Reminiscence

Hummingbirds are feeding in the cherry tree, pollinating the tiny pink flowers. My house is surrounded by bay trees thirty feet tall, and beyond them, redwoods even taller, candles reaching up to the overcast spring sky. The tattered Tibetan prayer flags flutter in the breeze. The meyer lemon is fruiting and we have been eating lemon bars for some weeks now. March Madness is a low drone on the television in counterpoint to the tumbling of the dryer full of newly laundered sheets. The sheets put me in mind of a reminiscence jotted down by my grandfather on a February day some sixty eight years ago, on an overcast afternoon in Chicago, chilly and damp, bone-achingly chilly and damp. I would like to share that note with you, that he jotted in liquid black ink, his fluid yiddish cursive on sheets of laundry paper. He had plenty of laundry paper, since he ran, quite unsuccessfully, a west side hand laundry. Be careful, the paper is delicate.

The houses and the streets are covered, as with a white sheet. Everything is white; the snow has covered everthing, and yet it continues. Everything is white and it dazzles the eye. It looks like the whole world is covered with sheets, you see nothing – but snow. And the stillness – it gnaws at your bones, and it freezes your nerves. And the memories, they carry you away, far away. Your past carries you away to distant lands. To lands and villages long since gone from the map.

I see myself, in the small town of my youth, where people lived and died quietly, as if this were the whole world. They didn't have luxuries there, they didn't want them. Their lives were as still and placid as the little lake. In the summer, warm beautiful days, cold in the spring and fall. Big winds and storms that covered the woods and the fields the whole winter. Then there was time. Plenty of time to think and to learn God's ways of life, and to earn a place in the higher world. They thought, and they meditated, and they learned the old ways.

I see myself. I think of my old school, meeting with my friends. It is winter. Everything is white. A deep snow. The houses and the small street, everything is covered with a white blanket. A strong wind blows and the windows are covered with snow, encrusted with ice. We cluster around the oven and we are engrossed with learning. Each lost in his own thoughts. And the school is blackened and smoky. The floor is black, filthy with mud and snow. A mournful image, young children, blue from the cold, sit in the smoke, and they learn, they learn from the antique pages, wrinkled with age, smudged, dirty from years of tears and sweat, from thousands of years. They study Torah. They seek to glean the secrets of the ages. They discussed and debated the wisdom of an older world. A world of traditions which time has long since obscured but which still lives, with with a breath and a pulse, beating weakly.

And the children are alone, half frozen from the cold, trying to warm themselves with their breath, and to discover the secrets of life. From the old, moldy leaves they want an answer. They wrinkle their young brows day after day, night after night, until they come to a conclusion that there must be a better way, a better world, far away, where people can learn whatever they want and think whatever they want and not be forced to know what their parents want them to, and nothing else, with no freedom of choice, right, or opportunity to live their lives, and make their search in the way they want to.

So, they gather together, one to the other, and their oven gets cooler. Their beit hamedrash gets darker. People from the narrow streets and from their small stores, half frozen from the cold, come together to pray and look for a place to warm themselves a bit by the half cold oven. And they rub their hands, one against the other, to warm themselves a bit, rubbing their hands on their books.

I knew there would come a time when I would get older and search for a new land. I dreamt of this even as a child, that there would be a place with new people, a place more free for my children. Years have gone by, and I have my dream. I have left my old home and my friends, my parents, the old houses, the dirty streets, the great heat of summer that couldn't quite dry up the mud of winter. I left the beit hamedrash where the walls grew dirtier, even in my time. This place was buried in my heart, in my younger years. We have left forever our childish souls. I have left on a long journey, that not my parents, nor theirs would ever have conceived.

I have met strange people. That is how the second part of my life started, with others. The life of an immigrant is hard and bitter. He comes to a strange land with no friends, no family. The people that he meets are condescending. They look at his as if he came from the wilderness, without a language, without manners, without a concept of his new land. What he brought with him from the old county made him look ridiculous to the strangers. His clothes, his habits, his speech, even the way he ate made him an object of derision in the eyes of others.

Some felt a certain tolerance for the greenhorn because they had been in the same plight. Some showed sympathy. But to the person who maintained some self respect, for him it was even harder. His existence was tragic, and his death was cheap, very cheap. No one wanted to give him work because there were too many unemployed. Thousands of young men came into the country every day and begged with all their strength to earn enough for a piece of bread. And the people took advantage of them. They exploited the strongest and the healthiest. What happened to this dream of freedom that we had.

For this we left everything. To run in search of freedom, and it would all wind up so cheapened. We had a sense that we were the true children of freedom.

Everyday the immigrants came together with these people who were but half immigrant themselves, and we began to realize that their lives were not much better than ours, maybe worse. We began to get a glimpse of this freedom that people laid down their lives for. We thought that when a person is free he has no fear, he has no shame. He lives in a world under no one, and does what he feels he needs to.

And then we began to learn; customs, language. We looked around a little and we began to understand things we never dreamed of.

And the children grew up in freedom. They knew the things that they learned in the schools, in the colleges. But from the home, from the father and mother, they learned nothing.

The old ones gave a homey Jewish upbringing. What is the need for this? He's a Free Man. And so, the children became estranged from the parents.

The parents didn't understand their children. They had different dreams, different times. You must understand life on its different stages. The children didn't understand the torn souls of their parents, who didn't understand themselves. These people who left the old ghettos and found no new ones, they were the strangers. It is to late to search. The old gods were left in fragments, the new ones haven't been found.