Re: [Cz-L] Generalizing about the Cz Jewish Experience

Re-sending in plain text.  Yahoo changed the Yahoo! Mail look and feel and I could not find the way to switch...

This discussion about the social strata in Czernowitz, and Iris' joke
bring to mind a couple of stories about my Czernowitzer parents (Arieh
Schatzberg, aka Bubi, and Sali nee Fang- Hedwig knew them and I am
interested in her feedback)

My father grew up on 39 Brauhausgasse
 (aka Luk’yana Kobylytsi, or Razboieni).  My paternal grandfather (Berl
Schuster) when I knew him in Tel Aviv, was a cobbler, spoke Yiddish,
played cards for entertainment, smoked cigarettes broken in half and
went to the synagogue on weekends.
My mother grew up on the corner of
 Residenzgasse-Dreifaltigkeitsgasse.  My Maternal grandfather (Gerschon
Fang) had a factory for dawn blankets on the Wassergasse and a store on
the Herrengasse.  I never met my namesake, because the soviets deported
him to Siberia where he perished.

Nobody ever said
 this directly to me, but it was my impression that even though my
father and mother knew each other socially as young adults, they were
from different social strata and would have been unlikely to end up
together had the war not acted as a great equalizer.  By the way, my
father went to medical school and eventually became a dentist.  He was
an avid reader, autodidact with a very broad general education.  We
spoke German at home, and to this day I find it difficult to respond to
people in Yiddish, even though I understand it completely.  I respond in
 German.  Does that make me a snob?

Now to Iris' joke.  It
reminds me of a bitter-sweet interaction I had with my father shortly
before he passed away (excuse the long story):
At the age of 93, my
father slipped on a wet floor and fractured his hip and arm.  I traveled
 from California to Tel Aviv and went straight to the hospital to see
him.  We had a very
 serious conversation about his medical situation and what should be
done going forward.  At that point I got hungry and left for 15 minutes
to get something to eat at the hospital cafeteria.  When I came back, he
 had slipped into dementia, but it took a while for me to realize it.  I
 sat next to him and he said something in a language I did not
recognize.  I asked him whether that was Russian.  He shook his head. 
Ukrainian?  yes.  "but I don't speak Ukrainian", I said in German. 
"What language do you speak" he said in Yiddish.  "Deutsch", I said.  A
very puzzled look came onto his face:  "How come?" (at this point I am
beginning to understand that he does not know who I am and is treating
me as a stranger- first order of business with a stranger is to
negotiate the common language).  So he now tells me, the stranger, the
key points of his life (Yiddish):  "I had three sons. 
 One died in an accident (my oldest brother Guido).  Another is very
smart, the third is a businessman (Soicher)".  Let it be known that in
my father's vocabulary, a businessman was synonymous with a crook- the
only honest businessman he ever met was my maternal grandfather.  "One
of my sons lives in Boston (my middle brother Alon, who is a PhD,
Electrical Engineering and a genius), the other lives in California
(that's me, also an engineer, but a customer-facing executive)".  So, I
asked him "which one is which?" and pointing his finger at his head he
said "the one in Boston- very smart!".

Gershon Schatzberg

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Received on 2012-12-14 14:19:40