Secrets Exposed by The Farewell Span Cultures

“The Farewell,” a new film about extraordinary acts by a family to shield its matriarch from being told she is dying, has received lots of press lately including a piece Thursday by Brian X. Chen, a Chinese-American staff writer of The New York Times (https://nyti.ms/2LDH9Lq). An underlying premise of the film is that Chinese, or for that matter many East Asian cultures, choose to keep secrets, even tell lies, rather than reveal truths that might be harmful emotionally or physically to the uninformed. 

I cannot dispute the notion but I would not limit silence as a tool to just Eastern Asian cultures. Even after my siblings and I grew up and married our parents kept quiet about health issues, about impending hospital stays. They didn’t want to burden us is how they would explain their silence. 

Perhaps it was an Eastern European thing, as well. Our father’s closest friends all emigrated from the same small town, Ottynia, in Galicia, at various times part of Austria-Hungary, Poland and now Ukraine. Many lost relatives during the Holocaust. During their monthly poker games, wives included, nobody talked about Ottynia. Nobody talked about departed, murdered, family members. They kibitzed about the cards, about business, about everyday life. Nothing about the past. Nothing about Ottynia. 

Was it any different from veterans of the Second World War who kept the horror locked inside military-issue chests stashed in attics, basements or garages until their exploits began surfacing after Tom Brokaw’s revelatory 1998 book, “The Greatest Generation,” released their collective heroism and trauma to a nation grateful but mostly uninformed to the sacrifices they made to protect and secure freedom for peoples around the globe? 

I can think of no example of silence more profound than what transpired between my father and his best friend from Ottynia, Charlie Brooks. Charlie was the youngest of three brothers. Adolph the oldest. Next came Harry. All three with their wives were part of the poker game that floated each month from home to home of the eight or so couples who were regular players. 

Eventually, all but Charlie, his wife Lily and my parents remained alive. They would see each other often. They usually ate dinner, then played cards to pass the evening. 

His voice was loud, a combination of a cement mixer with a bad muffler. Charlie was an effusive, stocky man. Always smiling. Laughing. He always was happy to see me. And Gilda. 

Several weeks before Ellie was born in December 1981 we came with three-year-old Dan to my parents’ home in Brooklyn one Friday evening for a weekend visit. Over dinner we asked about Charlie. 

Matter of factly my mother said Charlie had died. What!?! When!?! 

Right there, at the dinette table at which we were sitting, she dispassionately related. During a card game one Saturday night in August he suffered a heart attack. While they waited for an ambulance my father tried to revive him. He couldn’t. 

Lily never forgave his failure. You have to understand. To many emigres from Ottynia my father was an unquestioned leader of extraordinary talents. It was incomprehensible that Charlie could die in his house at his dinner table. That Kopel could not save him. 

I think my parents were caught up in the complex myth, as well. So they kept Charlie’s passing a secret, to be released only because we asked of him. Gilda and I did not have the opportunity to attend his funeral or make a shiva visit. My parents felt it was better to spare us the immediate sorrow of his death. 

Charlie is buried a few yards from my parents in the communal plot assigned to members of the Ottynier Young Men’s Benevolent Association. 

As is the Jewish custom, each time I visit my parents’ graves I place rocks atop their headstones and those of my father’s brother and his wife. And one on Charlie’s, as well. 

Images of the Past

Every now and then Gilda and I engage in an intellectual discussion on the merits of ending our print subscription to the NY Times, retaining just the online version. We always wind up keeping both, not the least because of my devotion as an ex-newspaper reporter to the tactile experience of holding newsprint in my hands but also because of the serendipity of finding stories in print I most probably would not have engaged had I been surfing the Web site.

Last Sunday’s Style section provides a compelling, and for me, personal, example. I didn’t get a chance to read the section on Sunday. It lay untouched until Tuesday night as I prepared the weekly recycling pile. Before I chucked it, I checked the wedding announcements. You never can tell when you’ll see someone you know; one time I discovered the marriage of a young man who was a camper in my bunk when he was 12 years old and I was his counselor. All the other kids hated him. He must have done something right, however, to have won The Times’ wedding pic lottery. But I digress...

Back on page 19 of the 20-page section, The Times ran a story on “the lost art of the group portrait at events,” highlighted by a 10.5-by-5.5 inch photo of the guests at the recent wedding reception of Brenda Malloy and Hal Reiter (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/fashion/weddings/banquet-photos-put-everyone-in-the-picture-field-notes.html?scp=1&sq=hal%20reiter&st=cse).

Two things about that photo. First, I believe I know the aforementioned Hal Reiter. If he’s the guy I think he is, he’s the chairman and CEO of a major retail industry executive search firm, Herbert Mines Associates. (For those searching for the happy couple amid the group, Hal and Brenda are in the middle. He’s in shirtsleeves, she’s wearing an off the shoulder white dress.)

But more importantly, the group photo is similar to a picture that hangs on the wall of my den. It’s of the 50th Golden Jubilee dinner of the First Ottynier Young Men’s Benevolent Association at the Hotel Commodore in Manhattan on December 24, 1950. There must have been at least 500 people in this group photo, with my parents easily visible sitting two tables to the left of the dais.

Ottynier (sometimes spelled Ottynia) is a small village, a shtetl, part of an area known as Galicia, controlled over the centuries by different countries. When my father was born there 100 years ago, Ottynier was in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After World War I it became part of Poland. The Soviet Union took over after Hitler and Stalin partitioned Poland in 1939. Germany conquered the area in 1941. Today it is in the southwest corner of Ukraine.

In 1931, Jews totaled 1,116 of the town’s 4,059 residents. Historically, Jews comprised about 25% to 40% of the population. That is, until they were eliminated by the Nazis and their Ukrainian sympathizers.

Jews began emigrating to America from Ottynier in the 19th century. Like most of their cohorts from Eastern Europe, they formed fraternal organizations, societies to help acclimate newcomers to America and to send funds to those back in the Old Country. After my father came to the United States in January 1939, he became active in the FOYMBA, eventually serving many years as its president.

In keeping with one of the founding principles of the group, to have social and cultural events, much of my parents’ entertainment activities revolved around the society. Aside from the annual dinner dance and smaller, more casual affairs, my parents had a floating monthly poker game with seven couples of their closest friends. They played penny-nickel stakes, husbands in one room, wives in the other. When I was around 10 years old they’d let me play one or two hands for either parent, in between my chore of making highballs for all who asked.

I look at that group photo almost every day. Though they don’t appear so, most of those in the picture were younger than I am today. My father was approaching his 40th birthday, my mother a mere 33 years old. Today, there are fewer than 50 members of the society who meet once a year for a deli luncheon. Most of those who attend are distant cousins of mine. It’s hard to get younger generations involved. I’m as guilty of indifference as the rest.

A young cousin from France recently visited Ottynier. Laura’s trip might be included in a French documentary about families who trace their roots back to Poland. She wrote me:

“We met an old man name Greenberg who lives in the suburbs of Kolomya now; he's more than 90 years old. He is the last living Jew from Ottynier apparently. Born there, he was hiding when the mass murders took place.

“I showed him pictures and he recognized Wolf (my uncle Willy) immediately. When I said "Fursetzer" (the original version of our name), he remembered: ‘Yes, two sons went to the USA, one before the war, the other after’.

“We went to Ottynier and met with old people. They do recall the name Fursetzer. We did not find much more. We went to the Jewish cemetery, there are almost no tombstones left. Most of the Jews of Ottynier were shot and buried there, it's a mass grave.”