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 continued on page 6