“Who is wise? He who learns from all men” (Ben Zoma)

It’s not only one’s father who can father one.

My Uncle Herman and his wife, my mother’s sister, lived near us in Brooklyn, NY for my entire childhood. We saw each other several times a week. He was a master tailor and worked for a well-known men’s suit and coat manufacturer in New York City. He was always smiling. In fact, he radiated. Whenever we would meet, he would reach in his jacket pocket and hand me a butterscotch candy wrapped in amber-colored cellophane. I developed a lifelong fondness for them.

He loved to ”do favors”. He happily created or tailored fashions for his family, immediate and extended. He would always accompany my mother back to our apartment after a visit. He was courtly and “old school.” He was a modest man and, in all the years that she knew him, he only asked my mother for one thing. After it became clear that his wife would be unable to have a child, he asked my mother if she would name me after his mother. She agreed.

I knew very little about Uncle Herman’s background. I just knew he was a kind man whose love was constant and enduring. Many years later, after he had died, I learned that he had had another wife and two sons before the war. These were things that Holocaust survivors rarely told children. They were protecting us. My uncle and people like him are ”tzaddiks” (righteous people) living among us. They never call attention to themselves. Their good deeds define them and when they pass away, they leave us with wonder.