Happy Birthday Dad. I Still Miss You

In a few weeks, it will be my father’s 100^th birthday. But tragically, there will be no celebration. He passed away 55 years ago, after he suffered heart attack just a few weeks after Passover. He never fully recovered, and three weeks later, he died. Had his heart lasted a few more decades, modern medicine would have saved him. But it was during the dark ages of cardiology, when too little was known about treating heart disease.

It’s been a lifetime since my dad’s life ended. Yet I think of him every day. I mostly think how unfair it was for him to die at the young age of 45, just as I was entering my teen years. But I’ve also come to the realization that being obsessed with his premature death, and my life growing up without a father, is an equal tragedy. My father not only died — he also lived.

My father was born Azriel Farkovitz (later Americanized to Irving Farr) in a Czechoslovakia shtetl near the Carpathian Mountains. He was one of eight siblings, five boys and three girls. His father was a teacher in the local cheder, a one-room, makeshift school where he taught local Jewish boys sacred Hebrew texts. From the stories he told me when I was a kid, I learned their small house didn’t have basic necessities such as plumbing, gas or electricity. I guess the next line should be “but they were happy.” I have no idea if they were. I somehow doubt it.

Like millions of fellow Eastern European Jews, his life turned upside down when the Germans invaded his small village. My father was shipped off to a German labor camp, where he spent two years working, starving and enduring regular beatings. He rarely spoke of his time in the camps, preferring to live in the present. But there was one story he told me that stayed with me all these years. He was walking on the camp grounds and spotted a potato under a barrack. He grabbed it and hid it under his coat. Somehow, word got out, and Nazi soldiers dragged him outside, where they tied his wrists together behind his back. They hung him from a pole for all to see. After two days serving as an example to the other prisoners, he passed out. He never again took “unauthorized” food.

After liberation he emigrated to America, where he eventually located two surviving brothers. Two years later he met my mother. They were a perfect match. She was also from Czechoslovakia and survived three death camps, including Auschwitz. She was her family’s only survivor.

As a kid growing up without a father, I often think what my life would be like had he lived longer. Would I take over my parents’ butcher shop and grocery store in San Jose, California, where we lived? Would he teach me to lead synagogue services with the precision and skill that came naturally to him as the shul cantor? I doubt it, since I have no interest in the food business and can’t sing a note.

Being a teenager without a father was tough. I missed father-son nights at school. I envied seeing friends sit next to their dads in synagogue while I sat alone or next to a stranger. More than anything else, I hated when my friends complained about their fathers. It would trigger thoughts of how lucky they were to have a dad, even if he wasn’t perfect. What father is?

I envied seeing friends sit next to their dads in synagogue while I sat alone or next to a stranger.

Most of all I wish my father could have known my wife, three children and two grandchildren. He certainly would see them as living proof that his survival and re-building of his life had meaning and, most of all, that Hitler didn’t win.

My father’s yahrzeit and birthday fall just a couple of weeks apart. This year, as I recite the kaddish,

I suspect I will also think about his birthday and what could have been.

So happy 100^th birthday, dad. If they have the internet in heaven and you read this, just know your short time on this earth had lasting meaning, and you will never be forgotten.

Harvey Farr is a Los Angeles-based marketing consultant, writer and photographer.