In January 1903, a girl named Henya Woliner was born in the town of Nemirov in the Eastern European territory of Galicia. In December 1996, a woman named Helen Podhoretz died in a hospice in Manhattan. Henya Woliner traveled a long way to become Helen Podhoretz; she was an American for 76 of the 93 years she spent in this world. And yet everything about my grandmother — the rich accent with which she spoke, the clannish way she viewed the world, the overwhelming vitality that kept her alive years after doctors had written her off marked her forever as a Jew among Jews, lost in 20th-century America.
Time was, it was a recognized fact that ordinary people could have greatness in them. And I don’t just mean greatness of soul, like a Tolstoyan peasant; I mean that Moliere could come across an illiterate carpenter and see in him the raw genius of a court craftsman. I mean poor and humble folk for whom there was no such thing as ambition because the circumstances under which they lived made ambition purposeless. In our day, however, there are precious few excuses for not “reaching your potential.” Now, a poor girl- child like Henya forced to raise her four siblings in the midst of World War I because her cruel father had left for America and stranded his off-spring with their hopelessly neurasthenic mother is supposed to become a successful country-andwestern singer at the very least.
Like Moliere’s carpenter, Henya could have done no such thing. She arrived in America at the age of 17 and only four days later met a cousin named Julius Podhoretz. After their marriage, Helen and Julius spent many years living in an American shtetl, a tenement complex that housed a score of relatives. After his death, she spent her last 25 years in an apartment building set aside for elderly Jews, where Yiddish was still spoken as familiarly as English. My grandmother lived within limits that had been drawn for her, and never fought them. In this way she never could become an American.
And yet she had greatness in her. She had the vibrancy of a great actress, the presence of a great political leader, and, most of all, the storytelling skill of a Dickens. This is no exaggeration: She spent her life transmuting her existence into a picaresque masterpiece. She could bring a room of noisy, argumentative Jews to an expectant hush merely by merrily uttering the phrase “Now you must listen to this. . . .”
Now you must listen to this: about Joe the boarder, my grandfather’s first cousin and best friend who paid $ 15 a month for food and lodgings. When Henya was pregnant with my father in 1929, she figured she was going to need the room Joe was occupying, and so she said to him in Yiddish, “Come on, Joe, beat it, scram already.” Joe, who fancied himself an American dandy, replied in English, “Like fun I will!” And he stayed. . . .
Now you must listen to this: about Gertie and the milk. My grandmother’s sister Gertie had a husband Hymie. Hymie worked at a dairy and was allowed (so they said) to bring home milk and butter and other such stuff. Gertie sold the dairy products to her sisters. They got for cheap, and Gertie got a little money. So one day Gertie is by Henya. Henya takes some butter and her regular carton of milk, and hands Gertie the change she owes her. Gertie fixes Henya with a cool eye and says, “Milk went up a penny.” . . .
We buried my grandmother last week. The hearse and the limos and the cars assembled near the funeral home on the Upper West Side to form the procession to the cemetery on Long Island. You try making a cortege on the streets of Manhattan; taxis kept intruding on us, separating the procession by traffic lights and right turns. Finally, we made it onto the Triboro Bridge (you haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen a hearse pull into a tollbooth), where we hit a massive traffic jam that completely disassembled the procession — after which the hearse driver began to speed like a madman to make up for lost time.
Somehow, we made it to the cemetery, where we stood, engines running, in the driveway for 20 minutes. Finally, we were led to Henya’s final resting place, where a sullen workman gestured us pallbearers onto a path toward the grave. But this path required us to climb over a large pile of dirt, and not only did we get earth in our shoes, we nearly dropped the coffin. Later, after he spoke the prayer called the Burial Kaddish, my father took hold of a shovel to begin the solemn task of consigning his mother to the dust whence she came — and, tripped up by the same dirt pile, took a slapstick gainer to the ground.
It was the last great story involving Henya Woliner Podhoretz, and believe me, she could have told it infinitely better. I can hear her now: Now you must listen to this, God . . .
JOHN PODHORETZ
