The Interconnectedness of Generations

The passing this week of Irving Roth, one of the truly great Holocaust educators, was a loss for his family and his friends, of course. And it was a loss for our entire community. But it was also a loss for the larger world of Holocaust education, one made all the more terrible by the fact that he will not be replaced, by the fact that the countless young people (and countless really is the right word here) he spoke to in every one of the fifty states and all across the world about his personal experiences at Auschwitz and Buchenwald will collectively constitute the final generation of young people to meet actual Shoah survivors and to hear their stories not on videotape or in books but personally from their own mouths. This is how the world works in other contexts as well, of course—when Albert H. Woolson died in the summer of 1956, there were no remaining veterans of the Union Army left among the living for young people, or any people, to hear speak about the Civil War in terms of their personal experience. (The last living veteran of the Confederate Army had died five years earlier, so Woolson was the very last one on either side.) When Peter Mills died in 1972, there were no more individuals alive who had been slaves in the ante-bellum South. And yet, even though all events far enough back in history must have some specific individual who becomes the last living person to have experienced that specific event in person, there is a certain poignancy to that thought when applied to the Shoah because that what the survivors of the Shoah survived was not a tragic accident like the sinking of the Titanic or a natural disaster like the eruption of Krakatoa, but a well-organized, fully-funded, diabolical plot to murder them and every other Jew in occupied Europe. Given that detail, it feels amazing that there were survivors at all and doubly so that some have managed to live to become nonagenarians or even centenarians. But once they are gone from the world, there will be none left who can counter the kind of demented anti-Semite who insists that the Shoah never really happened with the simple sentences that Irving spoke so easily and so gracefully. I was there. I saw this happen. I knew these people. I was in that place. I remember. I personally was an eye-witness.

But even though every event in the far-enough-past past has logically to have a final witness to it, there is also the way the generations interlink and interconnect to consider.

For my first example, I submit the case of Lyon Tyler Jr., who died at age ninety-five last October and whose grandfather, John Tyler, was our tenth president. Elected to the vice-presidency in 1840, Tyler came to the presidency when William Henry Harrison died in office after serving all of thirty-one days. Tyler was an interesting personality in his own right. Like our forty-fifth president, he ended up serving only one term, but unlike President Trump he failed even to win his own party’s nomination for a second term, let alone actually be returned to the White House by the electorate. (The Whigs nominated Henry Clay instead, who lost to Democrat James K. Polk.) Probably, that was all for the best—Tyler not only owned slaves himself and ended up siding with the Confederacy during the Civil War, but he actually ran for office and was duly elected to the Confederate House of Representatives shortly before his death in 1862. But my question was not how an American President born in the eighteenth century—Tyler was born in 1790—could have ended up working actively against the nation he once led, but how a grandson of his could possibly still have been alive in 2020.

The answer, it turns out, isn’t all that amazing. Tyler was married twice and had fifteen children in all, the youngest of whom, a boy named Lyon, was born in 1854 when his father was sixty-three years old. Lyon, who died in 1935, fathered a son in 1925, Lyon Jr. And it was this Lyon Jr., the grandson of a man born in 1790, who died last October at age ninety-five. (Even more amazing is that he wasn’t the sole surviving grandson of our tenth president—Lyon Jr. had a younger brother named Harrison who was born in 1928 and who is still alive.)

So to think that all three of my granddaughters’ lives overlapped with the life of a man whose grandfather occupied the White House in the 1840s—that collapses history just a bit and makes the past seem—if not really part of the present—then at least intertwined with it in a way that makes events from John Tyler’s eighteenth century childhood somehow linked—at least fancifully—with my twenty-first century granddaughters’.

Of course, to as keen an observer of the human condition as myself, the eighteenth century doesn’t really feel all that distant. I regularly take my youngest granddaughter for a long walk in Ridgewood, Queens, where she lives, in the course of which we follow a route that takes us around the perimeter of two contiguous cemeteries, one of the which, the Linden Hill Cemetery, has some very, very old Jewish graves in it. And on our walk we regularly pass the grave of the late Mrs. Caroline Welsh, who died at age 90 in 1860—so who was therefore born in 1770, a cool six years before the United States even existed as an independent nation. I think about Mrs. Welsh and the others in her row as we walk by their graves, wondering what the corner of Flushing Avenue and Metropolitan Avenue looked like when she was borne to her final resting place…and what that corner might have looked like, assuming it wasn’t still virgin forestland, in the year of her birth. But I also wonder what Mrs. Walsh would make of us, of me and little Josie, as we pass by on our walk all these centuries after her birth. Would she find us indecipherable? Would she look at my cell phone or at Josie’s super-cool Italian stroller and wonder what planet we came to earth from? Or would she see, not something strange or alien but entirely familiar: a man and a baby going for a week on a shady street just as grandfathers have taken their baby granddaughters out for some fresh air since the beginning of time?

I noted two different video clips on youtube the other week that fed into this line of thinking for me.

The one was a clip from the old television show “I’ve Got a Secret,” which aired in its first iteration for fifteen years starting in 1952. For those too young to remember, I’ll explain that the format was very simple: a panel of celebrities was challenged to ask contestants as many questions as they could squeeze into the time allotted in order to figure out the contestants’ “secret.” Most of the time, the secrets were slightly silly. (The lifeguard at a nudist colony sticks in my mind for some reason.) But the two clips I want to write about now weren’t silly at all.

The first aired in February 1956 and featured one Samuel J. Seymour, who at that point was the sole living soul to have been present in Ford’s Theater when President Lincoln was assassinated almost ninety years earlier. He spoke well and clearly, although he didn’t look too well or too healthy. (He died a mere two months later.) I don’t know if readers will respond the way I did (you can take a look by clicking here), but I had that same sense of the past intruding on the present as I watched: it would have been amazing enough to listen to someone who saw or talked to President Lincoln at all, let alone someone who saw him being shot. And yet our lives overlapped: I was a little boy of three and he was a nonagenarian, but we occupied the planet for a while together. And that brought President Lincoln into my life in a way that I would otherwise have found highly unlikely.

The second, also amazing, featured two older women, Delia and Bertie Harris of Knoxville, Tennessee. (Their episode aired in 1961 when both women were in their mid-seventies. To see the clip, click here.) And their “secret” was that their grandfather, Simon Harris, had been a soldier in the Revolutionary War and was with Washington at Valley Forge. How it was possible was also revealed: Simon’s son (the women’s father) was born in 1818 and he became a father when he was in his seventies. And now his daughters were themselves in their seventies…and that is how two women appeared on American television in the 1960s whose grandfather fought under George Washington. And so Washington himself stepped out of the shadows for the eight-year-old me and took his place in my parents’ living room. At eight, I wouldn’t have known to refer to what I was feeling as suggestive of the interconnectedness of the generations. (I heard that. But I was definitely not that precocious.)  In retrospect, though, that is precisely how I felt as I listened to these elderly dames and imagined their grandfather’s ghost flitting past us as we communed with President Washington during their fifteen minutes of fame in TV-land.

Both clips, of course, were meant to entertain rather than to serve as spurs to deeply ruminative thought. But both clips lured me into the same kind of thinking that the story about the death of President Tyler’s grandson inspired: that sense that the past is (pace Faulkner) not only not really gone, it’s not even really past. And that is how I propose we respond to Irving Roth’s death too.

The survivor generation is dwindling. When I came to Shelter Rock, there were literally scores of survivors in our midst. Earlier on, when I was a little boy, our neighborhood was filled to overflowing with survivors. (They were called “refugees” back then before the word “survivor” came into common use.) But we can serve, all of us, as those people’s hooks into future generations. My granddaughters will not know people like Irving personally. But they can know me. And us. And all those who knew these people and listened carefully and can say, slightly derivatively but still meaningfully and sincerely, “I wasn’t there…but I knew a man who was. And this is what he told me, what he saw with his own eyes, what he was an eye-witness to….”