Last week, as I was having Thanksgiving dinner with my family, my friend Mitia (a Russian short form for Michael) died after a 6+ year battle with esophageal cancer. His son-in-law called me the next day to let me know. I had been dreading this call for years. I tried to hold back my tears but did not succeed. The last time I spoke to him, about a month ago, he seemed calm and content, joking and cursing in Russian, which we both enjoyed doing. He knew he was dying, but never once did I detect even the slightest hint of self-pity or dread. He was old-school-tough like that.
I met Mitia in my twenties when we both worked for CSC, a technology consulting company. We remained close friends ever since. Over the years, I have gotten to know his family, his wife Helen, and his daughters Liza and Marsha. He talked about them often, and I could feel how much he loved them.
I did not want to go to the funeral; I hate funerals (and weddings), but I felt that I should go out of respect for the family. When I got to the funeral home, his daughter Liza got up to the podium to deliver a eulogy. I immediately felt ashamed for not wanting to come. Being there made me realize just how much he meant to the people who mattered most to him. With Liza’s permission, I am posting it here.
…my father was born in Kiev, the only child of Yuri and Julia. The way he describes his childhood is a mix of wonder and poverty, suspended in the failures and economic realities of communism and extreme anti-semitism. After a stint in the army, having been expelled from engineering school due to being Jewish and over the quota permitted, his parents, grandmother and dog knopka, or pushpin, bought and bribed their way out of the country via the first flight jews were allowed to travel after a train carrying Jewish refugees had been hijacked and bombed only a few weeks prior.
They made their way through Vienna and eventually to Rome, where they would spend months stateless trying to figure out where they, a paperless Jewish family, could go.
On August 26, 1976, a day that has since been celebrated each year as coming to America day, they landed in the US as official refugees – four people, one smuggled dog, scraps of what they could carry, and $100 for all of them. I cannot underscore how difficult the first few years in the US were – it was never a time that was reminisced fondly, and the fear and uncertainty of having no safety net never quite left. They thought they made it when they bought their first loaf of commercial bread, and didn’t have to subsit on the scratch and dent sacks of flour. I would also be remiss without mentioning and acknowledging the Arbeiter and Neugroschel families who were part of the circle that sponsored the whole family. Their kindness and their mitzvahs has never and will not be forgotten.
My father worked at least three jobs while going to school, including as in air conditioning installation, despite two left hands and falling through at least one ceiling. College wasn’t easy, either. Papa nearly failed statistics because he didn’t know the word “die” or “dice” and it wasn’t in his Russian English dictionary. The last time he had asked for a translation of a word not in the dictionary, it had been part of a colorfully obscene vernacular and he wasn’t about to make that mistake again.
He graduated and through some luck, good deeds, networking and grit he landed a job at the then-prestigious Bell Labs as an assistant programmer. He loved his work, and although he was restless in his career, it was clear that he took an immense amount of pride in his achievements, including multiple patents. Everyone started to thrive, but he never quite outran the shadow of where he came from and it would be with him throughout his life.
Within 8 years of arriving in the states, he met and married my mom, and bought his second home – their first together. Within a year I was born and my sister a few years after. If you know anything about my father, he loved his family more than anything – his grandmother, his parents, my mom and his kids. He doted on my mother, and there was no point in their marriage where they weren’t a team, or together. Even a short errand was an opportunity for togetherness. He took immense joy in being a proud parent and grandparent. I sometimes think he loved more fiercely than most because he knew what it was to lose everything, risk everything, and have family be the only thing that survives.
He also loved this country – his adopted country that took him in, allowed him to pursue a fulfilling career, raise his family, put his children through school and live a comfortable life. He loved traveling the country and dreamt of buying an RV and traveling nearly full time. Mostly I think he loved democracy – getting to speak his mind, which he did early and often, without fear of losing his life. He equally loved having the ability to vote with his dollars – he cancelled companies before it was a thing and there was constant whiplash about what companies were on the kaufman list of economic sanctions at any time. We all rejoiced when Dijon mustard made its way back into good graces. Heinz ketchup never did, and that’s where the rest of us drew the line and revolted – we always had two ketchups in the fridge.
There are so many other things that he liked that made him him. He had rules for everything, and superstitions wherever rules fell short, and we often referred to kaufman cockamamie plans that were designed to maximize efficiency only he understood. I would routinely be told, including through adulthood, that I boiled the water for tea “wrong”. At the same time, he had a healthy mistrust of low level laws and minor societal rules, having no problem finding loopholes. Indeed, he taught himself a new route to his home of more than 20 years after being warned for the last time by the new Providence police about rolling through a stop sign in his orange stick shift Volvo coupe. When I asked why he would waste gas and time to go around the block, he acknowledged that he’d never fully stop and the eventual ticket would be more expensive and annoying. I honed my legal skills from a young age being the family letter writer to many a traffic court, as well as corporations that had somehow violated his rules and code.
I would never really describe him as happy, or at least not happy go lucky and he lived his life waiting for the other shoe to drop. And yet, he took immense, palpable joy is his particular brand of mishegas and misanthropy. While he was mistrustful of people as a whole, he connected with people on an individual level and there’s hardly a store or a place we’d go where people didn’t greet him by name and he greeted them right back – with a joke about their sports team, family, cars, or something else personal he took the time to remember. He always identified deeply with people who he considered to be hard workers trying to get by for their families.
He loved so many small things that were, in retrospect, much larger. I’d like to share with you some of his great affinities and which are things that will forever remind of us of him.
He drank tea vociferously, and having tea together as a family was our quality time. Tea with breakfast, mid-morning, afternoon, and especially at night for dessert. He took his tea with milk, never sweetened and if it wasn’t dessert, he ate jelly with it, that reminded him of his family’s confitures growing up. His love of dark chocolate and most sweets was well-known, and he ate nightly ice cream nearly year round (there are rules you know). His love of ice cream was directly and inversely correlated with the price; his favorite was the carton on sale. As it turns out, many things tasted better on sale, not least of all fruit and we’d drive for miles to get a better deal of cherries or watermelon in season, and for watermelon, it included a thorough inspection of nearly all the fruit in the pallet.
Papa loved animals and particularly dogs. He was a softie and would stuff his pockets full of dog treats when he was going to the city. He needn’t have, because he was a dog whisperer – they were just drawn to him. He could recount, in detail, stories about each of his dogs and grand dogs, and in truth, we pretty much shared my family’s dog, Mothball, for whom he served as chief apologist.
He also had a soft spot for cars and loved to drive, finding it meditative and later, therapeutic. I have never met anyone else with such encyclopedic knowledge about cars, although he never gave himself permission to get a true performance vehicle. A few months ago we recounted every one of his 20+ cars that he owned or leased here and he could recall every detail. I think his favorite was the gray turbo station wagon that wasn’t labeled as a turbo and with which he took particularly delight in racing at traffic lights. He did not race to lose.He was a soccer nut, and while Arsenal was his favorite team, and Dynamo Kiev was his home team, he really loved the art of soccer. Watching soccer, in the early days on the Spanish channel, was probably the one thing he did for him. He didn’t care who he watched, as long as the game was good, but he especially enjoyed a later-in-life rivalry between Arsenal and Tottenham with Eric. In a testament to him, he had always wanted to see a world cup match, and had the opportunity to do so in 1994, but gave up a coveted ticket because it was my mom’s birthday, and he couldn’t bear not celebrating on the exact date.
Elizabeth Kaufman Bieber
Most of all, we will remember him as being funny and just…wildly inappropriate. His particular brand of sarcasm and bending of societal propriety is inimitable, cancellable, and despite our sometimes-mortified reactions, he somehow got away with the most outlandish things. He was also kind, good natured and loving. At his best, these qualities gelled in a way that is difficult to describe, but is a good part of the reason why we loved him and loved spending time with him, which is all we can really hope for. Now that I’m a parent too, I know he did his job right – to raise the type of children who you want around and who want you around, and really nothing else matters. He loved fiercely and we loved him fiercely right back.
We say in Judaism, Zichrono l’vracha: may his memory be a blessing. So I invite you to join our family – the next time you have a cup of milky tea, blow the car next to you out of the water, enjoy a deeply discounted cup of ice cream, hear an announcer cry GOL, eat the middle cherry of the season when the peak ripeness and lowest cost cross in an axis, snuggle with an animal, and you’re enjoying the moment with family, I hope, for just a second, you think of my father. For his family his blessing is so much more than a memory.
