Taking Inventory During the Days of Awe

I have been rummaging through the corner of our basement storage room that I refer to as my genizah.

By definition, a genizah — “hiding place” in Hebrew — is a room for the storage of deteriorated sacred texts and ritual items invoking the name of G-d.

Mine is a more secular repository, with plastic bins, cardboard file boxes, and shoeboxes stacked on shelves.

During the Days of Awe between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Jews are called to engage in introspection and repentance. I am engaged in a more tangible inventory, examining every item in these containers, a different version of “this is your life.”

As I handle decades-old documents, photographs, and newspapers, in a room with adequate light and a dehumidifier, I think of my great-grandfather, who spent months sifting through — and breathing the dust of — the centuries-old contents of the genizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in the Fustat section of Old Cairo.

Doubting the future interest of historians in such items, I have recycled a more than two-foot high pile of paper, including faded pictures of baseball players glued to the yellowed pages of a boyhood scrapbook, dry cleaning and room service bills from a hotel in Saudi Arabia, and reports that I wrote in fourth grade about Abraham Lincoln and George Washington (both received a grade of 100/A). My high school and college report cards, along with SAT and ACT score reports, went into a shredder.

I kept a notice from my high school journalism teacher informing me, mid-way through the semester, that I was failing her class; something about not turning in assigned work. I passed the course. I just wasn’t big on what I called “practice journalism.”

I disposed of rejection letters (circa 1983) from about 40 newspapers where I sought work after a layoff. The upshot was that I left newspapers for television news.

In the end, the journalism thing worked out OK, I think.

My parents gave each of their five children large envelopes of family history. Among the treasures I received was my father’s autograph collection, some obtained when he accompanied his mother as she worked at Jewish charity events in New York City. The signatures include Paul Robeson, Eddie Cantor, Benny Goodman, Oscar Levant, FP Adams, and other luminaries.

I was surprised by a folder of handwritten correspondence between my paternal grandfather and justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, many concerning his treatise on legal protections for trademarks. Among the correspondents were Oliver Wendell Holmes, Benjamin Cardozo, and Louis Brandeis.

I found a typewritten original of “Two Minutes for Prayer,” a bitter, multi-stanza poem that my grandfather wrote after his World War I service as a U.S. Army intelligence officer. The poisonous gas he inhaled in France likely exacerbated breathing issues that led to his untimely death at age 47.

I found my draft card, which I thought was lost years ago. Draft numbers were issued for my birth year, but the last Vietnam War inductees were called up the year before. I remembered my number as being in the 300s. It turned out to be 039, which might have put me in harm’s way.

I have bins filled with decades of historic newspapers and magazines, some from well before I was born and others as recent as this year. As this collection continues to grow, I wonder: Who will want this printed history?

Stuffed into a large plastic bag and a shoe box are hundreds of baseball cards, from the 1960s and early 1970s. I need an assessment of whether any have significant monetary value.

I ached reading letters and cards from family and friends whose passing I mourned. Tucked inside a birthday card was an uncashed $10 check from my maternal grandmother. It probably kept her from balancing her checkbook.

I have at least a thousand editions of the family letter that my father wrote on manual typewriters, using carbon paper. (For those unaware, the “cc” on emails stands for carbon copy.) As my fingers caress the onion skin paper, I can see my father and hear the clatter of the keys. Just as I find online newspapers sterile, compared with newsprint I can hold, as emails these letters would have lacked the same emotional weight.

I have decades of my father’s journalism, from the newspaper at the Charleston Naval Yard that he edited in the latter stages of World War II to articles that he wrote as a lay leader in the Reform movement and as the editor and publisher of magazines in the hospitals field.

The boxes contain envelopes stuffed with my clippings, beginning with a junior high school newspaper and continuing through high school and college, and then from my first full-time job as a newspaper reporter. One tub is half-filled with articles and columns written for the AJT.

The process of sifting through the contents of my personal genizah slows as I encounter lives that impacted my own, come across reminders of my successes and regrets, and lose myself in reading accounts of the events that continue to shape the world I entered seven decades ago. My form of introspection may be less religious, but it is meaningful.