A Year of Kaddish

Today would have marked my parents’ 59th wedding anniversary. They made it to 58-1/2 years. “Not bad,” as my mother, who had a knack for the understatement, might have said. Or “pretty good, don’t you think?”

I’ve heard the story of how they met and got married hundreds of times, and it got told a lot last August after the funeral and during shivah to the delight of everyone, not the least my father who relishes its telling.

My dad was a Holocaust survivor. He and his brother, Don, were the only survivors in his family. When the war ended, they made their way to America from Poland or what is now the former Soviet republic of Belarus. Their destination was San Francisco, where Auntie Katie and Uncle Reuben Ungar lived. Katie was my paternal grandmother’s sister. She had immigrated between World War I and World War II, and my father remembers hearing his mother saying she hoped to get more members of the family out of Poland during those interwar years. But U.S. immigration quotas of Polish citizens were low and the number who wanted out was high.

When my father arrived in San Francisco, he got a job selling Watkins products and later plastics, as in plastic table clothes, house to house. When other opportunities knocked on his proverbial door, he traveled north to Petaluma, Calif., where he peddled his wares from ranch to ranch and to a nickel-and-dime store. One thing led to another. Before long, he was selling in Portland, Oregon.

Portland was good to him. After first taking a room at the YMCA, he found a room to rent in a Jewish family’s home, when one day his life changed for good, though he didn’t know it at the time. Another Jewish family, the Sliffmans, across the street invited him to the wedding of their daughter, Shirley, on Christmas Eve 1950. And who knew?  Maybe he might meet a nice Jewish girl at the wedding.

The groom was a nice Jewish boy named Ben Benson from Toronto, Canada. Also at the wedding were Ben’s parents, Rose and Joe Benson, and his sister, Pearl, who had planned to spend the week in Portland before returning East to her job in Toronto.

That night at the wedding Stan met Pearl. “Would you like me to show you around town while you’re here?” Stan offered. “Sure,” she said. “That would be lovely.” They went out once. And then again and again and again.

A week later, New Year’s Eve, Stan proposed. In some ways, it was a perfect match. Stan was an immigrant to America. Pearl had grown up speaking Yiddish at home. And in a sense Pearl served as a bridge to this new land for Stan. As his Aunt Katie in San Francisco said, “Canadians are half European and half American.”

Six weeks later, on February 11, 1951, they got married in Vancouver, British Columbia at the home of one of Pearl’s aunt’s, Ann Cohen.

The newlyweds settled in Seattle, where I was born along with my two brothers. Seven years later, in 1958, we packed our station wagon and moved to California and the San Francisco Bay Area.

And as they say, the rest is history.