4 | JANUARY 25 • 2024 J
N

essay

What I Learned While Reading
My Great-Grandfather’s Last Will
M

y great-grandfa-
ther’s will is a sin-
gle page, 235 words
typed on plain paper and
signed in Yiddish. It is undat-
ed, but he died
in 1967 of pan-
creatic cancer.
“Dear chil-
dren and
friends,” Zayde
wrote, “when
the time will
come and I will
die, and everyone must die,
I beg of you, children and
friends, you shall not weep
too much, because I have
lived a full life.”
His name was Yitzchok
Yehoshua Dantowitz and
he was born in 1887 in
Ciechanów, Poland. He came
to the U.S. in 1906, worked as
a tailor in Boston, and taught
my father — who later taught
me — how to be a Jew. The
will requests that “the less
money the better” be spent on
a coffin and lists five commu-
nal charities to each receive
$25 — worth $250 today.















































“I ask forgiveness from
everyone,” it says. “Maybe I
did not do right by my chil-
dren and friends, so I ask for-
giveness. All of you took good
care of me and respected me.”
Zayde’s humble, poetic,
faded words were among
the treasures we uncovered
this week as we packed up
the house where my parents
lived for 36 years to move my
mother into a Hebrew Senior
Life community.
There was a black-and-
white photo of a pouty Mom

as a girl at Camp Wingo,
and one of Dad in his Coast
Guard uniform where his
face looks remarkably like my
nephew’s. The $3,380 bill the
bandleader sent after my 1983
bat mitzvah that describes it
as “the best, most creative and
exciting” of the more than
7,000 coming-of-age parties
he’d played in a 35-year-ca-
reer. A Yiddish newspaper
clip that seems to be from
the Forward about my father’s
lifelong friend, Cantor Paul
Zim, going to Budapest to
shoot a movie about the
Holocaust.
My sisters and I were sort-
ing through these mementos
and a thrift store’s worth of
kitchenware, books, art and
ephemera two weeks after
we completed the 11 months
of reciting kaddish for Dad
daily, two weeks before
his first yahrzeit — and just

ahead of the 100-day mark
since the Hamas terror attack
on Israel that sparked this
devastating war in Gaza.
I am painfully aware of how
lucky we are to have the lux-
ury of choosing which tidbits
of our history to hold close
and which to give or throw
away — unlike the Israeli
kibbutzniks whose homes
were torched on Oct. 7 and
the Palestinians whose homes
have been flattened by Israeli
airstrikes since. To have been
able to say proper, thought-
out goodbyes to my father in
his final days — unlike the
thousands of families whose
loved ones have been taken in
an instant.
It feels terribly indulgent,
then, to have spent the week
torn over which of the myr-
iad serving pieces my father
used over decades of Jewish
holiday entertaining, calculat-

ing how much I can possibly
cram into the car and store
in our New Jersey basement
in case one of the grandkids
wants it someday, crying as
we reread old birthday cards
and letters from camp.
And yet. It also feels
important, somehow, to tell
the story buried in these
boxes. Not because it is a par-
ticularly significant or special
story, but precisely because
it’s not.
The longer something has
been held onto, the harder it
is to throw away. That’s why I
already have in my basement
crates filled with valentines I
got in elementary school and
journals I kept in junior high
and papers I wrote in college.
But each death and each
move is a moment to not just
rediscover but re-curate our
histories.
As I sorted through the
boxes, I tried to keep only
the things I really wanted to
show my own children, things
I imagined they might some-
day want to show their future
children.
The pictures of Dad and
his business partner Marty
Rosenberg, who died decades
ago, at the ribbon-cutting of
their kosher butcher shop in
Newton, Massachusetts. The
mayor, Teddy Mann, was
there, along with Mom and
our lifelong friend Susan,
Marty’s wife, in their chic
1970s fur coats.
The glowing college rec-
ommendation from my high
school newspaper advis-
er. The program from my

PURELY COMMENTARY

Jodi Rudoren
The Forward

Some of the precious things I saved, including a colorized photo of
my dad in the Coast Guard and a black-and-white of my mom as a girl
at Camp Wingo (far left); the Jerry Davis Band bill from my 1983 bat
mitzvah; a Yiddish newspaper clip about Cantor Paul Zim; photos from
the opening of my dad’s butcher shop; the program from my kids’
baby naming; a portrait of my great-grandfather and a copy of his will.

PHOTO BY JODI RUDOREN

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