What I’m thinking about at any one time tends to be massively over-determined, for good or ill. In the last few days I’ve been thinking about the elderly. (I hate the term senior citizens). Partly this is because I’ve been doing a lot of health care events with old folks. Partly it is because my mother-in-law had a stroke last week and I’ve been talking with daughter about grandparents and what they mean to us. And partly its because Ted Kennedy just died and I think of him, as I thought of my grandparents, as someone who passed a political and moral tradition on to me, not in theory but in practice.
I’m a political philosopher and I believe in the importance of theory and reason in politics. But I’ve always believed that my fundamental commitments come from some place deeper than theoretical reasons, from a way of life that is exemplified and passed down to us in practice. That certainly the case for me and the source of my fundamental commitments is my grandparents.
I went to look for the eulogy I wrote for my grandfather when he died 16 years ago at the age of 95 so I could give it to my daughter. Re-reading it, I liked it a lot. And I thought some of my friends might be interested in hearing about a man they don’t think they ever met but who they, in fact, meet every time they talk or work with me.
My Grandfather lived a long life. And though he lived through personal tragedies, for the most part his life was healthy and, I think, happy. When a man has lived this kind of life, we cannot feel sad for him at his death. We are sad because of what we have lost with my Grandfather’s death and because we will miss him. However no man who has lived as good a life as Grandpa did is ever totally lost to those who knew or who were influenced by him. And that is especially true if we stop and think for a moment about what kind of man he was, what he meant to us, and how we can learn from the kind of life he lived.
When I stop and think about my Grandfather’s life, I am struck by a thought that, when it first occurred to me many years ago, I found surprising. Grandpa’s life was heroic in nature. This might strike you, as it once did me, as strange. For Grandpa certainly did not look the part of a heroic figure. He was a small, gentle, and shy man. And, as his grandchildren often said among ourseleves, the advice he gave us certainly did not encourage the heroic. Whenever we considered a trip somewhere or even worse, were thinking about moving from Liberty or the state of New York, Grandpa’s recommendation was always to stay put. I once asked Grandpa how he could tell us this when he had made such a difficult, dangerous trip from the province of Bukovina in the Austro-Hungarian Empire by rail to Antwerp and then, traveling in steerage, by boat to New York. How, when he had made such a radical transition in life, could he tell me that there was no need to go to Connecticut to college when there were so many good schools in New York In reply, Grandpa said to me, “I had to go but you don’t.” I have no doubt that Grandpa believed this, but it really wasn’t true. For Grandpa and his family did not have to leave Europe and come to America. Most of the Jews of Eastern Europe did not leave. When we reflect on the fate of those who remained, we can’t help being extraordinarily grateful to the men and women like my grandfathers and grandmothers, and many of yours, who made that difficult journey. I can’t help thinking that there was something heroic about the journey they took.
Nor did Grandpa have to leave a job as a foreman in a belt factory in New York to come to the Catskills to open a hotel with money that was almost entirely borrowed from friends and family. He once told me that he had to leave New York because my great Grandfather’s health was imperiled by his job in a sweatshop. But, again, not everyone in that circumstance left New York to start a new and uncertain business with little cash in hand. And fewer could keep their business going through a depression and world war. Furthermore, when Grandpa came to Sullivan County, he did not have to join the Cooperative Insurance Company and play a leading role in founding the credit union associated with it. He frequently told me the story of how, when he saw an old woman denied a very small loan at a local bank, he concluded that people needed to join together to help themselves by doing things like forming a credit union.
Of course, what my Grandfather did in coming to America and then to Sullivan County was not unique. And he was certainly not unique in his work at the Cooperative Insurance company and Credit Union. But that, it seems to me, does not make what Grandpa did any less heroic. For it seems to me that Grandpa was a member of an heroic generation. Indeed the heroism of that generation is a shining example of a collective kind of heroism, a heroism not of one or two leaders but of millions of people acting together. What that generation achieved could only have been accomplished by family members, friends and landtsman who traveled and worked together and sacrificed for each other.
Grandpa, like my Grandma Sarah, and my Mother’s parents and many of your parents or grandparents, was a leading member in this collective accomplishment. What I have found in looking back at his life is a model of how take part in such a movement.
What made Grandpa a leader in his own quiet way?
The first quality that comes to mind is what we might, if we were being polite, call determination. It would be more truthful, however, to call it stubbornness. When my friends tell me that I am a stubborn person, I say to them, “you should meet my father.” However, I think my Grandfather was even more stubborn than my father. Stubbornness is a much maligned characteristic. Without it, I don’t think my Grandfather could have achieved what he did. Let me give you two examples.
All immigrants who came through Ellis Island, had to pass some minimal medical tests. However, a doctor found something in Grandpa’s eye that would have prevented him from entering the country. The doctor marked his jacket with chalk and sent him to the line for people being sent back to Europe. Grandpa had no intention of going back, however. So, when no one was looking, he wiped the mark off and got back into the other line. (So I’m here because my grandfather was an illegal immigrant.)
Another example: My great Grandfather, my aunt Becky and my Grandfather came to this country before my great Grandmother and the other brothers and sisters. Grandpa lived in a rooming house with my great Grandfather and a few other men. Grandpa once told me how worried he had been about whether and when the others would be able to come to America. So he badgered my great Grandfather into borrowing money to bring the rest of the family over. He did it by constantly complaining about the quality of the food he had to eat. Grandpa would say that he could only eat his mother’s cooking. Eventually my great Grandfather relented. And it was a good thing he did because, had he waited, the rest of the family might have been stranded in Europe during World War I.
Tied to Grandpa’s stubbornness was a second quality, his strong sense of what was important and what was unimportant in life. Grandpa was not easily distracted. His children and grandchildren knew that of greatest importance to Grandpa was his family. He was always there for us in little and big ways. He was free with advice and accepting when we ignored it. He tried for years to get me to shave off my beard. He laughed when I told him that my mother liked me better with a beard, but I am not sure he ever believed me. He stopped asking me to shave off my beard only when my father grew one. This may be the only cause he ever gave up in his long life.
While his family was of prime importance, they were not the only thing important to him. Grandpa was committed not just to his family but to the larger community. The political and social ethics I follow I learned from him. When I would have lunch with him, which I did quite often, Grandpa and I often talked about politics. He didn’t talk about politics in a theoretical or philosophical way. However, what he told me and his whole way of life expressed a political and social ethic. It is his example and that of my father, that has shaped how I think about political and social life and how I live my life.
This political and social ethic was frequently exemplified in his life. Grandpa loved our hotel. Long after we sold it, he would ask me to drive him there so he could walk around on the grounds. He loved it because it was on a beautiful piece of land, one he had chosen; because building it was a great accomplishment; because it had provided for his family. Making money was his not sole purpose, however. Grandpa always wanted to treat customers and employees more than fairly and to help them where he could. He would sometimes let guests who were down on their luck stay without paying. He frequently used the hotel to contribute in kind to worthy causes. By most conventional standards, Grandpa was not the world’s greatest businessman. But by his own standards and my own, he did very well.
I can best sum Grandpa’s political and social ethic world by borrowing a phrase from President Kennedy and calling him an idealist without illusions. Grandpa instinctively took the side of the underdog and the disadvantaged. He usually had doubts about the good will of the rich. For example, Grandpa was not great admirer of Menachem Begin. He very much disagreed with Begin’s view of the national interest of Israel. Yet I remember once that he pointed with pride to an article in the Times that said that, of all the heads of government in the world, Begin was the poorest. This, to Grandpa, was a mark of integrity.
Grandpa believed that we had to build more just political and social institutions. However, he did not have illusions about how easy it would be and about how recalcitrant human nature sometimes was. It is from my Grandfather and my father that I learned to distrust both those on the left who seem to think that, with one transformation, the evil in the world can be done away with and those on the right who have lost faith in the need or the ability to create a better world.
That faith was central to Grandpa’s life in both public and private dimensions. In difficult times, Grandpa always seemed to me to have faith that something would turn up and things would work out for the best. He always gave me confidence that this was the case in my life. Grandpa wasn’t always right. The hardest things for him to deal with were the circumstances when he was not right, when my grandmother, and my uncle Hesh, and his second wife, Nora, died. Usually, however Grandpa was optimistic—worried but optimistic.
I don’t know exactly where Grandpa’s optimism came from. Perhaps it came in part from his religion. Grandpa was an orthodox Jew who followed the practices he had been taught as a child. But he did not talk much about religion. And I very much doubt that he expected that God would come to his rescue because he put tefillin on in the morning. I think it is more likely that Grandpa never doubted that the only sensible way to proceed in life is to work hard and hope for the best. That kind of optimism, it seems to me, is not the result of but, rather, the premise of being a Jew. Despite the oppression and disaster that Jews have faced, the Rabbi’s have always taught us that God expects us to be optimistic. Grandpa usually was.
There was another source, I think, of Grandpa’s optimism; and that was the life he had found and made in America. Sociologists sometimes say that it is only the second generation in America that assimilates. I don’t know about other immigrant groups, but this is certainly not true for the Jews from Easter Europe. I don’t think I have ever known a more patriotic person than my Grandfather. Grandpa was deeply grateful for the opportunities that America had provided him and his family. Of course, most of the time, that patriotism was not expressed in flag waving or in speeches. It came out, for example, when I asked him—as I often did—about his early life. He always began not in 1897 when he was born but in 1912 when he came to America. It also came out when I asked him if he would like to travel with me to Israel. He was, of course, a strong supporter of Israel. He took pride in the development of that country and in all the money he had sent to help our family there. Yet, he never really wanted to travel to Israel and I don’t think that was just because of the hardships of travel at his age. He didn’t want to go, I think, because he was determined to live, die and be buried here, in the US and preferably in Sullivan County. He used to joke to me that he did not want to die on a plane on the way to or from Israel because he didn’t want his body to be tossed from the plane into the ocean. At first I wondered where he had gotten such an idea until I remembered that he had undoubtedly seen something like this aboard the ship that brought him to the US.
I have said that Grandpa did not look at life in a philosophical or theoretical way. But I should mention the most surprising conversation I ever had with him. We had been discussing a case in which a journalist had been imprisoned for failing to turn over some notes that were thought by a judge to be potentially important evidence in a murder trial. I argued with him that, in this case, the reporter was in the wrong. Grandpa responded with the only philosophical monologue I ever heard him give. “This is America,” he said. “The freedom of speech and the press in the most important right we have.” If I am not mistaken, before he was done, Grandpa had managed to get the First Amendment, the Declaration of Independence and Thomas Jefferson into the conversation as well.
Finally, the last characteristic that made Grandpa a special person and special to me was his sense of humor. Grandpa really and truly loved to laugh. His ability to laugh at others and himself, to see the absurdity in so much of life, is a large part of what gave his life its focus. Someone who can really laugh can’t help but have a sense of what is important or not. And usually he can’t help but be optimistic about what is truly important. Let me give you an example of Grandpa’s humor, at its blackest: A few years before he gave up his own apartment, Grandpa’s landlord, who was also in his 80s, wanted to raise his rent. Now Grandpa did not really keep track of inflation. The 100 dollars a month he paid for a very nice size apartment seemed to him to be more than enough. He certainly did not want to pay another 25 dollars a month. So he bargained with his landlord to spread the increase out over a number years. Grandpa was telling me about this situation, and getting somewhat worked up about the unfairness of his having to pay such a stiff rent increase and about how he had managed to whittle the increase down. Then, he started laughing, partly, I think, at how worked up he had been getting. But also, I think about the absurdity of two men in their mid-80s making a long term agreement to gradually increase the rent. Then, his own optimism came back He said, laughing even harder, “my landlord thinks that he is going to live so long.” At that moment, Grandpa did not doubt the he would live so long, as he did.
Grandpa was among the last survivors of what will, I think, go down in history as the most important generation in the last 500 or 1000 years of Jewish History—the generation that suffered the loss of the Holocaust but that also founded the State of Israel and built the Jewish community in America. Those of us who are the descendants of that generation should never forget what we owe them. Grandpa taught me the importance of remembering and of passing on what I have learned. I am sorry that my daughter Katja, who is only 11 weeks old, never met Grandpa. But, given how he shaped my Father’s life and my own, even if I never mentioned Grandpa to her, he would shape her life as well. Still, I hope, to pass the story of his life and the life of my other grandparent’s and of my wife Diane’s grandparents on to her, so that she will have models of how life is to be lived and exemplars of the ethics we want to instill in her.
This, then, is not just an occasion for us to say good-bye to my Grandfather. It is also a moment in time to help us insure that, in the most important ways, we will never say good-bye at all.
Was so nice to read this.