Hesped (Eulogy) for Ferdinand Muller
by Jerry Muller
February 7, 1988
Ferdinand Muller, or Pinhas ben Yitzchak as he was also called, was born when the twentieth century was only a few weeks old. That made it very easy to remember his age. You just thought of the year, and you knew how old he was.
For a man who until well into his fifties smoked two packages of unfiltered Camel cigarettes per day, Ferdinand Muller lived a long time. Indeed he lived a long life by almost any standard, though he never fully realized it because, as he put it, how could someone be old whose mother-in-law was still alive.
He lived a long life. But more importantly, as I know from a conversation I had with him a few weeks ago, he concluded that he had had a good life.
By that he did not of course mean that he had lived an easy life. On the contrary. The century into which he was born was to be the most terrible in the long history of the Jewish people. In that terror he lost much of his family, including his parents and a sister. And not long thereafter he went through the sort of tragedy that people go through in every century and yet is perhaps the hardest loss one can sustain – the loss of a child.
And yet despite all that, I don’t think my grandfather felt that life had dealt him a bad hand (a metaphor that he would have appreciated, since playing cards was one of his few hobbies).
Indeed for most of the time I knew him, Opi was good humored, a fun man to be around. Many of the pictures that come to mind when we think about him are humorous ones. The earliest story I know about Opi was told to me by his nephew, Paul Schwitzer. He remembers, as a child, when Ferdinand was a young man, being woken up late one night to help push Ferdinand’s car down the street and into the family driveway, so that no one in the family would know how late he had been out. Or take an early photo of him, dressed in the uniform of the Austro-Hungarian army in 1918. There he is, late in the First World War, sitting at a desk behind a typewriter, with a barely suppressed grin, clearly pleased at not having to kill or to risk his own neck.
How might we remember Opi?
He was a good source of candy and other goodies, which he squirreled away with great ingenuity, so that his wife wouldn’t find them. He was colorblind, a great source of amusement to us grandchildren when we were young. He was a terrible driver; a ride with Opi was always an adventure, and in the last decades of his life, his son made sure Opi always drove a big car, to put as large a shield of metal as possible between Opi and any potential object.
How should we remember Ferdinand Muller? A description that meant a lot to him was the term “smart” – “gescheidt” in German. When he wanted an evaluation of someone, he would always ask, “ist er gescheidt?” or “ist sie gescheidt?” (for he was no sexist on this matter).
By some standards not a smart man, he lacked a classical Gymnasium education, the standard of culture in the central Europe where he grew up. In all the years I knew him, I don’t think he ever read a book cover to cover. He was not deeply interested in world affairs. Of course he read the paper daily, but in a rather peculiar fashion. He read it from the back (that is from the financial section) forward; and within the financial section, he largely read the numbers, not the analysis.
But Ferdinand Muller was “gescheidt” when it counted. He was “gescheidt” in his decision to leave Czechoslovakia in 1939, and in finding a way to get his family into Canada at a time when Canadian immigration officials thought that “one Jew was too many.” How many of us here literally owe our lives to that decision, which seems obvious in retrospect, but was anything but obvious at the time.
Let me offer another example of his “smarts” – an example which he would never have mentioned in public, but one that connoisseurs may appreciate. For many years he bought gold; no big deal, so did a lot of people. But after holding it for several decades, he sold it in the late 1970s within ten dollars of its all-time historical high, and just before it began a steep decline. Gee I wish I knew how he figured that out!
Part of Ferdinand Muller’s self-satisfaction came from the fact he was financially astute, worked hard, was successful economically, and measured himself in good part by what he earned. (“Ich habe damals gut verdient”, he recalled to me recently, when we talked about his life in Czechoslovakia in the 1930’s: “I earned well.”) It was a sign of how “gescheidt” he was that after having lost everything financially in 1939, he managed once again to become quite well to do, again by his astuteness and effort. He was a living embodiment of the work ethic – in his 87th year he still went into the office each day when he was in Niagara Falls.
Opi placed a high value on achievement, preferably on perfect achievement. Once when I was in high school I report to him with pride that I had just received a grade of 90% in English. “But you were born here,” he blurted out, astounded that a native speaker of English could have missed the other 10%.
In his innermost being, Ferdinand Muller had a sense of the world as a dangerous place, in which culture and even civility were fragile. He was deeply marked by his experience after the Nazi take-over of Slovakia, when non-Jewish friends failed to acknowledge him on the street. He lived with a deep and well-founded suspicion of the world, especially of the way the world would treat Jews when the chips were down. Among the many things that I and his other grandchildren owe to him is that sense of the world as a dangerous place.
Opi was much concerned with the making of money, but he was in no sense materialistic and never ostentatious. He judged people less by how much they made, than by how much they gave. And give he did, quietly, but consistently and with remarkable generosity. Over a period of many years, to take but one example, he and his wife funded a youth band in the Israeli town of Kiryat Ono, a resource that helped that town grow into one of the most desirable residential areas in Israel. To his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, his generosity was of a sort which one rarely encounters or even hears about. But he was also generous to those who were not related to him. For those who could not easily afford it but who he thought deserved it, he would pay to send them to camp and even to college. His generosity was not the least of his remarkable qualities.
No less remarkable, perhaps, was his loyalty. His loyalty to his synagogue, which he attended every Sabbath that he was in Niagara Falls for as long as he could go. (One of the saddest days of the last, difficult, year of his life came last September, when he realized he would not be able to make it to shul for Rosh Hashanah.). His loyalty to friends, many of whom died before him, leaving him with a certain loneliness that is the other side of loyalty. His loyalty toward his mother-in-law, Lilly Omama, who always knew she could rely upon him. His loyalty to the memory of his daughter, about whom he spoke rarely to others – as was his way – but about whom he thought often. His loyalty above all to his wife, to whom he was not only loyal for over five decades, who he really seemed to love more year after year. His loyalty to his son, to whom he was not only a father, but a partner, a confidante, and an advisor as well. And last but not least, his loyalty to his daughter-in-law, Bella, who was among the few people that he considered really “gescheidt”, despite her Polish Jewish original and her inability to speak Hungarian.
The other side of the coin of his loyalty was the loyalty of others toward him, a loyalty he inspired in so many of those that he knew. Of the loyalty toward him of his wife Magda and his son Henry, I need not speak to those of you who knew him; nor would any words be adequate to characterize their relationship to him. Last time I spoke with him, I was quite astounded to hear how often he was visited or telephoned not only by grandchildren (about which I was always kept well informed), but also by friends, sisters-in-law, nieces and nephews.
Inspiring that sort of loyalty requires another sort of “Gescheidtheit” – a special sort of know-how.
And so, if some day Ferdinand Muller’s great-grandchildren, who no doubt will just barely remember him, ask me whether he was “gescheidt”, I’ll have to say – and how! Das hat er auch verdient. That is a description he also earned.
Baruch Dayan Emet. Blessed is G-d, the ultimate judge of our worth.