My Father's Angels

Judaism teaches that angels can be created by human beings. A good thought, word, and deed gives birth to a positive force called an angel. These angels hover protectively around us in life, and then accompany us to our reward after death. Conversely, an evil thought, word, and deed creates a bad angel, or demon who becomes our accuser in the heavenly court.

I could almost recognize the faces of the angels that filled that white-tiled room in Bershler's Funeral Parlor.

A whole contingent was born on those rainy mornings when father, driving to work, would pull over to the bus stops along the way, offering a ride to anyone going to Camden.

Over there was the Angel of the Black Eye, which father got when he caught a man shoplifting in his drugstore. The police arrested the man, but my father refused to press charges. Instead, he offered his assailant a job in the store, so that he could earn money to pay for the items he tried to steal.

I recognized the Coal angel, born on a cold winter day, when I rode home from the drugstore with father, who delivered prescriptions to people too sick to come pick them up. I was in a hurry to get home, but father assured me he had only one delivery to make. He drove up to a dilapidated house in the Camden, New Jersey's ghetto, it and took fifteen minutes until he returned. "What took you so long?" I screamed.

Father said, "The house was ice cold. No wonder she is sick. I called the company to order her a load of coal, but their line was busy until a minute ago."

I could see the library angels. After retiring, father volunteered to deliver library books to shut-ins. Leaning on his cane and limping from arthritis, he climbed flights of stairs to reach the desolate apartments of people, usually younger and less incapacitated than he, who had run out of reasons to get out of bed.

Father involved himself with others' plights. This man suffered from back pain? Then and there, without an appointment, father took him to his own orthopedic doctor. This woman felt that she counted for nothing? Father picked her up on Election Day to take her to the polls, convincing her of the importance of her vote.

He lived in a world without strangers. He could not stand in a supermarket line nor sit at a restaurant table without striking up a conversation with the person nearby. I was embarrassed by his disregard for personal space.

Perhaps the young Irishman at the adjoining table would rather converse with his family than with this bald-headed Jew with whom he had nothing in common.

Yet father always found a connection. Either the Irishman had an uncle who was a pharmacist, or an aunt who had graduated Camden High with my Aunt Mamie in 1929, or he used pediatrician Dr. Hanson, father's old friend, or he had once summered in the same Poconos resort as we. By the time the waitress we reached the cashier, the erstwhile strangers were smiling as warmly as if they had found a long-lost uncle. Didn't my father know that by the end of the 20th century, alienation was the pervasive mindset of society?

Father lived all of his eighty-six years in that century, because he didn't belong in the 20th century. When I was a psychology major at Brandeis University, arguing with him about sociological issues, he stunned me by announcing that he did not believe in sociology or psychology. I was flabbergasted. Was sociology some nebulous religious system that one could choose to believe or not believe?

Fired up by my leftist convictions in the late 60s, I inveighed against the oppression of the lower classes, citing statistics of starvation in affluent America. Father retorted, "Ridiculous! If someone in Camden is hungry, they can come to me or to the minister in the church on Stevens Street."

That there could be societal problems that could not be solved by a kind and generous neighbor was beyond father's comprehension. I now wonder whether he was right.

At Brandeis, I belonged to the radical leftist Students for a Democratic Society. I had taken my stand with minorities and oppressed Third World peasants against the bourgeoisie conservative establishment of America.

Thus, I was mystified, on one of the times I visited father's drugstore during my college years, to see a teenage girl whispering to my father that she wanted to see him privately.

When I later asked him what she wanted, he answered that she thought she had venereal disease and was asking him what to do. Why should a teenager in the Black Panthers age, confide in this middle-class, white, Republican, Jewish pharmacist? If I perceived him as the enemy, why didn't she?

Another time, I came into the store one summer morning. Five or six matronly black women sitting at the soda fountain, greeted father with catcalls and complaints: "We ain't talkin' to you no more, Mista Levinsky."

"You's in trouble in our book, Doc."

I wondered how father's characteristic gruffness or fiery temper had hurt or insulted these women. He just ignored them, and went back to the prescription counter. Concerned, I approached and asked them what father had done to them.

One replied, "Yesterday afternoon he done told de ice cream man to give popsicles to all de kids on our block 'n he would pay for 'em. Us mamas had to spend all afternoon pickin' up popsicle wrappers. No, we ain't talkin' to him no more." And they all roared with laughter.

In the early 70s race riots wracked America's cities, and Camden's business district, too, was ravaged. Starting at one end of Broadway, the main street, rioters burned or looted virtually every store. They set fire to the jewelry store next to father's drugstore, razing it to the ground. Then it was the drugstore's turn.

According to an eyewitness, one of the rioters shouted, "Don't touch that store. He's our friend." The angry mob passed father's store, going on to pillage the shoe store next door. A chilling tribute to "Doc," as they called father: When the smoke cleared, his was the only store on Broadway that emerged unscathed.

Father was not rich, but he gave and lent money as if he had it. During the Six Day War, when the American Jews rallied to Israel's emergency, father, with two children in expensive private colleges, had no money to give. He went to the bank and borrowed $4,000 to donate to the Israel Emergency Fund. When the Jewish community was collecting for a geriatric home, he took out a second mortgage on his house to have a proper sum to contribute.

Father regularly lent money to drugstore customers who asked him. Most of these loans were never repaid.

When we were sitting shiva for my father, Carl, the Italian pharmacist who bought the drugstore from him, told us how, when my father was transferring the store to him, they came upon a one-inch-thick notebook, filled with entries. Carl asked what it was. My father replied that this was his record of outstanding loans. Carl asked how much it was worth. Tossing the book into the wastebasket, my father shrugged, "It's priceless."

Born to my grandmother just a year after his parents emigrated from Odessa in 1902, father was barely 17 years younger than his mother. I remember seeing him in his 60s, a six-foot-tall man, his balding hair completely gray, waiting on his 80-year-old mother with filial solicitude. Many times I watched in awe as my father mutely accepted my grandmother's petulant scolding. My father paid for his mother's two-bedroom apartment plus full-time help. When he finished his ten or twelve-hour workdays in the drugstore, he went to check on his mother. My mother waited to serve our dinner until Dad came home after 7:00 PM.

Father also assumed responsibility for Nana, my mother's mother. When my parents built their dream house in the suburbs, they included a room for Nana, who was stricken with Parkinson's Disease. While my mother did the labor of dressing, bathing, and caring for her mother, my father took care of her expenses as a matter of course.

When Carl bought the drugstore, his lawyer and my father's lawyer drew up a Purchase agreement. After it was signed, as Carl and his lawyer walked to his car, the lawyer said to Carl, "You just wasted your money." Carl gulped. The lawyer continued, "With that man, a handshake would have been sufficient."

Father expected no rewards for giving people rides in the rain or for finding jobs for the sons of his ghetto clientele. How amazed he must have been to find himself ascending to the next world, escorted by legions of familiar angels. Meditating by his body in that chilly mortuary room, I found myself saying, "Surprise, Dad!"

I that angel-crowded room. I saw that deeds are what primarily count.

Although I had been observant for five years, and I knew that Judaism is a religion less of faith than of action, of performing concrete mitzvot, I preferred to live in the ethereal realm of the mind and spirit. I was shocked to realize who he had become by virtue of his deeds. My father's road to heaven was paved with popsicle wrappers.

If there was a void or gap of the mitzvot he never learned to do, it was surely spanned by that book of loans he tossed away.

I, who spent my 42 years wrestling with profound concepts and lofty aspirations, had nothing as significant as father's coal order for the sick lady. I could feel my father winking at me, his religious daughter, from his honored place in the next world, saying, "Surprise!"