Nuland’s Father and Bubbeh

In his recently published memoir, “Lost In America: A Journey With My Father,” Sherwin Nuland contrasts his father’s religious feeling with that of his maternal grandmother. This grandmother, whom he called “Bubbeh,” lived as part of the family in their crowded South Bronx apartment when the boy Sherwin was growing up.

“Bubbeh’s Jewishness,” her grandson  writes, “unlike Daddy’s, was of a deeply spiritual sort, though she had no formal schooling. Hers was a homogeneous blending of religion, old-world superstition, and folklore, and its elements were inseparable.

Her relationship with God was so personal that she often addressed him in the diminutive, as did other shtetl women of her generation, He was Gotenyu, ‘my adored Goddy,’ as though she were speaking directly to one of her beloved grandchildren, but one with all the direction of the universe contained in His powerful goodness. She believed with an intensity that guided her life and enabled her to endure in face of tragedy after tragedy.”

Of his father, by contrast, the author writes: “My father, on the other hand, believed because he was a Jew, and Jews are expected to believe, at least on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when fate and destiny are determined. For this reason, he rattled out the prayer without thought–unless it was of the magnitude of Untaneh Tokef–and admonished his sons to do the same, lest some awfulness befall them.”

Bubbeh had emigrated from Russia in 1903 to New York, there to join her husband and two sons. She brought her four daughters with her, but the oldest of them died, as did the three male members of her immediate family. This woman stood four feet, ten inches tall, and never did learn to speak English. Yet, her Yiddish was the dominant language of the home where she came to live with her extended family.

The portrait of the grandmother’s spirituality is beautiful in its old-world simplicity rooted in a culture that sharply contrasted with that of New York City in the 1940s and 1950s. The promise of better days in America  never came through for her; instead she experienced the death of those closest to her. So God was her refuge and she prayed to Him for support.

That she had such a familiar relationship with God is a sign of her deep spirituality. It did not make any difference that she had hardly ever been to school because her Jewish tradition had taught her a trust that personal tragedies could not ultimately upset. Though her religion was not “pure,” mixed as it was with superstition and elements of folklore, it gave her a vivid sense of the beyond and moved her to find inspiration for her difficult life.

The prayer life of the author’s father, Meyer Nudelman, differed from that of his mother-in-law in many ways. Perhaps the most important was that it lacked the heartfelt intimacy with God that she experienced. At the weekly Sabbath and during other holy days, Meyer would perform the ritual in what seemed automatic fashion, racing through the prayers without any sign of the wonder and awe that they stir in deeply religious people.

However, one can make mistakes in judging other people’s practice of religion. The memories of his son may fail to recognize in his father’s prayer important elements of true religion that underlay his practice. Who ultimately knows how much spiritual sustenance Meyer received from his carrying out of the rituals?

His son says that Meyer believed “because he was a Jew.” That is not a bad reason for belief. It may not express the highest ideal held up by the religions of the world but this approach does maintain contact with a spiritually rich tradition. Even if his own faith remained weak, he had the advantage of being part of a community of faith. In a sense, his own spiritual shortcomings could find support in the faith of others.

The Nudelman household was often a cauldron of conflicting emotions as its members struggled with the pressures of poverty, disease, and cultural confusion. But religion, although realized so differently in the lives of Bubbeh and Meyer, served as a source of strength as the family faced these great challenges.

Richard Griffin

Sherman Nuland’s Story

All during his growing-up years and well into his adulthood Sherwin Nuland tried his utmost to get out from under his father. Even in his 70s, however, when writing a memoir, Nuland has not entirely resolved his problems with this parent. As he says: “I am writing this book to help me come to terms with my father. I am writing this book to finally make peace with him, and perhaps with myself.”

The book is entitled “Lost in America: A Journey With My Father” and ranks among the most compelling memoirs I have ever read. Its portrait of a Jewish immigrant family in the Bronx during the early and middle years of the 20th century fascinated me throughout, with the agonizing relationship of father and son at the heart of the story.

As a person given in later life to frequent reflection on my problematic relationship with my own father, almost 50 years after his death, I strongly identify with Nuland’s account of his struggles with his father.

His father’s name was Meyer Nudelman, as he was known when he first came to New York from Russia in 1907. At age 16, Sherwin changed his own last name to Nuland, largely in an effort to ease assimilation to Gentile society. On this occasion, ironically, his father also wanted to adopt the name Nuland, an action that would have defeated part of Sherwin’s reason for changing. Only vigorous protests from Sherwin and his older brother Harvey staved off their father’s action.

The small South Bronx apartment which the family occupied resounded to the words and phrases of the Yiddish language. Only the two boys learned to read, write, and speak English. The others – Meyer and the boys’ mother Vitsche, their maternal grandmother whom they called Bubbeh, and their aunt Rose – in effect remained inhabitants of the old world in Russia. Even though Meyer went to work every day in the garment district, he spoke a brand of English that was his own, mixed in with often bizarre dollops of Yiddish words and idioms.

Sherwin, called Sheppy in the family, was only 11 when his mother died, a crushing event for the boy and one that left him more than ever under his father’s influence.

Normally theirs was a turbulent family atmosphere. Even in religious practice, there was tension. When Meyer presided at the Sabbath and holy day rituals, he would rush through the rites at what the son remembers as “express-train speed.” He could discover precious little spiritual content in his father’s observance.

His grandmother, or Bubbeh, on the other hand, practiced a religion of some depth. Her relationship with God was personal and familiar, so that “she often addressed Him in the diminutive, as did other shetl women of her generation. He was Gotenyu, ‘my adored Goddy,’ as though she were speaking directly to one of her beloved grandchildren.”

Sherwin Nuland does not now believe in God, he reveals. In later life he sees the legacy of his family’s religion as negative. “It has been for me like the song of the Lorelei,” he writes,  “trying to lure me back to the destructive reefs of obsessional thinking, guilt, and depression. This is the heritage I have carried, the legacy of the formalized religion of my father, and no doubt also of the superstition of my Bubbeh.”

Despite what he describes as an agonizing struggle to become free of his father, Nuland’s life story leads to successes that make his father feel proud and fulfilled. After doing well as an undergraduate at NYU, he was admitted to Yale Medical School, his expenses paid by a family friend, possibly a cousin. On the young doctor’s graduation, his father’s face shone with pleasure and the son for the moment was able not to feel embarrassment at his presence.

Sherwin Nuland’s next professional success was being chosen as chief resident in surgery at the Yale hospital, only the second Jewish person to be so selected. When he broke this news to his father, the latter’s feelings went beyond words. “My triumph,” Dr. Nuland writes, “was his reward for all the bitterness he had suffered over the years, for the hours of despair and for enduring in the face of sickness, pessimism, and even death .  .  .  This news of mine was testimony that he had not failed in America. It was his affirmation as a man.”

The effects of the author’s long struggle to come to terms with his paternal heritage remain with him. A severe bout with depression ultimately resolved by shock treatments witnesses to the continuing impact on him of his inner torment.

And yet, he concludes his memoir by saying this about his father: “In seeking to escape him, I have drawn closer, and now at last I know that the closeness can be good. I have been trying to find his way in America for him, and for me. There is no end to it.”

Richard Griffin

France – Where to Eat

What a pleasure to visit a country where every meal is an event! I refer, of course, to France, the land of esthetic eating and drinking. It tempts me to feel envious of the older people I observed in that country where nourishment has long been a fine art.

Among such elders are Georges and Liliane Hue, a long-married couple who live along the banks of the Eure River in a town in Normandy called Pont-de-l’Arche. After striking up conversation with Georges about his house, framed by a brilliant display of roses, and the experience of World War II, I saw his wife returning from the bakery with a fresh baguette in hand. If only we Americans could experience the daily pleasures of such bread!

The Hues seem happy in their retirement years, finding special pleasure in their grandson and the peace and quiet of their river site. They showed themselves warmly receptive to this brash stranger and his family members. As citizens of Normandy, they remember with appreciation the role of Americans who came to liberate their country in 1944.

Almost everywhere you go in France, memorials to the dead of two horrific world wars attract your attention. In Paris, my eyes fixed on a tablet marking the death of a 28-year-old freedom fighter, Georges Loiseleur, who was killed on August 19, 1944 , the day I was peacefully celebrating my 16th birthday.

And in every village and town, one sees stone tablets mounted in churches, commemorating those killed in the two great wars. In one of them, under the heading 1915, the list began: Irenέe Bisson, Cέsar Ambroise, Henri Ambroise. Even after all these years, the pity of all those young sons of their families and country lost in such a foolish enterprise still strikes my heart.

These evidences of loss help one sympathize with France recently leading the “coalition of the unwilling” in the face of a new war. I feel myself an honorary member of that coalition myself, an affiliation strengthened by the encounter with these memorials so widespread in the land of our traditional ally.

Other elders caught my attention. I stopped to talk with Madame Alleaume, an 80-year-old resident of the charming port of Honfleur. She lives next to the hotel where we stayed.  She and I chatted one evening about our lives. Her only complaint was her knee, still troubling her after recent surgery. Like many elders everywhere, she put this trouble in perspective and smiled as she talked.

In a Paris park, my wife and I chatted with a woman who had come there to meet her sister-in-law for lunch. This woman, whose name we did not get, recalled with pleasure spending a year in Washington D.C. in the 1950s. Like just about everybody encountered on this visit, she feels appreciative of us Americans, though some of them strongly disapprove of policies pursued by our federal government. For instance, the van driver who took us back to Charles De Gaulle airport was eloquent in his denunciation of the George W. Bush and the people around him.

Speaking of De Gaulle, while in France I read a biography titled “The Last Great Frenchman.” Of course, the dramatic moments leading to the liberation of Paris fixed my attention as I recalled reading about them when I was a teenager. By force of character and sometimes sheer orneriness, the General moved boldly in the midst of turmoil and seized the dominant position as head of state.

As always in biographies, I also took note of the subject’s final years and the appraisal given the man by the writer Charles Williams. “The essence of Charles de Gaulle remains clear,” Williams writes. “Colombey, his home, of a very affectionate, emotional and private man; France was the home of a very cold, ruthless and proud public man. The contradiction between the two sides of his character has yet to be resolved.”

I also read the gripping popular history “Is Paris Burning?” This book recounts events first threatening, and then averting, the destruction of this fabled city. This saga retains its power as you read about the German commandant, von Choltitz, in his back-and-forth struggle not to carry out Hitler’s orders to blow up the 45 bridges across the Seine and the great buildings that contribute so much to Paris’ beauty. Though we never discover exactly the commander’s motivation, he seems to have lost confidence in Hitler’s wisdom and perhaps doubted his sanity.

Back to eating and drinking, I will not forget sitting along the Seine in sight of Notre Dame Cathedral and the Sainte Chapelle while eating a simple yet altogether delicious open-air lunch. A salade mixte and a small pichet of vin rouge followed by a petit cafέ were the only items I ordered. But this combination proved scrumptious.

What more could a rapidly aging man like me possibly need to advance his continuing pursuit of happiness?

Richard Griffin

From the Air

When traveling by airplane, I always request a window seat. To my surprise, seats next to a window are almost always available. I relish the opportunity to look out on the world from high in the sky.

Much about air travel has, of course, become routine. If you fly often, you are accustomed to check-in procedures (though security measures now make them more burdensome), boarding announcements, and reviews of safety measures. These preparations for flight, about the same at every airport and on every plane, stir boredom in many frequent flyer who simply want to get to their destination.

But flight itself should not be boring. I never tire of looking down, usually from a vantage point of several miles, at the earth, the sea, or the clouds. This scenery, laid out on a grand scale, allows me a renewed appreciation of the beauty of creation.

A recent flight home from Paris displayed the wonders of the French landscape. Far below me I could see the Seine as it wound its way north of the city into Normandy. Constantly turning in its path to the English Channel, this river, so resonant with history, led us out toward the Atlantic Ocean and, ultimately, Boston.

The beaches on France’s north coast stirred memories of having seen some of them at ground level only a few days previously. The beach at Etretat, especially, framed by giant cliffs with hollows eroded by centuries of wind, is a sight not to be forgotten any time soon. And the charm of the fishing and yachting port of Honfleur stays in memory long after leaving that picturesque place.

The clouds, when they appear, are drawn into marvelous shapes. Some wispy, others full bodied, these phantasms shifts into continually new formations and, when we ultimately descend to lower levels, at times cover us with darkness. The shapes in their myriad designs have the power to fascinate the observer who continues to contemplate them.

While flying, we are sitting in a huge machine, hundreds of us, with little if any awareness of the dynamics that hold us atop the world. The seat costs money; the view is free of charge, to me a bonus of splendor as we speed by at over 500 miles per hour. Though not an adventurer like Charles Lindbergh nor a poet like the dashing French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery, I am mindful of the challenge and romance they found piloting across the ocean some 80 years ago.

To me it is literally awesome to be carried thousands of miles across huge land masses and a vast ocean toward home. Covering distances that took our ancestors weeks to traverse, we get there in hours. Yes, the passage can sometimes drag but that comes from human inability to sustain the sense of wonder for very long and to keep in mind how fortunate we are in modes of travel compared to our forbears who lived before the 20th century.

In December of 1968, three American astronauts, after orbiting the  earth, set course toward the moon. As they traveled further, they focused a television camera on Earth and sent back images to the planet’s inhabitants. In the words of NASA, “for the first time humanity saw its home from afar, a tiny lovely, and fragile ‘blue marble’ hanging in the blackness of space.”

The astronauts arrived at the Moon on Christmas eve, at which time the crew continued sending pictures while reading these dramatic words from Genesis: “God created the heavens and the Earth, and the Earth was without form and void.”

Though not at the moon’s distance from earth, 250,000 miles, I felt some of the same emotion from my airplane seat. Seen against the backdrop of history, our modern air travel, however routine it has become, amounts to a continuing giant leap for mankind around the globe. We have gained access to a exalted vantage point  for admiring God’s handiwork in the air, the seas, and the land..

Thus I find in airplane travel the basis for a spirituality that starts with awe. You gain a new perspective on the world in which you live, you are presented the opportunity to see it anew and to value it for beauty and grandeur. The flight eventually comes to an end, but the vision can last and shape a deeper appreciation of the gifts that belong to us all.

Richard Griffin

Going Home

I am far from home and have been gone for a long time. Soon, however, I will fly back home and be reunited with my family members. That will be a happy time but before then, I must clean up the rooms where I have been living. This task involves gathering together my possessions, packing up the things I wish to save and throwing the others out. I feel anxious about being able to finish this work on time before I must leave.

This first paragraph summarizes the most frequent of the dreams that I experience. Many other dreams (some of them shocking or humorous) come through my psyche at night but something like this one occurs over and over. Being away from home; planning to return; feeling under pressure to get things done before I can leave – – all of these features mark the typical fantasy that visits my unconscious during sleep.

It does not surprise me to experience this kind of dream.  After all, in my waking life, I have often lived away from home, notably during my two years spent in Europe. Even when living in my home state, I did so, for a long time, in monastic seclusion cut off from family members and friends. And not rarely did I have to deal with the pressure of moving from one place to another.

Also, metaphorically, as a longtime baseball player and fan and a current Sunday softball player, I know the allure of heading home. Although my stepping on home plate has become increasingly rare, I still relish feeling my foot touch that starting and finishing place.

A spiritual writer friend, Harry Moody, sees dreams as one of the ways by which we come into contact with our soul. Filled as they are with basic images of  reality, dreams can put us in touch with our deeper selves. “These images,” writes Professor Moody, “convey advice and messages to us while we sleep, appealing to our deeper need for both guidance and transcendence.”

My friend’s view of dreaming stirs in me sympathetic vibrations, and much of it is confirmed by my experience. At various points in my life, dreams have given symbolic expression to events going on in my life and to vital issues with which I was then preoccupied. I have found them valuable for the messages.

I must add one note of caution, however. Though dreams may prove exciting and enhance our fantasy life, it can be dangerous to take them as guides for living. Just because a dream may be gripping does not mean it should be the basis for important decisions.

That noted, my most frequent dream clearly points to something important in my inner life. It suggests a longing for home, a deep restlessness to return to the place where I began.  This dream tells me that “home is where the heart is,” and that is where I want to go.

Being ill at ease with where you are is a situation that always reminds me of St. Augustine’s famous phrase addressed to God: “You have made us for yourself and our heart is restless until it finds rest in you.” In this perspective, nothing can satisfy human longing until the creature is united with the creator.

A verse from the Psalm 42, “As the deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you O God,” expresses the same desire. And the words I heard sung in Hebrew at a wedding last week: “I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me” (a verse from the Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible) suggest not only the longing that the bride and bridegroom feel for one another but the longing that seekers have for God.

The desire for God is itself a spiritual gift that can bring us closer to God. If we find material things ultimately unsatisfying, that is what many spiritual seekers have felt through the ages. Though these created realities  may have their own beauty and powerful attraction, they cannot fill the heart. God alone can offer complete satisfaction, not to say ecstatic completion.

Desire for God can be the foundation stone of one’s spiritual life. It can also serve as the engine and the content of our prayer. “You can go home again,” you can imagine God saying in open-hearted response.

Richard Griffin

Caring, Not Caring, and Sitting Still

“Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.”

These prayerful words come from T. S. Eliot, one of the most prominent poets of the 20th century. Born and raised an American, he later became a permanent resident of England. Characteristic of him, was a vision of the world and his place in it that were profoundly spirittual.

The poem from which the quoted words come is “Ash Wednesday,” a complicated but eloquent celebration of his Christian faith.

The balance between caring and not caring can be difficult for just about everybody. On the one hand, we must value our own life and we also learn to place great importance on our personal relationships, our possessions, and the beautiful things of the world.

Thus we care about our own bodies, our families and friends, our homes and their furniture, and many of the things we see around us or hear about from others.

And yet, on the other hand, every person is tempted to care about some things excessively, to his or her own spiritual harm. Marriages break up, and friendship shatter, often because of disordered caring about possessions or other human beings.

The spiritual tradition in which I was trained as a young man, namely that created by Ignatius Loyola in the 16th century, placed great emphasis upon what that saint called “indifference.” In one key passage of his little book “The Spiritual Exercises,” Ignatius said: “A person should be indifferent to all things and not wish for good health rather than infirmity, wealth rather than poverty, honor rather than dishonor, longer rather than shorter life.”

For him, the crucial task is to win the salvation and perfection or our own soul and everything else is secondary. Looking at life from this vantage point, spiritual persons should use things only in so far as they help them gain salvation and remove themselves from the things that endanger salvation.

This indifference is a combination or caring and not caring –  –  caring a whole lot about salvation and not caring about things that interfere with the spiritual health of the soul.

In this way I learned a form of detachment from things and even from other people. However, this austere way of living the spiritual life made me quite rigid; only with time did I learn to become flexible in applying this framework to daily life.

At my current stage of life, I now doubt whether the notions of indifference and detachment were good for me. These ideas perhaps required more maturity than I could muster when they were first presented to me.

I still find some value in these ideas. However, I now take them as rules of thumb rather than as commands. They are too abstract for my personality and tend to reinforce character traits that unduly limit spontaneity.

The parables of Jesus, the stories told by the Hasidic rabbis, and the anecdotes from the spiritual masters of the Far East warm my heart the way principles such as indifference and detachment can never do.

Mind you, many of the narratives with spiritual punch teach the same principles. But they do so with a human touch that is much more compelling for people like me.

“Teach us to care and not to care” remains a beautiful prayer, simple sounding but full of meaning. This attitude of soul is something we have to learn all of our lives. The prayer asks God to become teacher of this subtle spiritual art.

“Teach us to sit still” prays for another spiritual gift, the ability to do nothing. Meditation is a very respectable way of doing nothing because it occupies us in a receiving rather than a giving role.

In a hyperactive society like ours it is hard to stop for anything. Most of us must scramble to make a living, provide for our families, and maintain social contacts. Often we do not find time to just sit there and soak in the silence.

Even for those of us not pressed for time, we are out of the habit of just being there. Still, if we can ever find a short time, 15 minutes a day for example, using it for sitting in silence usually proves valuable. If we dare face doing nothing, it often pays off with an inner peace and quiet that can feed our souls the rest of the day.

Richard Griffin

Life Suddenly Changed

Certain days in our lives bring with them events that will mark us for the rest of our time on earth. This is the kind of dramatic event that arrived for me, some three weeks ago. My life will never be quite the same.

Shortly after one Friday midnight I awoke feeling intense pressure in my chest. I quickly became convinced that I was either then having a heart attack or was about to suffer one. Alarmed at the danger, I enlisted my wife to drive me to the hospital without delay.

Despite strong reluctance to pass even one night hospitalized, I agreed to be admitted, was quickly tied up to a heart monitor, and underwent tests to diagnose my problem.

For months previously, evidence for heart disease had remained unclear. No one had diagnosed clearly the reason why I so often experienced, on my daily walks, feelings of constriction in my chest.  

As soon as a veteran cardiologist at the hospital examined me, however, he was sure I needed a angiogram, whereby dye would be sent through the major arteries leading to my heart. Though I had always hoped to avoid this procedure, I was anxious enough about my condition to agree to have it done. However, I would have to wait until the following Monday, which meant a longer hospital stay than I had bargained for.

The angiogram began easily, with the wire inserted through the groin up to the heart. It quickly revealed blockage in one of the arteries. The surgeon then asked me which of two choices I wanted to make: bypass surgery or the implanting of a stent, or small metal mesh tube placed in the artery to hold it open for blood to flow unimpeded to the heart.

The stent was an easy choice because it could be inserted right then and there; bypass surgery, clearly much more drastic, would have had to be scheduled for another time.

I share these perhaps unwelcome details with the reader in order to suggest the impact on me of this sudden emergency. The revelation of having a serious heart problem shocked me into a more sober view of myself in the world.  

Now on the way to recovery, I feel myself to have entered into a new era in my life. “As you get older, life humbles you,” says my social worker friend, Wendy Lustbader. I have been humbled and now have a different self-concept as a result.

In addition to my native bones, muscles and other natural parts I now bear within myself an artificial product, a piece of technology. Though I am told the device will not set off airport alarms, I am eerily conscious of having foreign matter within my chest.

Up until two years ago, I never took any medication regularly. To me, it seemed an ideal to stay clear of prescription drugs and I believed that many other elders took too many. As a result of the new experience, however, I have become a walking drug store and take a pageful of pills every day.

I also prided myself on my low weight and my exercise disciplines. My diet, if not perfectly in accord with enlightened nutritional guidelines, was to a large extent free of junk food (with the exception of cookies, a longtime  insurmountable addiction.)

Though the oldest of six siblings, I considered myself to be the most healthy overall. My brothers and sisters had suffered some health problems that I had escaped. I qualified as something of a model elder at large in almost never having to spend a day in bed sick.

Now I have tasted vulnerability and I must continue to live with a vivid sense of my own mortality. Only by luck did I escape sudden death from a heart attack. During walks full of chest pain, I could easily have dropped dead. The intervention of a highly experienced cardiologist in response to my need for help has saved my life.

My expectations for the future have also needed trimming. The surgeon has told me that his work should bring me ten more years. Is that all? What about that online test I took two years ago that projected my living to 95.3 years of age?

However, the changes in my mentality are by no means all negative. I have gained a lively sense of the love that family members and friends hold for me. On hearing of my ordeal, they have all expressed concern for me and have rejoiced at my escape from mortal peril.

The care given to me by the hospital staff also makes me feel valued. Nurses, doctors, blood drawers and others worked hard to ensure my rescue and recovery. They have shown me that in a crisis, I can indeed count on the kindness of strangers.

I now feel a new appreciation for the wonder of ordinary life. As Rabbi Abraham Heschel once said: “Just to be is a blessing; just to live is holy.” Each day of life has become even more precious to me than it was before.

Richard Griffin