Dear Great-Grandpa David, you have been dead for just over half a century by now, yet I feel as if I just truly met you, now that I have read your long-lost diary. When you died in 1956, I was only seven years old. I was too young, and you were too old and too busy for us to know each other truly. Indeed, my memory of you is frozen into one snapshot: you arrive at a family occasion alone, you are dressed in a very formal suit, and smiling in a distant way. You present us children with a Hershey bar each, taken out of a small brown paper bag.
To be sure, after your death you lived on in our discussions about you. I am so sorry to report that your daughter-in-law, my Grandma Ruth, was not very complimentary about you. In her eyes, you were the “pencil pusher” who wasted hours in your small study in the back of the store. In her uneducated self-confidence Grandma Ruth would point out that you paid a vanity press to publish a volume of your translations of the Hebrew Bible into English poetry, and that you also self-published one of your many novel manuscripts, entitled Greed for Power. Nor was Ruth’s husband, your son Al, interested in transmitting your legacy. I don’t remember him ever speaking of you at all. We were proud of you in some vague way, but I truly doubt that any of us ever actually read your books.
To tell the truth, your image and your legacy had faded altogether until another of your great-grandchildren, my long-lost cousin Sean, came into the picture. Sean was born into a literary family across the country and I had never met him, or his mother, or his grandmother, your daughter Helen, Al’s sister. Sean’s grandparents Helen and her lefty husband Arthur had escaped our close extended family in St. Paul decades ago. Sean’s mother Beth converted to become an Episcopalian in the 1950s, while we in Minnesota lived as if in the Old Country, rich in the old values, in continuities and sacred communities.
Indeed, the differences between how Sean grew up and how my brothers and I grew up replicated the very split which you yourself tried to bridge in your writing. Sean was the son of Christian high culture, and I was the daughter of the old Jewish ways. It seems so fitting that I ended up with your full set of the Jewish Encyclopedias and Sean ended up with your unpublished novels and this diary.
Many of us have been reading the diary, and it is fascinating to talk about what the manuscript evokes in each of us. For me, the diary reveals that our mental furniture, our burning questions, our values and even our daily life habits are remarkably similar. I feel as if you have been living inside of my head for some time, now that I see what was on your mind as revealed in your diary. Jewish history was a central subject in all of your work, whatever the genre. For me also Jewish history is a passion. For years I was absorbed in the history of Jews in Germany, especially on conversion and assimilation.You too were obsessed with the topic, and in your published novel and in many passages in the diary you ponder the high price of assimilation. Now I am at work on a history of radical women in Russia, and again you were there first. Indeed your fictionalized diarycontains many mini-essays on historical events, ranging from the forced recruitment of Jews to the Russian army, to the 1881 pogroms, which precipitated the great emigration, to the Dreyfus trial, to an analysis of the career of Theodor Herzl.
Our personal habits seem to be remarkably similar too. We both rise early and try to cram our writing into the early morning hours. I even use your original copy of the old Jewish Encyclopedia to write my lectures sometimes, and it was uncanny to read in the diary about the day the box of large black volumes arrived.
Your harsh critiques of your children are, to be sure, quite shocking. But here too I admire and identify. Reading your diary now, as a parent, I was amazed at the rage you seem to have successfully repressed. I so admire your ability to articulate in writing deeply negative feelings, all the while apparently managing to preserve family harmony.
Then too, the balance in your public life was remarkable. You were constantly busy, managing your store, participating in the elite civic institutions of South St. Paul, listening to lectures by visiting Zionist dignitaries and actively participating in the Conservative synagogue of St. Paul. You and your wife Lena were gracious hosts and you seemed to be constantly organizing picnics and hikes and family outings.
Looking at my own life through the lens of the diary, I now realize that many of the institutions you helped initiate early on in the century shaped me during the 1950s and 1960s. Several times a week I was at the Temple of Aaron building, either for Hebrew School, youth groups, services, or folk dancing. I was an enthusiastic camper at two Zionist camps in Wisconsin, Camp Herzl and then Camp Ramah. Your diary shows us how you and your peers constructed that world of St. Paul Jewish life piece by piece.
Your legacy was thus more institutional than personal. Looking back, I can see now that your labors enabled me to absorb the skills, interests and values that propelled me to the Hebrew University for my Junior Year Abroad when I was 20. And then, as luck would have it, a cast of brilliant professors in Jerusalem opened up the world of German Jewish history to me. My path was set. At the time I felt truly solitary in my quest. Now I can see that I was following you and that you had prepared my way.
If we could only meet now, the first thing I would do is show you my bookshelves. How you would relish all the knowledge that has accumulated since you died, on the topics that so animate both of us! Then there would be some very long discussions about the fate of the State of Israel, only eight years old when you left us. The wild success of Judaic Studies at the universities would be flabbergasting for you, I am sure. If you were to come with me to the Book Fair at the Jewish Community Center here in San Diego,and listen to the well-dressed professors and authors gathered for the occasion, your jealousy would be so intense, so painful.
How unfair posterity has been to you! You were the real thing, but you were trapped in the wrong era for your audience. You sat in your little study at the back of the store, day after day, year after year, essentially writing for the drawer. You followed in the path set by the maskilim, the creators of the Jewish Enlightenment, which so transformed modern Judaism. Maskilim showed how to be Jewish in the home and in the family, but how to also be learned and sophisticated in the secular world. Amidst your solid accomplishments I know that your limited success as a published author must have been a huge disappointment for you.
To understand your predicament better, I recently read Abraham Cahan’s novel The Rise of David Levinsky. That book, written with so much more depth and nuance than your novels, was a very modest success when it was published in 1917. Assimilated Jewish readers were apparently put off by Cahan’s realistic portrayal of the immigrants, and it seems that few others were interested at all. Now, a full century later, Jews have become high literary chic, but not so in your times, alas. The graphic tragedies of Jewish life in the last half century have provided our intellectuals with so many stories and debates, and the world listens avidly.
We have so many common passions and it would be lovely to catch you up on all of them. As my mind wanders back to images of you and your store on Concord Street, I see that my identification with you is truly an affair of the mind. It is a connection, as it were, from the neck up. When I imagine your store, it is my grandmother, your daughter-in-law Ruth, and not you that I see in my mind’s eye. She would have been in her fifties, wearing a modest dress and sensible shoes, standing over a table of underwear in the store.
In September, when it was time to go back to school, or a birthday, maybe for Hanukah, I would be invited to the store and handed a pile of new underwear by Grandma Ruth. The symbolism seems so stark: the aged great-grandfather was the learned maskil writing books in the back room, while the grandmother gossiped with the customers and took care of us. We never actually read your books, but she provided us with the intimate necessities of life.
The dry goods store on Concord Avenue was eventually closed in the late 1960s, and was sold to the town of South St. Paul. The building was bulldozed, and a parking lot stands there today. Alas, we no longer have your space to help us imagine your life. But your diary is undoubtedly a more important memorial. Your life accomplishments illuminate the sweep of an entire era of social history, from your birth in 1863 until your death in 1956. First you were a peddler, and for years you opened small tailoring shops that tended to go under. In 1902, when you were almost 40, you cast your lot with the rough cowboy town of South St. Paul, and it was there that you flourished. Your children and grandchildren would stand on your shoulders and become educated professionals. I came of age at a blessed moment in time for women’s higher education and my mother was already a pioneer in the field. Thus it seemed utterly right and fitting for me to get my Ph.D in the 1970s, and to pursue a career in the academy.
One conversation that might be painful for us to have would be about women’s roles in Judaism. You often complained in the diary about the women in your life, especially your wife and your daughter Helen. I ponder how you might have responded to the turnabout in women’s roles we created after your death. Perhaps you might have appreciated the successes of women in the workplace and in the academy and even within synagogues. I wonder how you would feel that one of your great-granddaughters, not a great-grandson, continues your work. Would you find that a lucky and happy turn of fate, or a horrid mistake?
To my dear great-grandfather David, I thank you for the very belated gift of your diary. I so wish we might have a chat across time. Alas, we shall not.