Jerry L. Kastenbaum
Coatesville, PA
Dear Jerry,
As we get older we look back on the sometimes strange paths our lives have taken, the odd choices we have made, fortuitous and tragic events that have shaped it, and the many people we have encountered on the way who – sometimes without knowing it themselves – said something or did something that took us down a different road.
I am retired now and volunteer as a tutor at an urban school, and I was thinking about this, mainly in the context of the 5th graders I work with, and the group of volunteers who come twice a week, sometimes just to give the kids some attention. But then, of course, I realized how fortunate I myself have been to encounter the kindness of others.
Your father, Bernie, was one of the people who, probably without knowing it, changed my life. In the late Sixties I was a kid from a troubled family. Fortunately for me, at the end of the trolley tracks in Media, your father had opened a used bookstore. For me it was more than just an escape into reading. Every time I visited his store, your father would say this or that about a book, suggest something, or sell me a bundle of books he liked. And we would talk a bit. I still have many of the books: Toynbee, Malinowski, Malamud, literature, anthropology, history, politics, sociology, religion. He even sold me a Koran under protest once, describing it in somewhat unflattering terms. Without knowing it, your father opened up a world of ideas to me – ideas that were not even necessarily familiar to him – just by chatting with me, feeding and respecting the mind of some teenager he barely knew.
Our public and private sides are often different. I don’t know what kind of man he was to family and friends. Part of me hopes he was just as I imagined him: the quiet, humorous, cultured, self-deprecating pipe-smoker I encountered each time. He never seemed to have any customers, and he would joke that the store only existed because his wife needed him to get out of the house and do something. Your father’s Jewishness and the way he spoke of things may well have influenced me too. Coming from a family without religion, I became a Jew thirty-some years ago and, while not very observant, Jewish ethics express my values best and reflect what I have tried to pass on to my children.
The kindnesses of strangers – the seemingly insignificant, half-forgotten things we do for others – they are greatly underrated. They can literally change lives. You dad’s kindness changed mine. I’m so sorry I never got to tell him this personally.
Sincerely,
David Ehrens
Comments are closed.