MY FATHER

My father, Chaim Yosef Pakula z”l was born in 1911in Dzialoszyn (Zaloshin), Poland. He once told me that his first memories related toWorld War 1 when, as a young child, he saw dead soldiers lying in the streets.The town was not too far from the German border.

His father died of a strangulatedhernia when he was 11; and so he was apprenticed to a tailor in the nearby big city of Czestochowa, becoming a master tailor at the age of 15. He would race home onhis bicycle every Friday and spend Shabbos with his mother and sisters, andthen return to the master tailor for the week.

When I made a barmitzvah for our eldest son, mywidowed father told me about his own barmitzvah. On his 13^thbirthday, his mother gave him his father’s tefillin and sent him to the shtiebelto find someone to teach him how to ‘leig t’fillin’. And that was that.

His mother, who was my grandfather’s second wife, (and the sister of his first wife who had died in childbirth), remarried, and I havea photo of the stepfather, but not of Yisroel Moshe, the father.

All very confusing stuff, these late 19^thcentury/ early 20^th century European shtetl relationships. It seemshardly anyone married someone and then grew old with them. Women died inchildbirth, there were epidemics, wars, accidents; and cousins married cousinsand the family trees are pretty tangled up.

At around 20 years of age, my father marriedNacha Najman (not a cousin, btw); they had 2 sons. Early 1938, seeing the political situation unfolding,my father came to Australia sponsored by his brother-in-law Cam Goldring, an English Jewwho settled in Newcastle, NSW after marrying Dad’s older sister, Zelda. Theidea was to get papers together and to earn enough money to bring his family;but time ran out and his wife, sons, mother and stepfather were murdered bythe Nazis. 400 years of flourishing Jewish life in the town of Dzialoszyn, where even the non-Jews weren't such big anti-semites as in many other places in Poland, snuffed out in a couple of years.

In 1946 he met and married my mother and they weretogether for 38 years, until my mother died of ovarian cancer. During thistime, my parents worked in the market selling men’s clothing, and they made aliving. Before the markets, there had been a manufacturing business but itfailed partly because a cousin embezzled from the business, and partly becausemy father, a very sweet guy, was not much of a businessman. But my parentsraised and educated 3 children; and then suffered the loss of their second son Julian (Yehuda) in 1973 in the Yom Kippur War.

How does anyone come back from this? Such loss,such struggle, but still he persisted, this whole generation of European Jewspersisted. He was so sweet and gentle, never raising a hand to his children,always making jokes and singing to himself while he made yarmulkas on hisenormous professional sewing machine. I remember him  practicing his Chazones in the quiet of night, as he wasthe Ba’al Tefilla and Ba’al Koyreh of the Brunswick Talmud Torah. He sang apretty mean Kiddush too, and zmiros were a delight. (Oy, listen to me, I am SOOLD.) So sweet, but so tough. He just put all tragedy and loss behind him andcarried on, as most of them did.

My father, lonely for female companionship after 7 years as a widower,married his ex-sister-in-law; yes, his late wife’s brother’s ex-wife. It seemseven out of the shtetl, ‘better the devil you know’ as he put it. It was adisaster. I think he died just to get away from her. Well, she’s gone now too.Nothing more to say about that one.

He was always cheerful and pleasant, with sweetsfor the children in Shul, a cuddle for a baby, always calling every female ‘Sweetheart’ or‘Darling’, even flirting and joking with the nurses who looked after himduring his final illness. (Of course, as a teenager, I never appreciated any ofthis in him; he was just my embarrassing old fogey of a dad, so much older thanthe dads of most other kids.)

Dad passed away peacefully in our home at the ageof 86 on 5^th Elul; coincidentally, the 6^th birthday of myyoungest son, so my son’s birthday is forever linked to my father’s yohrzeit. Talk about bittersweet.

I see my father in my sons. His sweetness in one,his wit in another, his voice in another. His striking blue eyes, fair skin anddark hair are also apparent in some of my children.

It’s been 15 years, but you never forget a parent.May his neshoma have an aliyah. May he have a lichtige Gan-Aden. 

Yossele Pakula, the 16 year old master tailor of Czestochowa.