This one is personal.
My father, Abraham ben Odes and Fischel, died 50 years ago this week. To me it feels impossible that he’s been gone so long and yet is such a strong presence in my mind and heart.
Because my mother married a fine and devoted man a decade after my father’s death, I refrained from writing or even speaking much about my father. I didn’t want to hurt the feelings of my worthy stepfather.
A father's journey
My father’s father, Fischel, escaped from Svisloch – in what was then Russia, today Belorussia – in 1901, when he was squealed on for taking part in the Jewish resistance to pogroms and throwing a police officer over a fence. My grandmother Odes followed four years later. Their European-born son had already died. Reunited in the United States, they resumed family life and had six American children.
I have to wonder how this Eastern European Yiddish-speaking couple adjusted to bringing up a family in the Connecticut Yankee town of Colchester – a village green with a steepled white Protestant church, a Daughters of the American Revolution house, and a chapter of the 4-H.
There were already Jews living there. Baron Maurice de Hirsch, the builder of the Vienna-Constantinople railway, and his friends sponsored the settlement of Eastern European Jews as farmers in North and South America.
Grandpa Fischel, fittingly to his name, had a fish store. They ate a lot of fish in their household, convinced that it was brain food. All the kids were indeed brainy.
Colchester children attended a one-room schoolhouse, where first to eighth grades coexisted with a single teacher.
My father, who went by the name Abe, was a star student and also a mischief-maker. As the story goes, the New England schoolmarm summoned Grandpa Fischel to complain. Fischel, the anti-pogrom fighter, listened quietly while the schoolmarm enumerated my father’s peccadilloes and predicted what a bad citizen he would become. When her diatribe was over, my father was summoned. My grandfather called him close. “Abie,” he said, “here’s a penny. Go buy candy.” And then he turned to the teacher and scolded her: “Never speak ill of one of my children again.”
My late mother, a teacher, never liked that story and would sometimes throw it back at my father when she was angry. It conflicted with instructions to be respectful to teachers but engendered a sense of family and tribe loyalty.
The teacher was wrong about the lack of good citizenship of these first-generation Americans. My father’s older sister Adele soon became the one-room schoolhouse teacher. When she died in the schoolhouse of a burst appendix, sister Rachel took over. My father read the novels of Horatio Alger about impoverished boys who made good. He was among the few students in town to go on to university and graduate school. He studied economics and math; he studied physics under Robert Goddard. He added an “L” as a middle initial in appreciation of his hero, Abraham Lincoln.
At Grandpa Fischel’s insistence, my father also ran Colchester’s Jewish Free Loan Society meetings, which were conducted in Yiddish.
The Jewish immigrants brought Eastern European leathercraft to Colchester, and my father became their sales representative, pioneering occupational therapy use of the leather crafts for the blind. We traveled with him every summer to the national conventions for the blind. Elevators didn’t have braille on the number pads, and my sister Charlotte and I were expected as little children to escort blind adults and their seeing-eye dogs to the correct floors.
On a lazy Sunday my father, always a voracious reader, might read four books in a row. I once chose random questions from the books and quizzed him. He knew all the answers. I took his eclectic knowledge for granted until a fellow student from North Dakota who’d met my father told me he’d never known anyone from out of state who was familiar with the details of farming and rare minerals in his hometown.
In Colchester, the once mischief-maker from a Yiddish-speaking home became an assistant judge, a member of the Board of Education, and head of the Recreation Committee. Local decisions were made in town meetings, and my father was the moderator. He knew Robert’s Rules of Order by heart.
He was also a justice of the peace. Couples sometimes knocked on the door on a Sunday and asked to be married in our living room. Still a kibitzer, he asked them if they wanted the three-dollar wedding or the five-dollar wedding, and then told them they were the same. Others knocked at the door because they’d found an unusual coin in the attic or digging in the garden and wanted to know if it was a treasure. My father was a famed numismatist and an expert and published author on Colonial currency, the paper money that preceded US dollars. The townsfolk trusted him. Honest Abe.
Some nights he came home angry or disappointed from school board meetings when he lost the vote, or on issues related to local politics. My mother couldn’t understand how the next day he would greet his opponent with a cheerful “Hello, Joe” and how he’d cross the street to say hello to Smokey, one of the town’s itinerant characters.
Like many small Jewish communities, we had two synagogues, both nominally Orthodox. My father insisted that we belong to both, supported JNF land reclamation, and was a generous donor to Israel emergency funds.
When he was diagnosed with diabetes, my father gave up traveling across the United States and taught high school math, specializing in the kids who couldn’t catch on. He bought a used cash register and let them practice so his students had an edge at getting supermarket jobs.
MY PARENTS decided to retire to Jerusalem, where I had already moved – once again immigrants, this time olim. On their planning visit, my father made a final visit to a coin dealer near Davidka Square: He wanted to start a coin club for kids when he moved to Jerusalem. He didn’t return. My upstairs neighbor, a doctor, found that he had fallen on Jaffa Road and was in intensive care. He died from a complication of diabetes at age 63.
To process my loss, I took many long walks in Jerusalem. One time, I spotted my friend Eric across the street. I didn’t feel like talking to anyone, but I’d learned from my father that you should never neglect saying hello lest someone’s feeling be hurt. Eric said he had a friend he wanted to introduce me to. That friend is my husband, Gerald Schroeder. We named our oldest son Avraham. Here we call him Avi, not Abe.
My husband, children, and grandchildren were never fortunate enough to meet my father. Still, I recognize my father’s traits in all of them: generosity, intelligence, social activism, and a sense of humor.
Visiting his grave in Jerusalem’s Har HaMenuchot Cemetery, I update my father on the family news. Rest well, dear Dad. Miss you.
The writer is the Israel director of public relations at Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Her latest book is A Daughter of Many Mothers.