I interviewed my mother. It wasn’t something I’d planned or wanted to do. I’d heard her stories before. I knew that my parents had met at a house party in Utica and that Mom had fallen for Dad pretty quickly. I also knew that there were a bunch of Orthodox rabbis in his family and that they were not happy when he turned his back on their traditional branch of Judaism to become a rabbi in what they saw as a perversion of their faith.
I doubted Mom could tell me anything new or useful, but I had those blank tapes thanks to my aborted interview with Gramma. I figured I might as well do something with them. Plus, Mom and I had time to kill: two hours in the car on Saturday driving to and from the tip of the Cape, where we were going to meet friends from Utica. After I told her I wanted to learn more about Dad, she answered every single one of my non-threatening, innocuous questions.
Dad had grown up in Dorchester, a community in the south end of Boston that was home to many Jewish immigrants at the turn of the century. His father, Harry (given name, Zvi), had arrived in America from Lithuania in 1910 along with two siblings. Harry found work as a salesman and enlisted in the Navy during World War I. In 1921 he returned to the Old Country for his parents and remaining siblings. The whole mispocha, seven siblings and their spouses and children, settled along Blue Hill Avenue. Harry was the unofficial family cantor, the one who taught the boys of my father’s generation how to chant prayers and Torah.
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