Eric Leber wrote this sweet memoir of Uncle Max and Aunt Martha:
Servant: One who sees what there is to do and does it.
Uncle Max was my grandmother's brother, one of numerous "uncles, aunts and cousins" who made periodic visits to the farm in Toms River, New Jersey, where my grandparents, parents, brother and I lived. City dwellers all, this was a great treat for them: there was space and fresh air, the vast pine forest, pure well water, garden food in the summer and fresh eggs and home-made chicken soup year round, the clear, cool creek just a short walk away and the sparkling ocean half an hour's drive east.
But it was the gathering of the clan that drew us together most strongly, for all except the children born in America were self-exiled Jews who had emigrated in successive waves from Russia and Poland where they had lived together in tightly-knit community. Now they were scattered throughout New York City, some living in Brooklyn, others in Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx. They had adapted as well as they could yet always felt they were foreigners in a foreign land.
As was traditional, the women chattered, cooked and cleaned up, while the men sometimes helped with the farm work, but mainly talked a little business and a lot of philosophy over glasses of the cherry wine my grandfather made annually. I felt very grownup and important when I was entrusted with drawing a pitcherful from the dusty, five gallon jugs that sat in a dark corner of the cellar. (Of course I had already secretly sampled some one very early morning, but though I tried to like it-as a good man-Jew should-the combination of syrupy sweetness and the alcohol kick turned me off rather than on.)
There they were: they were my family and they were foreigners, for I shared very little of the present with them and none of the past. The elders all spoke Yiddish, though they did their best to use English when speaking to my brother and me, or a mix of both languages when talking with my mother, whose Yiddish was weak and rarely exercised.
Sometimes their conversations generated tears, often great gouts of laughter. Though I didn't understand what they were saying I could feel the Jewish passion, so richly potent with fierce joys and dark sorrows. Listen to both Klezmer music and Bloch's Schelomo and you'll hear what I felt. Sitting silently with them, the passion would pass through me in waves of unbearable longing, made even more intense by my self-imposed silence.
In my heart I knew they loved me, yet most often I felt pressed up against the outside window of a candy shop: I could see all the treats, I could even smell them, but something prevented me from gobbling them whole. At those times I became a stranger in my own house and felt as displaced as they all did.
Except Uncle Max.
He and his wife Martha came often, though he usually worked 10 hours a day, six days a week as a house painter in New York City. They always arrived by mid-morning Saturday, bearing large, deep paper bags crammed with Jewish delicatessen: rye, corn and raisin-pumpernickel breads and onion, poppy and sesame bagels, all baked fresh that morning; cream cheese cut from the big block; lox, hand-sliced very thin; olives and dill pickles out of the barrel; gefilte fish, whitefish and herring in sour cream; matzos and Sweetouchnee tea in treasure chest tins-and halvah! two tinfoil wrapped slabs in each wooden box, the box itself wrapped in red cellophane. My mouth waters as I write!
Of all the relatives who came to visit during my first decade, I saw the least of and felt the most for Uncle Max. He and Martha arrived, we helped them ferry in the delicatessen and their big overnight satchel. After greeting hugs he changed into the work clothes and shoes he always left in the spare room closet, then went out to work with my Dad on the current farm projects, leaving Martha to tell us "the news" in her heavily accented, wonderfully fractured English. He would reappear at lunchtime then disappear again, to work until dinner. Didn't have to; wanted to.....
As I grew older I joined him and my father on those projects and we worked together, primarily in silence, which they both preferred.
What stood out? What stood out was that nothing stood out. Uncle Max worked most intelligently, economically, easefully, steadily and selflessly. Thus he disappeared into his work. I might say now that his actions (and non-actions) were those of a Taoist or Zen master, a Bodhisattva or, more simply, that he was a true servant. He appeared without credentials, resume or following, and he was my first spiritual teacher, this man whose work, speech and silent presence were service, kindness and compassion incarnate.
Uncle Max was so extraordinarily ordinary that I never even considered verbally thanking him while he was alive. I'm sure that, if in heaven, he is busy repairing the gold-bricked streets and, if in hell, cutting wood for the fires......