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

