Written by Chuck Aug. 26, 2008

The following is a family legend rooted in fact. The historical details and contextual circumstances have, I am sure, been exaggerated over time to make a more compelling oral tradition. However, 95% is incontrovertible truth. The personal histories are accurate. I have seen the letters, climbed on the mahogany bed, and the dialogue was well documented by the parties who spoke the words. It is a story that gives me faith in an ordered and purposeful universe. This is how Harry met Rose. I hope you enjoy it.

It would take a sinking luxury liner, a clerical gaffe, and a lie to bring them together. The odds required for any two people to find each other are always staggering. Choose to tie your shoes, and you are looking at the pavement when the person you were meant to be with walks by. If your mother doesn’t wear the pink dress to the Friendly’s on the Friday night that your father’s shift ends early, he never tries to hold her hand as they walk home, and you disappear from the plane of existence. We all owe our lives to an improbable series of events. However, the circumstances surrounding Harry’s courtship of Rose gives credence to the last line of Desiderata, that “Undoubtedly, the universe is unfolding as it should.”

Rose was not impressive to look at. She stood only 4ft 11. In her old age, her body was rail thin and bent with osteoporosis. She had jet black hair, parted in the middle, and pulled back in a tight bun. As an old woman she had traded in her stylish New York fashions for the practicality of a house coat, tan ankle high stockings, and sturdy black shoes. Rose spoke with a thick Yiddish accent that followed her from a childhood spent in a Jewish section of Brooklyn. She loved to eat borscht, canned tuna, and anything made by Entenmanns’. Her home, on the second floor of the two family house she owned, smelled perpetually of steam heat. Rose was not impressive to look at, with the exception of her eyes. She had the bluest eyes.

In the hallway outside her living room was a bay window, whose wide shelf had been converted into a day bed. Underneath the small sleeping pad, her shoes were neatly placed, and her blanket was folded. This was where she slept. She had a large bedroom with a majestic mahogany bed that her husband had bought before the depression. “Ve had two cars, when most people didn’t know vhat a car vas,” she would tell me. As a small child the mattress and the down comforter were too high for me to climb up on. However, the bed no longer gave the comfort for which it was intended. She had not slept in it for ten years. She had not slept in it since her husband, the man that she had met by fairytale circumstances, the man who would be the love of her life for 55 years, passed away.

Harry was the son of a seltzer manufacturer, who was the son of a boxer. I only knew him after time had reduced his form to a delicate and emaciated version of his youth. But I have seen yellowing photographs showing a young man with a light-weight fighter’s build. He inherited his grandfather’s physique but not his pugilistic tendencies. Harry was easy going and kind. If there were ten people in a room and nine chairs you would know who Harry was. He would be the one standing.

As a young man he made a small fortune as a garment manufacturer. Although he once famously passed on an opportunity to co-found Martz bus-lines for an amount that, at the time, he would have bet at the track. The depression would break his success and the man who once owned an Oldsmobile and a Cadillac would shovel snow off the railroad tracks for 2 dollars a day. Alzheimer’s and a stroke would finally take him in his eighties, well after he wrote the letter, leaving his widow to sleep on a windowsill for the rest of her days.

Like many men of his generation, Harry was a doughboy. He was drafted at the age of 19 to fight in the First World War. He had a background in retail and was very good with numbers, so he became a supply officer. His experience coupled with a healthy dose of stereotyping made him a natural. He was reasonably popular with the men in his company as he could procure them extra food and cigarettes but women rarely noticed him. He was short and Jewish and, outside of his New York neighborhood, those were major disadvantages.

Although he was no-one’s image of a “warrior,” Harry saw action and lots of it. He spent several weeks and months in the trenches of France, pushing aside the corpses and shooing away dog-sized rats. He would on several occasions be asked to cross the no-man’s land between allied and German forces. He survived, by his own account, “because the number of our soldiers was more than the number of German bullets.” On one night, he would wake to men screaming and trying to untangle their gas masks. He managed to pull his mask on as the Normand winds carried German mustard gas over the trench. Harry would survive the ordeal, but it would cost him his hair. It fell out from exposure and never grew back.

One can only imagine the loneliness and desperation that Harry must have felt in such a place. One can only imagine the prayers he sent out to deliver him from the trench. As the universe would have it, somebody listened, and he worked for the post office.

Rose was well-to-do. Her father owned one of the largest stables in New York City. Prior to Henry Ford, horses still represented the primary form of transportation in the city. They towed the milk, the clothing, the cabs and everything else that needed moving. Since most people in those businesses could not afford a horse, they rented them on a daily basis from people like Rose’s father. The horse-leasing business was good, and Rose was spoiled rotten.

She was stubborn, proud and engaged to a promising young Jewish boy who worked in the garment district. Rose secretly wished he was a doctor or a lawyer. His family was also successful and their parents mutually approved of the union. However, prior to the wedding the world would change abruptly and forever, separating the lovers by 6,000 miles of ocean and war-torn countryside.

As the Lusitania made its way to the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, a string of improbable events continued in motion, that would one day bring us to a large empty mahogany bed in the second story of a two-family in Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania. The first of which was Rose’s fiancé getting drafted. America entered the war and off to France he went. Rose waved good-bye to him in New York Harbor as his ship made its way to England and then to Le Harve. Months of separation would turn into a year. During that time Rose and her fiancé corresponded regularly. She assured him of her fidelity and undying love and he assured her that he would be safe from the hail of machine gun fire and the clouds of poison.

And so it went. Until one day my great-grandfather got a letter. The address read:

From:

Rose Kaslov

132 5^th Avenue

New York, New York,

United States of America

To:

SGT Harry Rubin

Supply Corps

98^th Infantry Unit

United States Army

He opened the letter and read it. Confused, he looked at the address and read it again. Without much time to think he put the letter in his breast pocket and got in line with his company. They were marching out to the front that night. He put the letter out of his mind until they reached their rendezvous point and set down for sleep. In a rare moment of quiet, he opened her note and read it again. Still confused, but starting to get clearer, he made a decision that would change his life. He pulled out a pencil and he wrote back.

No one really knows what was in the content of that letter. But we do know this, it was a lie. From everything I have ever learned about the man, lying was way outside of his character. But the universe has an odd way of providing. If Harry was not in a ditch, feeling desperate, feeling lonely, he may not have written at all, and the mahogany bed would be in someone else’s home and I would not be here writing about it. And so, with a nudge from fate, Harry answers Rose.

The lie is that Harry is not who he claims to be. Rose’s letter is intended for Harry Rubin, Supply Corps, 98^th Infantry Unit, United States Army. However, it finds Harry Rubin, Supply Corps, 96^th Infantry Unit, United States Army. A small error made by a postal clerk, who maybe set his glasses down for an instant or exhaled his cigarette smoke which obscured his vision, and the arc of the Lusitania in continued. The letter is put in the wrong bin and, by lottery odds, there just happens to be another Harry Rubin in the US Army Supply Corps. That error made my life possible while simultaneously extinguishing another line of fate for another family.

Still, the mistake could be rectified and fate’s original path maintained, if Harry just responds in a manner consistent with his personality. “I am sorry Rose, I am not the Harry you are looking for,” would have stopped the process. But Harry does not write that letter. Instead, he steps out of himself and pretends to be the Harry she was seeking. He responds to Rose’s 19 year-old romantic prose with his own. He also tells her that his address has changed. Rose, a shrewd woman by all accounts, receives the letter and inexplicably buys the deception. Rose and the new Harry correspond; Rose sending words of love, and Harry gobbling them up, starving for hope, even if it was imaginary. They continue writing for several months while the universe plays its last card.

The unintentional consequence of Harry’s lie is that he falls in love with the woman that he has never met but whose letters soothed him. Somewhere in Rose’s language and in her expression of commitment to another man, Harry’s heart finds passion. Now he begins to write with genuine emotion to a stranger. In the articulation of his heart, Rose finds something new in the letters from France, a rawness that wasn’t there before, a sensitivity she wasn’t familiar with, a humor that made her blush. She simultaneously begins to suspect and fall for the man who is writing her. Her letters begin to change. They are less formulaic. They are filled with humorous rebuttal. She feels something real and responds, continuing the cycle for several months.

I don’t know the reason why, but the original Harry stops writing at about the same time that my great grandfather begins corresponding with Rose. Maybe he was killed in action. Maybe he ran off with a French peasant woman. Maybe he just wasn’t moved by Rose’s letters and stopped writing out of boredom. Either way, his withdrawal plays a critical and shockingly well-timed role in keeping the couple together.

However, within this impossible coincidence, a dark cloud is rising. Harry is sure of one thing, there will be a day of reckoning. The war will end, his reality will crash down, he will have to tell her the truth, and he will lose her for it.

It is possible that given the option, Harry may have hoped the war would continue on indefinitely, so that the fantasy would not die. But fate does not work that way. Harry, is compelled to tell her the truth and more importantly, the Germans surrender. He confesses to everything. He also tells her that within his fraud, he has fallen in love with her. He writes that he is sorry and then he mails the letter.

Armistice Day. Harry gets what is surely an angry response from Rose Kaslov. Who knows what he thought? I might have been too ashamed to read hear reaction and accept the consequences, he was not. Harry opens and reads the letter and is stunned to find it begins with the words: “I know.”

A meeting is arranged when he returns from France. Harry takes the train from Wilkes-Barre to New York. It is the last step of a journey that was set in motion by the big bang itself. Harry finds her house and waits outside for a moment. Placing myself in his shoes, knocking on that door must have been terrifying. Who would answer? The woman whose picture I have in my imagination? A product of flowery language and desperate illusion? Or someone, that would once and for all shatter the dream. An ugly woman, a mean woman, a woman with an eye right the middle of her forehead. As equally important, who did she think was going to knock? A 19yr old girl writing to a soldier she has never met and being swept away by the greeting card romance may have conjured up someone resembling Apollo as opposed to a short, bald Jewish kid. It was a big moment.

Harry knocked on the door and Rose answered.

Harry: Hello, I am Harry Rubin, it’s nice to meet you.

Rose: It is nice to meet you Harry, I am Rose.

Harry: Your eyes are bluer than I thought they would be.

Rose: You’re shorter than I thought you vould be.

They married within a year and raised two children, Charles and Gladis. Harry would famously let his young son take apart his gold watch at the dinner table as a bribe to finish his meals. Rose would go the elementary school everyday to feed her children milk and bananas through a hole in the playground fence. Food was scarce and it was the only way she could guarantee that it was not stolen or shared. They would be wealthy and poor and finally middleclass. Rose would often pull me close and, with a mouthful of coffee flavored hardtack, whisper in my six year old ears. “Charles, be a Doctor or a Lawyer when you grow up. I have no Doctors or Lawyers in my family. And please, marry a nice Jewish girl.” I would do neither. It just wasn’t to be.

When Rose spoke of Harry in her last years, she could not escape a welling of tears. Her voice would stammer, and her fierce blue eyes would tremble. “Dat man vas an angel! He put me on a pedestal. Everything, he did for me. I pray to God to take me to him.” God finally listened and took her ten years after they were parted. They are buried next to one another in a small Pennsylvania cemetery.

The mahogany bed is in the basement of my grandfather’s house. No one has slept in it since Harry died 33 years ago. The letters that ignited the relationship and set so many events in motion are with my Great Aunt in Scranton, Pennsylvania. I am now a father of three boys. Every now and then I tell them the story of how their great-great grandparents met and we marvel at how close to never our lives came. That great poem comes to my mind again: we are all children of the universe.