My Grandparents

My father just died this week. As I said here, I will always be grateful for Joel Brochstein. I also pointed out that he had imperfections, as all humans do. I have spent a lot of my life trying to understand his upbringing better.

One's parents can certainly influence one's ways, and my father had some very interesting parents, Sam J. Brochstein and Bertha Blumenthal Brochstein. I was very close to Maw-Maw and Paw-Paw always, though I recognized some issues with both of them. My grandfather died right after the new millenium, and my grandmother died almost six years later. They are buried in the mausoleum at Beth Israel's cemetery on West Dallas. I walk there almost every Sunday and took the above picture in August 2023.

Growing up, I learned at some point that they didn't like that my parents had adopted me. I don't believe I ever discussed this with them. Somehow, though, I became their favorite grandchild allegedly!

My grandfather was born in Safed, but this was before it was Israel. He came to the U.S. after his brother, Isaac, and ended up starting Brochsteins, Inc. with him in 1935, during the Great Depression. My cousin Deborah, who is the daughter of Isaac's son Raymond, and her husband, Steven Hecht, have been running it for more than a decade.

I have a very soft spot for Brochsteins. When I was in high school, I worked there during the summers after my sophomore and junior years and enjoyed it greatly. Even better, though, was after my senior year, where I worked a third summer. During that time, I worked on installation, and we installed Ken Lay's office at Transco (now Williams). He was the CEO!

Like my father, my grandfather spent many years at Brochsteins. I remember him also being on the Board of a local charity in Houston, the Texas Society to Prevent Blindness (now known as Prevent Blindness Texas). I like that he stayed married to my grandmother for so long. In my 35 years with my grandfather, I don't recall ever having any issues between us. Well, I do remember him being upset that I was a "stockbroker". Of course, I wasn't! I worked on Wall Street (institutional trading of bonds), and he thought, perhaps correctly, that I should have become a lawyer.

My grandmother could be troubling. I always got along with her, but I am the first to admit that she was a very mean person. I saw how mean she could be! She was always kind to strangers, from what I observed, but she could be very nasty with her family. The man who turned out to become my father-in-law, Jay Cohen, told me how she yelled at him when he fell off of her roof, breaking his arm as a kid.

Unlike my memories of my grandfather, I do have a very complete recollection of her. I remember this event like it just happened, but it was more than two decades ago and well before she passed away. Fran and I took our daughter, Shayna, to visit her. Before we rang the doorbell, I leaned over and warned my very young daughter not to take candy out of the jar on the table. Unfortunately, though, she did. Maw-Maw started screaming at her. Fran quickly said that we had to go!

Fran and I moved back to Houston in 1994 and regularly visited Maw-Maw and Paw-Paw with our kids. I fondly recall the four of us dining at Ninfa's on Richmond, which is now Pico's. I wanted to better understand my grandmother and looked into it a long time ago. I never talked to her about this, but her mother died during her birth. Her father remarried and had two half-siblings that Maw-Maw didn't like. Again, I never discussed this with her, but I observed this to be the case. Her brother, M.C. Blumenthal, was very kind to me and my wife in New York. They had lived in Roslyn on Long Island, and they ended up moving to a small room to deal with Aunt Ruth's Parkinson's. Like her sister, M.C. had a son named Joel too.

I believe that my grandmother was the only person that I have ever seen dead, as I went to visit her after she died. Here is her obituary:

I know some other stories about BBB that are negative, but I also understand how challenging it must have been for her to have had her mother die during her birth. Does this forgive her for being so mean? I don't think so, but, like my grandfather, I am glad that she was in my life. Their son Bobby died in 2014, and his son, David, died in 2022 (from TBI!). Now, their first son, my father, has died too.

No one has the perfect parents or grandparents. Also, no one has the perfect children. Why? Humans are never perfect! Our responsibility is to understand our relatives and to do our best to live with them in a smooth way. I feel like Fran and I and our kids did this with my grandparents. I have learned a lot, and I look forward to learning more about them and the rest of my family and Fran's family.