I have written about my grandparents in the past, although perhaps not to the extent that I should have. One could tell by the way my father writes about his father just how large a figure he was in his life. Although I was just 8 years old when he passed away on the sixth night of Chanukah in December of 1989, he was an important figure in my life as well, not only due to the fact that he was my grandfather but because of what he represented and where he came from. He was my link to generations of Chabad chassidim, which was a major force in my young life growing up in the 80s and 90s even though the decision was made not to raise us in that path.
We’d often visit my grandparents’ home in Crown Heights where we were exposed to the messianic fervor and expectancy that surrounded the Lubavitcher Rebbe in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Davening in 770 in the presence of the Rebbe was something that will remain with me my entire life. The banners on Kingston Ave that screamed “Let’s greet Moshiach with acts of goodness and kindness,” while listening to Avraham Fried’s “Nisht Gedaiaget Yidden,” “Sisu Vesimchu,” and “Boruch Haba Melech HaMoshiach,” songs that conveyed the immanence of Moshiach’s arrival and the rebuilding of the third Beis HaMikdash played a huge role in shaping my young and impressionable conscience. My grandfather would procure lulavim and esrogim for my father and his siblings every year. I would often accompany him on his erev yom tov trips to pick up our dalet minim. My grandmother never remarried after her husband’s passing and she’d often come to us for Shabbosim and we’d visit her on our trips to Crown Heights. My grandfather was the first of our four grandparents to pass away. We were all rather young and although he had somewhat of a heart condition it was a shock to us all when he passed away at what in retrospect was a very young age of 72. However, in writing about him now, before his yahrzeit I wanted to do so in the context of all my grandparents who collectively have shaped who I have become today. I remember my maternal grandparents well. My grandmother was a Holocaust survivor, a small woman who somehow had the courage to come over to the shores of this blessed country to build a family in full sight of the horrors that she witnessed through her nine-year-old eyes. She was a Yiddishe mama in every sense of the word. Nothing pleased her more than whipping up a pot of elbows, serving us turkey burgers, stuffed cabbage, salt and pepper kugel, or her legendary array of baked items, which a book would be out about if she had just left over her recipes.
She literally, like thousands of others, was prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice to remain steadfast in her Jewish observance and it meant everything to them that their children followed in the path trailblazed by them. They no doubt made mistakes vis-à-vis their children as a result of the great sacrifices that they made and the inability to discern early on that their children were living in a vastly different milieu than what they were brought up in, which required a different approach that perhaps they were not fully equipped to provide. My matrilineal grandfather was a student in the Novardok Yeshiva during the war years. He worked a double shift in order to spare his frail rebbi from having to engage in labor that would have surely cost him his life. He even pawned off his gold watch so that his rebbe could procure bread and milk for their two-year-old daughter who was starving and in need of basic nutrition. That daughter, Rebbetzin Perr, would, together with her husband, the late Rabbi Yechiel Perr, come to the Far Rockaway neighborhood, found the Yeshiva of Far Rockaway, and amass generations of students through a yeshiva that carries the name Derech Ayson which stands for Avraham Jaffen Talmid Novardok.
I have a lifetime of memories with my grandparents. I had spent Shabbosim in their Boro Park home and have vivid memories walking alongside my Zaide Nudel on Shabbos morning going to Beis Yosef or on occasion Chust or Skver, which were chassidish shtieblach in the vicinity of his home. My zaide used to daven closer to his home on Friday nights at a shteeble under the auspices of Reb Chaim Grozovsky, zt’l, whose father, Reb Reuven, was renown as one of the famous roshei yeshiva whose works on Shas have been published and studied in yeshivos the world over. Reb Chaim and my zaide were chavrusos; he was a tall and imposing figure whose history I was unaware of as a child. But as I think back now, he had this old-world simplicity about him, which I’m not sure even exists in our world of false sophistication. My zaide’s main preoccupation was in Torah and he could be found at all hours during the early morning to late night bent over a volume of Gemara. Funnily enough he had an interest in wrestling; I’m really still unsure where that came from. However, part of it must’ve been his attempt to show his new world einekel that he was relatable despite hailing from a very different time. He learned Daf Yomi for as long as I can remember. He didn’t do the Daf; he lived it. I’d wake up early in the morning and he’d be poring over a large volume of Gemara. One memory I have is him learning perek Chezkas Habatim, taking my little finger and pointing to the words of a Tosafos on the left side of the page.
As a young child in yeshiva he’d seek to learn with me and in the early years I would dread it. I would fabricate all sorts of excuses explaining why the current time was not ideal and I saw how much pain it caused him. However, as I got older and matured a bit, I would seek to compensate for all the lost time in my younger years by giving him the time that he sought to learn with me as well as to share my own ideas in learning, which gave him such pride because there was nothing else important in his life other than Torah. My grandparents were of very meager means. They never owned their own home and would rent until their last day. My grandfather worked at some point but after he was hit by a car and injured, he more or less stopped working and started to learn full time. He was an extremely simple and unpretentious person and would often find rubber balls, magnets, and other chotchkes in the street that he’d be happy to present to us as if he had bought it at the corner toy store. And you know what? We cherished them because we felt the love in his heart and saw the twinkle in his eye as he gave it to us.
To give you an idea of his unpretentiousness he once came home holding a pamphlet that looked like a kuntres of some sort that he said he got as a handout from someone in the street. I looked at the “kuntres” a little closer to realize that it was Jews for j paraphernalia that had been published in Hebrew in order to dupe unsuspecting passersby. I’ll never forget all the times my grandparents came to my parents’ home for Shabbos and yom tov. I was the “Shabbos goy” who would carry his reading glasses and his tallis bag when he didn’t trust the eruv. We’d walk together and reminisce about the giants of the previous generation that he would see as a child. He remembered Rav Meir Shapiro of Lublin and would reminisce about the time that Rav Dessler came to his yeshiva. At the age of sixteen he and a few friends of his would travel to Vilna for Shabbos where they had the opportunity to meet with Rav Chaim Ozer who pinched his cheek, a gesture that he told me he would never forget for the rest of his life.
He was awed by the Lubavitch and Satmar Rebbes. He was completely apolitical. I remember once talking to him about Rav Steinsaltz, zt’l, anticipating that he’d launch into a yeshivishe tirade of all the criticisms that were being levied at him. Nothing. Only praise for the renowned Talmudic genius. He would often tell me to always ask questions and never be afraid of being made fun of because without asking questions you won’t learn as the Mishnah in Avos states, “Lo habayshan lomed.” My grandmother was the breadwinner of the household. She was known as the little old lady who worked at the coat store in Borough Park. My wife remembers shopping at that store as a single girl and was shocked when she found out that the little old lady who had helped her in the store was my grandmother. She would remain in that store for decades and would continue to do so long after she was physically able to. She assured my mother that she had stopped working but we’d hear from others who would attest to seeing her there. I guess she was a workaholic.
The last eight years of my grandfather’s life were very painful. He developed dementia, which in the beginning would be accompanied by the predictable symptoms of forgetfulness but would in time intensify and would ultimately incapacitate him. However, in the middle of this period he would sing the song “V’lirushalayim” on repeat. It’s almost as if it was the last song he was thinking about before he developed this condition and he would just sit there repeating “V’lirushalayim.”
I don’t know what was going through his mind then. In fact, I remember on one of our final visits to him, wondering as he was staring blankly straight ahead or directly upward depending upon whether he was seated or lying down, thinking about what was going through his mind. However, against the backdrop of everything that I had described up until this point, I have no doubt that those declarations of “V’lirushalayim” were born from deep longing feelings for the redemption.
It was my mother perhaps who was the one who had grown up in the home of Holocaust survivors. Her mother, who I wrote about above, found herself on a selection line as a young girl 9 years of age and she was asked by an officer why she in her blonde hair and blue eyes was waiting on this line. “Run away,” they said, “you surely don’t belong here.” From that point on she’d spend the next six years of her life hiding out in the basement of their childhood housekeeper, and she would be the sole survivor from all the members of her family. My mother would tell us that her mother would tell her regularly in the morning prior to going off for school or later on to work that she might not be there later when she returned home. So although my mother and her siblings didn’t live through the Holocaust they have been hardwired with the consciousness of those who did, which no doubt had left a lifelong imprint regardless of whether it is noticeable or not.
My father’s father was born in a town in Belarus called Dokshitz, which was burned by the Nazis. My great grandfather and subsequently his family would leave Dokshitz long before the war, restarting their lives in Crown Heights where my great grandfather would be a shochet by trade as well as a gabbai in 770 both by the Friediker Rebbe and later the Rebbe. My grandfather would be educated in Yeshiva Torah Vodaas and would go on to get semicha from Rabbi Shlomo Heiman who was a talmid of Rebbe Boruch Ber who was the prized student of Reb Chaim Brisker. My zaide would go on to become a Yiddish journalist of great repute for the Algemeiner Journal in which he wrote multiple weekly columns as well as sustain the paper financially with the advertising revenue that he would generate. I was told a story of a couple who would regularly argue about the current events of their day and after a long and drawn-out argument they’d stop and say “We will wait to read what Reb Nison Gordon writes about what is going on and that’s how we will decide who is correct.”
Practically every time Rabbi Bender would come into our classroom to address us or to hand back a test or a homework assignment, when he’d get to my name he’d go on about how not a weekend could pass without his parents perusing the Algemeiner Journal and specifically the articles of my grandfather.
However, while my grandfather had come over from Dokshitz, as I said, getting out long before the Nazi rose to power, and ultimate invasion into their town, my grandmother, whose maiden name was Berger, was born in the Bronx. I don’t even think she really knew much Yiddish. She would recite this line every motzaei Shabbos after Havdallah: “Ver hut gelt deim iz voihl” He who has money is happy. It’s quite different than the traditional prayer of Gut fun Avraham and Al tira avdi Yaakov that I would hear in the home of my matrilineal grandparents, but the truth is I never really thought about it until now in these terms, but that in one line encapsulates the difference between someone who had come over to these shores from Europe, whose number one fear, concern, and anxiety was their children holding onto the tradition that they had sacrificed their lives for and someone who grew up in America and was certainly proud of their identity as a Jew but who was focused on living the American dream, never having to make the choice to die instead of renouncing their religiosity.
My patrilineal grandfather hailed from a devoutly Chassidic home whose parents and siblings all lived fully committed chassidic lifestyles and whose children and grandchildren have gone onto embrace the ideal of shlichus. He lived in Crown Heights where he had become a household figure. While on a practical level, he was extremely learned, he didn’t hold strictly to chassidic customs and sources and ultimately it didn’t carry over as strongly in the lives of my father and his siblings.
Although my grandfather was a noted Yiddish writer, he would converse with my father and his siblings in English and despite his strong Zionistic leanings, which would be realized with his decades-long summer trips to Eretz Yisrael and ultimately his decision to be interred where he is alongside my grandmother in Eretz HaChaim cemetery in Beit Shemesh, he very much adapted to the American lifestyle and lived the culture. He would often say that he was proud to walk the streets of New York but he would never allow himself to be buried beneath its impure soil. So in retrospect it would seem that my maternal grandparents were Europeans who had come over to live in America, they had always lived with the mentality of where they had come from while trying as best as they could to relate to their grandchildren who were born and bred here. My patrilineal grandparents, perhaps due to the fact that my grandfather had come here at an early age while my grandmother had always been in New York, lived with somewhat of a tension that manifested itself in his life on these shores while never allowing themselves to be buried beneath its soil.
My father once reminisced how the day he turned 17 and he got his first car he woke up one morning to his auto insurance bill next to him in his bed, which was left there by his dad who no longer felt the responsibility to foot the bill for him.
My maternal grandparents by contrast never had driver’s licenses and therefore never owned a car. My mom and her siblings would take the subway to work or to yeshiva due to the European mentality in the home that they would grow up in.
In my own life I can clearly detect influences of both sides. Most glaringly is the fact that I am doing the same thing that my paternal grandfather had done to earn a living. As mentioned, my grandfather was a Yiddish journalist who would write more than one weekly column for the Algemeiner Journal as well as run the ad sales department. My father would often tell us that he would visit his customers who owed money at their homes on erev Yom Kippur. He said, everybody could be found at home on erev Yom Kippur. It’s amazing that it’s half a century later and we are still figuring out ways to get money from clients who are not forthcoming in paying their bills. I always had an interest in writing. I wasn’t always the greatest writer, and I did not ace all of my compositions in school, but I remember often sitting down at a computer to write a recap of a sports game that I had watched as if I was writing for The New York Times sports section. Another area of writing that I exhibited great patience toward was note taking. During my years in beis midrash I would transcribe word for word the shiurim and vaadim of my rebbeim and roshei yeshiva, much of which I still have in my possession today. I was amazed to find out years later that my paternal grandfather had transcribed three masechtos of shiurim of Reb Shlomo Heiman, which were used in compiling the sefer Shiurei Reb Shlomo. It would solidify a certain connection between him and me that was meaningful as a result of the fact that I was so young when he had passed away. Today, the most meaningful compliment that I could be given is for someone to tell me that they see similarities in my writing to that of my Zaide’s.
I spent a number of years post high school learning in beis midrash and even a year in kollel after marrying in the year 2006. My parents had switched batei midrash to one that allowed part time college with the hopes that I’d get a degree and find a major that would help in finding a career path. However, I didn’t have much patience for school, and it was very difficult for them to enforce it from a distance of 100+ miles away in Waterbury, CT.
As I sit here typing these memories from about twenty years ago, I recall my father asking me if given the money I would choose to learn all day or still choose to work and earn a living “on my own.” The truth is I had an appetite for nice things, and I won’t lie, there was a thrill in making money, but I had spent a number of years in yeshiva and I felt at home there and wasn’t itching to leave.
I would like to think that the trajectory of my life is in line with the purpose with which I was put here to accomplish. Perhaps, on some level perpetuating the legacy of my grandparents on both sides in the area of journalism, chassidus, and in Torah study and my fealty to the Torah luminaries of this generation and of the past. Most of all, as the yahrzeit of my grandfather draws near it’s my hope that he is happy with my work and takes pride in my being his grandchild the way I am proud in him being my grandfather. n
Yochanan Gordon can be reached at ygordon5t@gmail.com. Read more of Yochanan’s articles at 5TJT.com.
