There is a Mystery at the Heart of the Universe that we will never be able to fully understand not through lack of effort but because it cannot be understood. —Why Faith Matters, Rabbi David Wolpe
Photo of Sonny Rosen, Eric’s father
My mother, Ethel Dorfman, and my father, Samuel “Sonny” Rosen, were married on September 10, 1944. He was in the Navy and returned to his ship, on September 27. It sank in a typhoon on December 18, 1944.
The telegram came in January,1945. “We regret to inform you… that after careful investigation there is no hope…”
I was born on June 13, 1945.
The father/son events, the camp fairs where both parents attended, my bar mitzvah, high school basketball games the well-meaning coach who asked, “Eric, do you have a living father,” my high school and college graduations, my admission to the bar, were bittersweet. There was celebration and loneliness, a hole in my part that could never be filled.
And then the first miracle. My uncle, Barney Rosen, dying of pancreatic cancer, contacted me. I was moving back here in 1977 at the very time that he contacted me. For fourteen months before he died, I spent countless hours with him learning the details of the life of the father whom I never knew and meeting again and being brought back into the “Rosen” family. I had wonderful stories and a lifetime of pictures of my father, nothing tangible that he had touched. Barney attended our wedding a month before he died.
Then the second miracle. One of the cousins that I met in 1977, now 89 years old, contacted me. “I have your dad’s watch that he entrusted to me before he left for active duty in World War II, and I want you to have it.” And now I do.
