A Rosh Hashanah Remembrance

My Brother’s Memory solved my Rosh Hashanah mystery.

I have been listening to “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn” this week and have been thinking about my Mom almost since the minute I started the first chapter. There is a passage in the book about how a little girl and her brother sat watching their Mother’s piano lessons. I thought about how our Mom taught herself piano and really should have treated herself to lessons rather than painfully watch as my brothers and I never really picked up the piano despite years of lessons. The little girl is also enamored by her father who loved to sing. The book tells the story of a little girl growing up with a deep love of books almost a century ago — when my own mother was a little girl and developed a delight in reading that I share.

I had also been thinking about her when I stirred the soup simmering on my stove. Despite the pandemic I have made a big pot of chicken soup for our holiday. Tomorrow I will make her brisket recipe and a noodle kugel, too. It is our holiday no matter how unlike others this year’s celebration will be.

My memories shifted gears when late this afternoon my brother texted me this short message, “On the Jewish Calendar, Sam Shapiro died 73 years ago tonight.”

Sam Shapiro is my maternal grandfather. My name Susan was chosen, as is the case in my Ashkenazi tradition, to honor his memory. Throughout my life I had heard stories about how he had loved music and shared that love with my mother who had a trained soprano voice that echoes in my ears whenever I hear the melodies of certain prayers chanted at religious services. It is during those moments that I remember sneaking into the adult services at our synagogue to sit with my parents and listen to her expertly sing Hebrew prayers that I knew she could not read.

We chose to join a synagogue a decade ago after I heard a Cantor’s voice that reminded me of my Mom’s. A voice that was its most beautiful in synagogue.

I always have known that my grandfather had a fatal heart attack during our synagogue’s high holiday choir practice. I had never really focused on the details of exactly when it had happened. I learned that today through my brother’s vivid memory. It was the night before Rosh Hashana and my grandfather was the professional choir director at the large Cleveland area synagogue where he had also been a member for decades. My Mother who had grown up at the synagogue, was one of the choir’s soloists.

In texts this afternoon, my brother explained that our grandfather’s funeral was held in the hours before the holiday began. My Mother and our extended family came home after the funeral for the ritual shiva. But, a few hours later when the holiday started, under our religious tradition, she could not sit shiva for the duration of the holiday. She changed clothes and went to synagogue to sing with the choir for that night’s services and then woke the next morning and went back to sing at the next day’s services, too. Those services were the last time she sang with the choir or publicly.

As I thought about his description of those days, I remembered something that had been pushed back in my memories so far that I had thought I had imagined it. I pictured the yahrzeit memorial candle that my Mother lit before Rosh Hashana every year. She would take the candle and put it on a plate and I could see it flickering in the kitchen from my bedroom.

After my father died during the Summer of 1983, I remember asking people when during the High Holidays one was supposed to light a memorial candle. I was convinced that it was on Rosh Hashana and was told by my more knowledgeable friends that it was Yom Kippur. I don’t remember asking my Mother what to do. Every year, for the last 37, I have had to remind myself, that the appropriate time to light the candle in his memory was not on Rosh Hashana. It is almost like I was fighting a reflex.

My Mom was an only child. I have lit one of my memorial candles for her on Yom Kippur and one on her yahrzeit every year since 1992.

Tonight, I lit a candle in my Grandfather’s memory. I did it for my Mom.

It will light my kitchen until Rosh Hashana begins tomorrow night.

Shana Tova. May you have a good year.