A Wonderful Chanukah Picture

 So I guess my Cali sister Sue was going through old photos, and she sent us one that lit up our evening like the electric menorah we have in the window. It was my beloved Dad at his Bar Mitzvah, in 1932, posed elegantly in his talis, a double breasted suit, and holding a Bible on a piece of furniture. On the back of the photo, someone, who I'm guessing was my Aunt Anne, wrote the address of where they lived (Barretto Street in the Bronx) and that they held a party in a vacant apartment on their floor to celebrate.

Wow. Talk about a ghost of Chanukas past! I sent the picture to my family, and D1 immediately DEMANDED more of them -- she's the most genealogically inclined of all of us. I asked Sue, and she said that today, following her singing gig last night, she would comply.

I looked long at the photo. Clearly I have my Dad's "visage." He looked pretty grown up for a 13 year old, and indeed, I realized that 10 short years after the photo was taken, he'd be drafted in the  Army "for the duration" of WW II -- a stint that indeed lasted nearly 4 years.

Before he left The Bronx, for stints all around the US that taught him MUCH about our nation outside of his White Ethnic NYC world (most people were either Irish, Italian, or Jewish), he began dating the pretty, charming girl who lived across the street, Sunny.

Their love grew through letters and rare phone calls, and he asked Sunny to marry him. Sunny, who had likewise never traveled out of the NYC metro area, got on a transcontinental train all the way to Pasadena, California. Dad met her at the station, and took her back to the bungalow he had rented up in the hills, and sought a little action. "Not until we're married!," said Sunny. Fortunately for my Dad, that was the following day.

They had a tiny service at the Huntington Hotel, with an Army Rabbi, and my Mom got a job as a secretary to the Dean of Cal Tech. I forgot the fellow's name, but he was the first Southern intellectual Mom had met -- from Vanderbilt, I think. Looking back, he was probably involved in the Manhattan Project in some way.

Mom, embarrassed about being a daughter of Jewish immigrants, sought to blend in with the WASPY Cal Tech office, and was going to work on Yom Kippur. The Dean pulled her aside and said "Sunny -- I won't hear of it. Jews are our older brothers and sisters (I think he was Baptist), and YK is the Holiest Day of the Year. Please honor the Lord and take the day off."

Yeah -- somehow crap has changed on university campuses regarding how the top people feel about Jews...

Anyway, Mom got pregnant in the Spring of '44, they didn't know where Dad would end up, as the War was still raging, and so Sunny went back to the Bronx to have her first child -- my sister Trudy, who was born in January of '45. Dad didn't see her until she was a toddler...

So it's funny -- one photo brings back all those memories and history. But that wasn't it! I posted the shot on FaceBook, and my cousin Gary saw it, and then posted a wedding photo of his parents from just after WW II -- his Dad Harry was my Dad's kid brother!

Wifey and the Ds had never seen a photo of Harry -- and they loved it. He was a picaresque version of my Dad -- always smiling and looking to have a good time. He let my cousins Russ and Gary have firecrackers! My Dad, overprotective, would never allow me that much latitude.

I was young when Harry died -- I guess about 6. His was the first funeral I attended -- he was in his early 40s when he succumbed to bladder cancer. My Dad's theory was that it was caused by a lot of pain and tranquilizer pills Harry took -- his cheerful demeanor belied AWFUL anxiety, apparently.

But he was beaming in that photo -- and looking a LOT like my beloved, late father.

Of course, Proust taught us how a simple memory can lead to an entire novel -- in his "Remembrance of Things Past." Eating a simple cake brought back floods of memories.

And so it happened to us last night -- one simple snapshot taken in the Bronx 91 years ago opened so many thoughts and memories.

I looked up the address on Zillow. A one bedroom co-op in the building is worth about $400K now. The 'hood is, I believe, nearly totally Dominican. It WAS Puerto Ricans, but they've moved to Orlando, or to more upscale parts of the Tri-State area.

But in 1932 it Dad's home -- a serious looking boy becoming a man, according to Jewish tradition.

Oh, what I would give to have had him meet Wifey, my Ds, and now his 2 wonderful great-grandsons, the older of whom has his name.

But people die, and even if Dad had lived past his 63 year old expiration date, he'd still have been long gone by now -- unless he made it to 104!

Thankfully, memories don't die, and last night I savored them.