A Life of Emunah

Alone at age seventeen, trapped behind the Iron Curtain, separated from his family and loved ones who remained behind at the mercy of the dreaded Nazis, never seeing them again. Despite all odds, he kept Shabbos and kashrus, and above all his emunah in Hashem, as he made his way across the barren wastelands of the Russian continent, fighting against the Germans along the way, until finally arriving on American soil to start anew as an immigrant. He raised a family in a foreign world, fighting a whole different type of battle. Now the story begins again …

If you read it, you haven’t forgotten it. Chaim Shapiro’s classic epic, Go My Son, depicting the adventures and tragedies of his life in Russia during the Holocaust, is a story that is not easily forgotten. Sales of over 30,000 copies over the last nineteen years have made it one of the greatest Jewish bestsellers of the past century and it is a staple on most people’s bookshelves. A friend of mine has been reading the same beat-up old copy every morning during breakfast for the past ten years, and he considers it his “guide to emunah.” I couldn’t put it down once I started, and it had me laughing, crying, or a combination of both throughout the whole 400-plus-page journey. It is not often that I am so inspired by a book that I desire to seek out the author in person. I once wrote a letter to the author of a book I had read that I had found incredibly moving. Years later I found the letter in a desk drawer somewhere and regretted never having sent it. Before I even finished reading Go My Son, I was already trying to track down the author so that I could express my appreciation to him personally. Unfortunately I was too late — Reb Chaim had passed away eight years before. However, my search was not in vain. I ended up finding his eldest son, Rabbi Alter Shapiro, a principal of the Mesivta of Greater Los Angeles, in the process. Reb Alter, author of A Legacy of Faith, a collection of essays written by and about his father, was able to give me a picture of Reb Chaim that went beyond the pages of Go My Son as he began to rebuild the broken pieces of his life, together with his wife, Hadassah, in America. I didn’t merit to meet Chaim Shapiro in person, but he left all of Klal Yisrael an eternal legacy engraved within the pages of his books.

Snapshots

Chaim Shapiro was born Erev Yom Kippur in the year 1922 in Lomza, Poland. He passed away two days before his seventy-eighth birthday and his levayah was on Erev Yom Kippur itself. He is buried in Beit Shemesh. His loss was tangibly felt in the shul in Baltimore where he was the regular baal tefillah for Yom Kippur. His heartfelt prayers and powerful baritone would bring people to tears year after year but it was more than his yiras Shamayim and beautiful voice that was responsible. His voice held within it the pain of someone who had lost his entire family and seen the destruction of a world, as well as the weight of a person who survived. When he first came to America, he kept his story a secret. There was such anti-Communist fervor in America at the time that he was afraid to reveal the fact that he had been an officer in the Russian army. Nonetheless, he remembered every single detail of how life had been before the war, like the snapshot frozen in our minds of the last time we saw a loved one who passed on. Reb Chaim used to say that his grandfather had a photographic memory, his father inherited half of it, and he himself inherited a quarter of it. The pictures he painted for us of his own journey, as well as life in the shtetel, the yeshivos, and the gedolei hador are so vivid, it was as if he never really left that world.

Reb Chaim was eventually invited to Baltimore in the early 1950’s to learn shechitah with two rabbanim there, one of whom was Rabbi Yosef Feldman, the father of Rav Aharon Feldman, the present Rosh Yeshivah of Ner Yisrael. He worked for most of his life in the slaughterhouses of Baltimore, working hard to support his growing family. In the early years, when his salary as a shochet in Baltimore was meager and not enough to support his family, he was offered a shochet job in Omaha, Nebraska where he would earn nearly five times as much money. He flew to Omaha to see what it was all about but when he saw how far the community was from Torah Judaism he flatly refused, even though it would have put an end to their financial problems. “I didn’t come to America so that my children could become cowboys,” he said. Alter Shapiro, Reb Chaim’s son, recounts the irony that his father, who was so moser nefesh for Yiddishkeit, never took his own kids to shul when they were growing up during the early years after the war. “Who doesn’t take their children to shul on Shabbos?” he asked me. “The truth is, he was embarrassed. The shul was full of old American Jews who were am haratzim, ignorant people. My father was the chazzan, the gabbai, and the baal koreh. He came from a completely different world, from Rav Elchanan Wasserman’s yeshivah in Baranovitch, from Rav Baruch Ber’s yeshivah in Kamenitz, and from the glorious Torah cities of Lomza and Tiktin. I am sure he felt, What am I bringing my son to shul here for? This isn’t Yiddishkeit.” When Reb Alter was fourteen years old, he didn’t play basketball during recess. They would walk around discussing the sugya from the Gemara together.