o Whom it May Concern:

No one believed it when Mordechai finally died yesterday morning. He was the last survivor of Auschwitz and he’d hung on longer than anyone had a right to expect. “Longer than their f-ing Reich” he might have said were he able to on his last birthday. “A lot longer.”

Mordechai was a comedian in his working lifetime — that and a civil engineer. “I build things up during the day, and tear them down at night,” he famously said. “That’s how I keep it together.”

Lots of people think he meant coping with memories of the death camp when he said that, but he never publicly let on. Others say it was something as simple as traffic or the inability to escape the influence of technology, AI being particularly loathsome in Mordechai’s opinion. If AI was so great, why was it artificial, the shtick in his act began, no one liked artificial flavoring or artificial fabrics, people paid extra for “real” ingredients, real fruit and real goose down and such. Did we make sure to give huge doses of AI to the mice before releasing it to the general public? How do we know it won’t give us all cancer?

There’s a reason Mordechai was never able to quit his day job.

But AI came around after Mordecai had already been working the clubs for decades, so it’s a safe bet he was referring to something else. Something more fundamental in all probability, something I’ve pondered for over fifteen years, but something that might have remained a mystery he took to his grave if not for the discovery I made yesterday.

Even if you’d asked him to explain it on his deathbed, he wouldn’t have obliged you. Not because he might not have wanted to, and not because he was rude or ill-tempered — most everyone who knew him said he was a prince — but, rather because on that last birthday, that last January anniversary of his mother’s natal toil, Mordechai had long since lost the power of speech. He lay on his bed in his house in Boca, with only the birds outside his window and me for company, having not uttered a word the last fifteen years of his life. Not a thank you or a gesundheit, not a goodbye to any of his far-flung progeny. Nor even one to his longstanding physician, me, who attended to him those final fifteen years, and watched over him when he expired, the late winter Florida sun alighting on his head one last time.

Not. A. Single. Word.

And why, you ask? Why did he remain mute for so long? Was it a protest at the cruel nature of this world and the circumstances of his life? Or was his silence a mystery as well, something for others’ idle speculation, like his glib connection between engineering and comedy?

No, it was none of that, none of that at all. You see, Mordechai was 997 years and 45 days old the morning he died, and those last fifteen years he wasn’t doing much of anything but existing. But still. Just three years shy of his original tormentors’ plans. How about that.

Now, you might say that obviously Mordechai was referring to his uniquely long life when relating engineering, comedy and survival, and that really there was nothing more to it than that. But, if you did, he’d come right back at you. Mostly he’d say there was nothing unique about it. After initially emigrating to the United States after World War II — how quaint that we used to bother to number them — one of the first things Mordechai did was visit Sequoia National Park in California. He’d read about it when he was a teen-ager in his birthplace of Lvov, Poland, his mother and father were all about books when he was a boy, almost anything they could get their hands on was fair game for Mordechai as well.

There were limits, however — how reasonable is for you to judge. In his act, Mordechai told the story of his father scolding him one time when he was nine for staying up past midnight reading Polish movie magazines by a flashlight Mordechai had received as a birthday gift from an aunt. His sister Miriam ratted him out the next morning over breakfast, and Mordechai’s father promptly marched his son upstairs and confiscated the periodicals, as well as the torch.

Back down at the breakfast table, as Mordechai’s half-eaten rye bread and currant jam gathered flies, his father reminded Mordechai that the Torah commanded a solid eight hours every night, rain or shine. Mordechai then claimed with a straight face that he was afraid to fall asleep, that he looked around his and Miriam’s room in the dark and saw only terrors, whether inside the closet or beneath the curtains, and as a Jew he’d learned to be afraid since almost the day he was born. Most of which was patently untrue — even by age nine, Mordechai had already developed a penchant for exaggeration, one of the comedian’s greatest tools, though his father, a patient man according to Mordechai, nonetheless asked his son the real reason why he feared sleep so.

“Because I might die,” Mordechai said.

“Why?” his father earnestly inquired. “Why would you think that?”

“Because we learned in school that the Talmud says that sleep is 1/60th of death. If you add it all up, I figure I’ve been living on borrowed time since not long after my briss.”

Again, Mordechai’s act, while charming, wasn’t really all that funny. At times, listening to him required knowledge that is best described as rabbinical, such as the relationship between death and sleep in Judaism, and no one has ever confused the Talmud with Mel Brooks or Carl Reiner, to name two comedians Mordechai admired. At other times, an “Evening with Morty,” as his show was known when it was popular, bordered on the purely philosophical, with Mordechai sitting on a stool, smoking a cigarette and asking the audience to travel with him to places they could never go, where they could ponder the meaning of it all through the eyes of someone who, while he’d ultimately last a dozen lifetimes, never professed to having seen it all.

Living nearly a thousand years might make you conclude that, I imagine.

Anyway, on the sixth night of Hannukah in 1938, the third-to-last festival of lights he would ever celebrate with his immediate family, his parents gave Mordechai a Yiddish translation of a book about the American national park system. As he looked at the pictures of the trees in Sequoia, fifteen-year-old Mordechai asked his father whether the giants were real, or whether the photographs depicted some kind of ecological fiction. His father assured him the conifers were, in fact, among us, the naturalists had even brought seedlings to England and were growing new ones to claim the species for the English. Wellingtons, the Brits called them.

Mordechai then asked his father how the trees could live so long, through drought and floods and whatever calamities might come their way. And his father answered: “Because they’re too stubborn to die. Kind of like us Jews.”

Mordechai was spell-bound by these trees, and swore to his father right then and there that someday he’d go see them, to be in the presence of things of such tenacity that no human who’d ever walked the face of the earth could possibly understand them. (Unless, of course, you believe those tales of Methuselah, which Mordechai said even his Talmud teacher conceded were apocryphal.) Sometimes, Mordechai claimed this vow is what kept him alive in Auschwitz, a promise made to a man who tragically didn’t make it past the summer of 1941, shot along with Mordechai’s mother and sister in the Lvov pogrom before the ghetto even got started. Any time Mordechai felt ready to pack it in, to just get in line for the showers, he remembered his paternal oath, and returned to wielding his shovel or pick axe or whatever tool the Nazis had given him that day, the yoke around his neck a bit looser for having beaten back the devil for another twenty-four hours.

Mordechai was shot as well in the July frenzy, but by some miracle survived, even though he’d been left for dead with the rest of his family and the dozens of others. To this day, many say this is where divine intervention interceded in Mordechai’s life — he was found by a sympathetic priest who claimed he saw Mordechai rise from a pile of corpses as a specter, suspended in the air, holding his hands to the sky as if beseeching God for an explanation for the massacre. And then the spirit Mordechai supposedly sat down on a nearby bench and began to weep, before falling onto his side and convulsing, back to human form.

Mordechai professed no memory of this in his lifetime, claiming recollection only of waking in a clinic afterwards with a healing wound in his chest — the bullet missed his heart by a fraction — and a nurse looking over him with a beatific smile, if such a thing were even possible in a Jew. The nurse had honey-brown hair and, from Mordechai’s vantage point, a bosom that invited him to rest his head and that smelled like vanilla.

“There he is,” she said when he finally opened his eyes. “The stubborn one.”

“Stubborn?”

She nodded and grabbed his wrist. “Too stubborn to die.”

“Like the Sequoias,” he croaked, to which the nurse merely raised her eyebrows and began the exercise of taking his rapidly strengthening pulse.

Eventually, Mordechai married this nurse, meeting up with her after the war through a sequence of events that are too fantastical to believe. But then, every Polish Jew who survived the Nazi plague has a tale to tell — this one you can look up on the Internet, at one of the countless websites devoted to Mordechai’s remarkable life. All you need know for present purposes is that when he finally made it to Sequoia in February of 1948, Sarah accompanied him, and was already carrying their first child.

The two lovers lay together in a snow-covered grove where the largest of the trees lorded over the forest, General Sherman, staring straight up the Commander’s backside, Mordechai would later call it in his act. You could do that back then, approach the colossuses and touch them with your hands or lie at their feet without being arrested. That was before we knew how fragile the trees were, that even foot traffic too close to them could compact the soil and starve the roots, let alone all the damage caused by people carving their initials and the like, though at least the latter was sometimes good for light entertainment.

When Mordechai and Sarah first entered Sequoia, for example, they’d laughed heartily at one artist’s attempt at posterity on one of the trees by the entrance. “LORD BYRON WAS HERE,” it read, presumably in honor of the Englishman’s famous graffito at the Temple of Poseidon. And whether you appreciate the ironic effort of the artiste or not, you’d have to admit it had special meaning for Mordechai and Sarah. The Temple is where they met up again after the war, after both had left displaced persons camps and journeyed to Greece for the trip to America.

Like I said, search the Internet. www.soyouwanttoliveforever.com is pretty good.

In any event, at the base of the General Sherman tree, Mordechai looked up at the canopy, at two thousand years of history reaching deep into the sky, the first of what we now estimate as over fifteen million descendants squirming around inside Sarah’s womb*. Fire scars were visible on the bark at different points, and sheared-off limbs abounded. And Mordechai chose that moment to tell Sarah for the first time about the promise he’d made to his father, and the book his parents had given him on that Hannukah night in Lvov. (*The geneticists claim that every living Jew on earth is descended from Mordechai, in one fashion or another. See www.mordechaiisyourdaddy.com. Whether that’s true or not, I understand the math is virtually unassailable.)

“That’s what I was referring to that first day,” he told her. “In the hospital.”

“I remember.”

“You do?”

“Yes – how could I forget. The boy with the bright eyes who dared compare himself to one of God’s most incredible creations, as if a man could ever understand something born when the second temple was being built in Jerusalem.”

If only she had known.

So now you have at least some idea why Mordechai would throw your suggestion back at you, your view that there was nothing more to his famous pronouncement than a wry commentary on his extraordinarily long life. To this day, the General Sherman tree lords over Sequoia, even as the ice in Glacier National is long gone, and the Sahara has begun to bloom again. And while the trees are a feature of nature’s marvelous engineering, they brook no quarter and, outwardly, have few comedic intentions.

So what did he mean then?

For this, some of the websites come in handy. One I like, www.mordechaimanormyth.com, asserts it grew out of Mordechai’s volunteer service in what was then known as Israel’s war of independence in 1948. While today politeness dictates we call it something else — I can’t keep track of the varying names — back in 1948, that’s how it was known. Israel was a tiny nation being dug out of the desert by Jews who’d finally returned to their homeland after nearly two millennia of wandering and unspeakable tragedy. It was an easy story to root for, but, sadly, one that didn’t last out the century. No fewer than 20 years after its founding, Israel had been reduced by the cognoscenti to an “occupying” power, little different than the Germans in Namibia or the English in India. Interlopers. Colonialists. To be rooted out by hook or by crook, or, as the case may be, by the massacre of an Olympic team or pizzeria patrons in Jerusalem.

But, in 1948, Israel’s story was yet to be written by others — the Jews were in charge of her tale. And, as a fledgling country facing enemies on all sides, she attracted her brethren from far and wide to come to her aid, Mordechai among them.

Not long after their trip to Sequoia, in an apartment they shared in Chicago, he told Sarah he was going to volunteer for the Irgun or Hagenah or whoever would have him. When she protested that they’d made it to America only six months prior, and he risked his hard-won citizenship by splitting his allegiance, he told her not to worry, he was just going to help with construction. Who could possibly object to a Holocaust survivor traveling to Israel to help build the new state? Besides, it was high time he put to use some of the knowledge he’d gained from the engineering basics the Americans had taught him in D.P. camp. That, and all the road-building the Nazis had made him do.

“And what about me?” Sarah then asked.

“What about you? I assumed you’d come with.”

“I’m pregnant, Mottel.”

Mordechai paused for only a second before enveloping Sarah in his arms. “So our child will be born in Israel. A sabra. Is that so bad?”

“I love you.”

“As you should.”

And so Mordechai and Sarah made Aliyah in March of 1948 after marrying in Chicago’s City Hall, and Mordechai helped build the new state. During the war, he was instrumental in the opening of the Burma Road to Jerusalem in May and June of that year, work he would later joke was not all that different than that which he’d undertaken at Auschwitz, minus the slavery part, of course.

“You try smoothing a passing lane while someone is using you for target practice,” went the punchline.

This bit of Mordechai’s, perfected after he returned to the United States for yet another comprehensive study of his genome in 2151, is the source of www.mordechaimanormyth.com’s assertion about the near immortal’s correlation. Myself, I don’t buy it. I think Mordechai was being more profound in his pronouncement, which first appeared in Bartlett’s in 2055, right before the compendium fell victim to the final triumph of AI, no one being able to tell whether any actual person was the source of anything anymore. And while the founding of Israel was certainly a weighty event, of which the construction of the Burma Road played a not insignificant role, Israel’s story, even today, ten centuries after her birth, is one of ceaseless building, and very little tearing down.

Even if so many wish it were the latter.

No, I’m now certain as of yesterday morning that the explanation lies elsewhere, for reasons I’m recording here for posterity, though before I get there, let me dispense with one other prominent theory. After Mordechai earned his degree in civil engineering from Hebrew University, it is said, though he never copped to it, that he was one of those who conceived of the Ben-Gurion canal, which even today remains just a dream. But what a dream! A 160-mile long trench connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, traversing land that is among the most contested in the world, subjected daily to the threat of terrorist attacks — who would even think such a thing was possible, let alone a good idea?

When first proposed in the early 1960s, it was so controversial that the American paper discussing the building of it was buried for more than thirty years, released to the public only during a time of relative quiet in Arab-Israeli affairs, at the end of the first Clinton administration. That paper, which outlines the use of nuclear explosives (!) to dig the canal, ends with the dry conclusion that “it is likely that the Arab countries surrounding Israel would object strongly to the construction of such a canal.”

As Mordechai might have said, “No joke.”

Later on, the idea resurfaced on two separate occasions in the 2020s. Once, in 2021, after the signing of the Abraham Accords, and then again, in 2024, after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks.

The former was arguably at the height of Jewish optimism about Israel’s place in the world, when it appeared that peace, finally, might soon be at hand. The Emiratis and Israel signed an agreement for increased use of the then-existing Eilat to Ashkelon oil pipeline, which had largely lain fallow due to the collapse of Israeli and Iranian relations after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Apparently, construction of the Ben Gurion canal was seen as a natural corollary to the new deal — so much so that Israel hastily announced that work would commence on the project in June, 2021, though nothing ever happened.

The latter revival is more relevant to Mordechai. The Hamas attacks, which among other things, brought an end to the brief notion that harmony would ever come to the river Jordan, were the subject of no end of conspiracy theories, each more dastardly than the next. These theories mostly blamed Israel for inviting the carnage, as a casus belli to invade Gaza. How else to explain the self-destructive nature of the violence, the thinking went, which not only led to so much ruin for the Palestinians, but also to the end of Hamas as a political force in the strip.

The alleged plot relating to the Ben Gurion canal was of a piece with all the others. Its proponents claimed that Israel had let the Hamas terrorists in, despite ample intelligence that an incursion was imminent, so as to permit the safe construction of the Ben-Gurion canal with either the old proposed port in Ashkelon or a new one somewhere in Gaza, once Israel re-took the territory. Using the unidentified new anchorage in Gaza would have numerous ancillary benefits according to the theorists, not the least of which was a vast savings in money. And everyone knew how important money was to the Jews, right?

As conspiracy theories go, this one was as convoluted as it gets, and Mordechai, rumored as he was to have helped conceive of the project, took particular offense, which eventually became fodder for those trying to unravel Mordechai’s legendary quote. “A war started over a canal,” he raged years later. “Only the Jew-haters would imagine we’d try to save money on building a canal, when everyone knows the real profit to be made in leveling the strip was in parking lots.”

Mind you, there was more to this hypothesis than just this single coarse joke. While it pained him to admit it, Mordechai expressed grudging respect for the jerry-rigged nature of the Hamas attacks, and not just the exactingly constructed tunnels — the paragliders also attracted his attention. As an engineer, he couldn’t help but admire a creative solution to a thorny problem: how to evade an enemy’s defenses in sufficient numbers to inflict grievous harm without being detected. While as a comedian, he lampooned those who used those same paragliders as symbols of “resistance,” pointing out that the display of giddy barbarity from the terrorists was something he recognized from 80 years prior, and weren’t the Israelis supposed to be the Nazis in this play? “Sometimes a paraglider is just a paraglider,” he said. “And a terrorist is just that.”

But ultimately Mordechai discredited this theory himself, speaking at a conference in the Great Rift Valley dedicated to his continued existence on his 225th birthday in 2148. Standing at the dais in the then-believed birthplace of humanity, already by then the oldest mammal ever known to have existed, longer-lived than any of the ancient whales that once roamed the Arctic, he let slip that he could joke about such things as the horrific Hamas attack — indeed, had to joke about such things — because he’d seen so much of what he’d built as an engineer crumble to the ground or, sadly, blown up in war. And yet he kept returning for more. “My beloved first wife Sarah called me stubborn when we originally met,” he reminisced at the dais, a tear sliding down his still pink cheek. “Too stubborn to die.”

So, is that the answer then? Was Mordechai indicating that engineers and comedians ply their trades through stubbornness, and that, thus, by extension, Mordechai owed his quasi-eternal life to this quality? It’s certainly worth pondering. An antique version of Merriam-Webster’s I found on his bookshelf last week — he loved doing word games when he was able — has a first definition of “stubborn” as “unreasonably or perversely unyielding; mulish,” qualities that might be useful in building a bridge over a seemingly uncrossable divide or crafting a joke about topics that most would say should be off-limits. You need to stick to your guns when doing such things; otherwise, the skeptics will have their way.

But as I sat by Mordechai’s bedside yesterday morning and studied his tranquil face, at last at rest, I rejected this explanation once and for all. Stubbornness implies an element of foolhardiness, of an unwillingness to listen to reason. The mule may stand its ground legitimately sometimes, but more often it’s because of its nature, independent of whether it might be wise or not. It’s how it’s wired, the way it was born, and, if I’ve learned anything in my comparatively short life, it’s that engineers and comedians are made, not born. Like Mordechai, each is the product of his circumstances, and does not reach his intended goals — creation or laughter or, perhaps sometimes both — without listening to reason. Stubborn civil engineers will build two halves of a bridge that do not meet, while a mulish comedian is likely to be left mainly with a roomful of long stares.

To be fair, there is a second definition of “stubborn” in that old version of Webster’s: “justifiably unyielding: resolute.” Now, that might be a better way to go: resoluteness. It’s a fine concept, as fine as humans are capable of, I think, and I suspect Mordechai would have agreed. Those who are resolute stand by the watch-towers for us, go down fighting for the right reasons, or venture into the unknown. We owe a lot of our greatest achievements to the resolute — the crossings of the oceans by the Polynesians and the Europeans, for example, or the pioneering of Mars and Titan. Without the resolute we might no longer exist as a species, as only those with conviction a few hundred years back even bore enough children to perpetuate humanity.

But, to be honest, I don’t think of comedians or engineers as “resolute.” Oh, the individual one might be here and there, but as a class, they don’t meet the parameters of the definition. He was resolute in his joke-telling or bridge-building just doesn’t seem like anything anyone would ever say. This is not to imply a comedian cannot be brave, as can a civil engineer. It takes immense courage to stand in front of a group of strangers and pour one’s heart out for a laugh, or to lead a crew to erect a span across a canyon of sea or soil.

Or to live nearly a thousand years, through ages light and dark and now thankfully light again.

Which is where yesterday morning comes in, when Mordechai perhaps revealed his secret, or something close to it. He went in his sleep, peacefully I assume, and as I was going through my mental list of administrative details I needed to attend to, his famous quote ran through my mind once more. Now that he was gone, answering the question of what he’d meant seemed more urgent than ever, before he was forgotten for good.

Because this is the surprising thing — people eventually lose interest in everything, no matter how incredible. All those websites I mentioned about Mordechai? Most haven’t been updated in centuries, existing only in the national Internet archives. The conferences dedicated to him? Those petered out after that meeting in Kenya. And his engineering and comedy? Mordechai’s final commission was for a refurbishment of the Burma Road as a tourist site in the mid-22nd century, while “an evening with Morty” had its last paid run well before that. Not that falling out of favor ever stopped him. He built this house as a winter home, for example, at the ripe old age of 875, and faithfully plied his comedy at open mic nights until going silent that fateful day 15 years ago.

Indeed, by the time Mordechai turned 200, he told me most people regarded him as a freak of nature, a one-off whose telomeres never seemed to get any shorter, a walking violation of the first law of thermodynamics, but one whose pronouncements about the world no longer had any relevance — he was just another old man, albeit older than anyone had ever been. He could have lived or died those last 800 years, and the world would have kept spinning all the same. Even his own people more or less abandoned him, like Moses heading up Mt. Sinai, he was forgotten in Israel like he was forgotten everywhere else.

It’s why he returned to America — that genome study was just an excuse. If he was going to be practically anonymous, he figured he’d do it in the city where he and Sarah had wed, Chicago, which is where I met him, one evening when he came to urgent care with a staph infection on the side of his nose. I was a resident and took care of him without the first clue who he was. We attended the same temple as it turned out, and, from there, struck up a friendship, and, eventually, a professional relationship that lasted over fifty years. He moved permanently to Boca as a favor to me — my daughter lives in Florida, and, after my wife was killed in a boating accident twenty years ago, I wanted to be nearer to her and my two grandkids as I aged.

So I leafed through his favorite dictionary and began running through the possible explanations once more. From “stubborn” back to “resolute” and then deep into the Ps (for pig-headed), where I noticed a page had been torn out, and from the looks of it, quite recently. I didn’t give it much thought at first, but then began to wonder how it could have occurred. The dictionary wasn’t something I’d ever touched until last week, and, as I said, Mordechai hadn’t managed much of anything the last fifteen years, let alone getting out of bed to look up a synonym. He’d retired early on the evening of February 7, 2905, the 957th anniversary of his marriage to Sarah, complaining of a headache and feeling weak, and I gave him a sedative. In the morning when I returned, I found him as I’d left him, and was unable to rouse him. I moved in shortly afterwards.

To be clear, he wasn’t in a vegetative state, but over the next weeks and months and eventually years he never rose from that bed. In fact, he rarely gave signs of life outside the steady trace on the heart monitor, and the air emerging from his lungs in faint rhythmic gasps. I did see him open his eyes once twelve years ago during a thunderstorm, and shift his weight a couple times when a neighbor dog barked nine years back. But that was the extent of it, and as the years accumulated, his body wasted away, to the point where he wasn’t much more than a living, breathing skeleton, not too different from when the Russians found him at Auschwitz.

So I looked around the room for the missing sheet, pondering who might have removed it, and for what purpose. I tried the bookcase filled with all the other antiques, as well as his closet stuffed with clothes for every possible occasion and from every conceivable culture, before turning to his enormous mahogany desk that hadn’t been used in years.

The memorabilia from a lifetime that extended beyond the imagination covered the priceless wood but led to nothing. Piles of faded honorary degrees, rusty plaques from Chi Epsilon, crumbling programs from countless openings for far greater comedic talents. Mountains of journals filled with joke ideas and building sketches, letters from dozens of wives and lovers, none of whom he’d remarked had ever held a candle to Sarah.

I even looked in the wall safe, which I knew contained only his will and a 20th century firearm, a commemorative Uzi he’d been gifted by the Knesset on his 150th birthday. I needed to be sure though. Alas, after listening to the tumblers fall, I found merely what I expected, the comical-looking gun and the one-pager leaving everything to a local museum.

Then I saw it, in the most unlikeliest place of all.

He was holding it, crumpled in his left hand — I hadn’t noticed it until the mid-March light entered the room at the proper angle, illuminating his port side. I’d spent much of the last decade and a half on Mordechai’s right, where the various machines that aided his continued existence sat, and yesterday morning had been no different. But once the light hit it, you couldn’t miss it, and I scolded myself for not having done a more thorough search of his person before prying through all his things.

How in the world? Looking at his balled-up fist, the veins standing out under his diaphanous skin, I knew of no one who might have placed the torn page in Mordechai’s hand. We were alone in the house, and had been except for the occasional delivery person and maid for these last fifteen years. Nonetheless, I felt certain this was the act of an outsider. Someone must have broken in while I slept to secure some free publicity. Because while Mordechai might have been forgotten these last centuries, his death would still be big news, as would potentially whatever was written on the scrap from the dictionary. I didn’t put it past some joker breaking in this morning and, seeing Mordechai dead and the dictionary where I’d left it on my chair, scribbling on the page and shoving it into his hand. Burglar alarms weren’t infallible after all, even if I’d put in a new one last November.

So when I opened up Mordechai’s fist, you can imagine my surprise. And now I’m doubting the last fifteen years, as well as the near-millennium prior.

The first word was “persecution,” the last “personally.” But in the middle was what was so astonishing. “Persistence,” underlined twice in red, defined as “the fact or act of being persistent.” And then, presumably because this definition was circular, an arrow to “persistent,” and an oval around the third of four possible meanings. All accompanied by Mordechai’s unmistakable signature, a huge, Scorpio-like M, with the rest of his name laying horizontally on the tail.

Persistence. Of course. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Not quite stubborn, not quite resolute. Persistent. Or, as that third definition read: “enduring: ‘Beyond our infatuations. . . our persistent self.’ (George Eliot).”

At last I had my answer. But no sooner than I was done congratulating myself, I began to wonder. How had he done it? I hadn’t left the house in a couple of days, so the opportunities for him to craft the message during daylight were essentially non-existent. And while I slept in a different room, there were alarms on the life support mechanisms, such that Mordechai couldn’t have accomplished the feat at night without waking me from my slumber. Even so, in my professional medical judgment, his body wouldn’t support him standing, let alone taking a stroll to my chair to grab the dictionary, and then to the desk to retrieve a pen. Surely, this had to be a forgery.

Then I remembered that priest from Lvov, who claimed he saw Mordechai ascend from the ashes. I’d always dismissed the poor father’s claim as the ravings of someone unhinged by a vision of hell, as the aftermath of a pogrom surely must have been. But then I considered it more seriously. Mordechai had lived nearly a thousand years without any good explanation — none of the genetic studies ever identified anything unique about him. He just. . . .kept on living. Perhaps the priest’s vision was genuine, and Mordechai was not of this world. An angel sent down to earth to bear witness, as it were, to the folly of our endless building, and the tragedy of the inevitable tearing down.

But what lay before me was flesh and blood, of that I had no doubt. And so I settled on it having been Mordechai himself. Somehow he’d finagled it, engineer that he was, rising from his bed though his body had long since failed him. And then the comedian in him played one final joke, posing a riddle he knew I’d never solve — how does a man, really just an idea in physical form, survive over the millennia? If I looked hard enough, I even saw the inkling of a smile on his death mask, as enigmatic as Sarah’s might have been, in that clinic in Lvov all those years ago.

Persistence. Engineering and comedy require them both. And a word that describes Mordechai to a T. He persisted through the unimaginable — the loss of his family to the Nazis, the ghetto and death camp in Poland, the chaos after the war. The journey to America and then Israel’s birth and near death so many times. And while he chirped in his act that he’d never really believed in all those claims of Jewish exceptionalism — God’s chosen people were picked only for suffering was his consistent refrain — even he might have acknowledged that if you dodge enough bullets over time, sometimes image becomes reality.

Persistence. Like a hatchling turtle making it to the ocean or a Sequoia seedling rising in the Sierra. They endure through equal parts luck and moxie, avoiding the animals that would eat them, the diseases that would befell them. Until they become tortoises or giants, gliding through the limitless seas or piercing the cerulean sky.

Persistence. In Yiddish, it is roughly אויסהאַלטונג. In Polish, trwałość. But in any language, it refers to the dogged determination to survive. It’s enough of an answer for me. I picked up the phone to let the world know he was finally gone, to await the inevitable crush of press and pundits, moths to the flame. The dictionary page? That, I stuffed into my pocket. Hail to Mordechai, corpus et spiritus, as that priest might have said. Let the literati puzzle over his wisdom one final time. His secret remains safe with me.

— Dr. Simon Levy: March 17, 2920

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