I Know Their Future

In the photograph, I see the gold watch hanging on a thick chain adorning my grandmother’s neck. It is now the possession of our eldest child, our daughter Amy. And so it was passed from generation to generation, not to tell time, but to be an ongoing remembrance of our family story. I love its connectedness, its bringing the generations together. I love how Amy must feel as she puts it on, thinking back to the great-grandmother she would have loved, but whom she never knew.

My maternal grandparents gaze at me from the picture which is one of a select few treasured enough to be placed, in perpetuity, on our kitchen wall. Between them are their two eldest children, sons, Duvid and Chaim, who were to become the Americans, Dave and Charlie. The photo was taken in Augustow, Poland, years before my American-born mother, Ida, entered the world. My careful estimation is that the picture has already had a long life and is now about 120 years old. It is professionally framed in such a way that it will continue to endure for centuries. It will be immortal, a pathway for future generations, to give them an enhanced vision of their roots.

I can only imagine the palpable excitement on the day the photo was taken. No doubt, from what I’ve learned, rather than from what I knew, Peshka, my grandmother, was the one who generated the idea to do a family portrait. Pop, my grandfather, was far too practical. He would, and probably did, say that it was too expensive, that they needed every bit of money to arrange their transport to America. She would have successfully argued that their time in Europe was quickly coming to an end and that they needed to memorialize it meaningfully. She made the arrangements and the photo-shoot was planned.

Each of them was dressed in their finest finery. The two boys were undoubtedly ordered, not asked, to refrain from playing and getting dirty. Each of them wore atypical fancy scarves atop pure, immaculate, white shirts. Their parents wore shul clothes. Pop had on a spiffy vest, an actual tie, and a well made jacket. Peshka, called Mom by my own mom, wore an elegant gown. All had professional tonsorial work and their hair was parted in the middle, in the style of the day. Their gazes into the camera show no trace of smiles. Then, unlike now, smiles were not seen very much in photos.

When the picture was framed and ready it was carefully packed for the journey to America. No matter what else they needed to bring, the picture was going to be included. They wanted me, and their other descendants, to stare at it and wonder about them, about their lives and their bravery, shared by so many other Jewish immigrants to America, sufficient to leave everything they had known about life and living, especially their beloved family members, to come with practically nothing to a foreign land. I can see in their eyes that they had the fortitude to make it work. And now, with the perspective of history, I know that they did!

They were the dreamers, those who plunged forward and crossed oceans with little children in tow. They were those who came with bravery, fearless or not, to a new land and found success. And I, in the powers vested in me, can tell you of their futures. I can tell you what they themselves didn’t know about their lives to be. I cannot predict my own future but, in the power of the photograph, I can tell you all about the lives of those no longer walking amongst us.

Pop found work as a presser in the garment industry, which provided salvation for so very many of his cohort. He earned a pittance but, nonetheless, a new child, my mother Ida, entered their family into a cold water flat in Brooklyn. She was privileged to be the first of the family to be born in a hospital. She became the princess. Pop ironed her bedsheet every frozen winter night. And my grandmother Peshka made plans. She was a doer, a hardworking, industrious woman who had big dreams. She had abundant talents, people talents. And she was a masterful cook. She became a hotelier, a career which my own mother always said killed her mother. She opened the Bauman House in Parksville, New York and Jews came to enjoy her food for decades, until, at age 62, she worked herself to death.

The boys followed their own stars. Dave became a businessman, father to Leon, husband to Fannie and undoubtedly the most loving, kind, caring, sweet, generous person I have ever known. He died long before his time, in his early 50’s, and I miss him always. He was a total mensch.

Charlie, fulfilled his mother’s dream, and became a dentist, husband to Bessie, father to Richard and Jonathan, my kid cousin known to many as Bowzer of ShaNaNa fame, Charlie, too, died young.

Pop died at age 77, at our home on Aldine Street in Newark. He had a small frame and a big love for his progeny. He was such an integral part of our household that I can never go back in time and imagine growing up without him.

And my mother. Although she is not seen in the picture, she was lucky enough to be allowed to go to Brooklyn College, which was not the norm in her generation. She studied the poetry she so loved, Keats, Shelley and Tennyson. She learned to adore opera and theater, and art, and to share that love with us, her children. She died, in the transient life of a Jew, in Israel at age 85, years before her beloved Sam, my father, joined her in the Herzliya Cemetery.

I told you I knew their futures, all of them. They were frozen in time in the picture. I see them before the lights flashed as they gazed seriously into the camera, looking ahead to the unknown, to what was still to come. May they rest in peace!