The Shoulders on Which We Stand

Da Lifnei Mi Atah Omed – Know Before Whom You Stand.  Of all the words inscribed on the doors of the Ark, these are my favorite.  

While I feel that I am standing before G-d when I am in synagogue, I also feel that I am standing before others. The Amidah makes that clear when it lists the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and, at many services, the matriarchs, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah. It is wonderful to be reminded of the biblical icons whose legacies continue to affect us deeply.  But we all have those who have influenced us more directly.

Sir Isaac Newton once wrote that “If I have seen further (than others), it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”  

One of my giants is my maternal grandfather.  At the age of 20, he left his home in Tabaczdwa, a village in Austria-Hungary (now located in southern Poland), outside the city of Nowy Sacz.  My youngest daughter did some research and discovered that my grandfather came to the U.S. in steerage class on a ship called the USS President Grant, which sailed from Hamburg, Germany in June of 1913.  We have no idea if there was anyone to meet him when he arrived in New York, but we do know that six years later he married my grandmother, also from Tabaczdwa, who had emigrated a few years after her future husband.

While my grandfather spoke Yiddish, Polish, Hungarian and, I think, Hebrew, I am embarrassed to recall that when he used to read me stories from a children’s book, I became frustrated with how he would stumble over words in English. Despite having to learn a new language, he worked his way up from being a laborer until he bought a bar in Newark — Klafter’s Tavern.  I have fond childhood memories of playing with the elaborate cash register.

My mother told me that in the mid-1930s, my grandfather, well aware of the darkening shadow hanging over Eastern European Jewry, returned to the old country to try to convince his family to join him in the States.  After several months he came back empty handed.  His family refused to abandon their home, so he gave them the money that was supposed to pay for their travel with the hope that they would eventually change their minds.

When my grandparents left the Nowy Sacz area, the regional Jewish community numbered around 25,000.  A quarter century later, in September of 1939, Nazi troops invaded, forcing most of the area’s Jews into a ghetto before deporting them to the Belzec death camp in August of 1942. By the time the Russian army liberated the city in January of 1945, nearly the entire Jewish population had been wiped out.  

My grandfather once asked me to look up his hometown in an atlas I was given when I became a bar mitzvah in 1966.  The atlas claimed to list every city in the world.  Tabaczdwa wasn’t there. When I told him that, he shrugged and said that he wasn’t surprised to learn that it was no more.

After the Shoah, my grandfather searched for surviving relatives but never found anyone. There was supposedly a distant relative in Philadelphia, but my sister and I don’t remember ever meeting him.  As far as we knew, his family was gone.

The first and only time my grandparents flew on a plane was to pay homage to his murdered family. They traveled to Israel in April of 1961 to be in the room when Eichmann was condemned to death. As an eight-year-old, I watched the trial on our small black-and-white television after coming home from elementary school, trying to catch a glimpse of my grandparents in the background of the courtroom.

Every Shabbat I think not only of G-d, the patriarchs and matriarchs, but also of Ike Klafter, who was born 130 years ago.  I thank him for providing me with the strongest of all shoulders on which to stand.

As we reflect on the year that passed and anticipate 5784, ask yourself: Who are the giants you have had in your own life?

As we reflect on the year that passed and anticipate 5784, ask yourself:  Who are the giants you have had in your own life?

Morton Schapiro is the former President of Williams College and Northwestern University.  His most recent book (with Gary Saul Morson) is “Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us.”