Synchronicity: When Life Imitates Larry David

If you watch any TV series long enough, you may encounter synchronicity. That’s when the program has a situation that uncannily speaks to you, maybe even when you are having the very same experience.

That happened to me last Sunday and Monday, when my life overlapped with an episode of Larry David’s series Curb Your Enthusiasm. What I did on Sunday, Larry David did on Monday.

What synchronized? We both found ourselves wandering forlornly in a Jewish cemetery. Here’s how this eerie situation unfolded.

Last Sunday my partner Naomi and I made our second visit to the Westchester Jewish Cemetery in Greenwich, Connecticut. We were looking for the grave of her grandmother, Valesca Schulman Leiseroff. She was an amazing woman, a single mother who got herself and her son Eric out of Nazi Germany to New York in June 1941. She died in 1972.

Naomi hadn’t visited the grave since the funeral. Last August, we went to find it, relying on a letter from the synagogue that had sold Naomi’s father Eric the plot. The 1966 letter indicated “Grave No. 15, Row 13, Section B.” How hard could that be to find?

As we discovered: real hard. Despite the coordinates, we searched the cemetery for an hour and found nothing. The directions didn’t match any signage. Naomi then wrote to the cemetery association and was sent a map with more instructions. We also learned that Valesca is buried next to Fannie Leibert and Valesca’s brother, Herman Schulman. For extra detail, the first grave on the row is for Charles Auster.

So last Sunday, a year later, we drove to the cemetery at the end of Memory Lane in Greenwich, confident we would find Valesca at last.

But, no. For 90 minutes we walked around. I read the gravestones of beloved mothers, fathers, friends, children gone too young. The new map still didn’t reflect the sparse signs at the cemetery. Footsore, frustrated and hot, we gave up again.

“Did they move the grave?” I asked Naomi. She doubted that had happened. I began to wonder if graves need AirTags or a connection to the Internet of  Things.

The next day: the synchronicity.

The sensation rolled over me as I watched the episode titled “The Special Section” of season 3 of Curb Your Enthusiasm. It began when Larry David’s mother Adele dies in Los Angeles while he is in New York working on a Martin Scorsese movie. His father (played by the late comedian Shelley Berman) doesn’t tell him because his mother wanted Larry to enjoy his time away. You know the routine: don’t bother him about me, he’s having fun, I don’t want to interfere. Baffled that his father hadn’t returned his phone calls, Larry drops in on him to see what’s up. His father hems, haws and finally reveals that, well, yes, Adele David had died and they already had a well-attended funeral, rabbi and all. Somebody had written in the condolence book, “Where’s Larry?”

And that brought me to Jews wandering in a cemetery. Larry learns from the cemetery administrator that his mother was buried not in the plot the family purchased, but in a “special section” reserved for “villains, suicides and gentiles who are from mixed marriages.” Reason: a tattoo on her buttock had, according to Jewish law, disqualified her for burial in the “consecrated ground.” So in this alternative TV universe, they DID move the grave.

Outraged, Larry literally takes matters into his own hands. He enlists friends and bribes a cemetery worker to relocate his mother’s casket at night. But the crew can’t locate the headstone. “I’m completely lost,” Larry mutters. “All these stones look alike,” says his father. They eventually find the headstone and gravedigger, hoist shovels and start excavating.

Larry’s quest for post-mortem justice for his mother touched me. I could relate. A loved one dies, you visit the grave, pray, remember. I’ve done that at family cemeteries in Texas for relatives going back to my great-great-grandparents. Failure to find the grave creates a deep unease in life and in TV. Larry says as much: “Mom would not want to be there, it’s not right. I feel terrible about it.” For one instance, real human emotion peeks through the character’s churlish façade.

Rabbi Hayim Schwarz at the Hempstead Hebrew Cemetery in Hempstead, TX (courtesy of author).

While we have failed so far in the quest for Valesca, we have had other successes in locating our ancestors. I’ve visited the Gonzales Jewish Cemetery in Gonzales, Texas, where my mother, grandparents and great-grandparents are buried. The place is even a Texas historical site. I also visited the Hempstead Hebrew Cemetery in Hempstead, Texas, where our great-great-grandfather, German-born Rabbi Hayim Schwarz, is buried. That was easy to find—just go all the way to the end of Old Cemetery Road—and a profound connection.

We paid our respects to other German ancestors during a trip to Dresden in 2014. Guided by local contacts who knew Valesca’s family, we found the graves of her parents, Aaron Ezvor Schulmann and his wife Sophie (the name became Schulman in the United States).

Aron Shulmann grave, Dresden (courtesy of author).

More recently, a friend who learned of our locational difficulties suggested we use www.findagrave.com. (That site, by the way, describes how to add GPS to a grave location.) While we didn’t find Valesca, Naomi was thrilled to fill in a major piece of her family puzzle by discovering details about her maternal grandmother, Rose Katz, including the name of her first husband, who died in his 20s, her date of death and place of burial. Her birth year, 1900, is approximate because she emigrated from Warsaw as a teen using the birth certificate of her dead older sister.

Naomi and I will contact the Greenwich cemetery administrator again. Maybe we need a guide to lead us around, as we had in Dresden. We are determined to find Valesca in Greenwich. We’ll say a prayer, place a stone and set the universe right again. Like Adele David, she will not be forgotten.