To Andrew Bosse on a Special Day

Dear Andrew:

I was at your bar mitzvah the other day. I was invited by your grandmother, Rose Toren, who is so proud of you. She wanted me to see, in a way, how far the generations of her family have come since her own dark history at the hands of the Nazis a lifetime ago. She wanted me to see that pride never dies.

You stood up there as straight as a young tree in a vast forest, even at 13, poised and self-confident, eager--as the young are--to step grandly into tomorrow. You can hardly wait, I know. We were all that way once, as eager as puppies to play in the street.

I was impressed by the talk you gave, embracing, as it did, an understanding that the boy doesn’t grow alone. That in the forest of your infancy and on up to that rite of manhood, others have watched over you, advising and teaching, protecting you against often bitterly hostile forces, so that you might someday protect those who follow.

Your audience at the dignified old Wilshire Boulevard Temple was filled with friends and family, and with people like me who never stop realizing how much we have to learn from each other, including the nature of rituals that mark the stages of our lives.

You displayed humor when you thanked your mother, Lili, as the boss in the family, and your dad, Jon, for having taught you about “sex and sports.” The audience laughed, as it should have, but there are those of us who wished we had fathers who took the time to teach us about the truths and the dangers of growing up.

So much lies ahead.

I don’t know how many times we’ve heard, Andrew, that the past is prelude to the future. The writer Edna Rostow acknowledged it by saying, “Everyone is a child of the past.” That’s you and me. That’s Lili and Jon. That’s all who were in the audience that Saturday at your bar mitzvah.

Your grandmother knows about the past. Rose was a year younger than you are now when the Nazis came to her small town in Poland, where the family of seven, your ancestors, lived. They rounded up the Jews and took them into an open field. They told them to stay there, they’d be back in the morning.

There were four sisters and a brother. One sister, Eda, wasn’t going to wait. She fled into the darkness and was never seen again. The father told Rose to save herself, and she ran to the home of a friend who helped her obtain papers that identified her as a displaced Christian. Rose survived, even escaping from Auschwitz after her true identity was learned, coming to America to tell her story in books. She has returned to Poland many times, seeking the fate of her family. She learned that her mother and another sister had died in a concentration camp. She discovered that the Nazis had murdered her father, brother and the fourth sister in that open field, on that starry night.

The mystery of Eda remains. Where did she go? Where did the darkness take her? “I have a feeling she is still alive,” Rose told me one day, “and I tell you I will find her.”

No photographs of Eda exist, Andrew--only a face in the memory of your grandmother, a haunting smile, fragments of laughter. She’s a part of your yesterdays. Of the world’s yesterdays. Know your past. Our past. Study it. Remember it.

The history of the Jews is filled with tears. But time embraces us all, so that your history is our history, your pain our pain, your guilt our guilt. As children of the past, we all play in the debris of lives and cultures ruined by the bomb, the gun, the sword and the arrow.

We’ve come a long way through time since the first club was fashioned. Who knows how much further we’ll be able to go when the club is transformed into the kinds of weaponry that can outkill in an instant all the wars in human history?

But your rabbi, Harvey J. Fields, could still talk of a world without war, wisely citing that portion in a prayer book that says, “Dark and twisting is the road to peace.” Dark and twisting indeed.

One hears cries of reason amid the gunfire that rocks the ancient Holy Land, but they die in the thunder of a war still unfinished. The cries are not just from diplomats and politicians, but from men and women protecting their young, as you were protected, Andrew. Jews and Muslims alike. Hindus and Christians too.

The cries haven’t yet reached God’s ears. We still tread the dark and twisting road.

This I wish for you, Andrew, as you walk bravely into the tomorrows our pasts have created. I wish for you a deep compassion for those who suffer, whoever they are, whatever they are. I wish for you the strength of leadership and the wisdom that is so severely lacking in the areas of armed conflict we witness today.

Stride past the hatreds that darken the twisting road. Stand tall when others tremble. I wish for you that fortitude. And I wish you love and caring and the ability to share them with others. I wish you life, my boy. Shalom.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@la times.com.