KCRW's Monthly Newsletter and Program Guide
JULY 1993
Vol XIV, No. 7

MY FATHER, HIS FATHER, HIS FATHERS FATHER..

This month, I begin an the adventure of living with a new name.

I never returned to my maiden name after my divorce almost twenty years ago. Then my children were still in school and it seemed important to maintain the Hirschman family name that we shared.

Besides, I was no longer Ruth Epstein. She was a lovely young girl, ardent and bookish, with long brown braids and a sunny smile. I had said goodbye to her many years before.

My married name was my public identity. I used it on the radio; it appeared in newspapers and magazines. I wore it out in the world like an old overcoat I'd borrowed. The time to return it has arrived.

The search for a new name led me back three generations to the small towns of Eastern Europe and my paternal great grandfather. He was a legendary figure and has had many namesakes. In America, they are called Seymour, the name I am now taking for my own.

The original Seymour, Reb Simcha of Pultysk, was a rabbi so revered for his devotion, earnestness, sincerity and erudition that his congregations were convinced he conversed with the Almighty. He lived a life apart from the worldly and mundane. My great grandmother ran after the petitioners who came to consult him, to collect the few "groschen" to feed the family.

Reb Simcha never handled money himself.

Reb Simcha wrote Talmudic works that became part of the Chasidic canon. When he died, two towns fought over the right to bury him. The dispute was only settled when both agreed to name all the boys born that year in his honor.

His son, my grandfather, was devout and studious, but he did not have the intellectual brilliance to become another Reb Simcha. He was married, while still a student, to the 15-year-old daughter of a prosperous fur merchant. She was well off; he was poor but of distinguished family.

My grandmother was an extraordinary beauty, blond, vibrant and adventurous. Her husband, on the other hand, was pale and serious, a true scholar. The Polish Counts who came to her father's house to buy furs were touched by her golden loveliness and saddened to see it put into the thin arms of this wan ascetic. When, after several months, she remained barren, his family advised him to divorce her.

But she was to bear him six children; she was too young, that first year, to conceive.

My grandmother took a carriage and rode off to the St. Petersburg fair to conduct her family's business. buying and selling the thick pelts of foxes and lambs. My grandfather sat hunched in the corner, before a burning candle, absorbed in a religious text.

By 1923, this corner of Poland was now Russian territory, engulfed in poverty, anti-Semitism and counter-revolution. White Russians occupied the area; Jewish children were barred from attending school; the First World War had left the country in ruin. The entire family, sponsored by my grandmother's brother, the "rich uncle," emigrated to New York.

America killed my grandfather; it began as soon as he arrived. The uncle made fur coats on the Lower East Side.

He offered to train and hire the"greenhorns" - his five newly-arrived nephews. The uncle's shop operated on Saturdays. My grandfather was at first astonished, then horrified.

The son of Reb Simcha forbid his sons to defile the sacred Sabbath.

That first Friday night, my grandfather pushed the heavy wooden dining table up against the front door.

Then, fully clothed, he lay down on it.

He intended to stand guard, sometime during the long night, he fell asleep.

My dear innocent grandfather! He had never heard of that urban invention - the fire escape. The boys awoke early. Excited by this new country, the adventure and the promise of it, they quickly climbed out the window and ran out of their old life. They came home that evening to a broken man, his heart shattered, his authority gone. He spent his remaining days going from door to door, collecting small donations for the "veshiva." He died within the year.

My father was considered the heir apparent to Reb Simcha. He had the imagination and the intellect, as well as a sense for the profound. But he was the youngest, born at the beginning of the century, and he was a child of his time. He was an atheist, his concerns were secular. His interests were in the great political and social movements of the day.

He became a Socialist in the American sense. He venerated Eugene Debbs and voted for Norman Thomas.

He believed property was theft and he never owned anything of real value.

Once the family sent him out to look at potential real estate investments. He was directed to a Puerto Rican tenement. He was so overcome by the misery and despair that he could not speak of it for days. No one dared to bring up the idea to him again.

My father's friends filled our small Bronx apartment with intense discussion and argument. They were passionate about politics, journalism and literature. They worked all day with their hands. At night they went to the opera, to lectures, to the theatre. They listened to classical music on WQXR and spent Saturday mornings at the 42nd Street Library.

They were working class people who saw foreign films and went to museums. They were alive to the world.

My father never reconciled the worldly and the spiritual. He never participated in Jewish religious life, not even on the High Holy Days. Instead, from the time I was seven, I was given a remarkable education in the rich secular tradition of Yiddish cultural life.

But my father had his secrets, perhaps even from himself.

It was his habit to attend the Easter Sunday service at St. Patrick's Cathedral, ostensibly to enjoy the choral beauty of the Mass. In summer, we rented a room in Rockaway Beach.

My father would spend occasional Sunday mornings in the small storefront churches of the Negro section. Sometimes he took me with him. We were the only white people there. He had become a familiar figure to the congregation and was acknowledged in some mysterious way. We were treated with an exquisite courtliness.

I don't know what my father would make of my taking the name of Reb Simcha. He had resolutely distanced himself from the childhood world that he found so narrow-minded and constricting. Yet, masking his interest as intellectual curiosity, he sought out the believers. He was drawn to places of religious faith.

Surely he'd be surprised as I, too, am surprised by the turns in life that have led me to this moment. But in this century of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, I think it is important to affirm the past that beats within and celebrate these souls on fire - my father, his father, his father's father.

- RUTH SEYMOUR

General Manager, KCRW