Opa continued

My father not only agreed to, but was enthusiastic about my printing his eulogy of my grandfather on the blog. Here it is. In keeping with my usually blog policy, I'm changing names to initials:

My father wrote a novel which, like most good novels, has chapter following chapter in logical progression, with reasonable transitions from one situation to another, smoothly developing the story. His Heavenly Father, on the other hand, wrote W's life story with chapters that jerk and start. W, who always protested that he was not religious, accepted and embraced each chapter in a way that would be the envy of the greatest Tzaddik, or holy person. He had every reason to be a bitter, resentful person, but instead--as all of us here know--he was loving, caring, and accepting of everyone.
The novel of his life begins with his birth in 1915 to loving parents and two older siblings in the far western part of Germany. That chapter ends abruptly, during the flu pandemic of 1918, with the death of his mother.
The next chapter is confusing to me, and probably was to him, with displacement, a stepmother, the devastating economic depression in Germany, then his living with his uncle in Berlin. He was raised with no religion, and attended gentile schools, learned to physically defend himself while progressing in a promising academic life. He shared with me a dream he had when he was about 4 years old, a pretty convincing recall of the last moments in the trenches of World War I of a gentile German soldier. He always took that as a sign of all people sharing a common humanity, something he never lost.
In 1933, at 18, and with one more year to go for W's basic education, his uncle, a man of remarkable foresight, realized it was time to just walk away from his house and money and flee Germany. This chapter ends with W following the family, a refugee in Paris and then on a train to join his family in Spain. On the train, he meets a Catholic priest who tells him he can no longer flee from his Judaism, that he has to embrace it.
The next chapter could easily have been what he thought it was to be, his settling in Spain and living there happily ever after. Three years after he arrived, the Spanish Civil War changed all that, and he was on the move again, sleeping on couches in France, Switzerland and Italy, teaching himself Italian and applying for immigration to the United States.
And finally he was accepted, arrived, and, as he describes it, felt like the biblical Gershon, "a stranger in a strange land," first working in New York City and then finding a job working for a Jewish stationer in Houston. There he met my mother, and their life together became one of great love and hard work, but even that promising life was interrupted by World War II.
After the war, he and his brother-in-law started a restaurant, and that place took up huge hours of his and my mother's lives. When he was able to escape that business, my mother and he found a small stationery store and dove in, building it to the third largest office supply store in the growing city of Houston.
It feels sometimes that I didn't get to see him much, but he somehow found time to introduce me to fine music, to build a huge train layout with me, to travel long distances for ski trips, and to go with me on Boy Scout outings. To this day, I love music, trains and the outdoors, and his memory will remain with me in all these.
I went off to college, then medical school, and finally, my parents were able to start selling the store and having time for themselves when, in another twist of the plot by the Novelist, my mother died, and my father was a widower at 55, without his business and without his life-partner.
Miraculously, he and S found each other and knew how blessed there were to have done so, and, as he entered a new career as a manufacturer's representative that progressed into retirement, he had a whole new family, forming a close bond with my stepbrother, B, that in turn led to his embracing a series of grandchildren and offering them so much of himself.
Somehow, he still had time and attention left for me, my wife D, and my two children, even though geographic distance made that difficult at times.
A loving man who gave selflessly of himself, a reader, thinker and intellectual who was never full of himself, a man of peace and high ideals, he painted, translated, wrote, taught and, as he shared with me, valued every day of his life. Each of us here is fortunate to have had his life touch ours, and can only hope to take life's surprises with the grace that he did.