My father died on Feb. 11, 1962, and I was born nine months later on Nov. 9. Loving my mother and bringing me into being was his last act of grace and generosity.
The stories about my father, Samuel Benkovitz, always have flowed like sweet Passover wine. They were mostly tales of delight and frolic, friendship and loyalty, tenderness and care, allegiance to Jewish tradition and a sense of playfulness that made for a lovely recipe of a life, of a man. They always told of his sweet smile and his sparkle and his tender face.
Sam met my mother where she worked in a department storein Pittsburgh, recently departed from her college studies after her parents divorced and the tuition and support money ran out. My mother was and is whip smart, nobody’s fool, compassionate and brave. She was and is beautiful to her core, the embodiment of a woman of valor. Together, they fused hearts and souls and gave me life.
The first years of my life were an adventure for me and rugged for my mother. We lived in a boarding house on Ardleigh Street in Philadelphia with other families and couples in an old and cozy converted Victorian house. There were screen doors everywhere and life happened in the streets and in the apartments of our neighbors. Every spring, from the tenderest age, I boarded a plane to go to my father’s family in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Squirrel Hill for Passover, where I ate kosher for Passover at home and dinners out with white tablecloths at Tambellini’s and Poli’s and Sodini’s. It was the butterfly-shrimp dinners and cocktail sauce and homemade gefilte fish and red horseradish that sealed my love for Judaism, Passover and the exquisite pleasures of family and tradition, celebration and the joy of meals and family love.
In those moments, my father was present. I carried his name with pride through the streets of Pittsburgh, and people young and old loved to tell me stories of the father I embodied and loved but never knew.
The delicate eggs he cooked for his niece Rose Linda, who adored him. The thoughtful trinkets he would bring back from trips to New York for his sister-in-law Evelyn, who set the most majestic, joyful and celebratory seder table. A cut-glass cruet set of oil and vinegar. A blue-enamel plate to bring life and light to the festive table. Tangible love notes that outlived him and contained his presence for years to come.
The tactile imprints he left behind are gone. The snowy hillside where he suffered a heart attach and said goodbye to this world has thawed and frozen many times since that mournful day. It used to bother me that I didn’t have more pictures, more things, more intricate understanding of the specific chronology and detail of my father’s life. Only a few precious items have weathered the bumpy road. His collection of books that I have yet to read. His Merchant -Marine yearbook from 1945, a watch with his name on it from that same year. On the back, it reads “Samuel Benkovitz.” The gifts he gave and the objects that passed through his hand now scattered in unknown places.
But I remind myself that the imprints we leave behind are smooth and silky, foggy and vaporous, turgid and sturdy even if not always visible or touchable. Helen Keller, a soul who deeply understood what lay beyond the tangible, visible world, said, “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched — they must be felt with the heart.”
I have seen the imprints of the past rest in the hearts of the living. I have seen how anguish and bitterness can take hold of a human heart and turn it against its fellow woman and man. The brutalities of the past have left us all as vessels for the truths and memories of things past. The Holocaust, slavery and racism, generations of institutionalized misogyny, abused power and greed have passed from the cups of our ancestors and overflowed into ours.
And beside them is the gentle touch of what humans do better than anyone. We are capable of marveling at the magnificence of love and one another. The mystery of conception and the transcendence of adoption. The impossibility of true love and the miracle of deep love, despite the impossibility, between women and men, women and women, men and men who find a soulmate to travel the turbulent and beautiful sea of a life with. The families we embrace and the families we create. The sacrifices we make and the stands we take to forge a more just, more dignified and more humane world. The tenderness we offer that becomes a silky comfort to the soul of another. Like a cloud. Like a holy touch.
I carried his name with pride through the streets of Pittsburgh, and people young and old loved to tell me stories of the father I embodied and loved but never knew.
How we carry these relics defines us. Whose pain we honor defines us. Whose love and decency and kindness becomes our human instrument and the music of our lives that we play defines us.
We carry the stories and the hopes and dreams of those who came before us. They are calling to us if we put our ear to the sky and to the ground. They will guide our hands for good and evil, so we must pay attention to the signals and understand their instructions and the damage or humanity that informs them.
We must listen for the lessons they carry and want to share with us. They hold the instructions from our ancestors and the angels. But to hear them, we must be quiet and slow enough for the thickness of poetry’s pour. Anticipation. Turn our ears to the beating hearts of their souls, still audible if we are willing to stop, still and listen.
The words of Abraham Joshua Heschel in his poem “The Forgotten” have always carried this sentiment for me:
Man, forgotten by everyone
Like a gas lamp burning in daylight
They had forgotten to extinguish it
Today he smoldered at my door
Softly beat his heart
Open, open your friendship with me
There is still, in my love,
so much room and so many words for you
Your entire world can fit
Into my open spread-out arms
Come, plant your gaze in me
Make a home for yourself in my memory
With our ancestors and the people we have loved and lost in our hearts, with our fathers and grandfathers and mothers and grandmothers, let us listen for the stories they hold for us and the mysteries they can reveal. Let us accept their encouragement and comfort and gentle handing of our family’s and human family’s baton.
Let us plant their gazes in us, and may we understand what they see and know, learn what they know. Not only walking in their shoes, but beating with their hearts and resonating with their struggles, by offering them deep and compassionate listening. And then, let us reassure them we will carry their gifts forward and discard that which no longer serves — the fears, the biases and the injuries that collect over time and can be released, each generation anew.
And so, in honor of Father’s Day, I would like to end with a letter to the father I never met, Samuel Benkovitz, z”l.
Dear Father,
I never met you, really, but I have known you all my life. Over and over again. Story after story told to me from my earliest years until even yesterday, as I gathered facts, gathered knowledge, gathered proof of you — from my mother, your nieces who adored you, your cousin and her husband who loved you dearly. I never talked to them until I sat down to write this: a Father’s Day letter of love and appreciation to you — a father I have never met and a father I have known since the day my heart first beat, just days after your heartbeat for the last time.
They tell me you were playful. I smile to imagine it. I learn you were beloved by every member in your sturdy and proud Russian immigrant family. They share eagerly that you were adored by your friends. They say no one ever, ever, ever had a harsh word to say about you. Not only after you died, as is often expected, but for the 37 years you lived.
Writing this piece inspired me to talk to people from your “old country.” Family and friends I had not seen since childhood.
I am told you were independent and the first to leave the family fish business, Benkovitz Seafoods, to make your own way. I have learned you loved beautiful women and, thankfully, my mother, so together, you gave me life. You loved fun. You were a good friend. You had great style and some swagger. You drove a white Mercedes after the war, kicking up a lot of dust in the small Jewish community where you were raised — Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, home of the sadly famous Tree of Life synagogue. Like me, you were too young, a fatherless child who I imagine longed, as I did, for your father’s heartbeat and loving, guiding presence.
You smoked filter-less Camel cigarettes and lit them with a Dunhill lighter. Several packs a day. Your father died young, failed by his own heart. Your heart failed you, too, on a snowy mountain in northern Pennsylvania on a weekend ski trip with my mother. There was a storm, and the volunteer paramedic crew in Seven Springs, Pa., was ill-prepared and lacked the resources and training to respond.
But there you were on a blustery mountain top. On skis, looking like someone who took a normal spill, pole and skis akimbo, crisp, cold snow on your skin, wind in your hair. I will never know how long you waited to be recognized and seen for who you were: A dying man in need of rescue. That not knowing will tug at my heart always. I cannot ever remember not knowing that if you had that same heart failure today outside of Cedars-Sinai, they would have treated you and sent you home.
They tell me you were playful. I smile to imagine it. I learn you were beloved by every member in your sturdy and proud Russian immigrant family. They share eagerly that you were adored by your friends.
Writing this piece inspired me to talk to people from your “old country.” Family and friends I had not seen since childhood. Yesterday, I learned that you loved smooth jazz and particularly loved the song “Mack the Knife.” Recorded in German in 1930 by Lotte Lenya, it is a Kurt Weill song from “The Threepenny Opera” that made it to the top of the American charts in a pop version by Bobby Darin decades later. It is a dark, sly song with murder and darkness and elegant twists and turns. It was, years after you listened to it, the opening song of the movie “Quiz Show,” the last film I set-decorated just before the birth of your granddaughter Rebecca.
My last movie before becoming a mom and when the most exquisite chapter of my life began. When people asked me what movie I was most proud of, I often listed “Quiz Show,” a tale of greed and ambition, class and privilege, and fathers and sons. I watched the film a few weeks ago to share it with my stepfather, Bill, and my mother. When the film begins in a Chrysler dealership, the Soviets have beaten the Americans into space, and the film’s hero has his eye on the illusive American dream. The radio is switched on and the big-band sound of your song, “Mack the Knife,” fills the showroom. Suddenly, the viewer is transported as we embark on a journey, an American morality tale of good and evil, anti-Semitism and bias, prejudice and bias, corruption and greed that goes all the way to the American Supreme Court.
I never knew why I loved that song so much every time I heard it. Now I know.
Thank you for the gift of this life and for finding my mother in the crowd. Thank you for the daily gift of seeing the world through your eyes and for teaching me and showing me by your example, “virtually,” as they say in pandemic times, that kindness and love are everything. That life is precious and briefer than we can ever understand until we grieve and mourn. And that we honor life and our creators by making our names a blessing.
Love,
Your grateful and loving daughter, Sam
Samara Hutman is a co-founder of The Righteous Conversations Project and the director of Remember Us: The Holocaust Bnai Mitzvah Project, a California nonprofit dedicated to passing the flame of Holocaust memory to the next generation.
