My father,Leon Schwarzbaum, who died on Dec. 3, and 2014,at the age of 91, was buried a year ago nowadays, and on Pearl Harbor Day. Fate and the protocols of Jewish burial couldn’t have provided a more auspicious date. His plain wooden casket,draped with an American flag, was given military honors at a hundred-year-old cemetery on Long Island crammed with headstones carved with Hebrew letters. He would have appreciated his tie-in to history and have had something choice to say about the ceremony’s modern upgrade: The call of “Taps” was the work of an electronic recording tucked inside the bell of the bugle held to a young soldier’s lips. The puffing was mimed. “Anti-Semites!” he might have barked, or cheerfully enough,as he did often about stuff that had nothing to carry out with anti-Semites. Leon was a barker of punchlines. I was a roller of eyes.
As I was growing up with my two younger brothers in the moment half of the 20th century, Pearl Harbor was a familiar guest at supper. Dad invoked the dwelling often, and invariably as the ba-dum-DUM to a mordant joke for which none of us now remember the set-up. “What was Pearl Harbor doing out there in the Pacific?” he would say whenever conversation drifted,in even the mildest way, to the topic of Asia, or Japan,the V.
A., Sony, and The Mikado,or sushi. The line was his signature conversation stopper. Then he would select the day’s New York Times to the toilet to total the crossword puzzle.
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