The Detour
by Paul Turner, July 2011
In May of this year, Althea and I visited the Jewish temple that my great-grandfather Max Brooks and his son Isaac, my grandfather built in the Borscht Belt of New York State in 1924. It was chartered as an orthodox congregation, changing over to a mainstream Reformed congregation more than 40 years later.
I had not been to Livingston Manor (Borscht Belt Central) in 18 years, soon after I discovered my birth family, the family Brooks. My mother was dead two years, and I was getting to know other family members in several cities. I was especially interested in her hometown, and what townspeople might tell me.
During the May 2011 visit, I was given a tour of the small temple building: its sanctuary, the ark and its Torah scrolls, the downstairs classrooms, and the heaps of books. Just the two of us; that is, the Board President of the temple and I. Althea walked our dog and walked off the 270 mile drive from Framingham.
I decided that it would be great to get a sense of temple heydays by attending a major holiday service or a bar/bat mitzvah. May and June were busy months for me, but I checked the temple’s online calendar and found that a bat mitzvah would be celebrated on July 9th. As in all these ceremonies, the 13-year old celebrant recites a few prayers more than once, and chants several sections from one of the five books of the Hebrew Bible, all in Hebrew.
I misjudged the time, the gas tank, and trusted Ms. Garmin, the GPS device, too much. The last push of the drive was 46 miles on Route 17 in New York, a road that takes you up to Binghamton. Route 17 is a hilly verdant experience, but a secondary highway. I was 20 miles away from the temple when one of the car’s odometers whistled that I had ten miles left on the tank.
I quickly spied an old highway sign that pointed to gas at the next exit, but alas, it turned out to be a boarded-up Amoco station. I’m now driving as though in the cardio mode of an elliptical training session, especially when the odometer jumped from 10 miles remaining to zero miles remaining. Fortunately, after two hills, I found a crossroads with gas, and fortunately, the bar mitzvah celebrant generally starts his or her portions one hour into the service, so getting there at 11:30 am was OK.
When I stepped into the sanctuary, I immediately saw the Board President who greeted me warmly; I sat down on a freestanding bench and he beckoned me to a more comfortable seat – I stayed put because the view was fine. The service warmed my thoughts if not my heart: the rabbi, the bat mitzvah, the cantorial singer, the loving family members were all endearing. It’s a big detail to try to memorize and chant so many ancient lines of text.
By the end of the service, the rabbi, another temple official, and a few regulars knew that I was in the congregation. Ellen, the temple official shook my hand, welcomed me, and asked if I knew what the Yiddish word Yikhes meant. “It means lineage.” You are grandson and great-grandson to the builders and founders of this temple. I smiled and nodded, and thought: “Do you know the Yiddish/German word Umweg, which means detour?”
It took me more than half a lifetime to get to Temple Agudas Achim in Livingston Manor, where my mother Sylvia was raised and tried to leave in her mid-twenties. When she, a schizophrenic, became pregnant with me by a Christian man, her orthodox father convinced her to relinquish me through adoption, a prudent choice, and also disowned her for a number of years.
Well, I’m back, long after the main cast has died. You can go home again, two generations later, but expect different faces, and hope for a welcoming experience.
