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Reflections: The Child Who Knew Too Much
 By Dan Schaffer, San Diego Jewish Times, April 7, 2006

My parents deserved better from me as I was growing up from childhood through adolescence. I was a willful child, the youngest of three, and the only kid left at home, so I usually got what I wanted. I also had the advantage of being more at home with American culture than my mother and father. Both were emigrants who had virtually no formal schooling and spoke with distinct accents. I could manipulate American English much more easily than they could.

By the time of their deaths I had apologized, though not nearly enough, for my youthful rudeness and self-centeredness. I am still uneasy thinking of them as people with feelings and not just as parents whose lives revolved around me. My uneasiness comes from facing their sorrows, especially two incidents that scarred their lives.

My parents were both early 20^th century Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe. My father Maurice spent his youth in Czarist Lithuania and sailed into
Baltimore in 1912 when he was 20. My mother Norma was born in Lomza in Russian Poland in 1899. She disembarked at Ellis Island in 1920. They
met in Cleveland shortly after her arrival and married soon after that. They were together till Maurice died in 1982. Norma died in 2000 a few months
short of her 101^st birthday.

Over the years, my father told me only a few stories of his early life. I know that his parents grew flax on a farm near Vilna (now Vilnius). Five years
after coming to America, he joined the U.S. Army during World War II and earned his citizenship through his military service. He was a Russian
and Lithuanian language translator for other emigrant recruits.

Before and after the war, Maurice was in the house painting business with his two older brothers. One was killed by a horse-drawn wagon in 1914;
the other died in the great influenza epidemic of 1918-19.

Other family histories came to me from my mother. Some were stories, like this one, that I would rather not have known at age 10. Maurice had been
recently discharged from the army when his brother died of the flu. The brother’s will made Maurice the executor. That was a big mistake.

My father was a skilled painter and a hard worker, a kind and decent person. But he had a major flaw: he was a pie-in-the-sky dreamer when it came
to money, and he could always rationalize his misuse of it. Maurice took his brother’s estate and invested it in smoke-and-mirrors ventures that came to
naught. The state authorities were not amused. Maurice went to prison for a year. By the time Maurice got sent away, he and Norma were married and
had a baby girl named Chayele. Her English name was Helen, but Norma and Maurice always called her by the Yiddish one.

The prison story was not a good one for me to hear. For years afterward I discussed it with no one other than my wife and siblings; I was too ashamed.
Until then, my father had been my hero. For many years, I resented my mother for taking a big part of that away from me.

The other event was much worse than prison. By the time Chayele was three, Maurice was back in Cleveland, working variously as an insurance
salesman and a housepainter. They had a new infant daughter, my sister Beatrice. Chayele needed a tonsillectomy. Their doctor botched the surgery,
and Chayele bled to death. My mother blamed herself for the rest of her long life. When she was 90, she cried about the loss of her child as if it had
just happened.

My parents went on to have two more children, my older brother Ezra and me. More than once, my mother had reason to worry about the luftmensch
she married, but we always ate well and had decent shelter. Maurice continued painting. In his old age he had a calm and contented retirement, with
family, friends and, especially, grandchildren.

The prison shame is now long gone. The Chayele pain stays with me in the hovering fear that a parent always has that harm may come to one’s child,
no matter what age. I didn’t picture how heartbreaking this could be until I became a parent nearly 30 years later.

But not all my memories of my parents are colored by embarrassment and sorrow. One warm memory stands out as an illustration of what everyday
good people they were and why my pride and love for them outweigh any negative family memories.

We lived in Pensacola, Florida, during World War II where my father was chief painter at the nearby Naval Hospital. One weekend afternoon, he
invited one of his painting crew over to our house. The painter came in the front door, sat for a while in the living room, and talked shop with my father.
My mother served him tea and cookies. He then got up, said his thanks, and left through the same door.

Not an exciting story, but it stayed with me. The other painter was black, and Pensacola was deep in the deep South, which was racist, anti-Semitic,
and sporadically violent. That was years before the Civil Rights movement began to change the landscape.

Maurice was a small, middle-aged, foreign Jew who had no protection against possible neighborhood disapproval, but to him and to Norma, people
were people. No guest of theirs was going to enter through the back door, take his own food at a separate table in the kitchen and leave like a servant.

My father and mother never mentioned that afternoon to me. It wasn’t a cause for comment that they treated another man as a human being when
that was not easy to do. But I never forgot it.

Maurice once committed a terrible, self-centered, and thoughtless act. He and Norma soon after endured an agonizing loss. Norma unduly burdened
a young boy with her waking nightmares.

Yet the legacy that stays uppermost with me is their everyday courage in trying to live a decent Jewish life for themselves and their children. I miss them
a lot, and I’ve nearly forgiven their bratty youngest child.

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