My Zaid, Norman Schlaff, died yesterday, December 20th, 2012 of a massive heart attack at 84. As my father says, this is the way that he would have wanted to go—quick and painless. But the suddenness of his death has hit our family hard. The funeral was December 21st in a gravesite ceremony. We expected it to be small but over 150 people showed up in the bitter cold. Below is a brief eulogy that I gave.
Any time that I’ve looked at the news in the last few days or gotten updates on my phone, I expect it to be about Zaid. Forget about the Fiscal Cliff or Robert Bork’s death. What event has more importance not just to us here but to the entire kosher venison community?
Zaid was a very special person. The Rabbi asked, “How do I know that I was?” My sister Meri had a good answer. “He was a very strong personality—so strong that he will continue to live in all of us.”
I wanted to share with you just 2 of the special things about Zaid:
- It takes a lot of work to thoroughly spoil people but Zaid definitely put in that effort. Whether it was the family wide trips to Disney World, playing with Blake in the early morning of Rosh Hashanah or just showing up with 10 lbs of kosher food every week it all made us feel incredibly special. He was always inviting people onto his sailboat or the farm or the beach, always wanting to share what he had. And if the kids or grandkids couldn’t make it up to Zaid, he would visit them and invite all their friends out to dinner. Zaid loved to give Blake gifts. He would visit every Wednesday and each time he would come over, Blake would pick up a toy car at the CVS. Zaid couldn’t bear to make him put it back. We of course thought that Zaid was going to live forever so we’d have so many cars that we wouldn’t be able to enter Blake’s room. So finally we told Zaid that he couldn’t buy any more. But then Hanukah came and we told him to buy some Bruder trucks. These were very well made and wouldn’t break. The problem was, we didn’t realize how big these things were when we picked them out online. When they came, these were the biggest things we’d ever seen. (For an example, see the garbage truck – 27” long.) So now we have these giant trucks to remember Zaid by. Zaid was also very generous. I remember a UJA dinner a few years ago honoring my parents. As the people went around the room announcing their pledges, Zaid stood up and Bubbie told him to sit down. But Zaid stood up again and gave a large sum of money—in the honor of his children and their spouses and his nine grandchildren. No one—not even he—knew that he would make this pledge. But he made it because it was the right thing to do. That’s the example he set for everyone in the family.
- He always told us that you can do anything you put your mind to. If a poor orthodox kid from Brooklyn with a bum arm can build a great thriving business, we all can do a lot more than we think. I remember when he started farming kosher venison. There was very little deer farming in the US so he learned about how they did it in New Zealand. Then he wanted to make the hind leg of the deer kosher. This was a big project and he needed to remove the sciatic nerve in the leg. But Zaid talked with the top kosher authorities in Israel and figured out a solution. He was one of the only people in the world that had kosher hind leg meat.
What will we do without Zaid? I don’t know. But the challenge for all of us is to be more generous and supportive of each other and to draw ourselves closer because we no longer have him as that driving force anymore.