JERRY STILLER: For Me & Many, An End of An Era. By Jon Weinstein

I never knew Jerry Stiller personally---but I could have. I never met Jerry Stiller, or even laid eyes on him---but I knew him. And knew him well. When FDR died, the famous African-American accordion player in tears captured for posterity, was asked if he ever knew FDR--- personally; the man allegedly said: " No, but he knew me". I feel akin to that sentiment in a sense because I grew up with many Jerry Stillers. The Jerry Stiller type incarnate was the soundtrack of happy times and memories.

My father and grandfathers were not at all like Jerry Stiller. My mother's side of the family hailed from distinctly mitteleurop. They were literate, striving, educated middle-class folks back in what is today's Czech Republic. In fact, the great Jewish writer and the first Jew to win a Nobel Prize in literature, S.Y. Agnon, was very likely a direct relative. These folks were not like Jerry Stiller.

But my father's family were more of that ilk--much more so on my father's father's side of the family, who came from the dregs of lowest-rung Russian peasantry: uneducated, unworldly, and not successful in the Old World but only middlingly so in our New one. But, they were just like Jerry Stiller. They had the cadences, the humor, the constant, effortless rat-tat-tat smart as a whip quick-witted mien, accent, cadence and tenor of Jerry Stiller.

I grew up with the same, exact humor, patter, cadence, and worldview in my ear that you heard from Jerry Stiller. There was a certain type of guy who was born on the streets of New York in the early 20th century---and those a little later, born about 100 years ago who grew up in the 1930s on the streets of a now bygone, forever long-vanished New Yawk.

The voices of my uncles and cousins as well as the numerous similar types I have known throughout business and general relationships, including friends and associates of my parents and grandparents, all sounded like Jerry Stiller. And Jerry Stiller sounded like them. Stiller's death was the end of an era that was personal, for me.

The younger millennials all love Ben Stiller. He does have talent, I give you that. I have enjoyed some of his performances. But the guy I always related to? The guy who I was most amused by? his father, Jerry. Jerry, you see, was the soundtrack of a happy part of my youth---the seemingly endless lunches and dinners where the constant uttler sui generis racounterial outpourings of my cousin Arthur, the most Stiller-esque of them all, would hold forth with a bottomless barrel of humor, anecdotes,. witty ripostes, come-backs, and endless drollery. Or, my uncle Murray who came of age on the even wilder streets of Brooklyn in the 20th century 'Teen years, and reached adulthood in the late 20's and 30's and was almost as funny.

And then there were my uncles, my grandfather's brothers, who, unlike him, were born with the humor gene front and center. These guys were far, far funnier, faster on their feet, and truly wittier than the Marx Brothers. The Marx brothers were definitely second fiddle to the laugh riot that these guys always caused wherever they went.

Maybe it was the classic Jewish theory that we are a people steeped in humor as a coping mechanism for the constant depredations and miseries inflicted upon us without end for centuries. Maybe it was this and a combination of the rough and tumble of immigrant poverty and trying to cope in a thriving, competitive, often cruel, and dirty world of disease and poverty in America. Remember, these guys came of age during and not that far removed from the first Flu Pandemic of 1918-19. And, their childhoods were framed by the Great Depression. The FIRST one. I grew up with their rollicking good humor--witty, pointed barbs and insults, funny takes, quick-witted come-back-at-ya replies. It was my soundtrack of a good part of my life. Good times, good feelings, and escape, sometimes, from the pressures of my own reality.

My Uncle Murray's taking to a stabbing heart the admonition on a sign at an old Jewish Catskills resort: MEN ARE TO BE ATTIRED IN JACKET AND TIES ONLY, and he shows up in the dining room wearing only those two items ----and a bathing suit; Maybe it's the constant badinage between my cousin Arthur and other guys of the same generation with creative, folksy pseudo-insults of the 1930's Bronx streets; maybe its the sign they all painted on a party bus they all rented to go to some guy's party: GIVE TO MENTAL HEALTH---OR WE'LL KILL YOU--a stunt that would not be funny or acceptable in today's world. The constant employment of old Ernie Kovacs insults to describe someone, etc. The picturesque descriptions of Jewish mothers, household insanities, etc..... It was as a definitely different world. It was the soundtrack of easier times and distraction. It is gone.

Jerry Stiller is gone. That generation of his is largely gone now, too. There are so few of these old guys left. Very few. Of mine? They are all, all of them, long, long gone. But as we remember Jerry Stiller, it's: Personal for me. The lost old world of a certain slice-of-time Jewish New Yawk has vanished. Forever.

Every generation laments these passing times, accents, memories, personality-types driven by exigent events--they all fade into history. But, to me: it's a final passing. It's truly a memory and only just a memory for me, from now on. And not a bad one, either.