Living with family - The Jewish Standard

When I was a kid growing up in Newark, I never missed my relatives. Why would I? So many of them lived, along with us, in the house that Zayda built, on a lot he had purchased at 83 Aldine Street, near the corner of the unforested Forest Place. He built another larger house on the corner of St. James Place, obviously named for a saint, but populated by a density of Jews, including additional family members.

Zayda was one smart guy. Not only did he become a successful builder in America, without any knowledge of the English language, but he also knew that if he built lovely apartments in those houses, in a prime Jewish neighborhood, he’d soon fill it with the occupants he most wanted to live with, mostly his own children and their children. He was the adoring father of six Litwaks, and their relationship was close and loving until he died at age 87.

Zayda loved to play cards, and with his in-house family, there was always a captive ready to challenge him in a game of gin rummy. As a kid growing up, I learned to play when I was young, so when the pickings were particularly slim he would entice me with a Yiddish invite to do a bit of gambling. In truth, I was no match for him, but he never collected my money. That was lucky, since I had none!

Living arrangements like this were common years ago. In our house, with its four apartments, Zayda lived with Aunt Edna’s family. Pop, my mother’s father, lived with us, and Flippy, my aunt’s mother, lived with Uncle Benny’s family. Only the non-related Hoffman tenants, who felt like family, had no older generation living with them. Thus our house was filled with relatives, from grandparents to aunts, uncles, and cousins. Why should I have missed them? They were always there!

In our family, no one outliving a spouse was ever left to live alone and never encouraged to move to a nursing home, which was, in those days, often considered a fate worse than death itself. In those long-ago times, nursing homes were not the stylish places we know today. They didn’t feature gourmet meals, myriad activities, social events, and luxury apartment-style living. They also were not categorized as to needs like assisted living or independent living. Today they feature hotel-style accommodations and delicious food. Then they were depressing places, often with shared rooms and abundant neglect.

My father spent several years in Achuzat Bayit, a lovely place in Raanana that provided a weekly concert on Saturday nights, had a tearoom with frequent entertainment every weekday afternoon at 4, delicious kosher meals, and many activities to keep all of its guests happy and fulfilled. Dad had lost Mom but he knew she would have wanted to see him busy, absorbed in yet another of his favorite nonfiction history books, and still living his life.

Our summers were spent with Mom’s family in our kuch alein in the Catskills. There I grew up with my cousins, who were like siblings to my sister and me. It was normal and it was the way it was supposed to be.

Today, not so much!

This past winter we organized a family reunion for our children and their children, and yes, their children! We were multigenerational and from multiple locations, from Israel, to Maryland, to Massachusetts, to New York and Connecticut, and even a few from where we started, in the great state of New Jersey. It was wonderful and beautiful and tender and exciting to be with our great-grandchildren as they played together in an unstructured setting as we watched their interactions, to be with our grandchildren, many with spouses of their own as they performed in our talent show and davened together and dined together and rejoiced together, and to see the pride and joy in our children’s eyes as we celebrated our togetherness. It was profoundly moving to us and, simultaneously, pervasively lonely. Why couldn’t this have been our normal everyday lifestyle, all of us together? Why did it have to be arranged and contrived? Why are our lives so spread out, even unto different continents?

I think, should I complain or merely bask in the beauty of the gathering? Can I please do both? Can I celebrate when we are together while being sad that we will very very soon be separated again?

I was once in a taxi in Israel and, as is typical, the nahag, the driver, and I engaged in conversation. Normally we would have found a common topic, something profound like elections, or wars, or high prices. That time we talked about family. He had seven children, all married, and all of them came with their children every Friday night for Shabbat dinner, except for one son and his family. Almost all the children lived in Petach Tikvah. The one, the exception, lived in nearby Ramat Hasharon, which was too far to walk on Shabbat, so they could not come for the weekly gathering. This man, this driver, this new friend of mine, was woeful.

And then I told him about our family and that our grandchildren are spread like windblown flowering seeds, all rooting and blooming in different places, some very far away, some merely far away, and a very very few not so far, but not around the nearest corner either. None of us remained on Aldine Street or in the Catskills. Our meetings and greetings are by appointment, always celebrated, until it is too quickly time to part again.

The cab driver nodded his head. He had no words. I hope he knows how lucky he is.

Rosanne Skopp of West Orange is a wife, mother of four, grandmother of 14, and great-grandmother of 12. She is a graduate of Rutgers University and a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. She is a lifelong blogger, writing blogs before anyone knew what a blog was! She welcomes email at rosanne.skopp@gmail.com

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