My parents were both born in eastern Europe, my father just before and my mother just after World War I. Life was fragile, and especially so for Jews.
They each made it to the US, my mother alone at age eight and my father at age 13, with a falsified birth certificate so that he could start working full time, in order to support his widowed mother. He had never been to school. My mother, at age eight, was needed to care for her half-brother and half-sister, while her father and stepmother worked full time. Neither of them spoke English and neither knew anything about the country they had come to. They only knew their responsibilities.
For both of them, there would be no higher education, no cultural experiences, no travel, no free time in which to develop interests and passions. Whatever intelligence, talents and abilities they had were turned wholly toward the need to survive.
My father, raised to be strictly observant in Judaism, was never able to have a Bar Mitzvah. The Bar Mitzvah itself is the ceremony that denotes the passage of a boy from child to man at age thirteen. My father’s passage was, instead, over an ocean. He left as a child and arrived as a man, with all the responsibilities that entailed.
My father was a quiet, introverted soul. He experienced great trauma in his pre-war childhood and carried that trauma with him for the rest of his life. He survived by hiding his voice and his abilities and whatever dreams he had had for his life.
My father tried to be invisible, fearing that were he not, “they” would come after him. Whenever I tried to talk to him, he would first hold up his hand to stop me. He would make sure the window was closed and the blind was down. Only then would I be allowed to continue speaking. When people out in the world called attention to his thick accent and innocently asked where he was from, the panic set in. Afterward he would always ask me why they were interested in him and what were they up to. My answer, that they were simply curious and meant nothing by it, didn’t serve to allay his fears.
When Then Husband and I planned a trip to Europe, giddy that we had saved enough money to make the trip, my father didn’t understand. “Everyone is trying to get away from there,” he said. “Why are you choosing to go there?”
Several years ago, my elder son purchased a poster showing the ship my dad came to this country on from Eastern Europe, in the exact year he arrived. The poster has been hanging on my bedroom wall. While I was in Brooklyn last week, helping to prepare for my grandson’s Bar Mitzvah, my husband called from home and told me that he was awakened during the night by a loud crash. He searched the house and couldn’t find what had happened. On Friday, Now Husband arrived in Brooklyn.
We returned home yesterday, on Father’s Day, and I discovered what had happened. The framed poster of the ship had fallen from the wall, tore out the plaster, hit the chair rail, dented two places on the adjoining wall and came to rest nestled in a box of padded envelopes. Had it landed one inch over, it would have shattered on the hardwood floor.
I stood there staring at the poster in the box of padded bags. For the first time in my life, I experienced my dad using his voice. Unbeknownst to us, he had made himself part of his great-grandson’s Bar Mitzvah in the only way that was possible for him. And he made sure that I discovered what had happened on Father’s Day. But he also, in pure Dad fashion, made sure that the precious poster remained unharmed.
I heard you, Dad, loud and clear, with no windows shut and no blinds drawn. And I have never been so comforted by your voice as I was in that moment.
Life in the Boomer Lane 
Shelley
June 21, 2022
What a powerful post. I can’t help but think about how fortunate I was to have popped out of the birth canal at the moment in history when things were getting better for women than they had ever been in centuries past, in the spot on the globe where the future was brightest, with the right skin color, born to two people that belonged to the mainstream religion, and eventually I would form a mainstream sexual preference . The ancient Greeks were somewhat right about predetermination. At the moment of birth, so much has already been decided for us.
I can’t imagine doing what your parents did at those early ages. What incredible people they must have been.
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Life in the Boomer Lane
June 22, 2022
Thanks for these words, Shelley. I, too, have always been grateful for having been born here, at a time in history that seemed so bright. My parents and countless others (then and now) have been and are now called upon to survive in ways that I can’t imagine.
nekkachim57
June 21, 2022
Free-will and destiny are ever existent. Destiny is the result of past action; it concerns the body.
Life in the Boomer Lane
June 22, 2022
I like to believe that, although we may not be able to control the circumstances of our lives, we are in control of how we interpret those circumstances and what actions we take.
Victoria
June 27, 2022
Dear Renee, I love you so much. Your honesty is heart-searing. I come to “Life in the Boomer Lane” most often for the humor with which somehow you are able to observe and address a great many terrible things we all face, and most of us have to turn away to guard our own spiritual safety. You face them head-on, heart-on. I respect your courage so much. I hope you are writing a memoir of pieces like this one. Memoirs share the truth that joins us below the level of class, religion, color, everything. Thank you, scrappy little Jewish girl. I grew up in Texas where at a young age I was told it was not okay to be Jewish and I should not play with the other little girls who were. No reason, just because. How stupid! I didn’t fall for it. Texas stuff that made no sense, did not stick on me. In grade school and Middle School I had girlfriends who were Jewish. I still do. So there.
Life in the Boomer Lane
July 2, 2022
Victoria, thank you so much for these comments. I’ve always used humor as a way to deal with many of the difficult/painful situations in life. I’ll admit that events in the last six years have sometimes tested my ability to do so. But there are topics, of course, that require a more serious observation. My relationship with my dad, for several reasons, has been difficult to write about and even more difficult to think about.
As for your experiences with hearing that it was not OK to be Jewish, I had the exact communication regarding non-Jews, as I was growing up. I think it all comes down to fear. Jews were persecuted throughout history by Christians, and Christians were fed messages that Jews secretly controlled everything. Like you, I was lucky enough to learn early on that those beliefs were not correct. Sadly, many people, both Christian and Jewish, never have. We see another version of this “us-them” mentality now with the messages constantly being put out by conservative media: “Those” people (whether Democrats or immigrants or blacks) are out to take your guns and your bibles and your money and your jobs and your safety. It’s all so damaging for everyone.