“And,” he had cautioned, “you are of the South. You must learn how other people live, if you are to live yourself.”

What Avrum did not, or could not, understand was that I knew nothing of the atrocities against the Jews that he described with stubborn certainty. In my home, atrocities against any race, or faith, were not celebrated or tolerated. When they were discussed, which was seldom, it was always with regret and sadness.

“No one is such an innocent,” Avrum had protested.

But he had been wrong. I was such an innocent—the fifth child of a farming family with an Irish and English heritage, settled from more than a hundred years of wandering from Pennsylvania through Virginia and the Carolinas and finally into Georgia, to the fertile bottomlands of the Savannah River. There was pride in the heritage and in the wandering and in the settling. Pride and tolerance and patience. And quietness. Quietness, too, was part of our nature. The silence of work, as my father had believed, was a great teacher. “A quiet man does not carry the weight of his tongue,” he had advised. I would later learn that people who did not know us—people who were not of the South—thought we were lazy and passive because we were quiet. We were not lazy. We were not passive. We were Southerners.

And for a Southerner, for an innocent, it had been a great leap to go from the green, humid foothills of northeast Georgia to the cool, majestic mountains of the New York Catskills—from the loblolly pine to the hemlock, from red clay to dark forest soil. But it was more than a leap of miles and scenery. It also had been a leap of culture, a leap so mighty that I am still in awe of it.

Avrum Feldman had been there, in Pine Hill, in the Catskills, when I landed, bewildered and frightened. He was sitting on his sidewalk bench, an old man who was thought to be crazy, a fool preoccupied with romantic nonsense.

And we had become friends. Destiny, Avrum had called it.

And long ago he had chosen me to close out his life, to recite his kaddish.

It was a strange request and I had tried to decline it. Many times, I had tried. I would say to him, in a plea, “But I can’t do a kaddish. I’m not Jewish.”

And Avrum would smile in his old-man way—mischievously—and reply, “So? Neither is my kaddish. You will see. You will see.”

I never insisted on an explanation. I knew he would be right.

I wanted to read in the Kingston newspaper that Avrum Feldman’s kaddish would be recited—performed—by his friend, Madison Lee Murphy, who was also known as Bobo.

I wanted to read that Avrum Feldman had not been crazy, or a fool, but blessed, because he understood something the rest of us could not understand.