MAPPING A PATH
TO IMMORTALITY

 
This was in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on Friday.

Some of my elderly friends are putting out self-published memoirs or uploading original songs to Spotify. We want our grandchildren to check us out down the road.

I want my grandkids to be able to check me out for 10 years after I’m gone. Ten years is not unreasonable. I’m not greedy like Shakespeare.

I’m not in the Hall of Fame of my alma mater, Charles F. Brush High School. But I play clarinet in Yiddishe Cup, a klezmer band. That might be my best shot at somewhat-limited immortality.

Here’s the plan: I recently donated some of my klezmer band’s memorabilia to the Western Reserve Historical Society — the repository for all-things-Cleveland. WRHS, founded in 1857, is Cleveland’s attic. The auto showroom is the grand living room, with early-20th-century cars, some of which were built in Cleveland. There is a Jordan roadster and a Baker electric car. F. Scott Fitzgerald supposedly came up with the name for the golfer in The Great Gatsby – Jordan Baker — from those car names.

I used to drop by the WRHS library to do genealogy research. The only drawback was running into other genealogists who corralled me and talked about their fresh findings. I didn’t want to hear about Uncle Patrick from County Mayo and how he wound up in Kamm’s Corners. Did they want to hear about my grandma Anna, from Austria-Hungary, who lived in the Kinsman neighborhood? Nope.

Sean Martin, the associate curator for Jewish history at WRHS, likes my band and its memorabilia. I have given the society several boxes of expired Yiddishe Cup contracts, publicity photos and press kits. And Sean has given me a guided tour of the society’s back room, where my band’s stuff will reside. The back room is approximately the size of a Dollar Store, lined with shelves of cassette tapes, manila folders, newspaper clippings and VHS tapes.

I even came across the 1932 Glenville High School diploma of produce wholesaler Maury Feren, who used to write local newspaper columns, and do TV spots, about how to choose ripe fruits and vegetables. He said a cantaloupe is ripe when the stem has some give in it. Maury also published a pretty good memoir, Wheeling & Dealing in My World.

I said to Sean the curator, “Is there anything you won’t take here?”

“Funny you should ask,” Sean said. “I was in the basement of the old Fairmount Temple, where they had tapes of every Shabbat service from the 1970s. I don’t think we need every single one of them.”

“Is this like TikTok?” I said. “You hang onto stuff, and maybe a couple years from now, say, Maury Feren the produce guy blows up on social media, and you’re golden?”

“Something like that,” Sean said.

Maury Feren has 5.3 linear feet of archive boxes. Agudath B’nai Israel Congregation of Lorain, Ohio, has 5.8 linear feet — mostly dues cards and temple financial statements. Yiddishe Cup has 1.4 linear feet and counting. Maybe I’ll pay a slotting fee — like the big food companies do for premium shelf space at grocery stores — and I’ll gain an edge over the Maury Feren-types and high-school hall of famers. What price immortality?