Be Normal

PHOTO: ELI COBIN

I’Mold enough to have lost most of those who had the largest formative influence on my life, including both parents. But not so old that the loss of a close friend younger than me does not hit particularly hard.

Rabbi Dovid Kamenetsky was such a friend. We already knew each other when ArtScroll asked me to write a biography of his grandfather, Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky, over thirty years ago. But that project brought us much closer together. I had been given a large pile of interviews conducted by Rav Nosson Kamenetsky ztz”l, which contained a fair amount of Yiddish. I asked Reb Dovid, who lived just down the street, to help with the Yiddish.

But that translation was the least of his contributions to the biography. He read each chapter and put his imprimatur on the book. He would tell me, “I can’t say that every story in the book happened exactly as reported by a particular interviewee, but I can say that every word is something my grandfather could have said.”

On that point, I trusted his judgment completely, for there was much of his grandfather about him. I once asked a bochur who had lived for a time in Rav Yaakov’s house what he saw there. He replied, “I saw nothing, absolutely nothing.” Everything was done so naturally and so consistently that one noticed nothing out of the ordinary, nothing for the storybooks.