When Grandpa died
Most of the family found out His
first name wasn’t actually Alan It was
Alexander
Which only added to the mystique
Of his names
For, when he was alive, he insisted
His Hebrew name was Elihu But
Grandma insisted it was Eliyahu A
long-running dispute
Incidentally, Grandma decided
This was a good time
To let everyone know
Her first name wasn’t Esther
But Mayta
It made sense, this
Changeability of their names
The mystery, the inconstancy
They did, after all, have one foot
In the Old World
Were that much closer
Than we will ever be
To the mysterious traditions
And dire circumstances
Of the past
My Hebrew name is Mordechai
After Grandma’s father
Max (Mordechai) Levine
The name was available
In keeping with the custom That
children are named only after The
deceased
Mordechai Levine
Was a butcher
Who should have been a rabbi
A learned man
Who loved to study
From his books
Who was condemned
By circumstance
To work all his days
As a butcher
Who was embittered
All his life
Because he was a butcher
Who should have been a rabbi
In the one picture we have
Of Mordechai the butcher
He is wearing white shirtsleeves
Glasses and a black felt yarmulke
Bent forward in study
Over an open book of learning
Held in his hands
Grandma once told me
Her father temporarily
Changed his name when he was
Very ill
An old superstition
To trick the Angel of Death
Mordechai the butcher
Was born in Kalelishok
A shtetl in Lithuania
Growing up in Kalelishok
Mordechai the butcher
Would have been known as Motel
In the Old Country
Any Mordechai like me
Might have been Motel
Motel’s father
Was Rabbi Shmuel Dovid Levine
A learned man
A teacher
And a ritual slaughterer
We know this
From a eulogy
Delivered by one of his sons
In Atlanta, Georgia
In 1914
And printed in a book of learning
Titled House of David
Thus, from the inscrutable
Darkness of the Middle Ages
At the end of a long line
Of unparticularized wandering Jews
Who traveled by foot
Cart and blood
Through unknown and unnamable channels
Of two thousand years
Of sufferings and persecutions
That began in a Hebrew kingdom
And ended up
In a soon-to-be-liquidated shtetl
In Kalelishok, Lithuania
Emerged to us
Into our recorded history
Rabbi Shmuel Dovid Levine
Rabbi Shmuel Dovid Levine
Had thirteen children
With two wives
Who were sisters
(He married the second one
After the first one died)
And that eulogy also tells us
His father’s name
Was Chaim
We don’t know his mother’s name Or any other names before him
Save Chaim
Chaim may have been among the first Jews
To take last names
And by taking Levine
We may assume
Chaim
And his father
And his father’s father
Believed themselves
To have been Levites
Descendants of priests
Whose portion was the Lord
And who therefore received
No portion in the Land
And we may also assume
That as a Jew, living
In the 1700s
In Europe somewhere
The father of a rabbi
Who considered himself a Levite
Chaim believed in
Carried with him
Was closer to
Than we will ever be
The foundational Jewish tales
Of Mordechai
Who counseled Hadassah
To change her name to Esther
So that she may live
To be a Persian queen
Of Rachel
Who, dying in childbirth,
Named her son Ben-Oni
“Son of my pain”
(But whose family renamed him Benjamin)
Of Jacob
Whose name was changed to Israel
Because he wrestled God and man And prevailed
And received a promise
His descendants
Would be like the dust of the earth
And of Avram
Whose name was changed to Avraham
Sometime before he withdrew the knife
And only at God’s command
From the throat of his bound son
His only one
Whom he loved
Isaac
The only one of our patriarchs Who
married only one woman Who never
left the land of the covenant And who
did not change his name
But we may never know
What mysterious traditions
And dire circumstances
Chaim’s son
Rabbi Shmuel Dovid Levine
Actually carried with him
From wherever he was born
From that even older world
To Kalelishok
What we do know is this
A few years after Grandpa died
My second cousin once removed
(His red-haired mother
And my red-haired Grandma
Were first cousins),
Rabbi Jonathan Porath
Met with me for sushi
In Jerusalem
Rabbi Jonathan Porath
Brought with him to show me
A book of learning
Once owned by his ancestor and mine,
Rabbi Shmuel Dovid Levine
In the middle of this sefer was a blank page
And on this blank page
Rabbi Shmuel Dovid Levine
Wrote the names
In cursive Hebrew
Of his thirteen children
And the dates and times
And villages of their births
Including Mordechai
My great-grandfather’s name
And my name
Or what would become it
Four generations later
And as I sat there
Trying to make sure
Soy sauce did not touch
My great-great-grandfather’s sefer
As I beheld my Hebrew name
Written in his hand
One hundred twenty-four years ago
I also saw the names
Of his first three children
Who died young
Mayta Esther
Chaim Asher
Avraham Leib
And I saw the lines through them
When they died,
Jonathan explained,
He crossed out their names
_______
Richard Rosengarten is a Pushcart-nominated poet and author living in Miami, Florida. He studied creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, where he served as editor-in-chief of The Original magazine. Later he served as editor-in-chief of the University of Miami Law Review. His poetry has been featured in Poetica magazine, Cosmic Daffodil, Sisyphus, The Reform Jewish Quarterly, and The Lehrhaus. His first children’s book, “With My Little Spade,” was published October 2023 (Happy Sailor Books; Gainesville, FL).