Essay #2: Grandparents, part 1

My mother’s parents were much more in our life than my father’s. When I was a child, my father was out of work after being blacklisted following WWII for several years, and we lived with my paternal grandparents in Washington, D.C., for some months after my sister was born, and then with my maternal grandparents, in Brooklyn, for three years.

            I did not like my father’s parents. They both liked teasing. Grandma Rose teased me about eating lettuce, which I apparently liked a lot as a four-year-old. “Are you a little rabbit?” she said. This upset me so much that I got down from my chair and crawled under the dinner table so she couldn’t see me. I wasn’t a rabbit, I was a girl. Why would she say such a thing. Grandpa James pulled my braids and called them “pigtails.” I didn’t like that either. Was he saying I was a pig? They teased, but from an emotional distance.

            Soon after we moved away, Grandma Rose died (she smoked and, my mother commented, she was overweight) and Grandpa James, who remarried a rather nice woman named Jenny, visited infrequently. You know how some people don’t know how to talk to children? He was one of those people, and when we were all teens and were told he was coming to visit, we all groaned and complained. My father got uncharacteristically angry; he was our grandfather, so we should be glad to see him and not criticize him.

            They were both immigrants, Grandma Rose from Lodz, Poland, still part of Russia when she and her mother came to the U.S. in 1906. James came from Vitebsk, Russia (what’s now Belarus), in 1907, and always told us that he was the only one from his family to emigrate. But I did an oral history with his daughter, my aunt Helen, in the 1990s, and she mentioned visiting cousins in Paterson, New Jersey, so who were these relatives? I have no idea. I know nothing of who they were, names, nothing. But by the 1910 census, Rose and James were married and living on East 103rd Street in Manhattan with Rose’s mother, Sarah Schwartz. James was naturalized in the early 1920s, but Rose didn’t get her papers until 1943. Why so late? I’ll never know.

            James was a very small-scale storekeeper. According to the 1910 census, he was working in New York City as a painter, but a year after my father was born in 1917, James moved his family to Hopewell, Virginia, to run a clothing store with a friend, possibly someone he knew from Russia. That didn’t last long, because by the 1920 census, the family was in Washington, D.C., where James ran first one, then two clothing stores, becoming prosperous enough to buy a house, which was then lost when the Depression hit and both stores closed. Then James opened a grocery store, with the family living upstairs, where they had no electricity, a wood stove for cooking and gas for lighting. There was a telephone, in the store.   James was also a supporter of the Russian Revolution. He and Rose belonged to an organization called the International Workers Order, one of those nationality-based groups that helped members before there was Social Security and health insurance. (The IWO was red-baited out of existence in the 1950s.) During the Depression, if customers came into his store and couldn’t pay, he gave them credit, and it being the Depression, often he never did get paid. When I knew him, he was a super in an apartment building in Washington before moving to Florida, which all grandparents do, don’t they?

            There are few photos of my paternal grandparents. When I find one, I’ll stick it in here. 

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