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Chaim Lazar Friedman ha-Kohane
was born in Grodno, Poland (now Byelorussia) in 1898 to fairly well to do
parents. His father Todres helped build the shul in that city with a very
large Jewish population. My mother remembers sitting in a front-row pew in
the shul with her father-in-law's name on a plaque or a cornerstone. That
synagogue was probably the one that was burned in November 1941.
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My father became an orphan at
a very young age with his sister Becky looking after him. She departed for
America at a young age. After losing his first son to the incompetence of
midwives, Lazar bundled his young daughter Ethel and his wife Tzivia up in
a wagon and made the tour of Poland through Warsaw and back, looking to
resettle. He worked as a leather worker and, after the birth of his second
son, bravely followed his sister to the New World in search of a better
life. What a gamble he took!
My father had a remarkable voice.
I remember him shaving every morning singing “Oiche Choynia” (Dark
Eyes) and even ironing his pin stripe suit before he went to work. Now I
realize he had brown eyes, and my mother had hazel eyes, so he apparently
had a great self-image as well. When I was a little girl of about three
or four I could stand on the benches in shul in the men’s section. That
made me as tall as him. Listening to him daven in such a rich tenor --
that was one of my dearest memories. Then, of course, I had to go to my
mother because it was time for him to go up on the bimah and be part of
the minyan for Birchat ha Kohanim. The mystery of seeing him hands spread
under his tallis tent is still with me. His rich baritone alto voice
pierces through the off key intonations of his friends.
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I still love being part of a minyan
that includes this part of the service. Perhaps if there were not so many
misfortunes: the loss of his parents; searching for work in Poland and
then again in Canada; I think he could have continued his cantorial role
from the shtetl that he had to leave in his middle twenties.
My mother tells this
story of my father: “One day a poor man was in mourning and could
not afford the price of tefillin to perform the year of
Kaddish. Lazar searched his tallis bag, found his set of tefillin,
and gave them to the man so that he could daven properly.” She told
me that story many times to demonstrate unflinching generosity
and compassion .
He was an expert card-player and enjoyed
pinochle with his sister, who later become the main caterer in town,
my birthplace Windsor Ontario Canada.
Poker was his
forte, much to the distress of my mother. When he cut the cards,
they seemed to fly in mid-air.
My
father was resourceful and clever, as he pursued many ways to
make a living for his family; formerly a leather finisher in Grodno,
he co-managed various establishments with his family from a butcher
shop in Brooklyn with his cousins to a deli in Windsor with his
sister Becky. Finally he bought a second hand store as his final
endeavor.
However this trait most impressed me when I was about five or six
years old and entered our home wailing from having stumbled on a
wooden playpen in someone’s yards. I had a fairly large piece of
wood embedded in my left leg, with a very small stub showing, and
my mother was calling a cab to take me to a doctor. My father put me
on the dining room table and found a scissors. He caught the stub of
the wood between the blades and twisted the scissors flat against my
leg to fully extract a long bloody chunk from a hole in my leg. I
still don’t know how he managed to do that. |