By Yochanan Gordon
You’ve read about the passing of my grandmother last week and you will likely read more about her in the coming weeks because Chana bas Shloime Shmaryohu (Nudel) was the matriarch of our family. She was a holdout, the sole surviving family member from an era when people knew the value of life because they had to fight for it with every vestige of their being. The refrain that I had heard repeatedly and had caught myself whispering in succession in the days following her passing was precisely that we had been witnessing the end of an era. We had all gathered at the cargo section of John Fitzgerald Kennedy airport on an early Sunday morning nearly two weeks ago to pay what is known as our kavod acharon, our last respects, sending our grandmother to her final resting place, before techias hameisim, to Eretz Hachaim cemetery in Beit Shemesh. Although all of us grandchildren had the keen foresight to visit our ailing grandmother repeatedly in what in retrospect was the final two weeks of her life, the feeling that we were unanimously pervaded with was that we could have done more. My parents, who put their lives on hold these past couple of years visiting her, maintaining a close connection with doctors and medicine schedules and so on and so forth, similarly felt that despite all that they had done perhaps they could have done more. One of the most remarkable things that I observed over shivah was the desire that my mother expressed to continue to do the things that she had grown accustomed to doing despite the taxing and overwhelming nature of it all. What that says is that regardless of how difficult something is, the moment we no longer have it, we long for it.
At the airport, my father delivered a few words just to give perspective to the range of emotions that were filling us all, young to old, gathered there for that small, makeshift funeral, before the main one in Eretz Yisrael where many of her grandchildren waited to pay their final respects. My grandmother, as you had read previously, was a survivor of the Holocaust. She hid for six years in the basement of a Polish lady who had worked for their family. After a close encounter with death on a selection line, my grandmother’s Aryan resemblance helped her out of harm’s way and into freedom. As such, although we were all saddened at the loss of our mother and grandmother, and the looks on our faces could attest to that, we were simultaneously celebrating her life and acknowledging the victory signaled in her ninety-two years on this world having left behind children and hundreds of grandchildren in New York, Baltimore, Chicago, Texas, and Eretz Yisrael. My father said that we were celebrating a life that wasn’t supposed to be. The life of a little woman, whom if Hitler had his way would’ve shared the same fate as the other six million victims of his evil megalomania. When he said those words I couldn’t help but think of King David, whose seventy years in this world were borrowed from Adam Harishon and my grandmother too, it seemed, lived on borrowed time and made extremely good use of every moment of it.
There is a lot to write about. But I have to take you back for a moment, just a couple of weeks, to when we stood at her bedside a week before her passing. She had slowly lost the strength and the desire to eat which led to her rapidly decreasing weight and she looked like a shell of herself. It was difficult for all of us to see her in that state but we were there to cheer her up as much as we could. We had visited her from time to time and never previously had we felt the feeling that had filled us then as we stood there. As much as I tried to dismiss the thought of it, it felt as if we were saying our last goodbye to our dear Bubby. We were able to converse with her, despite her diminishing energy, and she was able to verbally acknowledge how much she loved the songs that we sang at her bedside and how much she loved us, but she was clearly in a lot of pain and visibly uncomfortable. We had told her that we’d be back, a week later, on the following Sunday and although some of my siblings did make it there on that Sunday, sadly we did not and it is precisely that feeling of healthy guilt that immediately struck us upon hearing the news of her passing.
Although her husband, and our grandfather, had predeceased her about five years ago, in a certain sense he lived through her. In describing the beginning of our national Egyptian exile, the verse in Sh’mos says: “And Yosef died and all of his brothers and all of that generation.” This was a harbinger to a new King arising in Egypt irrespective of the great leadership of Yosef until that point. So as long as Yosef lived, the Yidden could not be exiled. As such, as long as our grandmother lived in a certain sense we still had a tangible connection to our grandfather and that entire generation which continues to dwindle day by day Now that she is no longer with us, in the physical sense, I find myself replaying all the wonderful memories that we were blessed with. The grandmotherly love, the cookies, cakes, and endless amounts of food that she prepared for us in her house and in ours when she’d visit over Shabbos, yom tov or in honor of a family simcha. She wasn’t just nourishing us physically; I feel as if there were certain intangible ingredients within the recipes of her food that could not be written down, similar to the characteristic of the oral Torah which Chazal say, “Cannot be committed to writing.” This past Shabbos, Malkie, posted a picture of a salt and pepper kugel which resembled the one that my grandmother had made, for decades, to the tee. Thankfully, over the 24 hours of Shabbos, we visited and I had the good fortune of tasting it and reviving those great memories. As it turns out, it wasn’t exactly her recipe, since up until this point it hasn’t been located. Although I hope it will turn up, perhaps her food is reminiscent of Coca Cola, a drink I relish, which possesses a hidden ingredient. In this case the missing ingredient is all of her life experiences and the love and the thankfulness of surviving and being able to raise children and grandchildren and to feed them. Do you really think that can be captured on paper?
The fact of life is that we all get older until we don’t. For us grandchildren though, despite the graying which is thankfully, very slowly, settling into my look, we remain grandchildren with our parents above us, who in the passing of our grandparents, have been promoted into the patriarchal and matriarchal positions in our family. It is an interesting feeling, I imagine, for a couple who just three decades ago were in the position that I am in now, as I sit here typing these reflections.
Our sages say that the sun rises and sets. You might be wondering why we need our sages to tell us that the sun rises and sets if it is empirically provable. It is a figurative statement of our sages which describes the waxing and waning or the transmission of one generation into the other. These were some of the sentiments that had occupied my mind and that I had expressed throughout the shivah, imparting to my mother that she was our link to the previous generation which she may not have directly lived through but was certainly brought up within.
Chana bas Shloime Shmaryahu was a small woman who endured perhaps in one day what thankfully, none of us will endure in our lifetimes. She exhibited a heroic amount of courage together with her husband to rise from the ashes and create a legacy—which with G-d’s help they did. There was no great material success to speak of, just plain old hard work, prayer, and Torah learning which has been the recipe that has followed us throughout the exiles. We long for the day, very soon, when G-d’s mercy will flow over and remove us from this difficult exile and reunite us with our departed.
Yochanan Gordon can be reached at ygordon5t@gmail.com. Read more of Yochanan’s articles at 5TJT.com.
