MY SAY: DREAMS FROM MY FATHER
Today is Father’s Day….I wish you all a happy day. My own late father was truly special and I thank his wisdom and courage and vision every day. That’s not to say he was perfect, or, even easy. But, he was amazing. He was born in Poland where he was a member of Betar, a militant Zionist group whose ideology was formed by Vladimir Jabotinsky. He left Poland after high school to study abroad. He had a PhD in Zoology from the University of Brussels in Belgium and subsequently went to medical school in Geneva. On one of his sojourns to Poland to visit his family he wooed and wed my lovely mother who went to Geneva with him. When he graduated from medical school he saw an ad for a physician to join the Bolivian Army in the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay. Following Vladimir Jabotinsky’s advice he immediately signed on, much to the surprise of his bride and the horror of his family. Within weeks he departed for Bolivia. He knew no Spanish and he had never carried a weapon, nonetheless he was quickly deployed to the jungle and became proficient in both. My mother followed within months. They lived in a tent, slept on hammocks to avoid spiders and snakes. He rode patrols on rivers with piranhas and surubis which could devour an injured cow within minutes. Nonetheless, my mother always spoke happily of those years.
When the war was over, the Bolivian government granted him citizenship and the title of “Surgeon General” and my parents moved to Cochabamba, then to Oruro and subsequently to La Paz where he practiced medicine until we left for America. He was forty years old, spoke no English, and had the equivalent of $2,000.00. We first went to Portland, Oregon via California where he obtained a job in an Army hospital. After a year he decided that we had to see America before settling down permanently. We crossed the United States by Greyhound buses, ricocheting from city to city. He loved E lPaso Texas, my mother did not. She liked Las Cruzes, New Mexico a commuter distance from ElPaso, but there was no Synagogue. Then it was Colorado (too high), New Orleans (too low), Chicago (too windy and cold), Cleveland (too something or other), Boston (obnoxious relatives who called us greenhorns) and so it went. I will never understand how we settled on the Bronx. He studied English, passed the Medical Equivalence test which enabled him to get a license and he became a general practitioner on Bryant Avenue.
I went on house calls with him, and during the rides I learned classical music, German poetry, geography, Spanish grammar and declensions, history, Zionism, the poems of John Milton, Yeats, and Walt Whitman, and other then boring subjects which have stuck to me until this day.
If he was a demanding , strict and didactic father, he was a perfect grandfather to his seven grandchildren and considered them perfection. Although he derided popular culture, he drove one of my daughters to Tupelo, Mississippi so she could visit the home and birthplace of Elvis Presley. He walked with her enthusiastically, visiting the museum and reading every detail of his life. She has since traveled all over the globe but remembers that trip above all.
He was felled by a stroke in 1979 and died in 1984. As I said- he was amazing….Mardoqueo Isaac Salomon remembered with love and gratitude…..rsk
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