July 11, 1943

Martin Irving Kallich marries Harriett Rena Sclar

Today is the anniversary of my parents getting married, and for those who can’t do the math, that was 81 years ago. The world was certainly different than today; there was no internet, cell phones, or ‘social media,’ and WWII was in full swing; the Allies had just landed in Sicily. My dad was in the army and stationed in Rhode Island in a searchlight battalion guarding the coast against German attempts to drop off saboteurs from U-boats.

In his archive at Northern Illinois University, there are numerous letters from him to my mother (she kept every single one, I believe) recounting anti-Semitic incidents and insults while he was in the army and how boring it all was, what he was reading, what they would do when he returned after the war (move to Baltimore, get his PhD in English at Johns Hopkins, she her law degree at the University of Baltimore), and how much he loved and missed her.

He was on leave, and they married at the Brooklyn Jewish Community Center after she graduated from Hunter College at 18. The picture below was taken earlier in the year when they announced their engagement in the backyard of my grandfather’s house. My grandfather and grandmother on my father’s side were recent immigrants from Odessa, and Dad was the ‘smart cookie' at the top of his class at City College of New York, aka known as the Jewish Harvard. Harvard (and Yale and other Ivy League schools had a ‘diversity quota system,’ if there were too many Jews, then the WASPs would feel inferior to Jews, so a system was developed that could deny ‘some people’ to keep the campus diverse.¹ Both Harvard & Yale denied admission to my father to the graduate program in English; in the admission interview at Yale, they asked him how being a Jew affected his thinking about ideas.

Yasha, my grandfather (Russian diminutive of Yakov (Jakob), and Luba, my grandmother who died the year I was born (Yiddish for Love), lived in a small house in Flatbush, with my father’s brother, Eddie, who took this picture with his brand new Leica camera. My cousin Paul printed the photograph from the negative much later (1986) and gave it to me.

But today, I celebrate their lives and light a candle, specifically a ‘Yarzheit’ candle; see below. The Yiddish word Yarzheit means anniversary of the death of a loved one. My father, who was an avowed atheist, turned the ceremony and traditions of reciting kaddish at the temple and then returning home to light a candle upside down for his parents. On the anniversary of their births, he lighted a candle and told stories of them and growing up in Brooklyn. My mother liked this idea a lot (although she always said she was an agnostic, not an atheist) and continued to celebrate my father’s birthday after he died. Until she passed, I would pick her up at her assisted living residence, and we would return to our house, where we would light a candle and talk about Dad and their romance during the war, how she met him, and their lives together before they had children.

When I was growing up, on my mother’s birthday, July 13, or their anniversary on the 11th, we would have a party, give presents, eat well, and celebrate both occasions together as they became a group event. As I got older, these were times when they shared who they were and what they hoped they and the world would be, just a bit better than it was before.

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The candle is still burning on the kitchen counter, and I will share with Sue some stories of my growing up with them. While she has heard them all now; she is a good person, so she will listen to me talk, and we will reminisce together, telling each other the story of when they took us to London for a week after Christmas, and we got off the Tube at Leicester Square and then were rushing to find a restaurant as we had a short amount of time to grab some dinner between the play which just let out, and the next one that we had tickets for, 11 plays in 7 days was the drill. They loved going to London and the theater and having a postmortem on each show. Sue & I share this love as well, and we often go to an afternoon matinee and an evening performance on the same day when we are in London or at a theater festival.

So, we got up from the underground, as I said, at Leicester Square (probably one of the busiest places in London), thousands of people rushing every which way, and my father crossed the street and took off in one direction, and my mother turned and rushes off in the opposite direction, leaving Sue and myself on the corner, by ourselves saying to each other where the hell did they go? Typical, we would say and laugh, both of them being so strong-willed and certain that we would or should follow them. And you wonder why I am such a mild-mannered guy?

1. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/09/22/how-ivy-leagues-jewish-quotas-shaped-higher-education