Mac’s eyes closed, not to reopen. Forever.
And the Jew rends his garment to mark the rip in his heart.
AJA
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Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
So moving. And beautifully written.
Whew. 🥲🙏
Starting my morning with that powerful set of memories so beautifully told. Thank you Jay.
Life’s beginnings and endings have been on my heart frequently in the last few months since my Dad’s stroke in mid-March, the loss of my beloved dog Oliver, my 6-month wedding anniversary coming on Sunday.
Your story took me deep this morning.
Family 🙏❤️