Gary M. Pomerantz

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A Story of Family: In search of Grandpa's world

A visit to the old neighborhood ...

... mirrors the
journey of a lifetime

The Atlanta Journal and Constitution
February 1, 1998

By Gary M. Pomerantz
Staff writer

No one ever called my father shy. At a party, or a business convention, he can work a room. When I was little, he was quick to hug or tickle me. Then he coached my Little League teams. A rock-solid dad, always there, he wore a thick gold ring that once was his father's.

But when I pull out my tape recorder and ask him questions about Grandpa, an unprecedented silence falls upon him.

"I didn't really know that much about him," Dad admits. I asked questions I should have asked long ago.

I know now why Grandpa didn't smile in family photos. He suffered from more than the bad heart condition that afflicted all men in his family. My father says that his parents argued often and that they sometimes separated, including once during World War II when Grandpa went off to build airfields in the Aleutians. "They couldn't get along," my Aunt Ruth tells me. She says Grandpa, her father-in-law, once said he hoped to die on the job instead of at home "with her." As his wife, Mae, worked by day at the Long Island Electric Co., Grandpa worked by night. But, my aunt says, you could always tell by the way Grandpa looked at his wife that deep down, he loved her. (My grandmother would outlive him by 21 years, dying in a Los Angeles nursing home at age 89.)

I am told that Grandpa was proud that his two sons were college graduates, and that he liked his Reader's Digest, his Denoblis and his vodka, and that occasionally he sang Yiddish melodies. I am left not with memories of him, only an image: a short, stout man, sitting on the couch, saying little.

He spoke hardly at all of Kremenchuk, other than to suggest it was "somewhere between Minsk and Pinsk," a fib that rhymed. Grandpa sometimes spoke of his mother's bravery and business shrewdness. Once, he said, two of the czar's soldiers came into the family dry goods, or hardware, store in Kremenchuk in search of illegal vodka. Under the counter, they found it. "Now, I've got you," the soldier charged. But according to family lore, Dora picked up a small lead weight and smashed the bottle. The vodka emptied onto the floor. "Now, prove I'm selling vodka," she said.

"You know what kind of guts it took for a Jew in Russia under the czar to do that?" my cousin Sadie, 82, says.

I discovered Grandpa's U.S. naturalization papers in a Brooklyn courthouse. He recorded the name of the ship he took from the Old World, the Adriatic. Later I obtained a picture of it from a maritime museum in Virginia. (A steamer, it was a British-made beauty.)

Stories in our family suggest that Grandpa, his mother and sister first sailed to Argentina. They were denied entry because of an outbreak of disease aboard the ship. So they sailed back to Europe, though precisely where we don't know. On Oct. 3, 1912, they boarded the Adriatic in Liverpool, England, stopped in Queenstown, Ireland the following day and arrived in New York on the 13th.

On board were Irish, Brits, Swedes, Finns and Russians. Under the category of "Race of People," the passenger list cited my relatives as "Hebrew" with their Hebrew names Dwosse (Dora), Raitza (Rose) and, for Grandpa, Pine (pronounced Pin-ya), which became Philip.

As we boarded the plane for Kiev, I thought about something my Aunt Ruth had told me: When Grandpa died, his two sons didn't really know what to tell the rabbi to say in his eulogy.

And so the rabbi said that Grandpa was a good man who loved his family and worked hard. Nothing more.

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