Who's Crying Now?

Mendush

She went back to the room where it happened to check on Edan. He was her first son and the first grandkid of the family. The little guy was resting comfortably, albeit from the induced nirvana of sucking on a cotton plug soaked in sweet Manischewitz wine. That’s standard operating procedure after having a brith milah, the thousands of years old ritual circumcision which all Jewish males experience when eight days old. Edan was not alone in the room peacefully zoning out in artificial bliss,  standing by the window looking out was his grandfather, Mendush. Edan’s chest was rising and falling rhythmically, Mendush’s not so. His was shaking erratically. The family patriarch was crying. Mendush crying? - those two words should not even appear in the same sentence. It’s oxymoronic. But nevertheless, the patriarch was crying.

What elicited this out-of-character behavior? Everyone found Mendush irrepressible, fun loving, and quick with a joke. But crying?, no. As a boy back home in pre-war Poland Mendush was  deemed a gonif, literally a thief, but in the affectionate form, gonif is a lovable rascal, mischievous at times but never with mal intent. That’s the Uncle Mendush I always knew and loved.  

my Uncle Mendush on the far right,

my father at the top center

circa 1930s

His rascal-ness was to prove more than a quirk, it was a life saver. In 1940 after the Wehrmacht goose-stepped into town, Mendush and my father, his older brother, were soon rounded up, subjected to abuse, then deported for forced labor. Having a touch of  gonif-ism helped keep the brothers alive until liberation five years later. Had it not been for Mendush’s periodic ‘organizing’ to find a potato or other food scrap, my father always said he wouldn’t have survived the deprivations of those years. 

But why was Mendush crying? 

Looking back, the euphoria of freedom at war’s end quickly tempered with realization that of his family of five, only he and his brother remained. And of their grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins, twenty in total, a mere three lived to see the sun on VE Day. Fortunately three other family members had previously emigrated to the US settling in Brooklyn and the Bronx. With the birth of his new grandson Edan, something unimaginable when first standing in the ashes of the Holocaust, Mendush gazed through the window and was suddenly overwhelmed with pent up emotion. For a few moments as he and Edan joined for some quiet time, he was not the gonif we knew. He was the scarred branch from a tree stump whose other branches had been hacked away. Against all odds, he witnessed emergence of a new green shoot. Call it Edan.  

  

 

 In Nirvana

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Mendush speaking to university students 

in Frankfurt, Germany

2009

Making the motzi blessing on the challah 

at my son's wedding

2004

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NB: I started composing this post before an unthinkable calamity struck in Israel on the recent holiday of Simchat Torah. Early in the morning of October 7th the world awoke to news of the most lethal attack on Jews since the Holocaust ended seventy five years ago. Never Again became Yet Again. That morning Hamas terrorists emanating from the Gaza Strip breached border barriers in southern Israel and perpetrated an orgy of cold blooded murder, rape, and kidnapping, while capturing the entire assault on camera. The attack shook not only citizens of Israel but sent shock waves of disgust, anger, and fear through Jews everywhere. My parents, uncles, aunts, and relatives of their generation, all Holocaust survivors, are gone now. I can’t fathom how they might have reacted to this gut-wrenching trauma. Given the latent PTSD they all carried from their blackest of days, in a way I’m relieved  they weren’t with us to witness this most heinous Yet Again outrage.

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