Page 200 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Old age and the future

and I can only feel them in their original: “Beloved wife and mother,
loyal Jewish soul. Our tears shall moisten the soil of your grave.”
It is customary with the Jewish people to wait one year before
marking the grave, but there is no meaning to that custom; it has no
tradition, no religious meaning whatsoever. So I decided to put up
this monument after seven months. What does it matter, as it says in
Hamlet, that man builds monuments of stone and iron: time turns
them to ashes. This generation may not know the meaning of those
few words in Hebrew; in a few years we are forgotten, but some
historian might chance to look at the stone and say, “There were
some Jews in Los Angeles.” This new generation is doing as the
German Jews did a century ago, erasing from the prayer book all
Hebrew letters and copying the churches of other people.
Assimilation is reaching the cemetery.
Only I and my two children and their families came to see the
stone and we moistened it with our tears. We did not care to have
friends come or a rabbi just mechanically say a few prayers which do
not help us or the dead. It was the day of days to me; it was not like
the funeral, when my mind was shocked and blurred, with no time to
reflect or contemplate. Here I had experienced seven months of
loneliness, and reflection on the past forty-seven years—when I first
married I acted as her father because she was so young, and in later
years when I was older and declining, she acted as a mother to me—
reacted on me when I visited the grave, and melted my eyes into a
stream of tears. They are hard to hold back whenever it comes to
mind. I know people who go regularly every month or so to visit the
grave of some loved one, but I cannot stand the thought of doing
that; I cannot control my feelings, they overcome my reason and
bring tears and tears.
It brings to mind my grandmother Beula’s funeral, which I wrote
about earlier: oh, how my mother and I cried when following the
cortege! And how different life—and death—is now, after people
have become prosperous, educated, and so-called progressive. All
look for sensual pleasures and excitement, and avoid sorrowful
things: don’t be emotional or expose your feelings, keep your cheeks
dry and moisten only your throat with your tears; smile, show your
teeth—whether you are young or old—and laugh. It has come to it
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