MEMOIR: My father's Hasidic family

I've always boasted that my paternal grandfather, Rabbi Samuel Reichek, was probably one of the first Hasidim to settle in the U.S. In 1906, he brought his family to this country from the Czarist Russian-ruled region of Poland, arriving aboard the S.S. Fatherland after a brief stay in Antwerp, Belgium. My father, the second oldest of his four sons, was nine years old.

The Hasidim are an ultra-Orthodox Jewish mystical sect whose religious practices display far more emotional fervor than other Orthodox Jews. Their men wear beards, black hats and coats, and their rites are marked by dancing, singing and hearty consumption of alcoholic beverages. Hasidism has been described as being "unique in its focus on the joyful observance of God's commandments."

My grandfather founded and headed what was undoubtedly the first Hasidic American synagogue, Beth Hasidim de Palen (House of Hasidim from Poland). It was originally housed on the second floor of a tenement apartment house on Manhattan's Lower East Side. To my knowledge, the congregation no longer exists.

There are many dozens of Hasidic sects, organized largely on the basis of East European geography and on the leadership of individual 18th and 19th century charismatic rabbis. My grandfather belonged to the Gerer Hasidim. The name stemmed from the Polish home town, Gora Kalwaria, of the sect's founder. According to family lore, the Gerer Rebbe (the sect's leader) personally urged my grandfather to go to the U.S. to establish a Hasidic presence in New York.

My grandfather, whom I never knew, would probably not appreciate my boast about his role as a pioneer Hasid in this country. I do not know of any one in my family who still has links to the Hasidic community. My father, Meyer (Yehiel Mayer) Reichek, was estranged from my grandfather after my father quit a New York religious seminary at the age of 18. My father wanted to adopt a secular life far removed from the provincial Hasidic lifestyle.

My paternal family came from Ostrow (also known as Ostrava), a small Polish town in the province of Lomza. My grandfather, the son of a lumber dealer, was a highly regarded Talmudic scholar. He was ordained as a rabbi but never earned a livelihood as a clergyman.

My grandmother, Gussie (Gelya) Reichek, was born in Grodno, a town that was also in the former Czarist Russian-ruled region of Poland; it is now in the independent country of Belarus. Her maiden name was Kuchiniak. She had a brother who decided to "Americanize" the family name when he came here. He was not very imaginative. He changed his surname to Cohen. Grandma also had several sisters in this country, but I never knew them very well.

Grandma's father was an adherent of another Hasidic sect, the Alexander Hasidim. He was a ritual slaughterer, the religious Jewish functionary who butchers kosher meat. Arranging a marriage to a man with my grandfather's impressive religious credentials was considered a social coup. The couple never met until the night of their wedding.

The newlyweds settled in the groom's home town, Ostrow. My grandfather had a pragmatic, older brother named Mayer, who recognized that Talmudic scholarship was insufficient for the support of a family. He was a prosperous businessman who staked my grandfather and his bride to a venture producing vegetable oil. When asked what my family did in Europe, I've jokingly boasted that they were in the "oil business," without mentioning the "vegetables."

My grandfather's brother and his children never migrated to the U.S. I learned only in recent years that some of his offspring perished during the Holocaust. At least one grandson survived the Nazi death camps and settled in Israel. A grand-daughter, who survived as a wartime laborer in Soviet Uzbekistan, eventually came to the U.S. It was through her that I became aware of the tragic fate of some of my relatives.

Unlike his brother Mayer, my grandfather had no interest in business. My grandmother, however, displayed great talent as a businesswoman. Almost alone, she successfully ran the vegetable-oil business. Meantime, my grandfather continued to devote himself to prayer and Talmudic studies.

When the family settled in New York a century ago, this occupational pattern was repeated. Grandma ran a tiny dairy store while raising five children. Her husband was primarily occupied with his religious endeavors. Their marriage was evidently an unhappy one, and they separated about 20 years after arriving in the U.S. I do not know whether they were ever formally divorced.

In the mid-1930s, my grandfather grew discontented with what he regarded as a lack of religious piety in this country and decided to move to Palestine so that he could die in the Holy Land. My father helped my grandfather board a ship and never saw him again.

My grandfather died in 1950, separated from his family, in a Hasidic home for the aged in Jerusalem. My daughter was born four years later. Her Hebrew name, Avigayil Shoshana (my grandfather's first name, which he never used, was Abraham) is a memorial to the paternal grandfather I never knew.

MEMOIR: My father was a rebel

When I was growing up, my parents never tried to influence my choice of a future career. Like so many of my friends, living within a few blocks from Yankee Stadium, my boyhood ambition was to be a big-league baseball player. I was regarded by my peers as a smooth-fielding second baseman, but I couldn't hit a curve ball. That, and some other athletic weaknesses, guaranteed that I would never make it to the big leagues. Journalism soon supplanted baseball as my career goal. And all the while, my mother and father never suggested what I should do with my life.

In contrast, my father had to contend with his father, an Orthodox rabbi who insisted that his son follow in his occupational footsteps. My father, however, was a rebel who declined to satisfy his father's ambition for him.

My grandfather belonged to the Hasidim, a Jewish mystical sect whose religious practices are marked by more emotional fervor than most other Orthodox Jews.

My father was brought to the U.S. in 1906 as an eight-year old from the sector of Poland then under Czarist Russian rule. The family settled on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

In the strict style of the Hasidim, my grandfather refused to allow my father to attend public school because he frowned on the mixing of sexes in the classroom. My father went to the local elementary school for several days, then was quickly withdrawn when Grandpa learned that there were girls in my father's class and that the all the teachers were women.

My father was then enrolled in a yeshiva, an all-day Jewish religious school where he learned English and a smattering of other secular subjects after regular school hours. The secular subjects were usually taught by immigrant college students.

It was generally assumed that my father would go on to a rabbinical seminary when he completed the equivalent of public high school at the yeshiva, and that he would subsequently be ordained as an Orthodox rabbi.

But my father's personal career objective did not match my grandfather's. My father's faith in Orthodoxy had suffered from exposure to the radical free-thinking views of the neighborhood's galaxy of socialist soapbox orators. The prospect of remaining in the Hasidic fold after completing his yeshiva studies and becoming an Orthodox rabbi had become remote.

My father's ambition was to become a doctor. However, his limited secular education and the family's modest financial means made such an ambition unattainable.

An alternative career path developed during his final term in the yeshiva. It was opened by Rabbi Stephen Wise, a nationally renowned Reform Jewish rabbi. Wise had been raised in an Orthodox Jewish community in his native Hungary. When he settled in the U.S., however, he decided that the Reform Jewish movement was more likely to flourish in this country than Orthodoxy.

He eventually became a Reform rabbi and a leader in the Reform movement. He realized that the students being educated in the Orthodox yeshivas were far better prepared in Talmudic and other traditional Jewish religious studies than the young men usually entering Hebrew Union College, the Reform seminary in Cincinnati.

Wise decided to recruit graduates from the Orthodox institutions, offering them scholarships to Hebrew Union for training as Reform rabbis. My father received such an offer and quickly accepted it. His father, however, objected. To my pious grandfather, becoming a Reform Jew was tantamount to leaving the Jewish faith.

To avoid family controversy, my father reluctantly rejected Rabbi Wise's offer. He was now 18 and decided to leave New York to seek his fortune elsewhere, unfettered by paternal supervision.

For the next couple of years, my father drifted from a job as a clerk in a dry-goods store operated by a Jewish merchant in a small town in Arkansas to one as a shoe salesman in Tennessee. After learning that Henry Ford had begun to pay $5 a day to work on his assembly line, he headed for Detroit and was hired. He was presumably the only former Hasid who ever became a factory hand for the Ford Motor Co.

During World War I my father was drafted into the Army. He served briefly and was discharged for medical reasons. In a strange move still criticized by military historians, his outfit, the 339th Infantry Regiment, was shipped in September 1918 to Archangel and Murmansk in Russia.

The regiment, which acquired the popular name of the "Polar Bears," was a unit in the Allied North Russian Expeditionary Force which was deployed in what one historian has called "a confused effort to thwart the Russian Revolution."

My father was always preoccupied by the irony that, had he not been discharged earlier from the Army, he would have been forced to return to the very land his family had fled only a decade before. That was something he could not have as easily rebelled against as he had done to his father.