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Workmen’s Circle Cemetery

August 19, 2010 in Best of THE NIGHT TRAIN, History, Meditations | 6 comments

In the early 1920s, my grandfather Isadore came to Detroit from what is now Belarus. My great-grandfather Yehuda was already here, building houses on the east side for the rapidly expanding community of other European immigrants settling at the boundaries the city.

Yehuda died in 1954. He was 86 years old. (If you want to skip the mental math, he was born in 1868. Time marches on.)

He’s buried at Workmen’s Circle.

I never would have known this had a reader not pointed out to me (at a really fun backyard party, after some champagne) that he’d noticed an out-of-place Orthodox Cemetery near Roseville, nestled between Wal-Mart and a Hampton Inn, or something. I forgot about it for a few days. (Thanks a lot, champagne.) Then I asked my dad where his parents were buried. He said they were at Beth El, at 6 Mile and Middlebelt, but that he thought his grandfather was somewhere around Mt. Clemens, at a Jewish Cemetery on Gratiot.

Let the games begin, right?

***

Detroit’s Jewish population in 1920 reached 35,000, a 10-year growth of almost 250%. In the city and all over the country, the climate was right for new congregations, new community organizations, new social clubs and new political movements.

Workmen’s Circle, a progressive Jewish fraternal organization dedicated to social justice and (at least today) a “big tent approach” to Jewish culture and community (see their website), was founded in New York in 1900. Rooted in the labor movement, progressive socialist politics and the Eastern European Jewish tradition, Workmen’s Circle was a big hit in Detroit. By 1917, the Detroit branch of Workmen’s Circle was the largest branch of the fraternity in North America and, by far, Detroit’s most popular Jewish organization. (See the Jewish Virtual Library’s entry on Detroit.)

Workmen’s Circle Cemetery was established in Clinton Township in 1919, with separate sections designated for member organizations, including several local congregations, Jewish lodges and friendship societies.

It’s one of the most distinctive (and well-kept!) cemeteries I have ever seen. Many of the burial sections have their own signs and gateways:

The search for my great-grandfather had barely begun when I found the Irwin I. Cohn Michigan Jewish Cemetery Index, a digitized and searchable database of over 64,000 burial records from the mid-1800s to 1999 for almost all of the Jewish Cemeteries in Southeastern Michigan. My dad cross-referenced, and within a week I knew that Yehuda was at rest at Workmen’s Circle, buried with his congregation in the Beth Schmuel section of the cemetery.

Dad casually mentioned that Yehuda had helped build, literally, Beth Schmuel. Founded in 1926, the congregation operated out of a rented hall for a few years before buying a house at Blaine and Twelfth from a bank for $2500 cash. Yehuda, a charter member of the congregation, helped convert the home into a synagogue, with apartments upstairs for the rabbi and his family. (More on the 40-year history of Beth Schmuel here. The congregation, which had grown wildly to a membership of more than 400 families, built a new synagogue at Dexter and Buena Vista in 1948, where they stayed until the congregation disbanded in 1959.)

Standing at Yehuda’s grave — lightning from a receding thunderstorm flickering in the sky — I felt an unusual chill. Readers of the blog will know that I’ve been visiting relative strangers at cemeteries since this project began. Why would Yehuda be different? He’s a relative. But a stranger. I know more about most of the dead people I’ve written about here than I know about him. If we were to meet, I’m not sure he’d feel much of a connection to me — an agnostic ethnic mutt, decidedly not Jewish (or anything else), a child of the comfortable suburbs.

But I am the daughter of his grandson. Our lives, and our experiences of the world, are completely removed from each other, but that fact remains.

It’s a funny feeling. Maybe that’s all there is to it.

In the Jewish tradition, I left a small stone on his grave marker. Like a hard, ancient, uncorruptable calling card:

Someone was here to see you.

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Valentine’s Day

February 12, 2010 in Best of THE NIGHT TRAIN, History, Meditations | 4 comments

st valentines day

(Harper’s Magazine, 1861. Library of Congress.)

I didn’t realize that Valentine’s Day was this weekend until late this afternoon. The fella and I don’t have anything planned, except we might have lunch with an out-of-town friend who’s flying into Ann Arbor to visit his long-distance girlfriend. For Valentine’s Day.

My blog has lately suffered at the hands of a story I’m putting together for the weekly about accordions in Detroit, so the chance to take advantage of an easy editorial plug-in would have been really appealing, had I not completely forgotten that it’s happening in like two days. And everyone knows that despite our 24/7 communications-saturated society, no one really reads blogs on the weekends. Okay, that’s not true. But if you post on the weekend, it doesn’t count. That’s what I was taught in internet school, anyway.

So, in between checking Facebook and not working on my story, I thought about some lesser-known famous romances. Mary Vining and Mad Anthony Wayne? I don’t really know enough about that one to know if it even happened.

mary vining

Captain Frederick and Maria Pabst? A handsome couple, magnanimous citizens, upstanding Germans and good parents, but I don’t really know anything about their love. Just their beer. There’s an arcane story that delights me about Frederick saving Maria from a shipwreck when he was still a Great Lakes captain, but chances are better that Maria’s father, the brewer Philip Best, just wanted Frederick in his camp.

maria

Mostly I’ve been thinking about love affairs that are a little closer to home.

margaret and bill fw

(Family photos courtesy my mom.)

This is my Aunt Margaret and Uncle Bill in 1963 or 1964. They met on a blind date when Margaret was 19. Uncle Bill used to tell me that Margaret wore all blue on their first night out: a blue dress, blue stockings, blue shoes, a blue handbag. I bet she looked incredible.

Bill and Margaret got married seven years later, at a hunt club in Farmington Hills. They spent the rest of their lives, as far as I could tell, marvelously in love.

My mother was nine years old when they were wed, so she grew up with Bill and Margaret as much as I did. They were like grandparents to me in a lot of ways: Margaret picked us up after school, cooked us fishticks and frozen vegetables or macaroni and cheese for dinner, read to us. But more importantly, she tended to the small, real people growing inside of us. We had conversations with her. We shared ideas, defended convictions, talked about books we liked, boys we liked, places we wanted to see. She was honest, and joyous. It’s hard to even write about her without stooping to tripe; I can walk my brain through every corner of her house,  but the influence she had on my life and the incredible love I still feel for her really overpowers any constructive details I can remember about her besides the last three agonizing weeks of her life.

So thank god for old family photos; I can see them like this, 20 years before I was even born, when they were gorgeous and adorable. Even when they were aging, Margaret grey and papery from decades of cigarettes, Bill bald and permanently sun-leathered, both of them losing their teeth, their love for each other was radiant, and together, they were a pretty beautiful thing to behold.

When Margaret died of lung cancer in 2001, Uncle Bill was permanently wrecked. It took years for him to cut his trips to the cemetery from twice a day to once. When we buried him in 2008, we arrived at the mausoleum to find the flowers he’d taped to the marble wall of her crypt the day before he died, peacefully, while he was napping on the couch.

I have a fiancé now, and it tears my heart out that Margaret and Bill don’t get to meet him — and that he has to settle for an occasional teary (and usually sad-tipsy) monologue from me about how great they were. On our first date, we went to the opera. I tried not to think too much about it, but my favorite vintage shopkeeper talked me into a stunning wool shift dress, with sheer mesh netting at the neck, dotted with tiny sequins.

It’s royal blue.

egglestons

Sometimes it’s so mind-boggling to remember that people who lived in the past really lived, you know? Ate, and drank, looked around, talked to each other, made love, fell in love, had bad days and good days and boring days, and maybe sometimes thought to themselves, how weird is it to be alive?

I don’t know why this is especially resonating with me in the run-up to Valentine’s Day. Maybe because even though it’s hard to understand, emotionally, what it might have been like to live without electricity, paved roads, heat, grocery stores, or to be the commander of an army, the governor of a frontier state, the wife of an aristocrat or the daughter of a beer baron, the capacity to understand a love affair is readily accessible to just about everyone.

Those are my great-grandparents in the black-and-white picture above, dolled up in their Sunday clothes. I don’t know anything about them, not even how they felt about each other, but I’m glad they got it on at some point. Happy Valentine’s Day to them, and to you.

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Dream – 09/20/09

September 21, 2009 in dreams | No comments

It was New Year’s Eve. I was spending it at home with my family, and it was almost midnight, but my mom was asking me if I would help her look for dessert contests, because she felt she had done a really good job with the cupcakes.

The New York Times was live-blogging New Year’s Eve, and their team of reporters included a woman named Paula, with a huge red mane of hair and huge ’70s glasses, who had recently passed away. It was New Year’s Eve, and as everyone knows, the dead are allowed to come back to life on New Year’s Eve, and when they walk amongst the living, it is as if they were never gone. Even the dead don’t realize they’re dead.

So my aunt, who died eight years ago, was at this party, in a beautiful black knit suit with a pale pink blouse and a pillbox hat. I was so happy to see her, but I didn’t really know how to talk to her. No one really did, and she didn’t really know what to say, so she kind of wandered around the party, listened in on conversations, drank coffee and sat alone at the dessert table. Whenever I walked past her I said, “Auntie, how are you?” And she said, “I’m fine, how are you?” and I told her I was good.

(Writing this I am reminded of the last conversation I ever had with her. She was bedridden, wasting, lapsing into morphine hallucinations, and when I visited her I didn’t know what to say besides, “How are you?” She said she was fine. My mom said to her, “You’re not fine. You feel like shit. It’s okay to say you feel like shit.”)

My aunt left the party early, which was tender, because I knew I might never see her again, at least not until next New Year’s Eve, but maybe never. I didn’t cry, though, or make much of a fuss, because I was busy looking for dessert contests and hoping not to miss the stroke of midnight.

I went into the garage to get something, maybe another tray of cupcakes, and found that my mother, to celebrate the New Year, had rented back every single car that anyone in the family had ever driven, including my first car, a red ’94 Mercury Topaz, which in this dream was also a convertible. I begged my mom to let me keep it, but she said, “We just drove it the last time I visited you in Wisconsin! Don’t you remember?” I did not.

My dad looked at his cars and said, “I never drove any of those.” My mom said, “Of course you did.” And I thought, “Yes, I remember all of those cars.”

In waking life I realize my dad was right. He never drove any of those cars.

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