Call for a Ruby-Felenstein-Brenner Reunion in 2013

Dear Marsha, Janis, Leslie, Dan and others,

Thank you enormously for your kind words about my reportage on the trip with Mel. As I said before, the trip turned out to be no sacrifice at all on my part, but rather a deeply enriching experience that had the wonderfully salutary effect of taking me out of my own problems and issues for a few days and giving me the chance to plunge into another fascinating and inspiring reality. I feel very lucky to have had the chance and emerge from it considerably calmer and saner than I was a week ago

Marsha picked up on my earlier comment that we Ruby kids missed out on a lot of family lore and family connection by the decision of our parents to leave New York when we were very small and move to Pittsburgh, Chicago and points west. (Stan, Helga, wherever you are, I’m not trying to guilt-trip you here, no doubt the decision made a lot of sense for professional reason and God knows, Green Valley Drive in Glenshaw, PA, had a lot of redeeming virtues, including skiing on Hodel’s farm and running wild in Mrs. Lawrence’s woods, etc.) Yes, Marsha, it was sad for all of us, but there’s still time in our lives to pick up lost threads and weave something old and new…

In any case, what I would propose for family reconnection and bonding purposes would be to take a page from Mel’s 87th U.S. Army Division and hold a 2013 Ruby-Felenstein-Brenner reunion in some lovely spot somewhere. Those who can’t make it physically could be streamed in via Skype. All generations should be represented, so members of the younger generation would be coerced by all manner of arm twisting, guilt tripping and/or vague promises of financial reward to show up. This would be Ruby-Felenstein-Brenner families in the broadest sense of the word, encompassing spouses and their families, stepchildren, and anyone else in our extended circles who would like to attend and share stories and memories.

We could have all manner of historical discussions, photo sharing and group therapy sessions, etc. and emerge after a long weekend, uplifted and transformed, and with enough material to keep Danny busy for decades to come on the Ruby Family History blog!

OK, the idea is out there; now I am turning it over to those of you with organizational abilities to bring to fruition…
This picture below from my jaunt to Naragansett Beach is symbolic of Cousin Love and the pheonix-like return of the Ruby-Felenstein-Brenner connection.

Much love to you all,

Walter

Mel's reunion final report

Group portrait of the surviving vets of the 87th, including several members of the WACS

Dear All,

Mel and  Leslie at the reunion

The second and final day of the 87th Infantry Division reunion (actually there were three days, but we missed the first) was even more intellectually enriching and emotionally resonant than the first. I missed the business meeting at which it was decided to hold another meeting next year, despite the dwindling number of living vets (they deal with that tough decision every year and every year decide to continue), so next year in Atlanta...

Mel and Kathleen Coleton, daughter of 

Mel's closest war buddy John Coleton, 

who couldn't make the reunion this 

year  because of ill health. 

Leslie Brenner arrived from her home in Portsmouth in time to attend the Memorial Service with Mel and myself...Various prayers, declarations  and color guards marching through a small room...This year when they read George Washington's Prayer for the Nation, the written version contained a reference to his faith in Jesus Christ, but out of respect for the Jewish soliders, they did not mention Jesus Christ when reading the proclamation out loud. (Mel had spoken to the powers that be on that issue last year and they understood the discomfort that caused the Jewish vets). There was plenty of spirituality though, especially when everyone joined wholeheartedly in a moving rendition of Amazing Grace...

Leslie and Kathleen Coleton

Then there was a session of reminiscing about difficult issues from the battlefront...They spoke about having known men who literal shot themselves in the foot so as to be able to get out of the horror of the fighting, with one guy acknowledging that he and others covered for one guy who shot himself in the foot, saying it was an accident, not intentional...One vet, a taciturn type from the South, spoke candidly about his lifelong struggle against anxiety--how he managed to succeed in his career and build a happy marriage and family despite the demons he was constantly fighting, including the shame he felt about his condition. He did electroshock treatments back in the 50s, which helped some, but he didn't really get relief until Zoloft appeared in the 90s. It was moving that he felt safe to share what had been deep dark secrets in front of all those people.

Military couple from Minnesota

One guy talked about the shock of visiting Buchenwald two days after it was liberated, describing vividly in the first person what we have all seen on faded newsreels and in history books; the smell, the piled up bodies and watching a former prisoner beating S.S. prison guards with a riding crop...Mel, whose unit also liberated a much smaller concentration camp, said until that point, there had been virtually no awareness of the reality of the Holocaust  among the U.S. troops, lncluding the Jewish ones. Mel shared one of the most powerful anecdotes---how he talked some of his comrades out of shooting German soldiers they had captured...He argued that it was morally wrong, would dishonor the company, and if word got out,  it would prevent more Germans from surrendering...At one point he summoned all of his will to hold himself back from shooting in the stomach a teenage Hitler Youth member he had captured who had been firing at him from a house...but sometimes there was no choice but to shoot the Hitler Youth who chopped down trees and did other desperate acts of sabotage to slow the American advance in the final weeks because they resisted to the very end...

Leslie works the crowd

Dear Readers, I must acknowledge missing the end of that session as I rushed off for a delicious swim at Naragansett Beach...Later came the closing banquet, which was memorable for me in part for the chance to have some quality time with Leslie, who shared family memories growing up...How her grandfather Lee Klein used to take them to the races at Saratoga and other wonderful memories of her grandparents Lil and Lee, of Uncle Morty, of her relationship growing up with Wendy, Marsha and Robert...It made me realize how much rich family life Dan, Joanne and I missed out on because our parents moved with us away from New York to Pittsburgh and Chicago as kids...There was an amazing entertainment at the Banquet---an acapella group called Boston Accent who performed songs from the 30s to the 70s with gorgeous harmonies, but also with plenty of fun and sass...utterly charming...and we all had plenty to drink, or at least I did...It seemed appropriate to honor the memory of my late grandfather Walter Ruby and Lee Klein, who also went into the liquor business, with several rum and cokes (as most of you know he famously invited the drink, which he labelled Carioca Cooler)...

In any case, it was a magical two days. I saw humanity at its best on so many levels...Maybe there still is hope that this species can build a decent future...Thanks so much to Mel for giving me the chance to experience all of this and to Leslie for sharing it with us...Hugs to you all,

Walter

Naragansett beach

Report from Mel's WW2 reunion

Dear Friends,

Just wanted to share a little of the reunion of Mel's 87th Infantry Division Legacy Association with you. There are maybe 150 people here at the Reunion at a large hotel in Warwick, RI --34 surviving veterans of World War II and the rest children and grandchildren and assorted relatives of the vets, including some who have continued to be involved even though their fathers are now deceased. They come from every corner of the U.S., though the majority are from the Northeast, and of course Florida, to which so many have retired. This is really Middle America in all of its permutations, but a really kindly, warm and fuzzy face of Middle America. People are here for each other, a wonderful spirit of voluntarism and everyone looking out for each other.

Battle flag of the 87th Division 

On one level obviously, the whole thing is a tribute to the unfathomable experiences the members of 87th Divison, living and dead (the youngest, like Mel are about to turn 87, the oldest surviving veteran, Walt Clarke, is 95) went through on the frozen battlefields of the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 and during their triumphant drive across Germany the following spring, ending near the Czechoslovak border on the last day of the way, May 7, 1945. On a deeper level, there is shared connections of the vets and their loved ones and survivors with each other.

Gen. William McAuliffe said
"Nuts" to the Nazis

To say that death was everywhere around them during those months is an understatement; for example, of the 42 men in Mel's unit at the beginning of the fighting in the fall of 1944, only 7 were still alive at the end of the war. Who died and who survived was completely about grotesque games of chance. One guy spoke about watching his entire unit get decimated while he escaped unharmed a few yards away; Mel was blown into the air by an exploding shell, but came down unharmed. Wiliam Foster of northern  New York State, who remembers Mel from the fighting as "a damn good soldier", remembers diving for cover into a foxhole during a German artillery barrage and finding himself on top of a dead German soldier. He jumped out and ran for another hole, hich he now remembers as a foolish thing to have done. Every night they would dig holes to lie down in their sleeping bags in the tundra like snowy terain; inability to get warm was a constant torture during the Bulge; in the morning they would slither out of the slepping bags to find them frozen to the ground and would have to cut the bags loose with knives...

Mel in conversation at the reumion

The vets speak of returning from that hell to normal lives back home--Mel who was then all of 19 and 20, said he "went back to being a kid." Somehow the miracles of the human brain made it possible to put the war experiences behind them ad lead amazingly normal lives; only many decades later did they feel the need to begin to process the experience together and realize in many cases that they had experienced traumatic stress disorders that had impacted their subsequent lives in ways they still often cant put their fingers on or articulate. But the overwhelming impression is of genial, balanced and good humored men of whom Mel is an Exhibit A (everyone here appreciates his warm and intelligent sense of humor and his wonderful eccenticites like the canes he whittles filled with  birds and whimsical human faces).

Faces in the crowd at the mixer

Last night's 'mixer' was a feast that ended in a sing-along of sons of the era (White Cliffs of Dover, We'll Meet Again and the previous generations (Bicycle Built for Two, This is the Army Mr. Jones)...One veteran got up and sang a less reverential send up of the army life, filled with words like 'shit' and 'asshole' at which all laughed uproriously. People reminsced and socialized and looked at photos and maps and documents chronicling the searing experience of the 87th with a sense of wonderment, sometime reverential and sometimes  irreverant. One is reminded of Kurt Vonnegut's famous throwaway line about the bombing of Dresden and all the other horrors of the era all of these folks lived through. "So It Goes," he wrote.

Walt Clarke, 95. is the oldest
survivor of the 87th. He was
a surgeon during the fighting

So it went and so it still goes in Syria right now and on  other assored battlefields around the world; so it has gone for our own Israeli cousins for all of these decades...and how fortunate most of us have been to have escaped having our own lives seared by these horrors. Without getting too pompous and teary eyed, our luck is due in large part to the sacrifice these guys made on the battlefields of Normandy, the Ardennes and so many other fronts; and the tenacity of our valiant Russian allies; who smashed the Nazi blitzkrieg in the snows of Moscow and Stalingrad and saved all of us not only from having to fight but of complete incineration at the hands of a system that tried to murder every Jew in the world.

To paraphrase the Who, I dig my own generation--we had a vision of a new non-exploitive and egalitarian society and did our best to create it against heavy odds..maybe it was "only the fitful dreanms of some greater awakening" to quote Jackson Browne, but I immensely proud of it and feel honored to have lived it. That said, I'm ready to cede the 'Greatest Generation' moniker to Mel and his comrades. Did they ever earn it!!

Leslie will arrive here shortly anbd more events for the rest of the day. I'll report again tomorrow...Here are a few pix...sorry on the quality...more pix to come with next report

Walter

Family attends Twyla's Barnard graduation

Also late, but congratulations are in order for the latest member of the family to pass through the gates of academe and step into the so-called real world. Twyla completed her undergraduate degree from Barnard College at Columbia University, the same institution (Columbia) where her grandfather Stanley was an undergrad and graduate student.

We had a big turnout of Rubys and Eilertsens to celebrate the occasion in New York City. Among Ruby kin, Danny, Joanne, Walter and Tanya, Gene, Janis Brenner and her husband Mitchell Bogart, and Sandy Brenner were on hand for some or all of the festivities. On the Eilertsen side, Kate and Allen, Ed, Judy, and Susie went all out to make the experience special, including at the several special celebratory meals. I was so sad that Stan and Helga could not be there that I broke up trying to say that in a toast at the first celebration dinner.

The graduation ceremony was plenty interesting, with featured speeches by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, David Remnick, Anna Quindlen, Judith Shapiro, and others. Billie Jean King was among those who received the Barnard Medal. Twyla walked with the Anthropology department as she was recognized for her double major in Anthropology and English.

At a couple of departmental receptions, Kate and I had the opportunity to meet two of the professors who advised Twyla's senior project—Ross Hamilton of the English department and Brian Larkin, the chairman of the Anthropology department. Both had lovely things to say about our graduate. Her thesis, "Made Visible: Scientific Constructivism Through the Lens of Hooke's Micrographia, received a 'A' grade from the two professors.

Graduation morning, there was a screwup because I failed to get word to Sandy on where we would meet. She came anyway—solo on the train with Mel in the hospital recovering from a knee operation—but we never managed to find each other. Janis was getting ready to leave for Asia that morning, and the last thing she needed was my frantic call looking for her mother. She ended up missing her flight while Mitchell worked the phones trying to track her down.

Turns out Sandy was there for the graduation ceremony and post reception. Then, not finding any of us, she sensibly went home, where she discovered everyone had been looking for her. My apologies for my part in the screwup. Thankfully, everything worked out okay and Joanne took the next day to visit with Sandy and help get Mel home from the hospital.

last pix from Brenners

a few more photos from Brenners--people and critters

Stan's birthday ,occasion at Brenners and forthcoming quest to Rostov, Vilna and Kovno

Dear Dan, Jo and world,

I am extremely exhausted tonight, preparing for my forthcoming trip to the former Soviet Union (Kiev, Rostov, Moscow, Minsk, Vilnius, Kaunas on trip to research our families in Rostov and Lithuania, but felt the need to put at least something up here on the occasion of what would have been Stan's 83rd birthday. We all miss him terribly and it would have been wonderful to share with him the joy of our geneological hunt into both sides of his family, which has succeeded beyond all expectation in terms of where we were at soon after his death when we started this project. My biggest excitement recently was finding in a book at Yeshiva University in NY that Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Spektor was the grandfather of Joseph Rabinovitch and ttherefore our great-great-great grandfather. Stan always told me we were descended from Rabbi Spektor, but only recently, when reading the biography of Rabbi Spektor by Rabbi Efraim Shimoff, based on Toldos Yitzhak, by Yitzhak LIfshitz, Rabbi Spektor's secretary, did I find the exact connection. According to the book, my great-grandfather Yosef Rabinowitz (or Rabinovich) was the grandson of Rabbi Spektor and the son of Chaim, the rabbi's oldest son. According to Lifshitz, when Chaim died at the age of 40 in 1874, Rabbi Spektor took charge of his grandson, then 19 and taught him Talmud and Jewish Codes and found him a bride. (According to U.S. census records, her name was Lena Lincoff and the newlywed couple emigrated together to New York in 1875, where they had 9 children, the youngest of was our grandfather, Walter Rabinowitz (b 1893), who changed his name to Ruby at the time he was being inducted into the U.S. Army in 1917 and sent to fight in France.

I have learned a lot also about Rabbi Spektor's role as the chief shdadlan (negotiator) with the Czarist government on behalf of the Russian Jewish community after the beginning of the pogroms of the 1880's, and his outreach to the leaders of West European Jewry (the Rothschilds and many others) to pressure the Czar to lay off the Jews (A lot of these messages were written in a kind of code so as to throw off government spies) and his gingerly embrace of the Hibbat Tzion (Lovers of Zion) movement, the first stirrings of Zionism in Russia that came 15 years before Theodor Herzl. So the great rabbi has come alive and as a very sympathetic and complex character. But I digress...

Tonight, we think of Stan and all of his wonderful qualities and zest for life and the wonderful legacy of values and insight he has left for us. We hope that our lives since your passing, Dad, including this quest, would do you proud and hope that somehow, somwhere you may be aware of all of this. I know it goes against all of your theories and convinced athiesm, but what the hell...

Last weekend, Tanya and I had a enjoyable and meaningful reunion at the home of Sandy and Mel Brenner of some of the surviving members of the older generation of Ruby relatives; Mel and Sandy Brenner, still going strong at 82 and 78 respectively, Marsha and Shelly, Robert Felenstein and wife Jane and Janice Brenner, the radiant ballerina. As viewers will notice, none of us are as young as we once were, but everyone was lively, upbeat and full of the wisdom of having kicked around this planet for a while. We had a delicious lamb roast, drank wine, talked about many things, including politics. Mel reminisced about having been a McGovern delegate in 1972 and there was a group effort to try to understand why this country has elected so many Neanderthal Republicans over the past 40 years. It was wonderful to reconnect to the liberal passion that was such a part of the lives of Stan and Helga and has been passed down to myself, Jo and Danny and to Janice as well. Excellent values, if I do say so myself. Many thanks Stan, Helga, Mel and Sandy for passing them along to us. Maybe they will come back into fashion in 2008. Too bad Stan and Helga had to leave us during the darkest period of Bushism. But to cite Ted Kennedy and Helga, "The cause goes on and the dream will never die..."

By the way, Sandy recalled that our great-grandmother Rose Ratner always reminsced with her about Rostov that it was the most beautiful city in the world and showed us a set of dishes collected by her mother Til decades ago, each emblazoned with a Rose in memory of her beloved mother, Rose Ratner.

How did 150 plus years of our family get from the shtetl to where are now? Well, I think I have to plunge back into the shtetl to understand some of that, so I'm playing guinea pig for that role. I'll be posting on our findings in Rostov and Lithuania when we return on August 8 or perhaps while we are there if we find a working computer. In the meantime, lehitraot and enjoy the photos I am putting up here from the get-together in Massapeaqua. (I'll put up a few more in subsequent posting).

Seven cousins

Here's another great photo from the Sandy collection, or else it is Marsha's. The photo print this was scanned from says October 1957. That's Walter, Danny, and Joanne on the right, Robert Felenstein at left, Marsha Felenstein kneeling, and I am guessing Janis and Leslie Brenner up front.

Dan's senior moment

Here is the longer version of how I managed to misplace Sandy and Marsha's treasured photos for nine months. I am so sorry it happened, but am happy now that I have recovered and returned them.

Last October, I made a trip that combined a Twyla college visit and family history tour in New York with a Festival Preview business trip to Nashville. I had a lot going on. Also I was carry two pieces of luggage that I had kept from Helga's estate. It was the first and only time I had used one of those bags.

The family part of the trip was tremendously successful. Joanne, Walter and I were together for a visit to Mount Hermon Cemetery, where Walter and Selma Ruby are buried. Then we met with Sandy and Marsha to share our slide show and videos. Later, with Twyla along, too, we all visited the old Ruby home on Walnut Avenue in Long Beach. Truly a day to remember.

When we were at Sandy's that day, she and Marsha also shared some of their photo albums. We all agreed it would be great if I would be able to scan some of their photos to include in our digital project. So they each took out photos--about a dozen in all--for me to take home for scanning, after which I would of course return them. One of the photos was a larger portrait mounted in a portfolio envelope. I put the other photos inside the portfolio, and slipped that in the outer pocket of my old leather briefcase/computer bag.

I say 'old,' because a few days later, in Nashville, I acquired a new computer bag at the IBMA convention. This is significant because later on, when looking for the picture, I had expected it to still be in that outer pocket in the old briefcase. The briefcase upgrade is what I remembered more than the Helga luggage.

I stayed in Nashville for a full week, staying at a Drury Inn a few miles out of town. Since I would be staying so long, I fully unpacked my suitcases, using the dresser drawers, desk and bedside table to organize my belongings. At that time, I obviously transferred the photo portfolio to a location for safe storage. One thing I worried about was, could I have placed it in a desk drawer and later forgotten to take it? I didn't think that was likely, but it was the worst-case scenario.

What I in fact did was place it in an inside zippered compartment in the unfamiliar suitcase. I then proceeded to forget all about it. I had a very eventful week participating in the bluegrass convention and talking up Festival Preview to everyone I met. I went into a completely different mode and Ruby family history went out of my mind.

When I finally returned home after the long trip, I had accumulated a great deal of literature for the convention and I laid out all these papers on my living room coffee table. Later on, when I began searching for the photos, my assumption was that they would have been among all those papers on the coffee table. Instead they were still in the inside pocket in that now-unpacked and forgotten suitcase in the basement.

A few months went by before Marsha sent me email asking about the photos. Oh my god, I realized I had completely forgotten about them. Strangely I couldn't remember ever having seen them since she handed them to me in Massapequa. It was the day before we were leaving for our family trip to Hawaii, and I assured Marsha I would find them when we got back in January.

Since then I made what I thought were comprehensive searches. They were in none of my home-office storage systems. I checked and rechecked both the old and new briefcase. I checked the luggage that I would usually carry on a trip like this. For some reason, I didn't check the new suitcase.

Before leaving on the most recent trip, I made a further effort by going through some of the remaining boxes of mom and dad's belongings that are in the basement. I didn't really expect to find them there and I didn't. I went off with no resolution to the problem.

Of course, I should have been in touch with Sandy and Marsha about the situation, but instead I had let it fester. Now Walter needed to contact Sandy to get information for our visit to Albany. By the time he spoke to her, we were already in the second cemetery, where Sandy's parents are buried, and she was so upset about the photos that she didn't want to talk to me.

As I sat on a curb in the cemetery as Walter spoke to Sandy on the cell phone, I once again rethought my movements in the Nashville hotel room from nine months earlier. Suddenly the memory of the other suitcases emerged. I remembered there was a zippered compartment. I wouldn't be able to confirm it until I got home five days later, but now I had hope.

Sure enough, when I got back to town on Sunday, I went to the luggage area in the basement and there was that three-piece set of bags sitting in the back. I went to the medium one first, opened the compartment, and there was the portfolio. What a relief.

Now that they are recovered, I feel like a dope not for losing them but for not finding them sooner. Maybe I can make up for it by continuing work on the family project, including posting this note here.