Leibisch's Journey

The last visit I had with both my parents was in 1989 and took place in Miami, where they had been living for some 30 years, after spending the earlier part of their marriage and family life in Rochester, New York. Both had come to America as immigrants when they were young. My father, Leibisch Ackerman, was from Kupel, a small town, or shtetl, in the Volhynia governorate of Imperial Russia, about 50 kilometers east of the border with Austria-Hungary, in what is now Ukraine. My mother, born Rebecca Ressell, was from Lithuania, then also a governorate of Imperial Russia. He was 17 when he arrived, on his own, at Ellis Island. She was about six, accompanied by her parents and brother as well as other relatives. My parents met through the local Kippel Volin Shul in Rochester and married three years later after my father had “established” himself. He started small, managing a single parking lot and worked six days a week building up his business. After thirty years, he retired at age 55 on disability, the decades of working outdoors during the harsh, upstate winters having taken an early toll on his health. When I saw him last, it would be a few months before he passed away. My mother, suffering from mild dementia by then, was mostly homebound and unable to fulfill her regular household duties, such as cooking and cleaning, with her usual efficiency--something my father had bitterly taken issue with. He was never one given to sympathy or patience, particularly when it came to mealtimes. He was resourceful though, so his afternoon routine was to venture out to shop for kosher food that was easy to prepare and if necessary, reheat. During that last visit my father seemed especially frail, his weight loss obvious. He still managed his daily walk down to the shops and Cuban bodegas on Collins Avenue, a short distance from his rental apartment, but I offered to drive him this time. It was during this last, ordinary outing with my father that my long-held views about him began to shift: my understanding of who he was, where he had come from, and what he had endured from an early age. The details of the day I spent with him, nearly 40 years ago, are etched in my memory. He pointed out a bodega where he said they carried “excellent cantaloupe,” a fruit he especially enjoyed. We parked, and upon entering the store, an elderly man behind the counter, recognizing my father, called out to him, “Lou-ees” --the Spanish pronunciation of Louis, an anglicized version of his given name, Leibisch. The clerk proceeded to speak in rapid-fire Spanish, and I was startled to hear my father respond to him with equal fluency. He had always spoken Yiddish with my mother at home and English with me and my two siblings, Marty and Ruby. When we left the bodega, I asked if he had picked up Spanish conversing with the shopkeepers all these years. No, he said, he had learned it when he was a child, living in Argentina. Argentina? There would be times, infrequently at best, when my father would reminisce about his youth in Kupel, and how he had left at an early age to come to America. He shared relatively few details about that part of his life and we, his children, were never encouraged to ask for more. I imagine there were things he never even told my mother. It seemed to me we were a family of silences. American families lived in the present rather than their European past. Still, the past haunted my father. Although there had been no confirmation at the time that his parents had perished in the Second World War, he said he knew in his heart when their letters stopped abruptly in 1941 that they were gone. Efforts during and shortly after the war to gather information about the survivors of Kupel through both official and unofficial channels had come to nothing. Richard, my uncle Sydney’s son, who was a post-war Air Force officer, attempted to obtain survivor lists but was unsuccessful. At home my parents never discussed the war and what had happened in any depth with me or my siblings. It wasn’t until I was old enough to seek out the information on my own that I learned about the Holocaust. I read anything I could find on the subject in newspapers, magazines and books. It seemed any discussion about the war was only between them, in Yiddish—a language their children did not speak. When it came to my family, such as what had prompted my father to leave Kupel when he had, and the eventual fate of the extended family left behind on both my father’s and mother’s sides, the stigma around discussing these painful subjects persisted. It wasn’t until years later that I was able to confirm through Yad Vashem, the archive in Israel dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust, that my grandparents, Hirschel and Ida, along with most of the other Jews of Kupel, had not survived the war. Over the next several days of my visit to Miami, I carefully questioned my father, taking pages of notes, trying to fill in the missing pieces of his youth. The doors to his past long shut had miraculously swung open and I wanted to take full advantage of it. There was still more of his story that I needed to hear, not only to learn his history, and our family’s history, but to better understand what went into forming the difficult, complicated man he was to become as a husband and father.