Only once did I see my mother really cry, full out. It was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, 1960. I was nine years old. As was our custom we got dressed up, far more than on any other day of the year, and traveled from our New Jersey home to Pelham Parkway in the Bronx, then a kind of upper middle class Jewish ghetto, to celebrate the holiday. That meant going to services in the morning and after the shofar (ceremonial ram’s horn) was blown and services concluded back to my maternal grandparents’ apartment for a big festive meal.

Services were held at the shul my grandfather frequented down the block from their apartment. Last month, as I drove Eric back to the City, we took a little detour so I could show him some sites of my childhood, and I pointed to an alley on Wallace Avenue and said this was the synagogue where my grandfather went. “This?” he said, looking at the alley. His incredulity was understandable. This shul (literally, “school”) was not a grand building constructed for worship. It was a first floor room carved out of the back of a standard Bronx six story apartment building, with virtually nothing to signal from the street that it was there. You would go to the back of the alley, through a door to a tiny vestibule and enter a plain square windowless room, perhaps 70 by 70 feet, with the ark containing the torahs along one wall and the seats arranged around it. To the right side as you entered, behind a curtain, was the women’s area, where perhaps 20 women could squeeze in on folding chairs.

The rest of the room was the men’s domain. Just as the space itself bore little resemblance to what you’d think of as a synagogue, the service did not resemble what you might expect of an organized religion. Yes, the rabbi or cantor would go through the set text for the day in a prescribed sequence. But for most of the time, in between the leaders’ punctuations, there was a chaotic cacophony of men’s voices, each at their own pace and varying volumes, reading aloud the very long passages of text in between. This was what I understood “davening” (praying) to mean: Jewish shucking and jiving, rocking back and forth and occasionally bending at the knee, mumbling the text until bursting into the recognizable song-like cadence of a prayer. The men were packed shoulder to shoulder, in suits, and on a typical Rosh Hashanah day, with its delightfully warm weather, it would be hellishly hot in there. As a child among the men, I reveled in the overwhelming intensity of the experience.

Rosh Hashanah 1960 was warm and sunny, and when we arrived there was, uncharacteristically, a very large crowd outside on the sidewalk. Something was amiss. My mother, upon inquiring, was told that someone had had a heart attack in services. Call it intuition, but she got an ashen look on her face and sent my father back down the alley to check out who it was. Perhaps five minutes later, he reported back that it was her uncle, Max Warman, my grandfather’s brother, and that an ambulance had been called. And while we awaited the ambulance, she sat down on a milk crate on the sidewalk, dressed to the nines, and sobbed uncontrollably.

Max (pictured above with me when I was about 5) was a gregarious bear of a man loved by all, a cheerleader of conviviality whose most characteristic act, arriving at the lake at our family bungalow colony in the Catskills, was to wade in and splash himself with cold water, loudly proclaiming “L’Chaim L’Chaim” (literally “to life,” but really “what a pleasure”) to everyone around him to urge them into the water. While it was not surprising that my mother would be upset, I was astonished to see an adult, particularly a pillar of strength like her, cry like a baby.

I was of course reminded of Max’s Rosh Hashanah death, which so shook my mother, by the news as Rosh Hashanah began this year of the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which shook so many of us.

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