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July 30, 1999/17 Av 5759, Vol. 51, No.43
Death at young age evokes pain of Jewish loss
JOSEPH AARON
The Chicago Jewish News
My zayde (grandpa) Yossel and my bubbe (grandma) Saral Gitel were no Kennedys. And yet, it is them, my grandparents, whom I have been thinking about a lot during these last two weeks, when I've been watching TV and reading the newspapers about John Jr., Carolyn and Lauren.
Their untimely deaths have become, much to my surprise, a very personal story for me. They have gotten me thinking and feeling about my relatives, and put me in touch more than ever with the pain of what I lost.
Two aspects in particular have gotten me in my kishkes (insides). The first is just how young John Jr., Carolyn and Lauren were, and how young Joe Jr., John and Bobby before them were. As Ted Kennedy put it in his stirring eulogy to John Jr., "Like his father, he had every gift but length of years."
While I don't know what gifts my grandparents had, I do know that length of years was not one of them.
I had never really thought about that until the John Jr. tragedy, when I found myself doing calculations in my head. I had always pictured my grandparents as older people, but the fact is they could not have been very old. My father was just a little past bar mitzvah age when the Holocaust began. Then, in the ultra-religious shtetls (villages) of Europe, men usually married at 18 or 19, girls even younger. This means that my zayde was about 38 or 39 or 40 when the Holocaust began, that he couldn't have been much older than his early 40s when his life came to an end. His wife, my bubbe, was probably even younger. And his only daughter, my aunt, was in her late teens, four years older than her brother, my father.
I had never really thought about how young they were, how much of their lives they had been robbed of, what short lives they had. My aunt never married and my bubbe and zayde never knew the grandchildren that would come.
My bubbe and zayde were not much older than John Jr. when they died. Like him, they had just begun their lives, had so far to go. Knowing that has deeply affected me, somehow made their loss that much more painful.
The second thing the Kennedy tragedy has evoked in me is the pain of not having somewhere to go to mourn. For John Jr., Carolyn and Lauren, at least, it was their wish to be buried at sea, not at a grave one can visit. But at least their families and friends know where that burial at sea took place, can go to Hyannis Port and feel a connection to them.
I do not have even that. I have no idea where my bubbe and zayde are buried, nor does anyone else. I don't even know if they are buried in some mass grave or whether their ashes were scattered with the winds after they were herded into the gas chambers. They have no final resting place, and it really wasn't until this week that I realized how cheated I feel by that. I wish I had somewhere to go to visit them, be by them, be with them.
In the first days of the Kennedy tragedy, as the search for the bodies was underway, I came to understand how important that search was, how the tangible remains of a person help those who survive deal with the loss and relate to the memory.
The other thing that struck me during broadcasts of the Kennedy tragedy is just how many images we have of them, how many ways we have to remember them, how in our minds they will be forever young. We can view the tapes of young John Jr. saluting his fallen father, making that convention speech, graduating from law school, presiding over his magazine, riding his bike. There are so many pictures of the Kennedys, pictures we've been seeing over and over, pictures we will always have, pictures that will keep them always alive.
I have no pictures of my bubbe and zayde, not one. I am named after my zayde. But I don't know if I look nothing like him or exactly like him. We can see who among all the cousins has that Kennedy face. I don't know if I have that Aaron face.
Indeed, I have nothing to remind me of my bubbe and zayde. No pictures, no mementos, no possessions, nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Hitler's ruthless efficiency managed not only to rob us of 6 million Jews but of tens of millions of memories. A chicken farmer in a small shtetl in Czechoslovakia herded out of his small house with no warning and packed into a cattle car and taken to a concentration camp where he was murdered along with his wife and daughter was not exactly able to leave something for future generations. Meaning me.
And so, unlike the Kennedys who have all those pictures, I have nothing to hold onto about my bubbe and zayde except their names and the knowledge that they were and the knowledge of why they are no more.
And, of course, I had my father, who was the only bond between us. He was their son and my father. Like them, he is gone now, too. He, too, did not have length of years. He died when he was only 55, a victim, too, of the Holocaust, someone who physically survived the horror but whose life after was haunted by it.
At least of him, I do have pictures, do have memories and do have a place to grieve. He is buried in Jerusalem and so when I am in Israel, I have a place to go. On my father's headstone are carved, too, the names of his father and mother and sister, my zayde and bubbe and tante (aunt). Bringing the whole immediate family together, providing, at least, a symbolic resting place for three souls who never received a Jewish funeral or Jewish burial.
I do take some comfort in knowing that their names are there, but after watching the Kennedy tragedy, I find myself aching that I don't know their true resting place and will never know it.
It is like a double whammy. People who died so young and yet who have no home for eternity. Cheated on both ends. Such is the tragedy of the Holocaust. Six million Jews, not just numbers, but Yiddische neshamas (Jewish souls) whom we must remember one by one by one by one.
I have always intellectually known that but never really felt it, until this week, thanks to John Jr., Carolyn and Lauren.
Joseph Aaron is editor/publisher of The Chicago Jewish News.
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