When my zaide (grandfather in Yiddish) died in 1959 when I was in high school (Music and Art , now LaGuarda High School). He was a very kind gentle person who dearly loved his family. Memories surface from my very young years, but I also remember his suffering in later life. Having worked for years bending over a pressing machine, he developed severe chronic back problems. He wore a miserable metal contraption to give him support but of course it provided little relief. (I am now approaching the age of his death, and I too suffer debilitating back disease but treatment, such as it is, does not involve wearing the painful metal cage my grandfather wore. Progress of sorts).
But I want to praise my grandfather whom I loved and thought would be forever in my life. And then I began to learn life's lessons.
Thanks to Morris' back-breaking labor he was able to send both of his children, my father George, and his younger Jack, his younger son to college and to graduate schools. My father became a physician and Jack a lawyer. In this picture, Grandpa poses with his two bright sons, George is on the left, Jack on the right. Grandma Rose probably took the photograph, but where?
How little I know about my grandfather's life; he emigrated from Odessa? He was a "tailor." And then what? All those decades are a closed book that I shall never open. History is cruel in that the detail, the precious detail of life leaves few traces for almost everyone.
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