Transcript of “My Zadie’s Chairs”
This is called My Zadie’s Chairs. Zadie is the Hebrew word for grandfather. Bubbe is the Hebrew word for grandmother. So this is actually my great grandfather that we are talking about but also my grandfather. My Zadie, my maternal grandfather had two black mahogany chairs in his living room. One was at his desk and the other one was next to the desk in the living room, next to his bedroom.
Even though he was quite ill with pancreatic cancer, from the time I was born until the time he died when I was only seven, I have memories of him sitting in those chairs. Whether he was doing paperwork at the desk or reading, sitting in the other chair. The chairs actually belong to his father-in-law, the old Rebbe back in Latvia, my grandmother’s father. The chairs came by boat to the South through Vicksburg, Mississippi. Someone has told me probably at New Orleans. They were part of the Michelson Guttman tribe, which had landed when they fled Czarist Russia.
Poppy, what I called my Zadie, left the shtetl and came by steamer from Russia to the American South. Nany, what I called my grandmother, came by boat from Russia to New York City where her brother Max had already settled.
They came together and moved to Trenton, New Jersey and then up to Jersey City and finally to Elizabeth, where Poppy opened Goodman’s of Elmora, a kosher style old deli, a place where you could get a good pastrami sandwich. Uncle Irv and Uncle Julie had come home from World War II. The family along with Uncle Leo and my mother, Josephine, was together again.
It was about 1946. Everyone was married and we, the grandchildren, started coming in short order. And through it all, Nany and Poppy sat in the old Rebbe’s chairs holding each of us as infants and toddlers. Nany would sit in her chair, she would hold us and she would sing her wordless tunes, her nigguns, as they are called, to us, imprinting in our hearts and our souls our family’s cultural DNA.
And through it all, the chairs stood watch. The chairs went to my cousin Leslie after my grandparents died. But when I asked for them, he sent them to me. There are no accidents. The chairs sit in my one-room synagogue a hundred and thirty to a hundred and forty years after they sat in my great grandfather’s one-room synagogue in the shtetl back in Latvia.
I sit in my Zadie’s chair, in his father-in-law’s chair. I channel his rabbinical energy. I channel his spirit. And as I do, I sit in his chair wondering who will look back in a hundred and thirty years and say, “This was my Mama Raine’s, the old Rebba. This was her chair. We brought it from her ranch in Texas where it sat in her synagogue, her one-room synagogue, just like her Zadie’s. Baruch HaShem, there are no accidents.
