New York Teacher

STILL STANDING

Mar 15, 2007 3:56 PM

For some people bowing and cringing is not an option.

Lessons of the Fathers
BY DAVID PAKTER

I was named after my Grandfather David, may he rest in peace. A little over a century ago, he trudged, mostly on foot, from a small village in Poland to a harbor in Rotterdam, with a sewing machine under his arm, to find a ship to take him to America. He passed, along the way, through villages where people threw stones at him. But he was standing tall when he entered those inhospitable towns and he was standing tall when he passed out of them. He had a goal and a purpose in life and at 23, having grown up in an age when Czars ruled Russia, my Grandfather also had a dream. He was determined to get his young wife and his infant son, (who was later to become my Father), to a land where they would never have to bow to the arbitrary whims of masters and be subject to the despotic abuse of brute naked power.

I come from proud stock and for many generations our only wealth was our integrity and our sense of honor. When my Grandfather finally reached America he slaved to save enough money to send for his wife, my Grandmother Lillian and his small son, Paul, my Father. They reached the teeming docks of New York City in 1905, arriving in steerage as my Grandfather had done before them.

Like countless other immigrants they started out on the lower East Side on Hester Street and through thrift and 16 hour work days they finally had saved enough money to move "uptown", far uptown, to 112 th Street in Harlem.

That was a step up from where they had started out from, and in those days

Harlem was a true melting pot where one could hear a dozen different languages being spoken in the street, even on the same block. The one language however, all people spoke in common was the language of "hard work". 

You worked and worked hard or you starved. There were no "safety nets" in those days. And it was not uncommon to see an entire family sitting in the gutter, in the rain, with their meager possessions and a few pieces of furniture, because they had been evicted for missing a rent payment.

And such a sight was enough to strike fear into the hearts of everyone else on that block- never to be so short of money that you cannot come up with the rent when the landlord knocks on your door.

My Father, I suppose, never had a childhood in the true sense of the word.

At the age of five, he was already responsible for descending down into the dark bowels of the basement each morning at 6 AM for the purpose of filling an old metal pail up to the brim with coal and then lugging that pail, which weighed almost as much as he did, up to the one room apartment on the fifth floor which was shared by a family of six people. And those precious lumps of coal and an old pot bellied stove, were their only source of heat in the winter and their only means of having hot water. Cold water tenements were the normal order of things at that time in New York City.

In those days, most of the tenements had only gas lights to see by at night.

But the less fortunate had to make due not with gas lighting, but candles and kerosene lamps. No friends- candles did not go out with Abe Lincoln.

And my Father shared something else in common with Abe Lincoln. He decided to become a lawyer by eventually going to NYU at night after working a grueling ten hour day on the lower East Side and later as a "runner" on Wall Street.

His desk was my tailor Grandfather's ironing table, the kind of iron you had to heat over a fire.

At fifteen my Father had already assumed the command of the family ship and he made up his mind he would steer that fragile vessel out of the grinding seas of poverty. He became the mainstay of the family when other boys were busy becoming experts at the pool table. I remember my Father's words years later, when I returned home late one night from my first and last encounter with that sport:

"When I was your age", he said sternly, "there was a saying that skill at the pool table is an indication of a misspent youth". I never put chalk to a pool stick again.

My Father, it is fair to say, when hardly a boy, rescued his entire family. He put himself through Law School at night, (graduating Phi Beta Kappa), worked three jobs so his younger sister Jean could attend Medical School by day. And he got his family out of that cold water tenement, after ten terrible years, to a building on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. It actually had, though my Grandmother could hardly believe the degree of luxury, hot and cold running faucets and miracle of miracles, contraptions called radiators that made it no longer necessary for anyone to have to go down to the coal bin in the basement to lug heavy pails of coal up five flights of stairs early each morning.

It required real backbone in those early years of the 1900's, to survive.

And my Father had that quality in abundance. Starting with virtually nothing he rose to become one of the great Lawyers of the land. (And with his support, his Sister, after graduating from Medical School, rose to become the Chief Pediatrician of New York.

I believe that is the most precious Legacy which I, and my three sisters and two brothers inherited from him, and from my Mother, of course, as well.

We were raised to do the right thing and always follow our conscience, even if that meant challenging the "lackeys" of the world, who serve the bidding of bullies and autocrats who pompously and hypocritically love to mask their insatiable need to rule others by cloaking their mealy mouthed pronouncements under the Heading of "Rules and Regulations".

We were taught that no job or position is worth groveling for and that those who abuse others, especially in a land called America, are part of the shame of our nation.

On his death bed, as though echoing from his long distant childhood, my Father, though old and weak, from time and Fate, managed to utter these, his last words:

"We are the strong, we are the strong". Something every person and especially every teacher, in America should always remember. Because the teachers, in every generation, serve as the shining examples that the next generation learns from.

A teacher by his/her actions, when confronted by adversity and the arbitrary and capricious use of Power, shows his students that Courage is more than a word.

It is a way of approaching Life, a burning torch, that must be passed from generation to generation-forever.

The New York City Department of Education can only take away my job.

It's lawyers and judges cannot take away or diminish, the contributions I made to the lives of my students over a period of three and a half decades. I have passed on to them the lessons taught to me by my Father and his Father before him.

And the Award bestowed on me in City Hall, by a former Mayor of New York, pales in comparison with the Honor of knowing that I taught my students to stand tall in Life.

Just as I, (after so much vicious bureaucratic Retaliation, for the crime of simply speaking the Truth), am still standing- even to this late hour.

Perhaps, in the end, this will prove to have been my finest lesson.

The lesson taught to my students for which I will be most remembered.