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Lili warned me Friday morning that she’d probably be at her office all day catching up on work. “Don’t count on me for dinner. I’ll grab a sandwich or something.”
“I was thinking I’d go back to Shomrei Torah tonight,” I said. “I want to ask Rabbi Goldberg about the document that I found at the old shul, see if his brother might have been able to understand it. I’ll feed and walk the hound before I go.”
She kissed me goodbye and went upstairs to shower and dress for work, and Rochester and I left the house a few minutes later. On my way to Friar Lake, Henry Namias called my cell. “Daniel Epstein left me a message I should talk to you,” he said. “Of course, now that I call him back, he doesn’t answer. What am I supposed to talk about?”
I explained about the testimony found by Joel Goldberg. “I understand you knew Myer Hafetz.”
“Who told you that? Epstein? What a mouth he has on him.”
“I also read a story you told my mother for the Oral History Project,” I said. “Maybe you remember her? Her name was Sylvia Gordon before she married my father.”
“Sheindeleh Gordon! Of course I remember her. You’re her son? Why didn’t you say so?”
I hadn’t heard anyone call my mother by her Yiddish nickname in years. Her aunts and uncles called her that when I was a kid, and my father often used it as a term of either endearment or frustration. “I didn’t think you’d remember her,” I said. “Could I talk to you about what you remember about Myer Hafetz? And my mother, too. I lost her too early.”
“What a shame,” he said. “I was at the funeral. Is your father still alive?”
“He passed a couple of years ago,” I said, grateful that Namias didn’t remember my father’s service, or that I hadn’t been able to attend because I was incarcerated. “Are you going to be at Shomrei Torah tonight?”
“Where else would I be? You want to talk after services? A little Shabbos wine goes a long way to opening up the memories.”
I agreed that I’d see him that evening. I remembered when I was a kid I’d stumbled on a book of translations of English songs and poems into Yiddish. There was “Affen Shpitz Alten Smoky,” or “On top of Old Smoky,” and one that had a particular resonance—Shakespeare’s short poem, “Who is Silvia?”
I had immediately looked up the poem’s text in a Shakespeare compendium I’d found in our basement – one of my mother’s old college textbooks. The poem became one of my favorites, because I adored my mother and at that age, she could do no wrong, and because her named matched in both English and Yiddish.
Who was my mother, anyway? A devout Jewish woman, in her way. We never kept kosher, but she and my father fasted on Yom Kippur for years, they observed the Yahrzeits of their parents, and she chauffeured me to Sunday school and Hebrew school for years.
She spent her working life as a bookkeeper and secretary, read voraciously, and loved to garden. So little to sum up a life, and yet I was pretty sure she’d been happy with what she accomplished. A comfortable home, a loving marriage, an educated son.
Like Victor Namias had described his wife Esther, my mother was a balabusta, a woman born to run the world. She volunteered at Shomrei Torah, chaired the Lakes Garden Club, looked after her elderly relatives, ran our household.
And yet none of those things got to the essence of who she was. Do we ever really know our parents, no matter how much time we spend with them, how much we analyze their behavior?
Those ideas continued to circle around in my head until I left Friar Lake around four, fed and walked Rochester, and then went to Shabbat services at Shomrei Torah. Daniel Epstein wasn’t at the door greeting congregants, and I didn’t see him in the pews either. I hoped he wasn’t feeling under the weather. I ought to give him a call, take Rochester over for a visit. I’d seen how the attentions of my generous golden had made Epstein look better.
After the service was over, I approached Rabbi Goldberg, and I realized I had barely paid attention to the sermon, my mind full of my parents and my own history.
But I wanted to talk about his brother, not his sermon. “That document I found at the old shul was a testimony from the Yad Vashem holocaust center,” I said. “Would Joel have recognized the Hebrew name of the center at the top of the page?”
“I think so,” the rabbi said. “Like me, Joel took years of Hebrew and he often went to temple with me and our parents after his bar mitzvah. So he certainly knew the alphabet. And as I think I told you, he was very interested in the Holocaust, to the point where he was convinced that America was at risk of another one. All the political name-calling and putting blame on immigrants. He was afraid that if the wrong people got into power, they’d start going after the Jews again.”
He sighed. “I know it was paranoia from his illness, but I can’t help believing there was some truth in what he believed.”
Another congregant came over to speak to the rabbi, and I found Henry Namias by the platter of petit fours, a plastic cup of wine in his hand.
“So you’re Sylvia Gordon’s boy,” he said. “I haven’t thought of her in a long time. A very smart young woman, a real go-getter.” He leaned forward and peered at my face. “You look like her, a little. The nose and mouth.”
“I’ve been told that,” I said.
“She was four years younger than I was,” Namias said. “I knew her from shul and I was excited when she asked to interview my father. I convinced him to say yes.”
“I read the transcript,” I said. “Daniel Epstein saved it. Did you know him when you were a boy, too?”
“Only by name. He’s much older than I am, you know. Six years. A lot to kids.”
“He told me that you knew a man named Myer Hafetz. That you might be able to tell me something about him.”
“Cousin Myer? What do you care about a man dead fifty, sixty years ago?”
I explained about the testimony I’d found at the old shul, though I didn’t mention it was Rochester who’d nosed it out. “I was fascinated and I wanted to know more about him.”
“I think I was ten years old when he came to stay with us. I don’t know how he was connected – maybe a landsman, maybe a distant cousin of my mother’s. He was German and had been in Auschwitz and he used to sit for hours talking to my mother in Yiddish and broken English. My father gave him a job at our family junkyard on New Street, and in the evening, after he had finished work and we had all had dinner, he told me stories of the old country so I could help him with his English.”
Henry Namias got a faraway look in his eyes and I could see he was remembering those years. “He was a real raconteur, and Berlin before the war came alive in his stories. He was a very clever man, and he was able to evade the Nazis for years, hiding in abandoned houses, scavenging for food. One day he was so hungry that he dared to go out in the daytime, and he was stopped and the police demanded he drop his pants to see if he was circumcised. As soon as they saw, they arrested him, and he was sent to Auschwitz, with the rest of the Jews from Berlin.”
I couldn’t help shivering. What must that have been like, living in constant fear? Most boys born around the time I was in the United States were circumcised, so my missing foreskin wasn’t as clear a symbol of my Jewish identity as it would have been for a German Jew in the 1940s. How would I have felt, being forced to drop my pants on a public street, knowing what it would reveal?
“He was lucky,” Namias continued. “He was young and strong and they put him to work, and the war ended before they could wear him out and gas him. He felt like God had saved him for a reason, to tell his story. That’s why he filled out that form from Yad Vashem.” He peered at me. “You read Yiddish?”
I shook my head. “I had Daniel Epstein translate it for me.” I paused for a moment. “How long did Hafetz stay with you?”
“Only a few months,” Namias said. “Then one night he didn’t come home for dinner, and my mother sent me over to New Street to get him. The junkyard was locked up and I was confused. Where was cousin Myer? I called his name but he didn’t answer, so I started looking around. When I went into the alley beside the building I found him there, on the ground.”
His voice quavered as he remembered. “I kneeled down and shook him but he didn’t wake up. There was blood coming out of his belly and I got some on my hands. I ran home like I was on fire and when my mother saw the blood she nearly fainted. She sent my father to the junkyard and she cleaned me up.”
He looked me in the eyes. “That was the last time I saw Cousin Myer.”
