PrintAugust 27, 2005
Eulogy to my father
No one knows another's life. Certainly no child really knows all there is of a father's. But in broad strokes I will try to tell the things which I knew were meaningful to my father. He was born in a small village in Poland. I've seen the name spelled in a variety of ways, but phonetically spelled it was Ravitz. Once in an Isaac Bashevis Singer short story he related stopping there briefly in a train trip from Lublin to Russia. My father said it didn't even have wooden sidewalks or outdoor toilets. His father, Morris, was a master tailor. His mother, Pearl, the shrewdest, most generous woman I have ever known, was a seamstress who had never learned to read or write . His father received a conscription notice .A pregnant wife won a conscript a deferment so my grandmother went to the police station and establishing her expectant state, my grandfather's call to his certain death was forestalled. My grandmother told me she'd walked to a market in...(Read Full Article)
