I woke up very early to a raging blizzard outside and the quiet flickering of the Yurseit candle in my dark apartment.
Forty years ago today, Pop, my grandfather passed.
One hundred eleven years ago, he climbed down the ladder of a ship from Russia, a very young Yiddish speaking boy who had traveled alone to New York to find a better life from the shetls of Eastern Europe.
It’s been so so long—and my mom’s recollections are shrouded in very aging memories—that fact and fiction are blended together.
In truth, my memories of him and a few black and white photos are all that I have.
He was, along with my dad, the epitome of what it meant to be a good man growing up.
Pop entered Ellis island as Ycze Ruvyn and walked out and made his way to his relatives in Philadelphia as Sam Rubin.
He lived on Rivington Street when it looked like scenes of early New York in the Godfather. He moved to the South Bronx, then to the West Bronx off the Grand Concourse where the picture above was taken in the 30s.
This was a guy who drove a horse drawn cab in the early days and spent the majority of his life working on sewing machines in the garment district.
Who dressed like a businessman in clothes he tailored to work on the line, sewing pieces of clothes together year after year.
He worked hard, loved his family with a passion, loved life and seriously considered himself the luckiest person in the world.
He considered America the land where dreams came true.
Never went to school. Never got an education. He never complained about anything.
Stories and memories abound.
How during WW2, three families lived together. My mom pregnant with my older brother, her brothers wife, Pop and his wife and of course the dog. It was over two years till the men came home from the war.
How he walked to Philadelphia by himself, just a kid speaking only Yiddish to find relatives when he got off the boat.
How on summer weekends, we would pile into Pop’s Oldsmobile and head upstate to the Catskills where my Uncle Harry had an old summerhouse. The extended family meeting there, cars full of kids, bringing bialys and smoked salmon, crumb cake and lox. Pickled Herring and OJ.
Old lawn chairs, Yiddish banter, cigars and pipe smoke, singing and yelling and a melting pot of generations.
This is the stuff of great movies that our lives in retrospect look like if we are lucky.
Pop was the only babysitter I ever had. The man who occupied one end of the kitchen table, my dad the other every day of my life growing up.
Who early every Saturday morning insured that food from the Jewish deli and bakery were piled high on the kitchen table before anyone awoke.
Who bought the first black and white TV the family had and we would crowd into his room off the kitchen to watch–Bonanza, Million Dollar Movie and Rod Sterling.
I so loved this man.
I still do.
And he so loved his family and his life.
Quiet. Large and strong. Cigar always smoking and dangling from his really large hands.
He stands for what it meant to be brought up in the middle class.
The focus on education from people who didn’t have the privilege.
The insistence on being happy by people who found it without huge economic success. The value of family and what it meant for sacrifice, for support of the members in the face of any circumstance.
I think how fortunate I was to be brought in an age where your grandfather was a part of the life dynamic of the family.
Not down the street or someone you saw on the weekends but who was there from day one, in the room off the kitchen, at the head of the table.
There is something reverential. Something unbreakable and powerful in that connection that bridges you to the parent of your parents. To generational values and wisdom. To something that feels just so right and strong and uplifting.
To something that you lean on when you are young to bolster you. To something that you take care of as all of us get older.
I’m a bit teary as I think of this.
Even today, I can see myself as a very young boy in striped pajamas, sneaking into Pop’s room, sticking my arm in the pocket of his great winter coat, all the way to my elbow, to find the quarters that he always had there for the kids to find.
This is the very good stuff of life.
My homage to a truly great man who will live forever in my thoughts.
