May Uncle Herman rest in peace . . . I think

Randi Kreiss

People don’t tell family stories the way they used to — and the way my dad still does. We’ve gotten so constrained, so PC, so uptight and careful, that stories have become homogenized into pap.

Last week, eight of us, average age 80, gathered at our house for dinner. The assembled: my parents, my husband and me, my sister (the toddler in the group), two friends and their mother and father. Also present was considerable hardware: two defibrillators, eight hearing aids, two canes and various other supportive devices. Now, don’t write me letters. I share this experience with tender love and gratitude for the place of these dear elders in our family/friends circle.

Before the meal, I urged my dad to keep his stories high-minded. Asked to define high-minded, I told him I meant jokes and stories that I could print in a family newspaper. You be the judge.

I don’t think he’d mind if I said that when he has a drink, all bets are off. He had a drink. We sat down to dinner. Dad, thinking he should get the conversation going, said to the table at large, “Did I ever tell you the story about my Uncle Herman?” I have to admit that when Dad starts a story, I hold my breath because I never know where it’s going.

And he proceeded to tell us that in 1933, when he was 14, he and his older brother Sidney happened to stop by Uncle Herman’s Brooklyn apartment to say hello. They smelled gas and broke down the door. Inside they found Uncle Herman in the kitchen and Aunt Leah in the bedroom.

Uncle Herman, 55, had downed a bottle of iodine, then, to be sure, turned on the gas and stuck his head in the oven. At this point in the story, my friends’ mouths were agape and my mom added, “Herman must have had the blues.”

Apparently Uncle Herman didn’t want to go alone. Before he checked out, he stuck an ice pick through Aunt Leah’s chest and left her for dead. “But he missed all the vital organs,” Dad said cheerfully. Aunt Leah recovered and lived to be 96. Dad said he and Sidney also found a hand-written will in which Uncle Herman left his paltry savings to a Coney Island bimbo. Somehow, the will disappeared.

Quite a story to tell over brisket.

With the plum cake dessert, Dad moved on from the ’30s to the war years. He told a story about my Grandpa Mush, my mother’s father, who was in the civil defense force in Brooklyn during World War II. When he went out on patrol, Grandpa, who was fiercely patriotic and proud of his service, borrowed my dad’s army hat and overcoat for their official cachet. Hard to believe, but residents of the East Coast fully expected the enemy to land on our beaches.

Grandpa patrolled Canarsie with Mr. Rabinowitz, a neighbor and fellow volunteer. One pitch-dark night, during a blackout, Mr. Rabinowitz, who was very short, fell into a ditch by the side of the road as they were walking. Grandpa didn’t see him go down but he did hear him yelling. Grandpa took off running. A highly excitable man, he ran home screaming that Mr. Rabinowitz had been captured by the Japanese.

So far so good, but with the fruit and coffee came the unfortunate story of Uncle Mike — not really my uncle but a man with a past (and a second family in Staten Island). My aunt lived with Mike for 25 years in unwedded bliss. “He was in a ‘family business,’ if you know what I mean,” Dad said. “And he was also my patient, since he was almost a part of our family, too.” Dad, a retired dentist, said that Uncle Mike disappeared one day. Just went upstate with some friends and never came back.
“Ten years later, the FBI showed up at my office,” Dad said ominously. “They asked me to identify some teeth.”

There were Will Rogers jokes and Prohibition stories and casual references to FDR and his cousin Teddy.

Now, we could have spent the evening chatting about the mosque near ground zero or the pastor in Florida or Obama’s new tax proposals or whatever folks are talking about at their dinner tables. But with our guests, all cherished elders with brilliant long-term memory, we just got lucky.

Copyright © 2010 Randi Kreiss. Randi can be reached at randik3@aol.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 304.