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I’m named after my zaida, Ben Waldman, who died in 1986, so every couple of months, I get an email or phone call from someone who knew him somehow. I get a message two weeks ago from someone who says my name rung a bell. He was a social worker, so he knew thousands of people.
But this time, the writer told me one of her grandmother’s sisters lived in Winnipeg like a hundred years ago and her last name was Waldman. Could we be related? “We might be.”
Today, I get an email from her with a scanned letter my grandfather wrote (or possibly dictated as his health failed) in October 1985.
I never met him, and it's crazy, but I hear his voice when I read it somehow. He uses expressions my dad uses, and the same sentence structures, and whoever wrote the letter has nearly the same cursive writing as I do.
He describes my baba, a "bundle of self-generating energy, to the degree where she was able to satisfy magnificently the duties of wife, mother and social worker." My aunt, an Olympic level swimmer with a brain to match. My uncle, whose "heart is as big as all outdoors."
And then he describes my dad, who had just graduated with a BFA from York and was the premier dancer with the Ontario Ballet Theatre. He writes, "This summer, (he was) introduced to a young lady, and we are all very hopeful something good will come of this."
The lady, of course, was my mom. As I'm reading this, in July 2020, I am in awe. I'm seeing my grandfather's handwriting at the end of his life, describing a moment in time when my parents' future was only beginning. I never met him, but I've always felt like I knew him.
He was an accomplished social worker, a community leader, a renowned stage actor and director, a former kosher butcher, and with this letter as evidence, a tremendous storyteller.
He was interviewed by the Free Press in 1968 about social work, and said though it doesn't pay much, it pays him millions in "cosmic income." He wanted to make the world a better place and didn't care much about material things.
This is all to say I'm proud to carry his name, and grateful he thought to put ink to pen while he could. It's also to say that we should all be so kind to write each other letters, because some day, decades after we die, the family we never met will finally meet us through them.
