Become from: An Experiment in Intellectual and Spiritual Accounting
Welträson: Reason for Being in the World, Part 2
Welträson: Reason for Being in the World, Part 1
“Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair.”
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
I said that I seemed by my nature to seek understanding historically. As with most stories, I wanted always to begin at the beginning, see how things came to be, experience their development, the obstacles and the overcomings, work my way to the resolution, however irresolute it might show itself to be. Histories offer explanations, how this came from that, how that led to this, how we got here – whoever we, whatever here happens to be in the context. The story of who we or anyone or anything is. That’s what I sought when I studied philosophy. And that’s what I did when I studied history itself. So I started, in college, with antiquity.
But “by nature” is a shorthand approach to personal history that can obscure an empty value. Maybe it’s true. Maybe I was born melancholy. Is there a gene? Or did I absorb, so to speak, into my senses, my waking and sleeping sense of the world, my mother’s own melancholia before I or anyone might perceive it happening? Who can ever say? But after a while, even still as a boy, the idea of history became an ever compelling and important element in my accounting for things and who I was.1
Even before I turned ten, I had begun to develop the understanding that my father was different from the other fathers. They were all Jewish like he, but he was older, by about a decade, and they, as far as I could tell, were all American born. Mac, unlike even my mother, was not. He had an accent, too. (I was about twenty when I first learned from my friends that they could barely understand a word he said.) My mother, Helen, had been born in New York City. My father was born in “Russia.” Where in Russia, what his life was like there, how he got to the United States – that was all unknown to us. Because Mac didn’t talk about things. He didn’t meditate, speculate, reflect back on his life aloud. He responded to the present in the terse vocabulary he possessed in his fifth language.
What wasn’t unknown was my relation to my father. I was an unplanned child, eleven years after Sharyn, five after Jeff – and then, learning the news, Mac wanted another girl. He got me. But according to the family lore, Dad fell immediately in love. I was his baby, and he doted on me. In the earliest extent photo of me, on one of the New York beaches, Coney Island, Rockaway, Jones, Mac stands with feet firmly planted in the sand and me cradled in his arms. He was my Moses – in his wrath at disobedience, too – and my world revolved around him. All week long during summer in the Catskills, while Mac stayed behind to work in the city, I would not move my bowels until he arrived for the weekend to hold my hand. When I unwittingly placed my palms against the searing heat of an oven door, I cried out for rescue to only one higher power.
“My daddy! My daddy!”
But who was this lord of my world?
He was short and slight, in his prime maybe 5’4” and 140 lbs. He had little if any formal education that we knew of and could sign his name in English only with the same painstaking effort he applied to reading the daily newspaper, and he would wield the pen only unobserved. In many ways dominated by the imperiousness of his wife’s superior intellect, he nonetheless maintained a strong center in the family life by the will he exerted to control his world and the anger he displayed when his control was threatened. He was loving and devoted; funny, kind, and friendly; helpful, resolute, and hardworking, hurt and furious.
What made him what he was? Where did he come from? Only the sparest of details, like the leak of memory through cracks, dribbled out over years and decades.
The story was that Mac and Goldie, Dad’s one full sibling, two years older, had been left with their grandparents when their parents, Minnie and Yoina, left for America to live separate lives. Then the grandparents, Minnie’s parents, died, after which the two children, ages ten and twelve, left for America themselves. It took them seven years. By the time they arrived, both parents had remarried and started new families. Yoina was a tailor, so he helped Mac learn a trade. Yoina, like my mother’s parents, was long dead. Minnie was Minnie. And they had all lived in a small village, a shtetl, called Orynyn.
But Orynyn was nowhere on a map and in no book and made no history, and no one knew of it. It didn’t exist, not anymore. It was the past, a past so dark in my imagination, as in Mac’s meager articulations of memory, as to be almost unimaginable despite my powers of it. It was a world long gone.
That was the narrative, the basic explanation of our father, constructed over decades from disconnected responses to random questions. Only occasionally could I elicit an additional detail – and it was I alone among the children who pursued any urge to do so.
One day after I had already started college, sometime during the 1970s, Mac and I were driving out of Rockaway together along Cross Bay Boulevard in Queens. Under questioning from me, Dad revealed for the first time that as a child, he had lived through pogroms in Orynyn, and that his grandfather, Zakiah, when the Cossacks came, would lead the children quickly up a hill through the trees and across the Jewish cemetery to the home of friendly Ukrainians, who would hide them. He described how the Cossacks charged through the town on horseback, hacking with their blades at those they could run down or corner. Once, lucky enough to be spared his life, Zakiah was caught and knocked to the ground to have his leather boots stripped from his feet. I remember staring with new, astonished understanding at my father’s eyes, as Jamaica Bay passed on either side of us and he continued to speak. I remember thinking that behind those eyes another world existed I could only try to imagine, images flickering across the film of his memory like a Moviola projecting from a recess back in time.
How in the spreading fog through which he reaches he might see a dirt road and a wagon passing a short, theological bearded and mercantile man crossing in the wagon’s traffic: then fierce riders on bridled fury madly grinning at the bit, their cry and whinny and his grandfather bleeding and bootless on the ground . . . from "The Twentieth Century Passes"
It was in those days, more or less, that I studied Russian history at City College: The Twilight of Imperial Russia, William Henry Chamberlin’s The Russian Revolution, The Soviet Achievement. I matched my professor cigarette for cigarette as he leaned back against the near edge of his desk in a plume of smoke. We foot-mashed butts hard into the floor while we talked excitedly about the emancipation of the serfs, the assassination of Alexander II, the rise of the anarchists, the struggle for power during and after the revolution. I concluded then what no scholarship since has dissuaded me from: that the Bolsheviks prevailed over Kerensky and the liberals because the Bolsheviks were more ruthless. The aftermath is tragedy. But I also gazed from the high windows of that Shepherd Hall classroom and thought, we study this as world-altering history, deep in the past to college students in 1970s America, but this (I was beginning to realize) is my father’s life. I simply hardly knew how, exactly.
I did know that in his poverty in the 1930s, Mac would travel up to Harlem and City College’s Lewisohn Stadium for cheap tickets to the concerts there, once for Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. He took the subway back south after and slept on a bench in Central Park. I knew that generations of Jewish and non-Jewish immigrants and sons of immigrants before me – writers, scholars, jurists, scientists, and politicians – had also attended the “Harvard of the proletariat.” That was why, with my parents unable to afford any school but the free City University of New York, I chose CCNY among its colleges.
(The ending of the Hollywood biopic of George Gershwin. Rhapsody in Blue, filmed at Lewisohn Stadium [now gone].)
Before Russian history, though, I had studied Greek and Roman history and literature. I studied classical mythology. Perhaps only due to its timing in my education, it was the mythology course that first impressed on me the understanding that as cultures and civilizations developed throughout history, advancing in cultural dominance or prevailing through military conquest, they absorbed their predecessors, adopting or renaming even their gods, integrating their myths into the existing mythological worlds of the successor culture. And in the ancient world of the Near East and Mediterranean, after roughly 250 thousand years since the evolution to Homo Sapien, succeeding and dominating cultures, empires – Egyptian, Assyrian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Neo-Assyrian, Achaemenid, Hellenic – were regularly arising.
With the advent of agriculture and cities and writing, it all reached a critical point somewhere between about 1500 BCE and 300 CE.
We see from these developments, and because of them, human beings seeking, compelled, to make an accounting of things. Some 12,500 generations (a mere 125 or so more to come to us) after what we consider people began living their short, hard lives in unaccounted relationship with each other, without, perhaps, any sense of purpose in the world – if they had even formed an idea of purpose – over a period of about 1800 years, they begin for the first time to make accountings of what they think they know – have learned – of their existence, of what they think they are. Literal accounts of business transactions. Accounts of family genealogies. Accounts of spirits and gods guiding their worlds and interfering with their lives. Epics of cultural formation recited over generations and then recorded in writing. Histories. Scriptures. Philosophies. Over a span of 700 years or so, the Hebrews and the Hindus arise. The Vedas and the Iliad and the Odyssey are recorded. The Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), the Buddha, Confucianism, the Tao Te Ching, the Socratic tradition appear in the world.
Offering accounts. Seeking to account. Accounting for.
This “world” — what is it? What’s it about? They conceived some ideas.
In my life, details of Mac’s life continued to emerge from time to time, even when I wasn’t paying attention. Orynyn had not been in Russia, exactly, but Ukraine, though the latter was then ruled by Russia, and was, still, in the 1970s, when the Soviet Union, under mounting pressure, began to permit its persecuted Jewish population to emigrate. Between 1970 and 1988, 291 thousand Jews were allowed to leave the Soviet Union, the majority during the 1970s, another majority emigrating to Israel. Most of the rest came to the United States, and sometime around 1970, five of them turned out to be our cousins.
Who knew we had cousins still living in Russia? Mac did, apparently, but he never told us. For me, it was all very peripheral to my self-involved and troubled life, anyway. Its significance didn’t strike me.
Joseph Sherrel was the father of these “Russian cousins.” He had a wife and two daughters, my age and a few years older. They were all very nice when they came to visit us in Rockaway. We had a lovely time. Joseph gave me two jacket pins, with photos of Russian “cosmosnauts.” He taught me the Russian way to drink “wodka”: down the shot, follow with a chaser of rye bread. Down the shot – you get the idea. Somehow, I ended up with one of the utilitarian-looking grey (of course) Soviet suitcases that had carried the Sherrel’s belongings to their new life in America. I used it almost immediately to hold the growing collection of my handwritten and typed manuscripts – my “juvenilia” we might call it – and if you look on a top shelf of my office closest today, that is where you will find it even now.
The Sherrels went to live in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, home to generations of immigrant Jews and Russians – to Mac in his earliest American years, to Goldie all her American life, and to new immigrants still today. But in Brighton thrived a world very different from our own Americanized lives, and certainly my own, and the Sherrels faded from our immediate family’s life. Except.
Except a couple of years later, a fifth Sherrel arrived from Russia. Joseph’s mother. She flew into JFK Airport, and Dad went to meet her. He didn’t ask anyone to join him. I was the only child still living at home at that point, and he didn’t ask me. My mother didn’t go with him. I didn’t ask who Joseph’s mother was, exactly – that Joseph was “our cousin.” Who knows what I did that day. I don’t remember. I don’t think Sharyn or Jeff even knew about it.
Minnie had a brother and two sisters. The brother, when Dad was a child, was already married and living in Lviv. One sister was living in Kamianets-Podilskyi, the great medieval city about ten miles from Orynyn. The other sister was Aikah. When Minnie left, Aikah still lived in Orynyn. Aikah was Joseph’s mother.
I have no reason to believe that Minnie’s brother living in Lviv survived the Holocaust. It seems almost certain the sister in Kamianets-Podilskyi did not: in August 1941, all the Jews of Kamianets-Podilskyi, along with thirty thousand Hungarian Jews who had been removed there, were murdered by a Nazi Einsatzgruppen in a matter of days. In neither instance do I know for sure. But somehow, Aikah did survive. She married, a Sherrel. She had at least one child. He had two daughters. That child, Joseph, with his wife and daughters, made it to the United States first. Then, two years later, Aikah arrived, and Mac went to JFK airport alone to meet her.
After Minnie and Yoina left for America, it wasn’t just their grandparents who cared for the children, Meyer and Golda. It was Aikah, their aunt. She had said goodbye to the children in 1920, when my father was ten years old. Now he was sixty-two. Was she perhaps ten years older? And that day at an international airport in Queens, New York, they saw each other again for the first time in forty-two years.
If I had known. If I had understood, I would have offered to go with him. How does it feel, Dad, I would have asked, to see her again after so long a separation? What was she like? What do you remember? Did you miss her all these years, who I never knew existed, who was now all that was left of that time, and those people, and that world? If he had let me, I would have stood at his side, as his son, for Aikah to see. I would have put my palm against his back, between his shoulder blades, to feel his heartbeat and brace him as Aikah emerged from the walkway, through the gate.
Instead, when it was over, Mac arrived back home on his own, drawing little attention to the occasion. He spoke to my mother a bit, in no great conversation I could hear, to which, in any event, I wasn’t invited to listen. Likely, soon enough, my father asked me what I was going to do with the rest of my day. I did something.
Mac felt no need to record or account, in writing or to others. He had lived it, then and now. It lived inside him. It was his, and it passed with him. I learned what I could, from him and, later, elsewhere. The rest I have had to imagine.
AJA
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I so enjoyed reading this, Jay.
I wonder if my own draw toward others' memoirs and biographies is because I share with you the lack of an accounting of my father's life, which remains mostly unknown to me. Born a first-generation American, orphaned at age 4 in 1920, his life as a child, as a young man in his 20s, and even later, is a blank for me. I know even less about him than you are able to reconstruct from what you learned about your father. Except for his quarrels with my mother, he moved through life mostly silent, never talking about what he felt or had seen in that time and place where a narrative thread might have been discovered, picked up, and offered continuity to a story, his own and mine, in the making. He was very handsome, as evident from a U.S. Army photo and pictures from his marriage to my mother, but I always thought to the day he died, in his early 70s, abruptly at my Virginia home, his eyes betrayed hurts that could never be expressed in words, not to my mother and not to any of his children. His was a life I have yet to be able to imagine with any satisfaction. I did not know how to get close to him. Yet I had so many questions, and had wanted to interview him, thinking that could be un-threatening, objective; his sudden death prevented that.
I think we do, indeed, "become from," chance and curiosity, intellectual need, creativity and spiritual capacity to fill otherwise empty spaces, sending us in one or another direction to find meaning for being. Who knows what he "became from," being orphaned and a ward of the state. The spaces, for me, remain mostly empty, though I like to think I've been able to fill some of them because I write, and because I have never stopped seeking and wanting to know, and understand, and make known.
Sorry to hear of your unshakeable belief that the Bolsheviks triumphed because of their greater ruthlessness, compared to Kerensky and the others...balderdash!!!! but this is something we never agree about...beautiful essay...hearing my father share his memories of youth, then the Shoah was quite enlightening...