Yesterday, I wrote about my Uncle Aaron and his poetry and some of his issues. Here's the picture of him I posted:
I promised to tell you the story of his name -- if I've written it before, sorry, but really, I'm lucky if I can remember anything I wrote before, let alone everything -- which I will. But when I saw the picture posted, it reminded me of something else:
Uncle Aaron was about 5'2". When I say I come from short people, I'm not kidding. I said yesterday that he was the youngest of 14 or so children -- three of them had died in childhood -- and of this noble group, there were only three sons: the oldest (Morris), the third (David), and baby Aaron. David died in Russia in the 1920s, a victim of mustard gas after fighting in World War I, so I never met him. Morris was roughly Aaron's height, perhaps a little shorter. I don't think any of the eight sisters were any taller, although one of them may have been by an inch. The strange thing was that Aaron had two sons, each of whom was about 6'4". Their mother was also little. So, I don't know if anything was going on there, but I doubt it. They looked like their father; apparantly, their mother's brothers were tall. But it was strange at any family gathering to see everyone else craning their necks to look up at them.
So, the name story. You'll notice that in the picture, he's labeled himself "Angelo Aaron Schmuller." In his later years, around 1980 I'd guess, he wrote my mother a long, rambling letter, typewritten in Yiddish. She spoke Yiddish fluently, before she spoke English, actually, but had never been taught to read it. My father, on the other hand, did not speak Yiddish but understood it fluently, and could read Hebrew. Written Yiddish uses the characters of the Hebrew alphabet. What they did was that my father read the letter out loud, both he and my mother listening to what he said in order to understand what Aaron had written.
At one point, though, they both just started to laugh and laugh. We had to make them stop and tell us what they had heard, because of course, my sister and I don't understand Yiddish. It seems Aaron had been describing the new revelation in his life, and that he had decided who had been the most perfect person who had ever lived, and that he was going to dedicate the rest of his life to living according to that man's beliefs, and that he had changed his name legally in order to honor the memory of that man. Who was it?
Pope John XXIII. Whose given name, pre-Pope, was Angelo Roncalli.
He had done it, changed his name legally to Angelo. Every letter we received after that was engraved with that name in the return address corner, and I've looked it up, that's how he's listed in the Social Security Death Index.
I don't know if it helped him. Not long after that, his wife divorced him, taking everything he had, and his sons, in their thirties by then, were estranged. He had not been violent to others since he stopped trying to kill my mother and her brother when they were children, but he had attempted suicide several times. Once, while spending the night with my grandparents, around 1970, I think, he had awakened my grandfather in the middle of the night to show him that blood was dripping from both wrists. He would generally commit himself after these episodes, I believe, and come out several months later. He always had ordinary jobs and supported himself, since poetry was his passion but not a source of income. In the few years before he died, my father had had to tell him forcefully to stop contacting my mother, since his late night phone calls -- wild rants and accusations -- would upset her so much.
There we go. We got the short and the crazy from that branch of the family. He was our prime specimen.
