My Father's Survival

A life of tsuris— and occasional joy

This essay is part of a new collection of work inspired by the anthology On Being Jewish Now: Reflections of Authors and Advocates. Want to contribute? Instructions here. Subscribe here.

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Photo by British Library on Unsplash

Tsuris, Jewish troubles: of these my father had plenty. As a small boy, his mother hid him and his four sisters in the root cellar when, in 1913, Cossacks on horseback thundered into their Russian shtetl. Even after the tsar no longer ruled, Cossacks felt empowered to carry out antisemitic raids. My grandfather, already in the United States, was trying to earn passage to bring his family over. My father’s five older brothers, out selling fish they’d caught, never made it home. My grandmother led my father and her four daughters from their burning village into the forest, where they hid from the Cossacks’ dogs. They lived on roots and berries, so many berries that their lips and bowels were blue. 

In 1922, my grandfather finally located them through one of the many ads he placed in the Jewish press. My father, 13 by then, began making deliveries, hefting cases of seltzer and running errands. At 17, muscular and fast on his feet, he trained at Stillman’s Gym and became a middleweight boxer, eventually earning enough money for his own grocery store—where he worked 16 hours a day, six-and-a-half days a week, seeing the sky mostly through a smeary window. Work was his penance for having survived. 

Nights, as he sat in his armchair soaking his swollen feet in a basin of Epsom Salts, I sat on the carpet, looking up at him. Even if he was too tired to speak, I was hungry for time alone with him. I watched as he nodded off to sleep, startled awake, his blue eyes darting, then closed them, his right eye half-open as if on alert for the next pogrom. 

At our Orthodox temple, I was thrilled to be his youngest daughter. My sisters, five and eight years older than me, had to sit behind the curtain in the women’s section with my mother while I was next to my father, his tallith draping one of my shoulders as he davened. I would amuse myself the whole service by running my hand over his deep blue velvet tallith bag, watching the magic of the fabric change from light to dark and dark to light. 

I would think of this in the times when my father was released from his darkness and infused with light, with joy, with freilichkeit. He loved Jewish weddings, the thought of, with mazel, a couple bringing forth Jewish children to replace all those who were lost. He would be the first to gather guests to the dance floor for the hora. On his swollen feet, he would pull someone into the center, sometimes me, link arms, and go around faster and faster until he and the wedding hall were a blur of laughter and music. 

Everyone clapped, stamped, and cheered when he squatted to do the kazatske, kicking his legs out one at a time, arms folded across his chest or his hands touching the floor in turn so that his upper body wagged as he kicked. Oh, the leaps he made, his legs in a V, his spins in the air, sweat like dew on his broad forehead. 

I am glad my father wasn’t alive to learn about the October 7 massacre of Israeli Jews and the surge of antisemitism that followed. At my dining room table on Rosh Hashanah, with my children and grandchildren who never knew him, we dipped apples and challah in honey to wish each other a sweet New Year. May the world somehow leap from the darkness of hatred and war into the joy and light of peace.

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Rochelle Jewel Shapiro has published essays in the New York Times (Lives). Nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, her short stories and poetry have been widely published. Death, Please Wait, her poetry collection, was published by Box Turtle Press in 2023. Currently, she teaches writing at UCLA Extension.

Instagram: @rjshapiro

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This essay is part of a new collection of work inspired by the anthology On Being Jewish Now: Reflections of Authors and Advocates. Want to contribute? Instructions here. Subscribe here.