I.
I'm not going to lie to you: I'm not known for being rational. It's not that I don't plan things; I plan exhaustively. Rather, my weakness is that of perspective and focus, so that I'm always preoccupied with the insignificant and worried about scenarios that could only conditionally be true, and that would require three to five steps, in declining degrees of likelihood, before they could ever come to pass.
Several years ago, I visited the grave of my grandmother and was appalled by the bare lawn devoid of all trees, the flat granite plaques embedded in the ground and attached to containers that held fake plastic flowers, the latter gratingly colorful against the grey and dun of a Northeastern winter. A whole cemetery of such graves, seen from a distance, looked like scattered litter. A sensible person might say, Well, what does it matter to the dead? And: Haven't you got more important things to worry about, anyway? But I am not an overly sensible person - this isn't a blog about retirement planning, is it? - and it must be dreadful, I maintained rather severely, to be buried in one of these places. How could you rest for all eternity surrounded by plastic flowers?
II.
My grandfather, my mother's father, would have been ninety-five this November 1 - All Saint's Day in Catholicism, the faith of his (Irish) mother, the church in which he was raised. Here in the U.S., most of us, whatever religion we are or aren't, merely skirt the outlines of the old holiday by trick-or-treating the day before, on October 31.* Halloween is now divorced from all nearly meaning but commerce, as are many American holidays; but in other (Catholic) countries, the link between the celebration and the dead is far more explicit, and one marks the occasion, not by giving candy indiscriminately to the costumed living, but by leaving food at the graves of the known and missed dead.
Bringing food to our dead is largely a lost tradition, at least in the Anglo world. But a visit to any cemetery or memorial suggests that though we are quite certain that the dead are sated for all eternity, we fear that, wherever they are, they are in dire need of flowers: and so we bring bouquets in vases, wreaths on metal stands, rose bushes or gardenias to plant at grave's base. In their names we donate altar flowers, because God may have taken care of their souls, but did He remember to order carnations or lilies? No, He did not. And the dead might be picky: I still remember the carefully-chosen red flowers placed by some Marxist supplicant at the gravesite of Antonio Gramsci, in Rome's Cimitero acattolico - an ironic choice because Gramsci had been buried there, not only because he wasn't anymore a Catholic, but because he was an atheist. Perhaps I am not alone in my irrational worry.
- So when we buried my grandfather last April, we brought flowers. Each person was given one carnation or rose, I can't remember, and after the service and the flag-folding ceremony conducted by Army reserve officers, we walked up, one by one, to place each stem on the casket. Afterwards, we wandered down the slope to see the gravestones of his parents. In older times, names tended to reflect places more directly - we were not yet in the era of treeless housing developments named "Glen Hollow" - and Woodlawn is like a large, 132-acre park that just happens to include tombstones and pompous nineteenth-century mausolea. The charming names of its neighborhoods - Elmwood, Beechwood, Laurel Hill, Colonial Gardens, Forest Glade - suggest parkland rather than cemetery; and maybe it had aspirations to be as beautiful as a botanic garden, for parts were designed by some of the best landscape designers of the time. Looking over the wall and across the road from the graves of my great-grandparents, I could see the elevated tracks of the Metro-North railroad, and I did not think it such a bad view for the passengers. I could not begin to speculate about how Henry and Anna felt.
III.
My mother has been, as the phrase goes, "rediscovering her (Jewish) roots" these past two years (and why not? her disapproving mother-in-law is dead). Today she visited the Jewish cemetery here in New York City where her great-grandparents are buried, and tonight I received her photos.
Like living palls, patches of ivy echo the caskets below and are joined, this time of year, by fallen leaves. I do not know whether the yew bush, dark and dense and toxic, appears by coincidence or in a nod to tradition. The graves of Isaac Charles and Marion Elsner are side by side on the Northshield family plot, under the leaves of an oak tree. They are joined by one daughter, son-in-law and grandson, though the size of the memorial stone suggests that someone had expected more of the family than just those five; but Henry married my Catholic great-grandmother, and several of his siblings left Judaism as well, slipping out of their religion just as their parents had adjusted their surname. Easier to be an Episcopalian than a Jew; easier to be a Northshield than a Nordschild. I cannot judge them for this.
To the right is the gravestone of my great-great-grandmother, Marion Elsner Northshield. What struck me immediately was the date of her death: August 30, 1914. August 30, 1914! I thought. What a time to die! That's just a month into the Great War, and you have no idea at all how it turned out. Maybe you believed that it would end before Christmas; maybe you worried that all Europe was exploding into violence. Either way, you could not have guessed the half of it, even had you lived until the end of the war: millions dead, empires destroyed, nations (re)born, class systems upended, populations scattered, beliefs discarded, grievances triggered. 1914 begets the yawning cultural chasm that divides you both from me.
And next I thought, About that war: you and your husband were both just one generation removed from Germany. Did you feel yourself primarily a Jew? Did you at all sympathize with the country of your and your husband's ancestors (the Nordschilds); or did you consider yourself fully an American (a Northshield)? Were you as distant from your own roots as I am now from mine?
____________________________________________________
* ...Although, my grandfather told us several years ago, when he was a child, he went trick-or-treating on Thanksgiving. On Thanksgiving! we said. That's ridiculous. Whoever heard of trick-or-treating on Thanksgiving? But he insisted: in his time, children went trick-or-treating on Thanksgiving. Had another nonagenarian made this claim, we might have dismissed it, but this was a man who could recall the exact date when his-great aunt had died, and her address, at a stretch of eighty years; who still knew the precise dollar amount tipped him by Arthur Flegenheimer's gun moll when he delivered her groceries as a young boy; who remembered not only the name of the ship that took him from England to North Africa, but the exact day that they passed through the Strait of Gibraltar, with the lights of Tangier, he recalled, lit up to starboard. So: let my grandfather's truths stand. Children in New York once went trick-or-treating on Thanksgiving, and the Hudson River used to be called the North River, and Mark Clark was a great man.
I'm not going to lie to you: I'm not known for being rational. It's not that I don't plan things; I plan exhaustively. Rather, my weakness is that of perspective and focus, so that I'm always preoccupied with the insignificant and worried about scenarios that could only conditionally be true, and that would require three to five steps, in declining degrees of likelihood, before they could ever come to pass.
Several years ago, I visited the grave of my grandmother and was appalled by the bare lawn devoid of all trees, the flat granite plaques embedded in the ground and attached to containers that held fake plastic flowers, the latter gratingly colorful against the grey and dun of a Northeastern winter. A whole cemetery of such graves, seen from a distance, looked like scattered litter. A sensible person might say, Well, what does it matter to the dead? And: Haven't you got more important things to worry about, anyway? But I am not an overly sensible person - this isn't a blog about retirement planning, is it? - and it must be dreadful, I maintained rather severely, to be buried in one of these places. How could you rest for all eternity surrounded by plastic flowers?
II.
My grandfather, my mother's father, would have been ninety-five this November 1 - All Saint's Day in Catholicism, the faith of his (Irish) mother, the church in which he was raised. Here in the U.S., most of us, whatever religion we are or aren't, merely skirt the outlines of the old holiday by trick-or-treating the day before, on October 31.* Halloween is now divorced from all nearly meaning but commerce, as are many American holidays; but in other (Catholic) countries, the link between the celebration and the dead is far more explicit, and one marks the occasion, not by giving candy indiscriminately to the costumed living, but by leaving food at the graves of the known and missed dead.
Bringing food to our dead is largely a lost tradition, at least in the Anglo world. But a visit to any cemetery or memorial suggests that though we are quite certain that the dead are sated for all eternity, we fear that, wherever they are, they are in dire need of flowers: and so we bring bouquets in vases, wreaths on metal stands, rose bushes or gardenias to plant at grave's base. In their names we donate altar flowers, because God may have taken care of their souls, but did He remember to order carnations or lilies? No, He did not. And the dead might be picky: I still remember the carefully-chosen red flowers placed by some Marxist supplicant at the gravesite of Antonio Gramsci, in Rome's Cimitero acattolico - an ironic choice because Gramsci had been buried there, not only because he wasn't anymore a Catholic, but because he was an atheist. Perhaps I am not alone in my irrational worry.
- So when we buried my grandfather last April, we brought flowers. Each person was given one carnation or rose, I can't remember, and after the service and the flag-folding ceremony conducted by Army reserve officers, we walked up, one by one, to place each stem on the casket. Afterwards, we wandered down the slope to see the gravestones of his parents. In older times, names tended to reflect places more directly - we were not yet in the era of treeless housing developments named "Glen Hollow" - and Woodlawn is like a large, 132-acre park that just happens to include tombstones and pompous nineteenth-century mausolea. The charming names of its neighborhoods - Elmwood, Beechwood, Laurel Hill, Colonial Gardens, Forest Glade - suggest parkland rather than cemetery; and maybe it had aspirations to be as beautiful as a botanic garden, for parts were designed by some of the best landscape designers of the time. Looking over the wall and across the road from the graves of my great-grandparents, I could see the elevated tracks of the Metro-North railroad, and I did not think it such a bad view for the passengers. I could not begin to speculate about how Henry and Anna felt.
III.
My mother has been, as the phrase goes, "rediscovering her (Jewish) roots" these past two years (and why not? her disapproving mother-in-law is dead). Today she visited the Jewish cemetery here in New York City where her great-grandparents are buried, and tonight I received her photos.
To the right is the gravestone of my great-great-grandmother, Marion Elsner Northshield. What struck me immediately was the date of her death: August 30, 1914. August 30, 1914! I thought. What a time to die! That's just a month into the Great War, and you have no idea at all how it turned out. Maybe you believed that it would end before Christmas; maybe you worried that all Europe was exploding into violence. Either way, you could not have guessed the half of it, even had you lived until the end of the war: millions dead, empires destroyed, nations (re)born, class systems upended, populations scattered, beliefs discarded, grievances triggered. 1914 begets the yawning cultural chasm that divides you both from me.
And next I thought, About that war: you and your husband were both just one generation removed from Germany. Did you feel yourself primarily a Jew? Did you at all sympathize with the country of your and your husband's ancestors (the Nordschilds); or did you consider yourself fully an American (a Northshield)? Were you as distant from your own roots as I am now from mine?
____________________________________________________
* ...Although, my grandfather told us several years ago, when he was a child, he went trick-or-treating on Thanksgiving. On Thanksgiving! we said. That's ridiculous. Whoever heard of trick-or-treating on Thanksgiving? But he insisted: in his time, children went trick-or-treating on Thanksgiving. Had another nonagenarian made this claim, we might have dismissed it, but this was a man who could recall the exact date when his-great aunt had died, and her address, at a stretch of eighty years; who still knew the precise dollar amount tipped him by Arthur Flegenheimer's gun moll when he delivered her groceries as a young boy; who remembered not only the name of the ship that took him from England to North Africa, but the exact day that they passed through the Strait of Gibraltar, with the lights of Tangier, he recalled, lit up to starboard. So: let my grandfather's truths stand. Children in New York once went trick-or-treating on Thanksgiving, and the Hudson River used to be called the North River, and Mark Clark was a great man.
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