Well, thanks for looking at it. When it gets out of Beta I think it might good for us, because by that time we may be way past the Z in Alzheimer's and we might need the site as a daily reference marker to our being and proof that at one time we actually existed.
I would prefer, however, that time might work backward and that I could hold conversations with my great-grandfather and his son, my Grandpa, who died when I was a callow youth of sixteen and I didn't know the important questions that I would want answers to, some sixty years later.
I've been hoping for a meeting with my father at 50, and grandfather at 50, and great-grandfather at 50, and me at 50 ever since I was fifty but I don't think that is in the cards for me. I would have liked to be able to sit at the table with each of us the same age at the same time, knowing what we knew at that age and then being able to tell each other, although I would have been more interested in what they had to say about their lives and history and what it was like for them in Russia and then in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side and how my Great-grandfather felt when he realized that his son, my grandfather, was a rabble rousing non-believer socialist bum, and then that my father was a person with little interest in politics or religion but a guy who ran with rum-rummers and ran track in high school, and who later became a Beau Brummel in the nineteen-twenties, with a big car and drinking, and the horses, and somehow still running a drug store and recipes for making 'gin' and 'scotch', and 'rye', using as a base the alcohol that druggists could purchase "for medicinal purposes only," and then there were the gallons and gallons of Lydia Pinkams, a tonic for women's "ailments," also mostly alcohol, but then you probably know all about that too.
What must my grandfather and his father thought of Bernie then, who liked to say that in his high school class the kids either became gangsters or judges, there were few other choices.
And then there was my great-grandfather, Abraham, now buried in the Landsman Plot at Mt. Hebron, with twenty-five other Katz'. What must he have made of all these goings on? He was a religious man, who prayed at he eastern wall of the synagogue every day and who was one of the seven founders of the Hebrew Free Loan Society--how could he have an atheist, or, at best, an agnostic for a son, one who spoke at street corners, and went to meetings instead of schul.
O what went on in HIS head, poor Abraham, everything lost, everything going down hill, and Bernie marries a Shiksa, can you believe it? With a son no less. It was probably better in Svir, near Vilna where he could keep his family in their religion and there were no apostates, only the Polish Noble whose estate he managed while the nobleman drank, and raced horses, and screwed Jewish maidens, -- just like Bernie...
Life has stolen away youth.
Life has stolen away youth.
