Life used to be pretty dam hard
Looking ahead to the third year without my dad
We know life used to be hard in spectacularly awful ways. Thank God for indoor plumbing, espresso machines, and epidurals. But the time before these modern marvels seems very, very long ago. We romanticize simpler times: mechanical gears were better than electric motors. Analog shutters were better than digital chips. An ice cream soda down at the corner drugstore was better than a 36-pack of KIRKLAND ice cream sandwiches.
Nostalgia is strong. No matter how great Halo on your Xbox was in your 40s, it’ll never match the joy of playing Atari Pong in your PJs the day after Christmas when you were 9.
If I look back before the nostalgia, I can get a sense of what my parents’ lives were like before they made me — as well as what the world was like. It was very different.
In January, we flew down to LA, rented the biggest SUV we could find, and crammed it full of boxes from my parents’ storage locker. Looking through these boxes, I’ve been able to peel back a generation — 100 years past — my grandparents.
Figuring out my Grandpa’s story last month was unexpected. That’s my mom’s dad. My dad’s side remained murky — until last week.
Monday — March 2 — marked the second anniversary of my dad’s death and I didn’t notice. I’ve been busy teaching a high school class I just took over mid-year.
Tuesday I saw a text from my sister: “What date did dad die?”
I figured she needed it for some legal thing, so I dug out his death certificate: March 2, 2024.
I stared at my reply. We talked. Monday was the day I cleared the final administrative hurdles to get my Emergency Teaching Credential. An unexpected accomplishment — Monday was a good day.
The year after my dad died was rough. I lost both of my parents in 2024 — my mom died three months after my dad, a day before his 98th birthday.
The second year, this past year, was different; sorrow replaced by memory. My dad’s memorial picture has lived on our kitchen counter for the past two years. Now it’s hanging on the B&W wall of fame:
While my mom’s story keeps coming into sharper focus — I’ve discovered more letters and keepsakes from her pre-WWII life in Austria than I will ever get through — I only knew the basics about my dad’s family. My dad was close to his older brother and sister, but estranged from his mother. On my dad’s birthday last year, I wrote how he got on a bus in Pittsburgh headed for LA at 19, and never looked back.
But last week I caught a new glimpse of his family. Buried in a box that I packed when I cleared out my dad’s bedroom two years ago, I found a picture I’d never seen:
I can’t stop looking at it. I found it in a large envelope dedicated to just this photo. The envelope had the negative, multiple prints, a folded family tree and a photocopy with my dad’s writing of who these people were. There was also a letter between my dad and his brother — my Uncle John. My dad got the negative from a lost cousin he found in LA and together they’d figured out the couple on the left were their grandparents.
That makes them my great-grandparents.
That picture is from the 1920s, around 100 years ago. Looking at them, I try to imagine their lives because 100 years doesn’t seem so long ago.
My dad’s family immigrated to the US from an impoverished and oppressed corner of the Russian Empire called the Pale of Settlement — land that’s now Belarus. Jews were a lower class barred from owning property, holding office, or worshiping freely. Mobs tore through villages: pillaging, burning, killing. Pogroms. My guess is this photo was taken in the Pale, before the family left for America.
Look at the baby — I’ve no idea who they are — but even they’ve had enough of this bullshit. Life is hard.
Digging deeper in the box, I found a red plastic folio marked, in my dad’s writing: ‘Dan’s Army Discharge Papers.’ Among official US Army papers, I found a treasure trove of old photos my dad saved. It’s all photos of his family — a family I never knew.
This picture was taken just a few years after the first one in Russia. My dad’s father Nathan emigrated from Russia when he was only 15 and here he is perhaps 5 years later proudly opening up his tailor shop in Pittsburgh. Unlike the first photo with its washed-out background, this one is rich with detail — I can almost smell what it would be like getting fitted for a suit in Nathan’s shop.
Nathan’s dad — my great-great-grandpa — never made it out of Belarus, but I wonder what he would have thought about his son’s new business. To go from life in that first picture to the second — it’s easy to see why no journey was too far, no hardship too bad, to deter going to America for a better life.
I never met my grandpa Nathan, but my dad told me lots of stories about him. When he got older and a bit senile, my dad brought him back to LA to live with him in his small second-floor bachelor apartment. My dad lived a few blocks off of Fairfax avenue and Nathan would go hang out with a crew of old Jewish tailors in LA’s Jewish Ghetto.
Then Nathan developed narcolepsy — falling asleep during the day, often and unexpectedly. My dad couldn’t take care of him anymore and so he took my Grandpa Nathan back to NYC. This picture is from that trip and it’s probably the last time he saw his dad.
My Uncle John lived in NYC and he took over looking after Nathan. Uncle John carried on in Nathan’s footsteps, expanding the family tailor business into an embroidery empire.
Here’s one last picture of my dad with his brother, my Uncle John. Color! This is from my cousin’s Bar Mitzvah in 1980 and I want to believe they hit the disco afterwards.
I met up with an old friend the other day. She said she doesn’t like to live in the past, instead looking ahead and living in the moment. I agree with that. A few days later I was chatting with another friend who also writes once in a while about his past and he said it’s like driving forward but also checking the rearview mirror — to go in the right direction, it helps to see where you’ve been. I agree with that too.
Life sure is noisy today. But we’ve got comforts our ancestors never dreamed of. Bet I could get that baby to smile with a warm bath, a bottle, and a picture book. Maybe the teeniest bit of screen time.
It's amazing how the older generation did not want to talk about the past. I learned pretty early that my sister and I had different dads from my sister. My mother never talked my sister's dad. Then there was my dad's eldest sister. When we tried to ask about someone in the past, she would say, "What do you want to know about them for? They're dead." Then again, my kids haven't asked about my past. Only when an appropriate story comes up, so I mention someone from my past. They just learned 2 months ago that I had a wife before their mom. Why didn't I tell them sooner? My life before them didn't exist. It's fascinating to think about how our ancestors lived. Some had some interesting stories and some had it harder than others. However, very little oral or print history for me look back on.
Just to let you know… They are services who can repair any old photos you have that have been damaged or lost sharpness or have had color shifts over time. Ask around first as some do better work than others. My wife had some old family portraits of her sibs redone that had hung in her parents house for 50 years and they look like they were taken yesterday. All while preserving the original.
I’ve had experiences like yours going through family stuff. I discovered that a family member had donated land in my downtown for a black church for escaped slaves “The Anti-Slavery Methodist Church” A few years later it merged with a church that is still in existence today. Love letters between my parents when he was in Korea… Yeah, life was hard, family made it less hard. I think back to how poor we were when I was a kid and what life is like for people today… But I still get nostalgic for the corner drugstore malt (one, because getting one was so rare!) and the 10 cent comic books you’d mow lawns and pick up pops for…But mostly I miss the people I shared that all with…;-)))