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Grandpa Ben

By Moshe Parelman   My grandfathers presented contrasting examples of grandpahood. When Grandpa Jake, my father’s father, came to see us on Sundays he would perform a magic trick. He often took my sister and I to the zoo. When he and my Bubbie babysat my sister and I, he would dry us off after our baths and tell us a story about the Ginger Bread Man. Grandpa Ben, my mother’s father, didn’t do magic tricks, frequent the zoo or tell Ginger Bread Man stories. When he would dry us, we would beg him to tell us a story about the Ginger Bread Man. But he’d keep putting us off. Finally, he’d say this: “The Ginger Bread Man was going down the street in the back of a truck. He fell off and got run over by a car.” The first conversation I remember having with him was when I was six or seven. He and my father and I were watching the 1968 Grammy Awards. The category was Record of the Year, and the nominees were Little Green Apples , Glen Campbell, Mrs. Robinson, Simon and Garfunkel, ...
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The Road to Crown Heights

The Rebbe looks at the bleachers from his chair, eyeing us long distance. I’m holding sweet Kiddush wine in a paper cup, the kind they give you at the dentist’s to rinse out your mouth. I’m supposed to wait until the Rebbe looks at me, then say “ L’chaim” (“To life”) and drink the wine. But I can’t tell whether the Rebbe   is looking at me. Thousands of other eyes parked inside 770, headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, compete with mine to hold the Rebbe’s gaze. The Rebbe has resumed speaking. Apparently, he’s given up hope of making eye contact with me. I try to prepare myself for another hour of uninterrupted talk in Yiddish, a language I don’t understand, with the exception of   a few words, such as “ meshugana ,” “ schlep ” and “ oy , ” none of which, I assume, figure very prominently in the Rebbe’s Torah talks. As I peer at the Rebbe, my mind wanders. The Rebbe is wearing a wide-brimmed fedora hat made by an Italian company called “Borsalino.” He wears i...
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Campaigning with Tom

By Moshe Parelman     Jimmy Carter, 1976               Tom Long and I were standing by the curb outside his house. He wanted to show me something. On the street someone had written with red spray paint, “Humphrey Sucks.” I wondered who would have done such a thing. Living as we were in highly Republican Johnson County, a collection of upscale Kansas City  suburbs , there were certainly a lot of suspects. Then I noticed a hint of a smile starting to form at the corner of Tom’s mouth. How could I have been so gullible? Tom, of course, had written it himself.             Hubert Humphrey was a favorite politician of my family. Humphrey was a kind of Jewish heirloom. In fact, earlier that year, my parents had asked my Ouija board who would win the presidential election in 1976. Wonder of wonders, the Ouija board spelled out “Humphrey.” What the Ouija...
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