Remembering Milton Himmelfarb
A number of readers have asked for the full text of Edward Himmelfarb's eulogy of his father, Milton Himmelfarb, that I excerpted here on Sunday. I mistakenly thought I had posted a link to the full text of the eulogy. I have accordingly copied the moving eulogy of his father by Edward Himmelfarb into the continuation of this post.
It's sort of a cliché, but Dad's entire life was the "life of the mind." I discovered this as a 6-year-old boy who wanted someone to pitch baseballs to him. Dad didn't pitch; Mom did. Mom explained that Dad had never really played ball, even when he was a child. And others have confirmed that Dad was a bookworm from the beginning.But we do have some confirmation that Dad did more than read books as a kid. Dad's mother, my Grandma Bluma, used to tell a story about him – that he loved milk. And because he loved milk, they used to have dairy lunches on shabbat so he could at least drink milk in the afternoon. But one week, they went to a relative's house for shabbat lunch and had a meat meal. In the middle of the afternoon, Dad was playing outside – see? he didn't just read books! – and he called up to Grandma, who had come to the window, "Throw me down a glass of milk!" (I remember the story well. Grandma definitely said, "Throw me down.")
Grandma told Dad that it was only 3 hours after the meat meal and he couldn't have milk until 6 hours afterwards. So Dad responded, "Then throw me down half a glass of milk!" When you have seven kids over a period of 12 years, your kids have very different perspectives on you. Martha and I are probably the only two of us old enough to remember what Dad was like before he had a stomach operation in 1965. His stomach ulcer was quite severe. Along with his poor vision, the ulcer kept him out of the War. It seemed to me at the time that Dad had a rather explosive temper. But I think it really wasn't so bad; I just was a little kid and didn't like to hear yelling.
Martha can speak to what happened when she dropped a whole watermelon on the concrete floor of the basement at Parkview Court. And whenever someone spilled the kiddush wine, Dad could explode. But the ulcer operation, which removed a large part of his stomach, was a godsend for us – and I think for him, too, at least until this year.
He no longer had to consume massive quantities of Gelusil; he could eat the food he loved, including pickles; his temper went away; and he turned into a rather mild-mannered person. (Maybe it also helped that Martha stopped dropping watermelonson the floor.)
Dad spent over 40 years at the American Jewish Committee. He considered it the perfect job, one that he would have enjoyed even if he hadn't been paid. That was exactly the way he explained it to me, and I've always kept that goal in mind for myself.
Over the years, Dad spoke and wrote about some matters that were quite controversial at the time. But it always seemed to me, anyway, that no matter how much hostility he encountered – and in Jewish circles he encountered a fair amount – he was able to mix it up quite well without taking it personally. I remember one time in the late 60's or early 70's, when Dad was at a conference at which he gave a talk.
That was a time when Dad was well on the way to becoming politically conservative, and his talk apparently caused somethingof a stir. Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, the Hillel rabbi at Yale, was scheduled to speak the following day. Wolf was a left-wing, anti-Vietnam war, rather loud fellow – though actually he turned out to be a pretty nice guy when I got to know him – and he apparently lit into Dad in his own talk the next day.
A few days later, a man who commuted with Dad on Metro North and who shared Rabbi Wolf's political views, smiled mischievously and asked Dad what he thought of Rabbi Wolf's talk. Dad told him he didn't know because he had left the conference the day before, immediately after giving his own talk. Dad had left because he just didn't enjoy staying at these events any longer than he had to be there, but he was very amused by the fact that by missing the attack, he had frustrated Wolf's plans.
Another time, Murray Kempton wrote to Commentary magazine to complain about what he called "vulgar" and "mean-spirited" remarks about White Anglo-Saxon Protestants in articles by Dad, Norman Podhoretz, and I think it was Nathan Glazer. Well, Podhoretz and Glazer wrote lengthy responses to Kempton, but Dad told me he didn't find out he was supposed to respond untilthe magazine was about to go to press.
So Dad's response was very short: "I am not vulgar; I am very refined. Neither am I mean-spirited; I am known far and wide for magnanimity." Of course, I don't mean to suggest that Dad never expressed his private annoyance publicly, sometimes in a way that his teenaged children found completely mortifying. Strangely enough, I've embarrassed my own teenagers a few times.
There's a notion in my family that Dad knew everything about everything, but this isn't really true. It would be more accurate to say that he knew a huge amount about many things and something about nearly everything. When I was a senior in college, I was working on a seminar paper on the philosophical foundations of mathematics – on a French school of thought called intuitionism. It was a fascinating, non-standard approach to some basic, foundational questions in mathematics. So Dad asked me what I was working on. I told him it was intuitionism. And he said, "Oh, yes, that was a school that included Poincaré, wasn't it?" I still have no idea how he knew that.
Dad was brought up in an orthodox family, but he fell away from orthodoxy. The interesting thing is that, in an odd circle of movement, he left our conservative shul over its failure to liberalize its approach to women's participation in the service and ended up at this orthodox shul, where he was very happy for 30 years. I can't know Dad's heart, but I've always felt he had more an intellectual than a spiritual attachment, to Judaism. A college friend of mine, who later became a conservative rabbi, once visited us in White Plains and was amused to learn that Dad would spend shabbat afternoons with the mikraot gedolot and would check the gematria with a calculator. On shabbat.
After Dad's father, my Grandpa Max, died in 1965, Dad wrote an article in Commentary called "Going to Shul." On re-reading it, I noticed just how Dad-like it was. Dad wrote, "I still catch myself daydreaming about the things I would do if I were rich. Lately, one of those things has been to have my own shul, with the legislative, executive, and judicial powers all mine. I would make some radical reforms, of a generally reactionary character." There's something so "Dad" about fantasizing about having absolute power to change how the shul operates.
Elsewhere in the article, Dad wrote about saying Kaddish for Grandpa Max:
"Although we have been born when it is hard to believe in immortality, the Kaddish helps us to believe, a little. I know that it makes me think of my father often, more than forty times a week; and it will keep reminding me of him after I have stopped saying the Kaddish daily, when I hear someone else say it and I make the appropriate response.Dad really loved gematria, as I've mentioned. So I think it's fitting here to finish with some gematria. This is in honor of my father. Dad lived to be 87 years old, and the number 87 is gematria for the Hebrew phrase ze lichvod avi, which means "this is in honor of my father."To think of my father, to recall him, is to hold off his mortality – and because ritual is eloquent, to hold it off still one generation further. Where has Daddy gone? To shul, to say Kaddish for Grandpa. By doing what allows my children to ask this question and receive this answer, I also allow myself to hope that my own mortality will similarly be delayed."
Dad, we're really going to miss you.
