I find myself thinking all the time about Bubbie and Zaydie Tucker and what they would say through all of this. They survived both Stalin and Hitler, they survived World War I and the Bloodlands that followed World War II, they just barely made it out in time from Bubbie's home shtetl when the Jews of Wysokie were rounded up to be massacred - she literally heard the gunfire that killed her mother. When Stalin came in 1939 with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, it was expected that Zaydie, as a businessman, would be arrested and carted away, maybe to Siberia, maybe to a mass grave. But he was beloved of his workers, who vouched for him so heavily that he was spared, so the story goes. When Hitler finally came into Eastern Poland after the breakdown of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1941, they had to go into hiding in barns and fields for nearly three years, living on a diet of raw potatoes. They were also hiding with Bubbie's sister Rochel and had to leave their daughter in a convent. Rochel was the architect of their salvation. Like me, she had red hair that didn't look Jewish, she was a passionate leftist, and she would risk going into town without a yellow star and buying whatever little supplies she could when she could easily have been recognized, and god knows what else she might have done to keep them safe. But they were perhaps the only married couple anyone had ever met who survived the whole experience together. When it was over, they picked up Zipporah from the convent and went back to Zaydie's shtetl of Bransk. 3000 Jews lived in Bransk before the war, 37 came back. Zaydie, being head of the only coherent family unit, triumphantly led the Rosh Hashana service with little Zippora at his side. By Yom Kippur she was dead from typhus. Shortly thereafter my aunt Rochel, who seemed to have connections with the partisan resistance, was killed in the riots of Poland's Nazi-sympathizing Endex Party which followed World War II. I've heard conflicting accounts of her murder. I've both heard that she was deliberately assassinated and also that she was caught in a crossfire and shot in the back. But given the nature of those times, I wonder if the real truth is not still much more disturbing.
In January of 1946, there was a big question about what would be done when the first Jewish child was born in that city, Bialystok. Leftists encouraged the parents to embrace the Soviet Union because God had clearly abandoned us. But they elected to have a Bris, to keep going as Jews, and every Jew in the entire region came to celebrate it. The name of the baby was Yaakov Ticocki, who soon became Jack Tucker, my father.
They'd be 110 and 105 now and were both suffering from dementia by the time I was 10. There's obviously plenty of time to write real, better reminiscences of them now if it seems like an appropriate time. But what they would say now, what they would do, what their goals would be, how they lived, became so abundantly clear to me in the last few weeks.
We are about to undergo enormous struggles, struggles that will probably not end with coronavirus. America is so overdue for problems that beset the rest of the world, and a Pandora's box has now opened that may only begin with coronavirus, but also may include a depression as bad or worse than The Great Depression, hyperinflation, a world economy that may only be reignited by war between rising powers and declining powers, or a true dictatorship of emergency power in which the Trump administration delays the election or a war between the two factions of America, and after all that, global warming which takes out huge swathes of coastal populations, and hundreds of millions of migrants coming to our border who must flee from countries whose lands are no longer arable and have even less functional governments than they have now. Will all of this happen? Probably not. But it's all possible, and much more possible than it was six months ago. Even if only two of those events were to happen, it will be the single worst crisis in American history, worse than the Civil War, and to a tragically large extent, whoever survives what comes next will be arbitrary - a mixture of skill and luck.
Bubbie and Zaydie lived for their family, and they lived for what they called 'simchehs' (slightly different than the Hebrew pronunciation). A 'simcheh' is a momentous life event. They lived for Friday Night Shabbos dinners, they lived for Bar Mitzvahs and weddings, they lived for births and brisses, they lived for reunions where surviving relatives would come from all across the globe, and events would be a bewildering melange of English, Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, Spanish, even Polish, where everybody would update everybody else on thirty years of family news in each other's barely comprehensible foreign accents.
And they did not live for the High Holiday services, they lived for the lunches and dinners afterward. Their family's security was literally all they cared about, because every other part of their family who didn't make it out no longer existed. We all take for granted what we have until we can lose it.
If the worst is truly coming, it ultimately does not matter which of us makes it out of all this so long as those who do can keep this all going, rebuild, and give us all more things to have simcheh about. More births and bar mitzvahs, more holiday dinners, more weddings, more reunions with whomever is left. So long as there are still people left, there is always hope that these events will never wipe so many of us out again, and life goes on, sometimes with agony, sometimes with joy, and lots of mediocre and frustrating times that make us question the value of it all. But what matters is that all the institutions that make us us, the continuity of everything that we were, will still remain, if we keep them going, because otherwise, in moments like this, there's no reason to keep fighting. Institutions can always evolve to include new people and concepts, evolving is how to prevent these events, but they must stay here through anything and everything.
Bubbie and Zaydie did not endure all that, their families did not endure even worse, for it all to stop here. Everything they did in their lives was to make sure that here, in Amerikeh, what happened to them, what happened to so many generations before them, would not happen to us. On some level, they clearly knew it was possible. Zaydie did all kinds of crazy things like bury silver dollars in the back yard just in case he had to dig it up to bribe someone for help if society broke down. We never figured out where he buried them but it suddenly doesn't seem so crazy.
The point of life is not happiness, it's not achievement, it's not power or money, all those things disappear and many of them are clearly about to. The point of life is to live it, and everything short of survival is secondary and fleeting. But when it becomes clear that some of us can't survive, then the things which make life worth living become much more important to cling to with every bit of our grip, because otherwise, why keep going?
Bubbie and Zaydie did not live through all that for us all to not be mindful of what's possible. This may well be the moment that comes to every civilization and to every place this family has ever been. The storm of 2020 is going to capsize the ship, and those of us who try to stand upright will be taken down by the water. This is a year without simcheh. And this is a year to get everybody to safety whom we can, beginning with those we love, and then those they love, and then those deserving of love. We all need to decide what our priorities are, and Bubbie and Zaydie's example lights the way to mine.
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