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By Debbie Gold Hadar

My usual jocular tone will be somewhat muted in today’s piece. Lag Ba’Omer marks a personal anniversary for me. It’s the date in the Hebrew calendar on which my grandfather died.

And this year marks twenty years since that day.

I don’t talk about my grandfather much. It’s just not a topic of conversation that springs to my lips readily. You know how it is, in this day and age. We’re all so busy dealing with the terminal crises of the here and now, that calm and passive reflection is not a high priority.

That said, it doesn’t mean I don’t think of him. Often.

My grandfather was a very impressive man. A family doctor by profession, which meant that every itch, pain or krich of my childhood was first referred to him for consultation before utilizing the National Health Service. He was also a staunch Zionist, and a big community macher.

[Linguistic note: Macher is Yiddish for a mover/shaker, wheeler/dealer type member of the community, who knows how to get stuff done. Probably faster than you, and possibly wholesale.]

It is almost entirely due to his love of Israel, that my father was thus infected, and because of that… well, the facts speak for themselves. Here I am, 13 years later, still living here happily. Barring the occasional kvetch.

Yes, I know. I am peppering this piece with random Yiddish words. While I will not deny that “Oy vey!” and “Oy gevalt!” are staples of my daily speech pattern, I don’t indulge in very much more usage of the (Ashkenazi) “Jewish” language of “der Heim”.

My grandfather, on the other hand, did. Foolish child that I was, whenever he would reel off a long and convoluted sentence in Yiddish; usually a proverb, or a demonstrative sentence that encompassed why you shouldn’t have done what you did because of the ensuing grave danger, deep shame or heart attack to be delivered to my mother; my eyes would glaze over until he’d finished whereby I’d be back in the room, smiling brightly, and changing the subject rapidly.

This was a foolproof method of not learning a word of Yiddish, and therefore enabling my parents and other relatives to speak about me freely in front of me, with no possibility of offending me.

Of course, this said, had I paid attention to what he said, I would have learned that my grandfather had his own personal version of Yiddish. My family understood every word — I think even they were fooled into believing that it was the real thing half the time, but go try and find any of his favourite sayings in “The Joys of Yiddish”. And good luck with that. You’ll need it.

I find it strange when I reflect upon the timing angle of his life. I was born when he was 62, and he died at 79 when I was 17. He was an enormous part of my life up and until that point, and when he died there was a huge Poppa-shaped hole in my day-to-day that took a very long time to close up. Today, almost twenty years has passed since then. More time than the span during which our lives coincided. And yet those earlier years were so much more significant, and his influence still holds strong.

It was Poppa I thought of guiltily when I first had my hair highlighted, because he’d made me promise never to colour my hair, to give one example. (It took me until I was 35!) It was Poppa I though of all day on my wedding day, and the advice he’d given me about life, to give another.

He was a lover of life, a dynamic and exciting person. He had more friends than anyone I know, was known, loved, respected and admired throughout the British Jewish community. I have lost count of the number of times someone looked at me and said in awe “Oh you’re Sidney Gold’s granddaughter..!”

He’d be proud of me and my achievements today. I’m sure he is, as he watches me and his great-grandchildren from wherever he is. Especially when I tell them the bedtime stories that he told me and my sister.

On Lag Ba’Omer, along with most other parents across the country, I’ll attend a bonfire with my children, and sing songs and have fun and roast marshmallows. And rejoice in having known him — because it’s the one day in the year that he is constantly at the forefront of my thoughts. He’s always there anyway, but on Lag Ba’Omer, I think of him more, naturally. And I can’t think of a better way to remember and celebrate my having known him.

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