CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
January 1940
Lebn is vi a blits.
Life is like lightning.
The pain and trauma Isaac and Rebecca suffered in Europe left them with scars and memories that would never disappear, but nothing could compare to the blackness that engulfed their small family in Philadelphia when their youngest child Beryl died.
Beryl, known to his friends and basketball teammatesI at Southern High School as Benjamin Caprove, is generally remembered more for dying at the young age of seventeen than for how he lived and was loved. The following story is the family’s last happy memory of Beryl.
On New Year’s Day in 1940, the family gathered, as was their tradition, at Ben’s Nickel Inn, the luncheonette that Anne and Ben owned across the street from the high school. They were fortunate to have the place to themselves and sat on the tall stools near the counter drinking hot chocolates and ice cream floats. Beryl showed off the class ring with the ruby-colored stone that Sunny had bought for him, and he talked animatedly about his upcoming winter graduation.
That year, the holiday was particularly special because both Anne and Sunny were new mothers. Sunny had her baby first—a boy named Jerry; Anne followed with a daughter named Marcy. Beryl was enjoying his new status as an uncle.
Once they finished their drinks at the luncheonette, the family headed over to the church next door. The priest gave them a key so that the families could sit in warmth with the babies while having a front-row seat, by a second-story window, to the city’s most famous parade. Anne looked on at Beryl’s wide grin, dimples, and twinkling brown eyes as he pointed to the flamboyantly dressed mummers marching by; he was apparently enjoying the parade as much as his infant niece and nephew.
Less than two weeks later, on January 13, Beryl’s luck took a turn for the worse. While working at Harry’s rag shop, Beryl caught two of Harry’s employees stealing, and when he confronted them, they roughed him up, throwing him into a baler machine (a large hanger with wire that tied up bales of clothing). Beryl sustained a serious cut on his leg, and when Harry found him, he took him to the hospital, where Beryl received stitches and was then released.
On the evening of this incident, Beryl was scheduled to go on a date with a girl he adored. Despite his weakened condition, he insisted on going. While escorting the girl back and forth on a trolley, Beryl was caught outside during a major snowstorm. As a result of this exposure, he became sick with pneumonia.
When Anne went to visit Beryl at her parents’ house the next day, on January 14, he was jaundiced, and she rushed him to Pennsylvania Hospital, across the street from her house on Spruce Street. Each evening after work, Anne rushed to the hospital to see how Beryl was doing, but on the fifth day she was stopped at the door. The building was quarantined because there was a case of scarlet fever, thus limiting entry into the hospital to members of the medical staff and the clergy.
Luckily, Anne happened to be friendly with a nurse at the hospital who took care of her when she gave birth to her daughter Marcy ten months earlier. After finishing her shift each evening, the nurse stopped by Anne’s house for coffee and ice cream and gave the concerned sister updates on her brother’s condition. To her relief, she was told that Beryl was improving and that the doctors were planning on releasing him soon.
However, Anne’s relief turned out to be short-lived. After dinner on January 23, a local rabbi, who was permitted to enter the still-quarantined hospital, stopped by her brother’s room and offered to play cards with him. When one of the cards fell to the floor, Beryl bent over to pick it up, resulting in blood rushing to his head, which the family initially believed caused his immediate death.
Beryl’s death was sudden and shocking, and the family never really understood what happened to him. Years later, Anne read his death certificate, which stated that the principal cause of death was from a “pulmonary embolism” and the secondary factor was “lobar pneumonia.” A blood clot, probably resulting from the injury to his leg, must have traveled to his lungs, which were already in a weakened state due to the pneumonia.
Beryl was the baby of the family, the only child left at home. His death shattered everyone close to him into a million pieces. Each one suffered their own breakdown. Sunny, who was the closest to him, was so devastated that her parents feared that during the funeral she would try to throw herself into Beryl’s grave. Their fears were unfounded, but she suffered miserably for an entire year from gastrointestinal problems.
After the funeral, Ben took Anne away to Atlantic City, where the couple started a new business that was already in the works before Beryl was hospitalized. He hoped that the move away from Philadelphia would help his wife heal, but it was difficult being so far from her grieving family.
Her mama and papa stopped functioning and could no longer care for themselves, so Harry moved them into his and Sunny’s home and tried to look after them. After Beryl’s funeral, Rebecca became so emotionally ill and confused that at times she often forgot where she was. While still struggling during her early days of mourning, she once walked down the street and heard a group of people say, “Oh, here comes a crazy lady.”
Isaac became so depressed that he stopped eating and lost a tremendous amount of weight. He didn’t know what to do with himself. Harry took Isaac to work with him at the rag shop every day to get his father-in-law out of the house. When Isaac commented one day on the inviting aroma of one of the worker’s ham sandwiches, Harry was not about to pass up an opportunity to feed his wife’s undernourished father, so he gave him a ham sandwich without ever telling Isaac, the grandson of a rabbi, that he was eating pork. Isaac loved it, and Harry continued to give him a ham sandwich every day.
It wasn’t just Beryl’s family who grieved over his death. A week after his funeral, Beryl’s classmates graduated, but instead of celebrations, an overwhelming feeling of sadness hovered over the commencement exercises at South Philadelphia High School. Even sixty years later, Beryl’s classmates recalled how shaken they were by the youngster’s sudden death.II
Somehow, the family managed to survive 1940. A year later, they found themselves gathered with all of Rebecca’s family from New York at Mount Lebanon Cemetery in Philadelphia, this time for Beryl’s gravestone unveiling. An unusual eight-foot-tall gray headstone, carved in the shape of a tree with its limbs cut short, was erected at his grave. It symbolized a young life cut down in its prime without ever having the chance to grow.
As Anne stood there, she could not help but think back to that happy day eighteen years earlier, when everyone celebrated her brother’s brit milah in the yard in Kishinev. Her papa held Beryl proudly before the crowd, overjoyed that he finally had a son, a Kaddish. Now underweight and frail, her father stood by his beloved son’s graveside; he put on his pair of round spectacles as he opened to the last page of his prayer book. With all his loved ones by his side, Isaac slowly began to recite the words of the Kaddish, in memory of his only Kaddish.
1. I. Some of Beryl’s former classmates believe that he played high school basketball as an underclassman with Red Klotz, who later became, at five foot seven, one of the shortest players in the NBA. The endearing guard also became the coach with the most defeats in history, losing fifteen thousand games to the Harlem Globetrotters.
2. II. Life continued for these boys, and many of Beryl’s friends were soon drafted and fought overseas during World War II. Even many of the physicians and nurses from Pennsylvania Hospital served in the war. The young doctor who signed Beryl’s death certificate, Garfield G. Duncan, served as a lieutenant colonel and advised General Douglas MacArthur on malaria suppressive therapy. After the war, he became a leading expert and author on the treatment of diabetes mellitus.