My Father's People: A Family of Southern Jews

1. A Family

fl Family THE MALES DEPARTED in the order of their arrival . Harry, the patriarch, went first, then Dan, Manning, and last my father, Louis.All the sisters outlived them. Dora, oldest of all her generation , died in her mid-nineties, followed by Essie—Esther—and Ruthie, the youngest and also the longest-lived, who when she died in the year 2000 was ninety-eight years old. Dora had assumed that, being the firstborn, she would be first to go."When I'm being buried," she told Manning once, "I don't want you and Harry to laugh." "You do your part, Dora," Manning replied, "and we'll do ours." The family had a penchant for macabre humor, my father in particular . He liked to listen to music on the phonograph while at dinner, and once he bought a record of Chopin's Funeral March, on a special version designed for use by funeral parlors. When Dora next visited he placed the record, together with others, on the turntable drop mechanism , and midway in the meal the Funeral March began, with the sepulchral theme sounding again and again, until Dora at length realized what it was she was hearing. As for what might account for this taste in humor, it may have been the early presence in their lives of so much poverty, death, and illness. In the 19005 both the father and mother were ill, and the family income , never more than barely adequate, fell disastrously—so much so that the three youngest boys were sent to the Hebrew Orphans' Home 1 6 My Father's People in Atlanta for several years until their father could work again. The father died in 1911, the mother two years later, both at agefifty. Neither my father nor my three uncles attended school past the seventh grade; after that they looked for jobs. The same was true for Dora. The two younger girls graduated from high school. Twoof the brothers married, two did not. Of the three sisters only Essie married, and not well. Thus, two bachelors and two spinsters out of seven siblings, and of those who married, only four children, three of them my father 's. In all, a blighted family—which, however, survived. For all the early deprivation, in none of them wasthe acquisitive instinct very strong. Even my father, who was off to a thriving business career until stricken by illness in his mid-thirties, cared more for the show than the profits, as his later years demonstrated. Of the four males, he was least intellectual in bent. The other three were readers, and two became writers. All were, incipiently, highly creative. Under different circumstances, with college educations and without the spectre of childhood insecurity to inhibit their willingness to take chances, what they might have done may scarcely be guessed. They were remarkable men. As for their three sisters, not only the family situation but the time, the place, and the cultural and social expectations served severely to limit them. Dora possessed imagination and a keen sense of humor; these, however, remained unapplied. Of the younger two, there was still less that was striking in their lives. As best I can, I want to tell about them all—my father, his brothers, and, insofar as there is much to be told, his sisters. Individually and as a family the Rubins were distinct, uncommon entities, conforming to no stereotype I have ever encountered. This was in contrast to the Weinsteins , my mother's family of "normal" second- and third-generation Jews, the merchants and professional men and housewives, all of whom married, had children, grandchildren, lived reasonably contented lives. None had intellectual interests or artistic inclinations; there was not an iconoclast, or an agnostic, among them. They were good people, devoid of mystery. They differed from my father's family as an expanse of field at harvest time might differ from a moonlight A Family 7 landscape by El Greco. I feel no urge to seek to explain them. But as for my father and my uncles, the puzzle remains. What made them into what they were? What impulses drove them? Who were they? Riddle me this. As is true of so many nineteenth-century immigrant families, almost nothing was handed down about their antecedents beyond the ocean. The father, my grandfather Hyman Levy Rubin, was born in or near Georgenburg, or Eorborg, in what was then...