I know much more about my mother’s family, and her mother’s
family. Here is a formal photo, from about 1928. My mother, Leah, sitting
demurely in front, looks to be about 10, and her sister, Anita, standing next
to her, would have been about four. Their parents stand behind them on the
right, their mother, Elizabeth, gazing
appraisingly toward the camera, their father, Sam, looking anywhere but at the
camera. Had he lost his job by this point? He was a fur worker, a union organizer,
and a member of the Communist Party, and the “reds” were being hounded out of
fur shops in the 1920s by company goons, according to Philip Foner’s history of
the Fur and Leather Workers Union, published in the late 1940s—which includes Grandpa
Sam in the index and in the photo insert. He and his union colleagues sometimes
sat in front of fur and leather shops, where many Jews worked, and
ostentatiously ate ham sandwiches; they were trying to break the religious hold
on workers by showing they wouldn’t be struck down for eating traife.
I don’t
know what occasioned this photo. Everyone is very dressed up, especially my
great-grandmother, sitting on the left. My grandmother, the oldest of three
children, is the plainest dressed in this photo. Did this bother her? My mother
told me her mother was a good wife: her husband was a leftist, so she was, but
if she had married a rabbi, she would have been a good rebbetzin.
My mother’s
Aunt Esther is on the left, with her husband, Morris Rappaport. Morris was a
CPA, and prosperous. When I was young and visiting the relatives in Brooklyn,
Esther showed off her mink coat. Her sister didn’t have a mink coat or a fur of
any kind. My mother tells me that when she was young and her father was still
working in the fur shops, he would bring home scraps of fur and put them
together into little fur coats for her and her sister. Morris remained lean
throughout his life, while Esther became more corpulent, like her mother. In
1930, they had one daughter, Honey Lee, who had rheumatic fever as a child.
That damaged her heart, and she died in her thirties. Honey was born 12 years
after my mother, I was born 12 years after Honey, and Honey’s first daughter,
Randy, was born 12 years after me. I broke the pattern when Christie wasn’t
born until Randy was 18—and I was out of touch with the part of the family
Honey’s
husband worked at NBC as some sort of technician, and when I was six or seven,
he got me onto The Howdy Doody Show
as one of the Peanut Gallery. I really didn’t want to be part of the show, I
just wanted to watch it, so being in it felt excruciatingly awkward. I sat in
the back, so as to be as invisible as possible.
My mother’s
Uncle Louie, in the center, is not married yet in this photo. He and his wife,
Millie, had no children, so my mother had only one cousin on her mother’s side.
Louie was a liquor salesman, and he also was on the corpulent side. My
grandmother was the only one who remained slim. My mother told me that there
was constant feuding in the family, Liz and Esther against Louie, Louie and Liz
against Esther, Esther and Louie against Liz. My mother found this very
upsetting, but I was totally unaware of this emotional upheaval. Was it just my
self-absorption?
My
grandmother was the only one born back in Russia, in the town of Khotin (or
Hotin, or Chotin, depending on whether you were writing it in Russian,
Ukrainian, or Yiddish), near the border with the Ottoman Empire. The
region was called Bessarabia, and when I asked my grandparents where they were
from, they would say Bessarabia, not Russia. Nathan Mucinic, my
great-grandfather, sitting on the right, was the only son in a family of seven
children. His family owned a cigarette factory, and when Nathan’s father died,
his mother ran the factory herself for a while, but her son took over.
When Nathan
stopped paying the czar’s cigarette tax, he feared retaliation. He had traveled
to New York with his oldest daughter, then only five, around 1900, then
returned home. A few years later, he went back to New York with his wife and
daughter and settled in what was called the East Side, now known as the Lower
East Side or the East Village. By this time he had changed his name from
Mucinic to Ohrenstein, presumably to hide his identity from any czarist police
who might be after him.
The family
lived on the second floor of an apartment on East 9th Street facing Tompkins
Square Park. For a time, they ran a restaurant in their apartment for “landsman,” people from their region of the Old World; presumably, they would know
how to make food in this New World taste familiar. This is where my mother’s
parents met.
Nathan
continued his taste for flouting the law. He owned a car that he
claimed was bullet-proof, bought from a gangster. In the Prohibition era, he
also had a license to make sacramental wine, and presumably sold it to
speakeasies. Leah also remembers sitting in the kitchen with her mother,
grandmother, and aunt, signing different names in different handwriting to long
sheets of paper; she thinks these were political petitions to get favored
candidates onto the ballot. Another job for which Nathan was paid by Tammany
Hall, the local Democratic machine?
Here’s a
photo of his gravestone. One of these days I will go to the Center for Jewish
History and see if I can find out where in Brooklyn it is.
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