Grave Apology

Mr. Goldberg was a lonely old man, not completely normal, who worked in the local city park, picking up garbage. Sometimes, he’d find an old piece of clothing left by a homeless person and he’d bring it home, or worse, wear it. He had no friends, and his family, aside from warning him not to use the money in his bank account (presumably so they could inherit it when he died), had abandoned him.

My husband and I have a soft spot for people with nowhere to go and no one to love them. Mr. Goldberg was a sweet old man, and despite his bedraggled appearance and the strong odor that sometimes emanated from him, we welcomed him into our home almost every Shabbos. It’s true that we sometimes had to place him far away from our other guests because of the smell, but otherwise he was quite harmless.

Mr. Goldberg had lived in Brisk as a young child. His mother, he would tell us, was terribly upset about the haskalah movement there. He would hear her repeatedly say, “Where are the Yiddishe kinderlach?” The haskalah was strong in Brisk, and this had troubled his mother terribly. Consequently, when they moved to America, he and his mother took great pleasure watching the Jewish children board their school buses to yeshivah or camp every morning.

One Friday night, after the meal, Mr. Goldberg mentioned that he was feeling weak. I invited him to sleep over and handed him the pair of freshly laundered pajamas that we reserved for guests. After Mr. Goldberg left the next morning, I was horrified to see that the pajamas were crawling with body lice. Even worse, over the next few days, we found that our whole apartment was crawling with body lice. We had small children in the house, I was expecting, it was two weeks before Pesach, and we needed to move out for a few days while the house was fumigated. My parents, concentration camp survivors, were terrified of lice, and they couldn’t bear to risk having us stay with them. It was an enormous ordeal, but baruch Hashem, we found another place to stay and then went to my in-laws out-of-town for Yom Tov.