On My Father’s Fifth Yahrzeit

This week marks five years since my father, Morris Moscowitz, died. The following is what I said at his funeral in St. Louis on August 18, 2006.

Morris Moscowitz
May 29, 1914 — August 15, 2006 (22 Av, 5766)

As we lay our father to rest here — here in the city of his birth; here next to our mother; here less than a mile from the resting place of his parents and other family members — we, his family, wish to recall at least these things.

Morris Moscowitz was the son of Louis (Leib) and Bertha (Bryna Sirka); the older brother to Hyman and Sylvia; and the grandson of Chaim and Sheindel (Jenny) Fleg, Zvi and Rayza Moscovicci. His parents were East European immigrants, having arrived in this country in their late teenage years — his mother with her parents, and his father alone. Both had fled the impoverishment and constraints of the Old World, and, at least in his father’s case, gravitated toward the appeal of the New World. As a boy, our father was caught between the traditional mores of his mother and the intrigue modernity held for his father. Our father’s first language was Yiddish, but his sight was on the New World, not the Old. Morris Moscowitz was his father’s son.

 

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