The siblings we’re stuck with — and stick with

Kayin and Hevel. Yaakov and Eisav. Rochel and Leah. Yosef and his brothers.

Sibling relationships, as seen throughout Tanach — and in our lives today — can be so complicated. They can encompass love and friction, harmony and rivalry, protectiveness and bitterness — sometimes all at the same time.

When we decided to Schmooze about Siblings, we thought we’d explore these dynamic relationships and see how they did — or didn’t — apply to our own family. Yet, as each of us started viewing the subject from a different angle, we discovered one immutable reality: All roads lead to our mother, Rose Stark a”h.

As in many of our previous Schmoozes, she turns out to be the common denominator, the glue, in all our sibling relationships. It’s Mommy who exemplifies the eternal mother-child bond and perpetuates the memory of the brother we never knew. It’s Mommy who unites the three of us with our fourth half-sister. And it’s Mommy whose influence continues to keep each of us watching out for the other, whose memory keeps us schmoozing together — on land and even in the cool, clear waters of the Kinneret.

Marcia  wonders about…

The Brother We Never Knew

I always wondered what it would be like to have a brother. Especially an older brother.

Yes, sisters were great, but… I’d go to friends’ homes after school or on Shabbos afternoons and observe, fascinated, the various sister-brother dynamics. Some big brothers were bullies. Some were annoyed with their pesky little sisters. Some tolerated them. Others were quite protective.

What would my big brother have been like? You see, I did have an older brother. But I never knew him. Because the Nazis, yemach shemom, killed him before he reached his first birthday.

To me, he was always this nameless, faceless child who’d been taken from our mother’s hands the night they arrived in Auschwitz.

Our mother always referred to him as “der kind, the child.” Long after I was married, I finally did find out his name: Shlomo Nachum Hy”d.

Hmm… I married a Shlomo. And our mother married a Nachum. Coincidence? I think not.

Back when we were kids, even before we knew his name, our brother wasn’t a secret. He was a natural part of our existence. Always hovering in the background of our minds.

But in the background, not the forefront. Our mother, Rose Stark a”h, made a point of not traumatizing her new family with the horrors endured by her first family. She meted it out in small tolerable doses, with slightly larger bits reserved for our yearly Sedarim, when we got to Vehi She’amdah.

Even then, she hardly spoke about little Shlomo Nachum. But every year, on his birthday, she would say, “Today my son would have turned (blank).” Once in a while, she would let something slip. Like the time I was in first-time-parent mode, learning how to diaper my newborn son. When I had that inevitable stream-in-the-face experience, she smiled at a sudden recollection.

“That happened to my mother-in-law a”h. I remember her laughing and shouting, “Rozen vasser, rose water!” Then, more somberly, Mommy added, “He was her only grandchild.”

Mommy was 79 when she wrote a little book, Family Album, as a gift to her children, grandchildren, and extended family. It included chapters entitled, “My Paternal Grandparents,” “My Maternal Grandparents,” “My Parents,” “The Siblings,” and “My Aunts and Uncles.”

No chapter on “My Son.”

(Excerpted from Family First, Issue 656)