Second Installment of "A Look From Within"

THE "WHY" IS MURKY AND OBSCURED
　
Now that you’ve seen the "who I am" and some of the "what I am." Let’s have a look at "why I am." That is a question that cannot be easily answered. Quite frankly, I’m not really sure I know the answer. "Why" seems to go very deep. Uncovering the "why" part of anyone is like peeling away the layers of an onion. The further one goes, the more difficult it gets. The more difficult it gets, the less one wants to dig into it.

I’ve seen my family tree as far back on my father’s side to the 1840's, and on my mother’s side only as far back as my grandmother who was born in 1894 and died at the age of 79 in 1975. All four of my grandparents were Russian Jews. My maternal grandfather was a blacksmith who died from lead poisoning in 1928, when my mother was 4 years old. His wife, my maternal grandmother, who never remarried after his death, immigrated to the United States through Canada, arriving there in 1912. Her two oldest children, my uncle Julius and aunt Rosie, were born in Canada. My mother was born in Detroit, Michigan.

My father was born in Romania while his parents, my grandparents were fleeing Tsarist Russia in the wake of the Communist takeover. They were truly non-citizens as they were fleeing without travel papers. They ended up in one of the North countries, either the Netherlands or Denmark. Eventually, they found passage as steerage on a ship headed for Cuba. This was the early 1920's. The first language other than Yiddish that my father remembers was Spanish. At less than three years old, he was a street urchin begging for food on the streets of Havana.

Two of my grandmother’s older brothers had immigrated to the United States several years earlier and had established a Kosher meat market in New York City. They agreed to sponsor my grandfather and his brother-in-law Zalman by providing them with jobs. On that basis, the American Consulate in Cuba provided them with travel papers to enter the United States.
After arriving in New York, Zalman and my grandfather whose name was William found little if any pleasure in butchering. Furthermore, they had heard that Henry Ford was offering $6.00 per day to hire people to work in his automobile foundry in Dearborn, Michigan outside of Detroit. Both families packed up, and I believe made there way by train to Detroit.

The work in the foundry was excruciating, rigorous and most of all blistering hot. The work was hard, but the rewards although steady did not provide the two men what they were looking. They saw what they believed was a far better opportunity, by purchasing a horse drawn wagon and going house to house bartering junk. They became junk peddlers, selling iron to the foundry to be melted down as car parts. For the next 25 years until is death in 1950, my grandfather was a junk peddler.

My father worked along side his father by driving the wagon and later a truck while grandpa did the heavy lifting and lugging. Eventually, my father after graduating from high school went on to college and became an accountant. He worked hard. In fact, you would definitely call him a workaholic. He was driven and did everything to the fullest. When he got involved in something, he drove to the top. He was a winner and worked hard at it. When he died in 1999, his estate was valued at over one million dollars.

I am very much like him. In this case, the apple didn’t fall very far from the tree. I went further and worked harder and got ahead quickly, only to fall flat on my face and have the chair pulled out from under me, not once, not twice, but three times. I still haven’t given up. I will pick myself up and have a go at it again.

It would seem therefore that the answer to the "why I am" stems directly from the "who I am" as well as "what I am" and most certainly from "where I came from."

What is your take! And, what do you think?

Yours truly,

LW