Finding Peace and Eternal Rest After the Journey of a Century

This is a story of Joseph and his brothers. Of how they said goodbye in 1913, in the fall, as the harsh Ukrainian winds began to sweep into their little town of Belogorodka. Of how they would not meet again until Joseph was in his dotage, the 102-year-old patriarch of a fine clan with deep roots in a city called Los Angeles. --Los Angeles Times, Dec. 22, 1996

*

Last Tuesday afternoon, a light wind blowing an edge into an otherwise magnificent day, Rabbi Samuel Lieberman intoned the name of Yosef Tzvi ben Yakov--Joseph, the son of Jacob.

“Alav ha-sholem,” the rabbi said, for the first time using the appellation that in Jewish tradition must follow the name of someone who is deceased. May he rest in peace.

As is customary, family members tore clothing or a piece of cloth attached to their lapels, and, one after another, drove a shovel into golden California soil, turning the earth so that it scattered on top of a wooden coffin.

It was 103 years and five months since an earlier rabbi, standing with the trembling parents of a 7-day-old boy, had chanted that name for the first time in the Ukrainian town of Belogorodka.

Yosef Tzvi ben Yakov. The second son of Yankel the shopkeeper and his wife, Reizl. Who was known in the United States as Joseph Saltsman. Who at the age of 102, like the biblical Joseph, received his youngest brother in a land of plenty. Whom I met researching the story of his life and his family’s deliverance in Los Angeles in 1996. Of whose story, somehow, I had become a tiny part.

I spent Tuesday evening at the Saltsman home in West Los Angeles.

I spoke to Joseph’s wife, Pearl, and to his sons, Louis, Sam and Gerry, and to his grandchildren. I hugged his brother, Ikhel Vodonos, and Ikhel’s wife, Riva.

At sunset, during the evening prayers, the rabbi called his name again.

Alav ha-sholem. May he rest in peace.

Joseph Saltsman died in his sleep, in his own home, in his own bed, on April 5 at the age of 103.

Like so many of Eastern Europe’s Jews, he had fled the poverty and pogroms of his native Ukraine, slipping over the Russian border at night, and booking steerage--the lowest-class passage--on a steamer headed for America.

It was 1913, just before the First World War and the near-closing of U.S. borders. It would be decades before his brothers and sisters could leave Russia. Ikhel, the youngest, would wait 80 years.

Do not cry for Joseph, his parents told their other children. Your brother is the lucky one. He has a chance for a new life.

His name at that time was Joseph Vodonos, a Russian name that means water carrier. It was changed to Saltsman in the United States, when a harried immigration official at the Port of Boston wrote it down incorrectly.

An uncle driving a horse and buggy met Joseph in Boston and took him back to the mill town of Lowell, Mass., where he settled, working in the factories and treating himself once a week to a movie and a haircut.

When his story was chronicled over seven days in The Times in December 1996 under the title “Journey of a Century,” readers wrote and phoned and sent electronic mail. Joseph’s experience, many said, his very American experience, was their own--whether or not the readers were Jewish. It had left them longing--as it had me--for their own scattered American families.

When I met Joseph Saltsman, he had just turned 102.

“My hearing is not good,” he would say. “My eyes are not what they used to be. But everything else works fine.”

At a Hanukkah celebration at the home of his son Sam, he giggled and played with my young son, who is also named Sam.

“Do you want to live as long as me?” he asked the boy, who was exactly 100 years younger than the ruddy-cheeked old man. “I hope you live as long as me.”

That Hannukkah was the first that Joseph had celebrated with his brother, Ikhel Vodonos, whom the family had brought with his wife, Riva, and their son, daughter-in-law and granddaughters from Russia earlier that year.

“My dear brother Joseph,” Ikhel had written from Moscow in 1991, “this letter is written by your youngest brother, Ikhel, from Moscow, Russia. . . . I have looked for you for a long time.”

Even the Vodonos family dog had made the journey, sponsored by the Saltsman family and by the same Jewish relief organizations that had helped resettle Joseph.

Ikhel was two months shy of his 80th birthday when he struggled through Los Angeles International Airport that January in 1996, in a heavy Russian coat and hat. His brother was nearly 102.

Two months later, the family celebrated Passover, the Jewish holiday commemorating the Hebrews’ flight to freedom from slavery in Egypt. Joseph, who had been protesting all day that he would not preside, that he was too old, rose from his chair and began to lustily chant the song that had been his signature at Seders for as long as anybody could remember.

“Who knows one?” he sang in Hebrew. “One is [to signify] the Eternal, who is above heaven and earth.”

Ikhel stood beside him. “Who knows two?” he recited, as his pious older brother Leib had taught him when he was a boy, before the Revolution made it dangerous to practice religion. “There are two tablets of the covenant.”

Joseph celebrated the bat mitzvah of a great-granddaughter last June, and the bar mitzvah of a great-grandson in September. At the June affair, he was too weak to rise for the honor of blessing the Torah, the Jewish holy scroll, so it was brought to him in his chair, and he proudly sang the prayer from the front row.

“I can’t see and I can’t hear,” he had confided to his daughter-in-law a few months earlier, as she accompanied him on his daily walk. “But I don’t know how to leave.”

Last year, at the family’s Passover celebration, Joseph again protested that he would not preside, and would not sing his signature song.

Ikhel rose to sing it in his place. But Joseph, whose hearing was all but gone, recognized the rhythms of the familiar tune. He pushed himself out of his chair and rose beside his brother. They chanted the song together.

Joseph Saltsman died just five days before what would have been his 104th celebration of Passover.

The family, glad for his life yet stunned at his departure, carried on with preparations for the seven-day Passover holiday, which began Friday night. Ikhel, himself now 82, would sing “Who Knows One” alone.

And I imagine that as Ikhel pushed himself up from the beautifully laid table at Sam Saltsman’s Studio City home and sang, that somewhere in the rhythms of that song he felt his brother Joseph.

May he rest in peace.