Number Our Days: A Triumph of Continuity and Culture Among Jewish Old People in an Urban Ghetto

329 Pages·1980·21.78 MB·English

by  Barbara Myerhoff

Number
Our Days
BARBARA MYERHOFF
A Touchstone Book
Published by
SIMON & SCHUSTER
NEW YORK LONDON TORONTO SYDNEY
Copyright @ 1978 by Barbara Myerhoff
All rights reserved
including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form
First Touchstone Edition, 198o
Published by Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Rockefeller Center
12 30 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10020
TOUCHSTONE and colophon are registered trademarks
of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Previously published by E. P. Dutton
33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 Pbk.
Ubrary of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Myerhoff, Barbara G.
Number our days.
(A Touchstone book)
Bibliography: p.
Includes indeE.
Jews
1. in Venice, Calif.-Sociallife and customs.
2. Social work with the aged-California-Venice.
3· Aged-California-Venice. 4· Venice, Calif.
Social life and customs. I. Title.
F869.V36M9 198o 979-4'94 79-28368
ISBN o-671-2543<Hl Pbk.
For Ruth Adams
1932-1975
A woman of valor
" ... Give her of the fruit of her hands;
And let her works praise her in the gates."
PROVERBS 31
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful above all to the Center people who gave themselves
to me so fully, and by doing that gave me parts of myself and
my heritage. Many other people helped me in various ways
throughout this work. Sherrie Wagner has assisted with many
research tasks, and along with Maggie Starr, typed the manu
script with intelligence and patience. Margie Remar helped with
my children, consistently and lovingly. Bill Whitehead, my edi
tor, brought extraordinary skill, sensitivity, and devotion to his
work and mine.
The Center Director, Morris Rosen has been my colleague,
teacher and stalwart friend at every stage of this work. Andrew B.
Erlich, acting as Center rabbi while the study was in progress,
was as generous to me as to the elderly. Barbara Kirshenblatt
Gimblett, Charles Silberman and Mitchell Sviridoff were excep
tionally helpful with their criticism and support. Foremost among
those who contributed abundantly and lovingly to this work are
Lee, Nick and Matthew Myerhoff, Deena Metzger, Lynne Litt
man, Victor Turner and Riv-Ellen Prell-Foldes. To all these
people I wish to express my great appreciation. The National
Science Foundation contributed part of the funding for the work
in connection with its grant to the Andrus Gerontology Center
of the University of Southern California, and this assistance, too,
I gratefully acknowledge. Naturally, I alone am responsible for
the interpretation offered here.
CONTENTS
ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
by Victor Turner xiii
FOREWORD
1. uSo what do you want from us here?" 1
2. Needle and thread: the life and death of a tailor 40
3· uwe don't wrap herring in a printed page" 79
4· ''For an educated man, he could learn a few
things" 113
5· uwe fight to keep warm" 153
6. Teach us to number our days 19 5
7. 44Jewish comes up in you from the roots" 232
EPILOGUE 269
273
AFTERWORD
283
NOTES
REFERENCES 297
INDEX 313
L
FOREWORD
- - - - - - - - - 1
Although this book celebrates the elderly and an ancient tradi
tion, it is also in the vanguard of anthropological theory. With
it anthropology has come of age: Its extremes have touched.
Barriers between self and other, head and heart, conscious and
unconscious, history and autobiography, have been thrown down
and new ways have been found to express the vital interde
pendence of these and other "mighty opposites." A few years
ago M. N. Srinivas, the distinguished Indian anthropologist,
foretold this development. A Brahmin, and hence "twice-born,"
he urged anthropologists-in a lecture delivered at the University
of Chicago-to go one stage further. We were to seek to be
"thrice-born." The first birth is our natal origin in a particular
culture. The second is our move from this familiar to a far place
to do fieldwork there. In a way this could be described as a
familiarization of the exotic, finding that when we understand
the rules and vocabulary of another culture, what had seemed
bizarre at first becomes in time part of the daily round. The
third birth occurs when we have become comfortable within the
other culture-and found the clue to grasping many like it-and
tum our gaze again toward our native land. We find that the
familiar has become exoticized; we see it with new eyes. The
commonplace has become the marvelous. What we took for
granted now has power to stir our scientific imaginations. Few
anthropologists have gone the full distance. Most of us feel that
our professional duty is done when we have "processed" our
fieldwork in other cultures in book or article form. Yet our
discipline's long-term program has always included the move
ment of return, the purified look at ourselves. "Thrice-born"
xiii
xiv FOREWORD
anthropologists are perhaps in the best position to become the
"reflexivity" of a culture.
Dr. Barbara Myerhoff is one of the few anthropologists
whose work attests to this double cultural rebirth. She has writ
ten an important book, Peyote Hunt, about the sacred journey
of the Huichol Indians whose homeland is in the more inacces
sible reaches of the Sierra Madre Occidental of Mexico. She ac
companied a pilgrim group of Huichol on a journey east to the
holy land of Wirikuta where the gods dwell, the place once in
habited by the First People. Her analysis of the myths, rituals,
and symbols associated with this quest for a sacred origin broke
new ground in the study of cultural dynamics. Peyote Hunt,
nominated for a National Book Award, may itself be regarded
as a protracted metaphor for the human quest for reflexive wis
dom, and for the anthropological search for cultural meaning.
Number Our Days is the fruit of Dr. Myerhoff's "third
birth." To write it she has returned not only to her nation of
birth, but also to her Jewish heritage. A pilgrimage may be as
much temporal and interior as overland. It is a venture, history,
biography, and autobiography. Anthropologists learn respect for
the elders among those they study. It was thus a felicitous
chance that brought Barbara Myerhoff among the truly elderly
folk of the Aliyah Senior Citizens' Center, a group of former
migrants from Eastern Europe now mostly abandoned by their
more or less successful and assimilated New World progeny.
She was prepared to find wisdom .in their memories and found
not only wisdom, but also a source of vitality, "survivor's" vi
tality. For the Center people were survivors twice over: By
emigration they had escaped the Holocaust and by extreme old
age many had "survived their peers, families, and often chil
dren." Wisdom comes through in the many autobiographies Dr.
Myerhoff collected, vitality informs the sociocultural dramas of
living she observed and took part in.
Dr. Myerhoff demonstrates with full documentation that
the very old can remain in command of the basic human facul
ties of insight and imagination until the very end. The veil with
which our culture covers the daily affairs of the aged has been
pulled aside in Number Our Days. We see powerful personages
thinking, reflecting, loving, arguing and, above all, articulating
their long experience of living-in splendidly rich language. Dr.
FOREWORD XV
Myerhoff mostly lets them tell their stories and present their
cases in their own words, bringing us the very ring and savor
of what is elsewhere a fading Yiddishkeit.
Being, meaning, and narrative are intimately related in
Dr. Myerhoff's vision of the human condition as it is played out
among these people. In her conclusion, she characterizes our
species as Homo narrans, humankind as story-teller, implying that
culture in general-specific cultures, and the fabric of meaning
that constitutes any single human existence--is the "story" we
tell about ourselves. Her use of narrative and dialogue gives the
work its distinctive flavor, at once deep and rich, full of subtlety
and surprise. The process of going from the familiar to the far
and then back again involves movement in depth as well a!l
distance. Dr. Myerhoff constantly goes beneath the surface of
events, relationships and personal statements to the many under
lying levels of Jewish culture, seeking to discover how people
assign meaning to their own and to other people's lives. Her
approach to her subjects is consistently probing as well as affec
tionate. The anthropological perspective is omnipresent but not
intrusive, always made to serve the purpose of p~esenting specific
people and events.
New theoretical wine requires new presentational bottles.
It is not simply to give an "impression" of the original, pungent
quality of her subjects' speech and thought that Dr. Myerhoff
introduces so many verbatim transcriptions of the ''bobbe
myseh," or "grandmothers' tales," nor does she cite people's
narratives merely for introducing "rattling good yams," or "edify
ing stories," though often they are. She uses this material to
show us the very processes through which her subjects weave
meaning and identity out of their memories and experiences.
As she writes, "The tale certifies the fact ·of being anq gives
sense at the same time." And such tales, marvelous tales, spun
from the plain strong wool of ordinary human life. The book
brims" with comedy as well as tears: true to the many-layered
complexity of the human tragicomedy, sometimes in bristling,
bustling crowd scenes, sometimes in a portrait gallery full of
Rembrandtesque chiaroscuro characters. If there is a hero, it is
Shmuel the tailor, one of those rare spirits that a culture oc
casionally produces, -ample and strong enough to contain all
the complexities and paradoxes of the human condition and his
own tradition. Though thoroughly rooted in Judaism, he tran-