My father's bar mitzvah

After my father died, we sold his apartment in the Promised Land (sometimes known as Florida) but before we put it on the market we found treasures including his parents’ naturalization papers which list him as a one year old, but what struck me most was an invitation to his bar mitzvah. “Mr. and Mrs. Solomon Stein Request the honor of your presence at the Confirmation (and then in Hebrew ‘Bar Mitzvah’) of their son Joseph on Saturday April 10th, 1926 at 9 A.M. at Machzike Talmud Torah of Borough Park 1319-43rd Street, Brooklyn, N.Y. Reception at 8 P.M. at their residence 1847-48th Street, Brooklyn, N.Y.”

I wonder if I’m the only reader of the Voice & Herald ever to receive an invitation to their father’s bar mitzvah. The section from the Torah that morning was Sh’mini which among other things describes the deaths of two of Aaron’s sons and his silence in response. The Haftarah was from the book of II Samuel describing the moving of the recaptured Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem and the death of one of the men escorting it who made the mistake of touching it when it seemed to fall from its cart. Sixty years later his grandson Daniel, our first born, read the same texts. Life can be odd that way.

I’ve tried to get the weather but people who write columns on typewriters don’t readily have access to such information. But what intrigues me more is that I know the future of those there in a way my grandchildren will know my future and the world as it unfolds beyond our time. I’m just visiting this planet; we all are. Some of us try to make it a better place in our limited allotted time; others simply reside as a tenant in someone else’s apartment, making no improvements, others exploit all advantages intended or not. I do not pass judgment as I am as often willing to laugh at the world’s absurdities from the sidelines as I am to roll up my sleeves to resolve them.

But I know that in 1926 Hitler was merely an ex-con heading up an obscure political party considered too radical to succeed; that the Great Depression was still three years into the future; Stalin would have his show trials in 1936; Pearl Harbor was fifteen years away; my parents married eleven months later and I came along seventeen months after that. None of this was known on that bright sunny day (as I picture it in my mind) when my father read from the Torah and haftarah way back then, eighty-four years ago.

What’s in store for us? One of the things I’ve learned as an historian is that attempting to predict the future is a fool’s game. The old cliché about history repeating itself is a canard, not a truth. Economists and political scientists try to anticipate events and trends all the time, and fail. They study their charts and computer print outs and fail to account for this little thing or that and so they are wrong as often as right. If it were otherwise we’d all be millionaires. After all, who in 1926 was predicting the Great Depression or could have foretold that in seven years Hitler would be Chancellor of Germany?

In Berlin there’s currently a showing of Hitler mementos which opened with some trepidation. This is the first time a German museum has had such an exhibit, and the curators say they have taken great care to avoid glorifying the villain who is their subject. The Central Council of Jews in Germany acknowledges that the timing is right, given today’s political climate where Germans are nervous about the economy and immigrants and some in the lower middle class seem to want a leader to extract them form the doldrums—paralleling some of the conditions of 1933. Exhibits are set up in ways to discourage neo-Nazis from taking heroic photos of themselves near images of Hitler. But Hitler though dead is still a living presence, alive to those who fear foreigners, non-Christians, the better educated. In America their ilk is confined, generally, to the wilds of Idaho and Montana (except when they emerge as a Timothy McVey in Oklahoma City).

None of this was known when my father, a young boy of thirteen innocently celebrated becoming a man in 1926, to which event I’ve just been invited.