A New Marriage and Family
FOR ELI, THE meaningful work of medicine and the restoration of his professional identity helped him to look forward, beyond the almost incomprehensible sadness of what he had lost. However, work alone was not enough. In 1948, his residency at the Swedish Hospital of Brooklyn brought him more than additional training and experience. On Kol Nidrei night, the eve and the start of the solemn holiday of Yom Kippur, he was listening to the religious service on the radio in his room. He had been promised that he would not be disturbed but told he needed to stay on campus in case of emergency. Meanwhile, Masha Friedman, an elderly and religiously observant immigrant woman, had left dinner for her daughter Pearl to eat when she came home from work, and they planned to meet at the synagogue close to their apartment in Brooklyn. While the older woman was waiting in front of the shul, boys on bicycles or roller skates somehow knocked her down, and by the time her daughter arrived, she was extremely upset—not so much at the blood pouring from her head wound but at having to go to the hospital in an ambulance on a holy day, when riding in a vehicle is forbidden except to save a life.
That turned out to be Eli’s emergency. He was not thrilled to be called away, but he was told he was the only Yiddish-speaking doctor available, and this hysterical woman spoke no other language. Eli recounted the story that would become famous among our family and friends:
When I was listening over the radio [to the broadcast] in Temple Emanu-El, the Yom Kippur services—they told me to come down, and there is an old lady who fell down and busted her head. I came down, was an old, nice Jewish lady, and I talked to her in Jewish; Oh, she says, wonderful, you talk in Jewish. I want to give her a needle for anesthesia, she says, No, if you talk to me in Jewish, I don’t need anything, and sure enough I put in about sixteen stitches, did a good plastic job, and then she was admitted in the hospital for further observation, skull X-rays, and observation. And then I met Pearl, a young healthy wholesome-looking farmer’s daughter, that’s my usual taste, but I didn’t talk to her. [At some point] I mixed up her with [her older sister] Betty.1 Then I talked to my patient, Mrs. Friedman; I say, Look, Who is this nice lady? I would like to go out with her. She says, Oh, no, she is married, she has children, and I say, That’s so? She says, Don’t worry, I have another daughter for you. OK, I would like to see her. And then I said to Mommy [because it was Pearl, later our mother], I got in touch with her; I saw her once in an elevator in a beret, I saw her in an elevator and I liked her: the pink cheeks with the nice hat, and I wanted.
The next part did not become family lore, although perhaps it should:
Then, she says, No, I have a date; I cannot go out with you. And I got so mad, I says, OK—I didn’t tell it to her, but, so you want to go out with somebody else, OK with me. And I didn’t intend to even to talk to her because she couldn’t break a date with another fellow, you know. To make the story short, somehow we were talking, talking, till she got me in her net and I said, OK, we’ll get married, what’s the sense. I don’t regret.
Dad describes his marriage jokingly and sardonically, and I hear Burt’s laughter in the background. In the NYPL interview, Marsha Rozenblit asked my father if he felt having an American wife was helpful to him in adapting to America. The transcript records, “It’s a good help. An American wife is a good help. Pearl was a help. Pearl was instrumental in times of depression or indecisiveness, I would say . . . and aggravation. . . . You cannot go life where everything is roses. . . . She was always ahead and straightened me out. And she straightened me out in relationship with other people because sometimes I get militant and talk back. . . . And I have a habit like that. I did it in Europe, I did it in the medical college. I did it with some professors” (Rochelson, NYPL interview 77).
Before, Ida had begun setting up dates for him with her friends. But Ida was fifty-three years old in 1946, and Eli only thirty-nine. To judge from the descriptions he gave us in later years, the women she chose were not appropriate for a man who still felt young, regardless of what he had been through. While Pearl was not literally a farmer’s daughter (Max Friedman worked in the New York garment district), she had the bright smile and rosy cheeks that won her future husband’s heart (figure 47). She was the youngest by ten years of her immigrant parents’ four children, and the only one who was born in America. She always had an optimistic personality. She was outgoing, smart, and had many good friends. Eli sensed that she would bring new life to his spirit, as well as new children to their new home.
Figure 47. Pearl Friedman, 1940s. Family collection.
The Kol Nidrei night on which Eli met Pearl was October 12, 1948, two years to the day before my birth. They were married on April 29, 1949, a day that happened to be the anniversary of the liberation of Dachau, but it may have been chosen, instead, because my maternal grandfather was at that time dying of cancer, and they wanted to be married while he was still alive. As it happened, however, he died six days before their wedding ceremony, which took place in the apartment where my mother lived with her parents, right after the shiva period of mourning was over. My parents honeymooned, briefly, at a resort favored by Holocaust survivors, probably in the Catskills (figure 48).
Until her death in 2010, Pearl saved romantic greeting cards that Eli had sent her in the early years of their courtship and marriage, as well as a string of faux pearls, one of Eli’s first gifts, with a note promising that one day he would give her real ones.2 The lovingly preserved cards and notes show that Eli was a true romantic, but they also show that the relationship was complicated. On April 10, 1949, a few weeks before their wedding, Eli gave a short poem to Pearl, in which he called her “my darling,/who gave me sense in life.” The words sense and sensible come up often in his notes, as if to explain to Pearl that she helped him make sense of his life, after the struggles and losses of the preceding years.3 In a long, beautifully handwritten note, in clear and graceful English, Eli wrote to Pearl on their wedding day:
Figure 48. Eli and Pearl Rochelson on their two-day honeymoon, late April 1949. Family collection.
Yes, my dear, I’m marrying you today. And I’m happy. . . .
Pearl, I waited, I hoped and I prayed. Is there anywhere a person who will understand me, who will love sincerely, who will give the warmth and the sensible understanding which I needed so much.
I lost my hope. I walked through life indifferent and disappointed. There were no feelings in me, no satisfaction in work, no happiness in life. And after you came, my dear. . . . I felt a ray of hope, a feeling that maybe you are the one who will bring me sense and contents in life. The more I saw you the more I felt that you are the one I desired.
When I read these words, feeling their power, I wished that I could talk about them with my parents, now both gone. But I was not prepared for the next and final paragraph:
I beg you give me the opportunity to love you, don’t tell me that I have no understanding. . . . It is not true. Give me love and happiness and I’ll return to you the same. Let’s our motto be “we have to work to live” for our mutual happiness.
How could someone, on his wedding day, still be asking his soon-to-be wife to let him love her? How could she, apparently not long before the wedding, have told him he had “no understanding”? Pearl and her sisters, in later years, talked about how they “got up from shiva, walked around the block, and then Pearl and Eli got married.” It could not have been easy for Pearl to get married less than a week after her beloved father’s death. Perhaps, when Eli expressed joy at the coming marriage, she accused him of not understanding how she felt, although if anyone understood grief it was he. Again, this is all speculation. I don’t know. But whatever the immediate situation, it could not have been easy for people with such different pasts to join their lives together. In the end they did work hard for their mutual happiness. They were married just short of thirty-five years when Eli died on February 15, 1984.
They had their share of arguments, of course. Despite our parents’ undeniable seriousness and dignity, Burt and I have discussed how we each often saw them as Lucy and Ricky Ricardo from the I Love Lucy television show—Mom the assertive and outspoken American wife, Dad, the successful professional who yet could seem stymied and defeated as he strove to make his case in accented English. Like Lucy, too, my mother may have felt somewhat frustrated, after my birth, that her arena of action was circumscribed. Although she enjoyed being a mother as well as a doctor’s wife, and she helped her husband with office paperwork—sitting opposite him in his study long after the children had gone to bed—she had had a fulfilling and independent career as a bookkeeper for seventeen years (figure 49). Marriage had to be a significant change.4
Figure 49. Pearl at her desk in the New York office of Robbins Mills, where she worked from 1942 to 1950. Family collection.
Yet Pearl and Eli created a happy and mutually satisfying life together. In addition to providing him with love, children, and a warm, nurturing home, Pearl brought Eli a large extended family that had originated in a town not far from Kovno5 and spoke the same dialect of Yiddish. They embraced my father warmly, and he was very close to my grandmother (whose head he had stitched, and who lived with us until she died in 1962), as well as to my maternal aunts and uncles, who lived nearby and whom for years we saw daily. Just as Eli became part of Pearl’s family, she, in turn, became part of his. She made sure that we had a close relationship not only with Dave and Ida but also with Eli’s extended family in Oklahoma, with several of whom I remain in touch and who continued to visit my mother until her death, whenever they were in New York. I have fond memories of a trip by train from New York to Tulsa, complete with Pullman sleeper, dining cars, and glass-topped observation cars, on Thanksgiving weekend 1960. Even at that time, I knew that I was experiencing an important part of American culture on those trains (although I was unaware of how soon they would become part of the nation’s past). Perhaps equally impressive and surprising, however, was getting to meet a huge extended family on my father’s side, people who thought I looked like him (in contrast to my New York family, who said I was the image of my mother), and who met for Thanksgiving dinner in an enormous ballroom at the Mayo Hotel. For years—at my mother’s encouragement—I had written a poem that we sent to Tulsa, to be read at this annual event. In 1960 I had the opportunity to read my own poem aloud. Additionally, on that warm Oklahoma weekend late in autumn, I first encountered the suburban lifestyle of ranch homes and streets with only minimal sidewalks, although the blue Naugahyde sofas in cousins Lou and Susan Fenster’s home were similar to the yellow ones in mine. Thus I came to know middle America through my European-born father.
Dad established a private medical practice, and he worked as a physician in internal medicine with a subspecialty in diseases of the chest. Although obstacles I have discussed may have prevented his American relatives from bringing Eli and his family to the United States before the war, they helped him substantially once he arrived in 1946. The man I knew as the patriarch of the Tulsa branch, Maurice Sanditen—who with two of his brothers, Herman and Samuel, founded the Oklahoma Tire and Supply Company (Otasco)—gave Eli $2,500 to purchase the most up-to-date medical equipment. The correspondence between them is touching in its reflection of Maurice’s sincere generosity and my father’s gratitude, as well as poignant in Maurice’s offer of a vacation stay at the home and on the yacht of a wealthy business associate in Ohio. The gap in experience and wealth between the cousins at this time was so large as to make me wonder how much Maurice actually recognized the extent of the disparity, and yet Eli seemed grateful for the generous invitation. He apparently tried to find a way to accept, although in the end the visit did not take place. He later expressed his thanks movingly, too, in a letter to a cousin in Wichita, Jacob H. Bloch (figure 50):
It is almost three years since I came to the United States and I am beginning to realize the miracle of man.
In the early days . . . I suffered a period of frustration and sadness for my harried past and heavy personal losses, but I have found that time and the warmth and interest of my family are wonderful healers. . . .
Now I am ready to open my office and begin to practice, and thank God again for the concern my family showed. My cousins from Tulsa gave us a very gracious and handsome start and now you, whom we didn’t even notify of our marriage or office, sent us such a generous gift and warmly sincere note.
Figure 50. “The Miracle of Man.” Copy of letter sent to cousin Jacob H. Bloch, May 21, 1949. Family collection.
With such financial assistance, Eli began his private practice in our street-level apartment at 542 Parkside Avenue in Brooklyn. In 1955 we moved to a house in the Midwood area, and Eli purchased a building, to which he moved his office, on Marcy Avenue in Williamsburg on the edge of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood (figures 51, 52, and 53). The Jews of Midwood in the 1950s and ’60s were most likely to be Conservative, Reform, or of no affiliation, whereas at the time of this writing the area has a large Orthodox population. And unlike much of Williamsburg today, the area surrounding where Eli’s office stood is still not gentrified or trendy; his patients were predominantly low-income Puerto Ricans and African Americans. It was part of Eli’s character to want to help the disadvantaged and the poor, but, as mentioned, he had also become frustrated with American-born Jewish patients who distrusted his expertise because he was a refugee. He was devoted to his patients in Williamsburg, and I remember how proudly he told me, once, that he had signed a medical form for a young woman in his practice who was about to attend my own alma mater, Barnard College. At one point he developed plans for a community center in his office neighborhood, and he was disappointed that it was never built.
Figure 51. Eli at his desk in the first office of his private practice, at 542 Parkside Avenue, Brooklyn, August 1951. The framed document above the desk is his license to practice medicine in New York State. Family collection.
Figure 52. Eli and Pearl Rochelson in front of their home at 817 East 17th Street, Brooklyn, in 1974. Family collection.
Figure 53. 493 Marcy Avenue, the building that housed Eli Rochelson’s medical office from 1955 to 1984. Photograph by Burt Rochelson, 2016. Family collection.
In addition to his primary practice, he was one of the survivor physicians employed by the German consulate to examine Jewish Holocaust survivors applying for restitution for medical conditions and disabilities. The German government knew that survivors were reluctant to be examined by German doctors, and that part of Eli’s job was victim advocacy. Whether he felt any ambivalence working for the German government, I don’t know, but he took his role as patient advocate seriously. I remember with affection a few of the consular officials my parents came to know well. Ilse Kaminski once gave us as gifts goblets of dark red Bohemian crystal, one each to me and to my parents, each slightly different from the other. For many years I have used mine as the Elijah’s cup at our family seders, seeing it as a symbol of peace and reconciliation. Now that I have my mother’s, too, it is our Miriam’s cup.
Our family’s religious practice was like that of many Jews in Brooklyn in those years. We kept kosher at home, but not outside. While my Bubby was alive, we attended holiday services at a small Orthodox synagogue, which I suspect my father enjoyed for its evocation of the shuls of his youth. As Burt neared bar mitzvah age, however, we joined a large Conservative synagogue. Because my parents, having been brought up in East European Jewish traditions, thought bat mitzvah was something of a fad, I attended religious school at a Reform temple, which did not require bat mitzvah, and was I confirmed on Shavuot 1964. My father presided at large family seders, where the men gravitated to one end of the table, the women to the other, and which I looked forward to all year long. Because of my grandmother’s presence, even more than my father’s, Yiddish language pervaded my childhood home, and I understand spoken Yiddish well. It was a rich Jewish life, eclectic and meaningful.
Although Dad worked long hours when I was a child, returning home often at around 9:00 p.m. to what I always envisioned as a time of warm intimacy with my mother, eventually he was able to be home for family dinners, and he was always available to sit and talk with his children in his study. As a doctor, he especially enjoyed helping us with science projects. I recall how he explained to me the meaning of the blue and red blood in diagrams of the heart, and I still own a wooden model of the lungs that he gave me when I was a child; it is in the room where my grandchildren sleep when they visit. I have fond memories of Saturday nights, watching the Jackie Gleason show on our family television, sitting on my father’s lap in a living room full of aunts and uncles. When I was very young Dad taught me to play chess, and we often played together. I never developed a sense of strategy, but I loved the game, especially our games. New Year’s Eve was a special occasion in our house, when our parents’ friends came, all dressed up, and danced to the music of Guy Lombardo and his orchestra in our living room. My cousins and I would play games on the stairs, and we invented our own master of ceremonies, “Man Sombrero.” It felt like a magical night, and I sensed that it was for my parents, too. For me, it represented an adult sophistication, which somehow I knew was also European. I loved watching my elegant parents dance and look so happy.
On Sundays our family either visited Aunt Ida and Uncle Dave in Queens (they had moved from Crown Street) or we spent the afternoon at a museum or some kind of performance; Dad loved the Moiseyev dancers and Mom the Museum of Modern Art,6 and I enjoyed going to both, multiple times. We went to concerts of Russian and Yiddish music, and at least one Chekhov play—I remember Three Sisters—at which Dad listened to the Russian while the rest of us used headphones for simultaneous translation. Late afternoons on Sundays, especially in summer, Mom’s extensive extended family would drop by, and we’d gather for a dairy meal of herring and bagels in the dining room. Sometimes the families of friends from Kovno would visit, or we would visit them, although I never got to know any of their children well. Only recently, as I’ve gone to meetings of Assistance to Lithuanian Jews, have I become reacquainted with Sharon Silber, whose mother I was speaking to when Nissan Krakinowski recognized my name, as well as Bella Pace, Cindy Perry, and their siblings. At the 2014 meeting we began to organize a gathering of the Kovno descendants, nearly all of us American-born and all now in (at youngest) late middle age. The next January a group of ten or twelve of us, including Burt, met at a restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and talked for hours.7 More recently we had dinner at an outdoor restaurant near Fort Tryon Park. I like to think of us as the Kovno kids, reconstructing in our own way those long-ago bonds.
In summers when we were children, Pearl and Eli took our family on two-week vacations to Lake Mahopac, north of Westchester County, and other locations not too far from New York City (figure 54). Eli enjoyed swimming in the ocean, which he lovingly called “the sea,” at beaches closer to our home. His favorite stroke was the side stroke, which he referred to as “swimming like a frog.” In later years we went to Bermuda, Israel, and Europe; and in Paris and Italy, in 1972, Eli reunited with his cousins Riva and Genya (figures 55a and 55b). I vividly remember a conversation at a Paris restaurant, carried on among all of us in English, Yiddish, French, and Russian.
Figure 54. Family vacation, early 1960s; left to right. Pearl, Eli, Burt, Meri-Jane. Family collection.
Figure 55a. Pearl and Eli with Riva and Max Kané-Kahan, Paris, 1972. Photograph by author. Family collection.
Figure 55b. Pearl and Eli with Genya Lubovsky, Abano, Italy, 1972. Photograph by author. Family collection.
Our trip to Israel in 1968 was especially significant. Although Eli had not wanted to emigrate to Palestine after the war, his admiration for the State of Israel was enduring, and in 1968, just one year after the Six-Day War, we joined our Fenster and Minsky cousins from Tulsa in a bus tour on which we took up most of the bus. Israel’s spirit was optimistic, and it was exciting to feel that we were among the first Jews in many years to pray at the Western Wall. I remember visiting the Knesset, the John F. Kennedy Forest, the Israel Museum, and similar places in a 1960s tour geared to Americans, as well as the Cave of Machpelah, near Hebron, and locations of Christian interest both in Jewish Jerusalem and the newly accessible West Bank. We were unaware of political contentions that even then must have surrounded those areas. I remember taking off my shoes to visit the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, touching the rock itself and learning about Islamic calligraphy.
But Israel was also a personal journey, a time for my father to reconnect with friends from the past and for his family and those friends to meet each other. I have mentioned our visit to Masha and her family; they lived in Binyamina, then a small, rural place. It was also the first time that my father would see his relatives in Hadera, the children of his aunt Minne Kanter’s son Uri, and the first time since the 1930s that he saw the companions of his youth, Joseph and Chana Kushner. I visited the Kanter family again in 1974, when I spent the summer in Israel studying Hebrew at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In later years I forgot the daughters’ married names and we lost touch, and even the resources of the internet have not (yet) been able to reconnect us. But Joseph and Chana and their family became my lifelong friends. I visited them on every Israel trip and, now that Joseph and Chana have died, I visit their children, grandchildren, and small great-grandchildren and connect with their day-to-day lives via Facebook and e-mail. Nurit Nahmani, with whom I saw Lithuania in 2003, is Joseph and Chana’s daughter. We had met Ruth and Mota (Mordechai), Joseph’s niece and her husband, a few years before our 1968 trip, when Mota, a highway engineer, was working with a company in New York. My mother became something of a mother-away-from-home to this young couple during their US stay, and I looked up to them as older, wiser siblings. When I visited Israel on my own, Ruth Blank took on that semimaternal role with me.8
In 1968, the meeting between Eli and Joseph was emotional and unforgettable. They embraced repeatedly, each saying, I can’t believe it. Joseph told me, years later, that after the war he awaited word from family and friends in Europe, and heard from no one. Then, at some point after the liberation, a letter arrived addressed to “Joseph Kushner / Advocat / Haifa,” and it was from my father. When Joseph had made aliyah, he intended to go to law school, and Eli was unaware that he had changed his mind and become an accountant. But there was another Joseph Kushner in Haifa who was a judge. He knew the Joseph whom Eli was looking for, and he forwarded the letter. Joseph told me that when he read it he was overwhelmed with emotion. Of all the people he had known in Europe, his friend Eli was the only one to survive. They immediately continued to correspond, exchanging photographs of their children throughout the years, finally sharing those hugs in Haifa. They had one more visit, when Joseph and Chana toured the United States in 1980 or ’81. After my father died, my mother gave me a belt of his to give to Joseph on my next visit, in 1986.
In the fall of 1969, soon after I had transferred to Barnard and was living in Manhattan, my parents called me with exciting news. My father had received a letter from his brother in Russia. The Cold War was still in a very icy stage, and Misha had written to him through Polya Meerovich, my father’s sister-in-law, who had survived the war in Russia, returned to Lithuania, and kept up a regular correspondence with Eli until his death. Misha’s letters did not disclose where he was living; they arrived in envelopes written by Polya with her return address. As Eli explained, his brother had been a decorated functionary of the Communist Party, a bureaucrat likely living “in a dacha in Sochi,” and thus someone with a great deal to lose, should it become known that he was in touch with a brother in the United States. Indeed, the last previous correspondence my father had received from Misha had come when he learned that Eli had decided to go to the United States after the war, and Misha told him he was making a terrible mistake. The ostensible reason for this new letter was to let Eli know that he had arranged to have their father’s grave moved to the new Jewish cemetery in Kaunas. Apparently the old Jewish cemetery was to be destroyed, and families (if they could be found) were given the opportunity to relocate the graves. Enclosed in the letter was a small photograph of my grandfather’s grave and the assurance that it was safe in its new location (figure 56). Of course, it was the beginning of a much more intimate correspondence. In subsequent letters my father and uncle exchanged pictures of their families. I learned that Misha was married and had two daughters, both of whom were in middle age at that time and had remained single. Eli and Misha wrote to each other until 1974, when Misha died of cancer. When we learned of his disease we felt that there was a deeper reason for his initial contact than simply information about the gravestone.
Figure 56. The gravestone of Bere-Mikhel Rochelson (inscribed with his Hebrew name, Dov-Mikhel b”r Eli’Gershon), as sent in a photograph to Eli by his brother Misha in 1969. Family collection.
During the five years of their contact, I asked my father many times why we didn’t travel to the Soviet Union so that the two of them could reunite. He cited his brother’s fears, apparent in the secretive way he sent his letters, and he seemed to have no idea where his brother lived. He also mentioned his own fears; as he described, he was told he could be in serious trouble if he ever decided to go to the Soviet Union, having changed his mind and gone to the United States after the war. Even if all those fears could be surmounted (and, clearly, they would not be), our family’s impression was that Soviet travel regulations would have made a personal visit impossible as well as risky. We never made such a trip.
When I visited Lithuania in 2003, however, I brought the photograph of the gravestone with me. My husband, Joel, and I were traveling with Nurit and Yakov Nahmani, Joseph Kushner’s daughter and son-in-law, who had been trying to convince us for years to make the trip together. Since they were Israelis, when we visited the cemetery they read the Hebrew on the gravestones easily, and while I struggled to make out inscriptions letter by letter, they both suddenly called out, here it is! I walked quickly to where they were standing and I saw the stone, exactly as it appeared in the photograph. I broke down and cried, a reaction I hadn’t expected, and I started talking to my grandfather in a Yiddish that came back to me from having heard it in my childhood home, but which I had hardly ever produced in speech. “I am your grandchild. This is my husband. We have two children. . . .” The words poured out amidst my tears. I found pebbles to place on the stone in the traditional sign of a visit to a grave in a Jewish cemetery, just as I might put pebbles on the graves of my maternal grandparents in Elmont, New York. It was such a homely and simple gesture, yet one that in my wildest dreams I had never imagined being able to do. Joel, Nurit, and Yakov added pebbles of their own. Suddenly my grandfather’s monument, which had remained unvisited for at least thirty years, if not sixty, looked like the graves of people whose families paid regular visits. His granddaughter had come, from the other side of the world. Nurit and Yakov later visited the old Jewish cemetery, which had not, in fact, been replaced with a highway or apartment blocks or anything else. But the site was in terrible condition and the remaining gravestones were tumbled and vandalized. The new cemetery was well maintained, but there was no signage to mark it or to direct visitors to it. We had found it only because a kind woman we met in a gas station brought us to local businesspeople who pointed the way. When we left, Yakov took out his ballpoint pen and drew a small Star of David on the nondescript cemetery gate.
Eli practiced medicine until shortly before his death. He was seventy-six years old, and his last year witnessed the birth of two grandsons, something he told us he had never expected to see. Yet, in the months leading to his death, the importance he placed on his professional identity led to considerable sadness. Although he had suffered more than one transient ischemic attack (TIA, or mini-stroke), he did not want to give up his medical practice. When illness finally forced him to do so, I remember hearing him say, “If I am not a doctor, I am nothing.” I recognized right away that it was untrue, but I also saw in it a reflection of the trauma he had survived and the means by which, emotionally and practically, he had survived it. Work was, in part, a way of displacing painful memories, but also a justification for his survival when so many others, especially his wife and child, had perished.
Some years before he died, however, Eli reflected upon his life in a way that I had not expected, and gave me an emotional gift for which I remain grateful. We were standing outside somewhere; I remember it as an airport but I can’t be sure. My Aunt Mae, my mother’s eldest sister, had been speaking about her son, who had died of a heart attack years earlier at age thirty-seven. Dad had been especially close to this nephew, who was close to the age that Borya would have been, who was a doctor, and who even had a similar name. Barry’s death had been a shock to the whole family, and although my aunt continued her life with great strength, surviving another fourteen years and taking pleasure in her grandchildren and all the family that remained, there was a sadness about her that never fully disappeared—indeed, not unlike my father’s sadness. But at that airport, or wherever it was, Eli looked at her as she walked away from us and he said to me (as had been said to him), you have to be rational about these things. There is nothing that can be done, and you have to go on. He added: When I die, I don’t want you to grieve too much. I thought I would die many times in the past, and I never expected to live this long. Those words, which I paraphrase after many years, helped me to deal with my father’s death when it came, and in those words, too, he gave me permission to be happy. Whether he said it or not, or maybe it was in the way he spoke, I knew that he meant his life had turned out better than he had expected, as well as longer. He thus reassured me that I—and my mother, my brother, all the rest of us Americans—had given him a second life that he enjoyed and that had meaning, despite his having lost that first life that always seemed to be in the background. I did not have to grieve too much for his death, or for his past. I was not Borya, but I was his child, and I deserved to go forward and live my life.
He died on February 15, 1984, in the intensive care unit of Interfaith Medical Center, in the building that had been the Jewish Hospital of Brooklyn, the hospital with which he was primarily affiliated from the 1950s to very shortly before his death. The Jewish Hospital had merged with St. John’s; hence, Interfaith. In March and May of the previous year, Burt’s son David and my son Daniel were born. A few months earlier, Eli was advised to undergo gall bladder surgery, but he told his physician he wanted to wait until after the births; he wanted to live to see the babies, and he did. He was a grandfather. However, other medical problems developed. During the autumn when David and Danny were not quite toddlers, Eli underwent successful surgery to remove plaque from his carotid artery, but by late January his condition was serious and he was admitted to the hospital. I received a call from New York and flew north right away. I saw my father and I spoke to him. He recognized me, and when I said, “I love you, Dad,” he smiled at me and squeezed my hand. I told him about what eight-month-old Danny was doing: standing up, smiling, probably starting to vocalize a bit. It was a conversation, although I don’t remember what, specifically, he said or asked me. I was grateful for the smile and squeeze of the hand, and maybe even the voice that said, “I love you, too.” That night Dad had a massive cerebral hemorrhage and went into a coma.
Interfaith Medical Center is located between Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights. In 1984 it still had the old-fashioned intensive care unit, with multiple beds in a large room and virtually no privacy for patients. Families could visit for ten minutes out of each hour; the rest of the time we sat on molded plastic chairs opposite the elevators. My mother, brother, and I at various times shared those chairs with families of young men being treated for gunshot wounds. I realized that their deaths, if they occurred, would be more tragic than my father’s at age seventy-six, but of course that didn’t help. We all tried to make comforting small talk. We were all devastated.
My father had many visitors, members of the family and those who were like family, such as Noemi Marquez Mesquita, who had been his office assistant for three decades. We all spoke to him and hoped he heard us, although his coma was deep. We learned from Eli’s medical record that on the night of the cerebral hemorrhage a nurse recorded that he was speaking incoherently, asking for “a club soda.” Burt, our mother, and I knew that this was not incoherent at all. Eli drank club soda, not water. He was simply thirsty, and apparently no one responded to his request. At another point he referred to the ICU attendants as “Nazis.” This did not surprise us.
After about ten days, I went home to Florida. Danny had been in New York with me, staying with a different friend or family member every day. Nursing him at night gave me comfort, although I felt that it was wrong to have him continue this way indefinitely. (He is now, as an adult, easygoing and resilient; whether he had those qualities from birth or developed them in part through this experience I don’t know.) I also realized that I myself was beginning to hope for my father’s death, so that this miserable waiting could end. My mother agreed that Danny and I should return home. We went to a crafts fair with Joel over the weekend, and I was able to relax a bit. I’m sure I pretended that my father would get well and all would be back to normal, although I never sent the Valentine card (“to Grandma and Grandpa”) that I had bought and still have. Early on Wednesday morning, Burt called me. Dad had died overnight, and no one from the family was with him. I hope that our love, at the end and all through the life we shared, somehow sustained him through those last days. I flew to New York immediately, and Joel and Danny joined me soon after. The funeral was the next day, and the chapel was filled.
My father had given me the greatest compliment of all when he saw my bound dissertation and turned the pages of its bibliography, recognizing the amount of effort it took and praising me for what I had done. In every subsequent achievement of my academic career, I have sensed him by my side, inspiring me and cheering me on. Listening to his voice in the recorded interview, I was brought back not just to the history of his life but to the life we shared together and to the more extended time I wish we had had. Completing this book now, more than thirty years after I spoke to him last, I miss him again and at the same time feel his presence. I also feel grateful that I inherited his stubbornness (figure 57).
Figure 57. Eli G. Rochelson, MD. A professional photograph taken sometime in the 1970s. Family collection.
1. He had seen Betty, too, and asked her mother about her.
2. I have no idea what happened to notes that Pearl might have written to Eli. Like him, she was an excellent writer, and she enjoyed writing clever poems to family and friends. I still have the faux pearls, along with the brown velvet beret Pearl wore that Kol Nidrei night.
3. This word use was not unique to Eli, among survivors. Beth Cohen quotes a young man who resettled in Denver, as saying, “I don’t seem to see a sense in life and little by little I lose the courage to live and that worries me” (152).
4. In 2009 I learned something important about my mother’s connection to my father’s first wife. My daughter, then aged twenty-one, decided to change her given name to Serafima, to honor the memory of someone whom she felt was part of our family but still had no namesake. I was afraid to tell my mother, thinking it might arouse uncomfortable feelings. But it was the very opposite. Tearfully, my mother explained that she was glad young Serafima had chosen that name because she, Pearl, had often felt guilty that she had enjoyed being my father’s wife when the first Serafima had suffered such a horrible death. She was happy, now, that Serafima finally “had a name,” and her words were extremely meaningful to all of us.
5. Dolhinov (or Dolginovo), Belarus.
6. I remember going to the Brooklyn Museum often with my mother, too, although not as a family. Mom had a special affection for that museum, as I did, and when she was sixty she became a docent there.
7. We were sons and daughters of Drs. Pace, Perry, Rochelson, Silber, and Rosenstein, the last a female physician who had graduated medical school with the others but who had stayed in the Soviet Union and eventually emigrated to Israel. Several of us got to know her daughter, Paulina, who now lives in the United States, at a meeting of Assistance to Lithuanian Jews.
8. When Ruth died of breast cancer in 1991, in her very early fifties, I lost a dear friend, but Mota and their children are still my cousins. Nurit’s husband, Yakov, and her brother, Eli, are also now gone, having died in their early sixties and seventies. I felt these all as losses of family.
