Eulogy for Ethel Bailkin delivered graveside by her great-nephew Saul Kelner
At the start of the family history that the rabbi just mentioned a moment ago, Aunt Ethel wrote, "The inquiring mind wants to know, what are my roots, my heritage? With these requests in mind I am appointing myself family historian and will endeavor to enlighten you on the facts." She wrote these words in 1989 and most of you have probably read them.
As the Narrator of the family history, Aunt Ethel more than anyone, would recognize that for our family, her passing is more than the passing of a single person. This is a watershed moment for us. As Stevie wrote, this is the end of a generation. The family of Morris and Dora and the 9 siblings who planted our roots in America 111 years is now gone. It's worth contemplating what that means. I won't be so presumptuous as to tell you, since I think it will mean different things for each of us, but I do want to say some words in the hope that they might help us to be present in the significance of this moment.
As the Narrator of the family history, it is from Aunt Ethel's stories that we can trace our family back to Russia in the 1700s
(Pinchas, her great grandfather who lived to 113)
When she told our story, she told it with her her parents and siblings as archetypes for everyone who came after:
if you have artistic talent, you got that from Morris
If you have artisitic AND musical talent, you are like Ida.
And if you can curse like a sailor...
Where are the 9, where are the archetypes now?
In Angels in America, Tony Kushner opens with a eulogy mourning the passing of the generation that links a family to its roots. In the play, it is the immigrant generation itself, not the first American - born generation that Aunt Ethel represents, but his point is apt: we are mourning a woman who experienced what we will never experience, and yet the legacy of her life will continue to shape each of us.
The play opens with an old rabbi giving a eulogy. In the HBO production, Meryl Streep, in beard, acted it in a thick Jewish accent. I'm not sure if Kushner intended that:
"She was not a person but a whole kind of person.
The ones that crossed the ocean that brought with us to America the villages of Russia and Lithuania.
And how we struggled and how we fought for the family for the Jewish home.
Descendents of this immigrant woman you do not grow up in America you, your children, and their children....
You do not live in America.
No such place exists.
Your clay is the clay of some Litvak shtetl.
Your air is the air of the steppes because she carried that old world on her back across the ocean in a boat and she put it down on Grand Concourse Avenue.
Or on Flatbush.
You can never make that crossing that she made for such great voyages in this world do not anymore exist.
But every day of your lives the miles, that voyage from that place to this one you cross every day.
You understand me? In you that journey is."
Ethel was our closest link to the generation of immigrants who came from the Old Country to America
- the last to know Meir, who came in 1904
And she was the last of the 9 siblings. As each one passed, Ethel became more and more our living and loving link to each of them. The three youngest sisters, Kate, Ethel and Sylvia, had always each been surrogate moms to each others kids, and I know that for my mom, Rhoda, after Sylvia died, her bond with Aunt Ethel only strengthened. With weekly phone calls and regular outings to take her to Original Village for Italian food. For my children, Shoshana and Boaz, Aunt Ethel was their as-if great grandmother, the only one they ever really knew.
"You understand me? In you that journey is"
Aunt Ethel's journey -- from a child in an immigrant house in an apartment without a toilet before the invention of radio to matriarch of the Cohen clan whose fifth and sixth generation Americans are scattered across the country and the world and who stay in touch by Facebook and Instagram on their cell phones-- this journey happened entirely in one City. For almost the entire second half of her life in a square mile radius at Bustleton & Red Lion.
The family's history is in Zhitomir, but our roots are in Philadelphia. Because Aunt Ethel and her generation planted those roots here. For those of us who have moved away, Philly is our Old Country.
Aunt Ethel was the last of our family's first truly American generation
-She was the first born in a hospital
- the first and only sibling to go beyond High School -- she was always proud of that
- She met Uncle Iz at a soda shop, where she would go for, in her words, "a coke & a smoke." That's an American romance. Things like that weren't happening in Russia.
Aunt Ethel paid homage to the past, to roots, but she was not bound by it.
She believed in progress, that newer is often better. I remember when she was teaching me to bake knishes she told me don't fry in schmaltz, because it's not good for you. And don't eat the gribenetz because it's bad for your cholesterol.
(I wanted the schmaltz for the sake of nostalgia. She wasn't sentimental like that)
Aunt Ethel bridged our family's past and present
- she was a living bridge to our family roots,
- to an intimacy, when the family was not 3rd and 4th & 5th cousins, but siblings
We have lost that bridge.
She is not here to tell our story over homemade kamishe bread and chocolate chip cookies, and to be for us that living connection to the 9 siblings, to Frank, Joe, Tillie, and Rose, to Ida and Phil, to Kate and Sylvia, and to the ones who brought us to these shores and made us an American family, a Philadelphia family-- Meir who became Morris, and Dubba who became Dora.
But as Ethel told us, their legacies live on.
If you have artistic talent -- you are like Morris. If you are artistic and musical, you are like Ida.
And any time you keep those memories alive, pass them along, and tell a piece of our family story, you are like Ethel.
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