Fragments of a Memory

The Old Man on the Stoop

In this yellowing and blurry photo, taken sometime in late 1943, before he was too ill to go outside any more, my grandfather Moses is sitting on the stoop in front of his brick house.  He is wearing a winter coat and hat, so that we know it must be November or December.  He sits on the left of the steps, leaving a space, and I think there was another companion piece to this picture that showed me sitting next to him on that day.  I was a little more than three years old and my father had gone away into the army, not to return until late 1946.  Or perhaps, if you think about what the world was like then, someone else had been there with him, one of the grown-ups who loved him and wanted to give him comfort that afternoon, knowing it might be the last time he could enjoy the sun shining directly on him.  Or maybe it was no one at all and he placed himself apart, making room for someone to walk up or down the stairs.  Or perhaps in a different version of this context to the photograph, without his will to do so, he kept that space open in case one of his lost relatives returned, his first wife, his son already virtually disappeared into the military, or some more distant cousin or parent whom he had left so many hears before in the Old Country where already the Final Solution had probably already swallowed them up.

            There are many questions I have about this photograph.  It is almost too painful to look at.  Everything about the time and place is shrouded in sorrow and grief.  My grandmother, my mother, and everyone else who might have been in the house at that time is gone.  Other friends and relatives of the family could have provided some of the necessary background information.  But now no one is left for me to ask about it, except myself, and I was so young then it would be foolish to trust my memory.  What I do know is that we, that is, my mother and I, had moved into my grandfather and grandmother’s house on 48^th Street on the other side of Old New Utrecht Road, across the street from Pershing Junior High School, when my father went into the army.  Before that we had lived upstairs from a dress shop on 53^rd Street, where 13^th Avenue converges with Old New Utrecht Road, so that the El passed right by our window. 

My mother and I lived in that brick house with her parents, and then only her mother, until a year after the war ended in Europe and in the Pacific  when my father returned from the war and he bought our big house on 47^th Street.  Aside from a faulty memory, there are a few of these old photographs, at once warmly redolent of the world I have lost—not one of the people in these pictures, as I have said,  remains alive, except myself—and that lost world is frustratingly peopled by persons I cannot recall and buildings I can only vaguely identify.  Soon anyone looking at the pictures, even my own children, will see them as a complete stranger would: just old phot0graphs, like those you find in a tin box in a junk shop, curiosities of times gone by, nothing personal left to them.

            My grandfather Moses Herman was ill virtually the whole time I was aware of him.  However, he was still working a little as a cloth-cutter and tailor, so that, when my father started to wear his military uniform, I was given one also.  Then Grandpa stayed at home all the time, sometimes working in the small backyard where he grew roses, sometimes sitting on the front stoop to catch the sun, but more and more he stayed indoors the more ill he became, until it seemed to me he was always lying on the window seat in the front parlour and was dying.  I cannot recall when he actually passed away.  It just happened and I never saw him again. He was a short, very gentle, quiet man.  There is nothing I can remember that he ever said. 

            What I have subsequently learned about him is little enough.  He came originally from Hungary.  When he arrived in America shortly before the First World War, he had a European wife who bore him one son named Bertram. I never met him.  Nothing can be discovered about him except that he was old enough to have joined the Navy during the Depression.  He was, my mother always said, in Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked the US fleet in December 1941.  Bertram disappeared, missing in action.  He may or may not have been aboard one of the ships that were sunk.  My mother used to write to the War Department to find out if they had news, but they never did.  This was one more thing that made her always sad.  If she saw someone in a sailor uniform years later, she would tremble and often when she realized it was not her brother she would faint in the street.  Probably there is no one in the whole world now who remembers who he was or knows what happened to him. 

            After his first wife died, Grandpa Moe married my Grandma Molly, who was from Romania, and she was a widow with one son, my Uncle Jack Goldner.  Molly came from a family of great rabbis who lived in northern Romania and the border area of the Ukraine nearby, perhaps from the city of Czernowitz.  She claimed he was the Grand Rabbi of Dorohoi, so that when Queen Mary of Romania visited New York in the mid-1930s, Grandma was invited to have tea with her.  She had aristocratic pretensions and passed them on to my mother, who always felt she deserved more from life than she received and should.

            It could be that my mother was the one taking the photo.  That does not seem right, though; she was never able to deal with machines of any kind.  Maybe, instead, it was my grandmother, although that, too, when I think of it, seems improbable, for though she was likely to have been agile enough to work a camera, she might have deemed it below her dignity.  Obviously it was not me: not only was I too young but I was in the missing companion piece taken the same day and close in time.  Like so much else in my past, as recorded in my child’s memory, the answer is elusive, the concepts beyond my intelligence and experience at that time, and the resolution gone with all the people who may have enlightened me at any point in the last seventy years.  Photographs were taken and later developed, rarely were they annotated with dates or names of the people and places they reproduced.  The pictures were put in boxes.  No one looked at them from one decade to another.  When one person died, they were passed on to another, and so on, until they came to me.  For many years, I could not bear to look them, as they recorded a world of nostalgia and meaningfulness that had disappeared.  Now, more recently, as I approach the end of days, one or two can be lifted out of the box, laid on a table, and looked at, their mysteries all too evident.  Either nameless people in unknown settings, or one or two familiar faces in rooms or near scenes that I vaguely recall, but not the specific occasions that would let the experience fill up with memories.

            There are a few photos of Grandpa Moe, some of my Grandma Mollie, but nothing at all to indicate that Bertram ever existed.  Yes, there are images of Uncle Jack, his step-brother, and also of my mother.  Even the wedding of my parents has the whole mishpucha there, including an unidentified young woman, but again no Uncle Bertram.  What do you do when there is no one left to ask about him?  Perhaps there could be documents somewhere, if all that was needed were the kind of positivistic data one fills in a genealogical tree with; while that would confirm what he was—the son of Grandpa Moe and his first wife—it would tell us nothing about him, what caused him to run off to join the Navy, or why he was never heard of again.  How many ancestors whose names and vital dates can be placed on a chart remain totally without personalities or substance as living persons? 

His absence, in a sense, defines our family mother cared about him, yet no one else has left a record of their sense of loss.  I was for a long time too young to be interested in or understand anything that might have been said in whispered conversations, and later in my early adolescence had not the wit to question my mother when she passed on the few dribs and drabs of information I have just told you about. 

Yet when I try to imagine in my mind the ages of the people involved and the chronology of the events, few as they are, something begins to emerge that is totally unexpected.  Since my mother was born in 1919, her step-brother Bertram would have had to be a few years older than her.  Grandpa Moe was not drafted into the Army during the Great War, although he duly registered as a citizen, and it is likely that there would be a few years between the death of his first wife and his marriage to my Grandma Molly, even if his son was still relatively an infant and he felt he needed to marry quickly to give the young child a mother.  Let us therefore guess that Bertram was born in 1915, making him eighteen in 1933, an age when he might have decided, for various reasons, to join the Navy.  One reason, to be sure, was the Depression.  Another reason could have been rivalry with my mother’s other step-brother, Jack, the son of Grandma Molly and her first husband Mr. Goldner.  Jack and Bertram may have been similar in age and the tensions at home over the poor economy, perhaps exacerbated by Jack’s marriage to Bella and the birth of a daughter, my Cousin Bernice, around 1922.  Probably something else happened that stirred him into leaving home, cutting relations with his parents, and never contacting my mother again after he joined up.  He would have been around twenty-six at the time of Pearl Harbour on 6 December 1941.