SOLSC 16: Ukraine

My mother’s parents, Liz and Sam, met in New York City in the early 20th century. Both came from what is now south-central Ukraine, a town called Khotin, or Chotin, or Hotin, depending on whether you spoke Russin, Yiddish, or Ukrainian. (There were also Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, and Turkish names, but I didn’t record them when I worked as part of a team of 12 copy editors on a massive revision of the Columbia Gazetteer in the late 1990s. Khotin was ruled or had residents who spoke all of these languages over the ages, and it was named first in the third century. It was also at the northern tip of what was also called Bessarabia.)

            Liz’s family ran a small restaurant in their apartment for “landsman,” people from their region of the world. Khotin became part of Romania between the wars, but when WWII came, Romania pushed many of its Jews across the Dniester River, where the German, and some Ukrainians killed as many as they could. (It doesn’t seem to be part of what is now called Transnistria, though that name was applied to the area when Jews were killed en masse.)  Liz corresponded with her family back in Khotin until the war, but after, my mother told me, there was silence.

            So, while I know there is no more family in Ukraine, I still closely follow the news coming from there now, hoping the war will stay away from that city (last population around 10,000). Many around the world are watching with horror what is happening, and those with families still there are much more connected than I am. Yet I still feel connected to a place I have never been and know almost no family stories about.

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I’m participating in the 15th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 16 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

 

SOLTuesday: Getting Out of the Cold

I’m packing today for a trip tomorrow.

            I never understood why older people became snowbirds, going south in the winter. Then, the winter my husband died, New York City’s cold weather became harder for me to take. The wind off of the river up my street felt colder. Was it just that I was older? Or because I had no one to hold hands with as we walked up the street? I’ve never liked winter weather anyway.

            I decided to start taking short trips to warmer places. I don’t want to leave the city for months at a time—there’s too much happening here that I don’t want to miss. But a few weeks away is a nice

Kailua tree, 2017

Beach near Mazatlan, 2018

break from the cold.

            In 2017, I visited one friend in Hawaii for a while, and another in central California, where I also was able to see my brother and one of my nephews.

            In 2018, I visited a friend who was herself a snowbird in Mexico with her partner—and she apologized the whole week for the colder than usual temperature. (And about the same temperature as back home!) Then I went on to New Orleans, for my first time in that city.

            In 2019, I went to Alabama. I had a friend who’d moved to Mobile when she got a job teaching almost 15 years earlier. (She arrived just in time to evacuate ahead of Hurricane Katrina.) I’d promised to visit, but this was the first time I actually did. Then I moved on to Montgomery and visited Bryan Stevenson’s Legacy Museum and Lynching Memorial. These were extremely moving places to see, and I strongly Civil Rights Institute. I happened to be in that city on President’s Day and found a Not My President’s Day demonstration there; maybe there were a couple of dozen people, and I got into conversation with one woman and we went to lunch and then I got a personal tour of the city. Traveling is such fun.

Civil Rights Institute, 2019

recommend everyone go there. And then I was on to Birmingham, to the

            This year, I’m off to Southern California. First, Los Angeles, where I have a college friend I will have dinner with, and another nephew, who I’ll also have dinner with along with my brother driving down from San Jose. Then on to San Diego, where I have another old friend, as well as a friend of hers who’s become my Facebook friend and who I will now meet IRL.

            I’m grateful I have the means to take these trips and the free time. 

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It’s Slice of Life Tuesday over at Two Writing Teachers. Check out this encouraging and enthusiastic writing community and their slices of life every Tuesday. And add one of your own.

SOLSC: Random Family Facts

            I’ve been using Facebook’s On This Day feature to download my Facebook posts to my computer, and it’s been illuminating. The past couple of days, I came across five-year-old posts that I had labeled “Random Family Facts.” My parents had died in 2010 and 2012, and going through their papers I’d come across information that I had not known.

            For instance, when my maternal grandfather died, in 1974, he’d left small bequests (he’d never had much money) to organizations that revealed his interests and his political tendencies. a Yiddish newspaper founded by the American Communist Party (defunct since 1985); the Daily World, the English-language CP paper (defunct since 2010); Jewish Currents, a magazine whose tagline is "activist politics and art," founded in 1946 and still publishing, with an interesting Web site; the Yiddisher Kultur Farband (Jewish Cultural Association), an international organization, initially Communist-oriented, for writers, artists, musicians (the U.S. branch closed in 2006); the Jewish Folk Chorus of Greater Miami, founded in 1943, but no longer existing; and the Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women’s Clubs, which started as the women's section of the Jewish section of the International Workers' Order (a Communist-leaning fraternal order that died during the McCarthy era) and disbanded in 1989 as membership declined.

For example, the Morning Freiheit,

            Another Random Fact: when my mother was small and lived above a candy store in New York City, there was a fire in the story. She was carried to an apartment next door over the fire escape. The smoke and noise frightened her so much that decades later she couldn’t watch a fire in a building in San Francisco when she was visiting there, and when she moved to an assisted living facility, she didn’t want to be above the seventh floor because she’d heard that was as high as fire department ladders went.

            I posted these little stories to Facebook. Are there any random family facts you’ve found or remembered that your kids or grandkids or other family members might not know and you’ve thought of passing on?

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I’m participating in the 11th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 23 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

Catching Up, III

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Today I transitioned, from family to friends. Over the weekend, my brother and his wife, two of my nieces and their significant others, my nephew, and two cousins were all in town for the memorial. They came from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, Virginia, and California. They flew in, and they drove. Some I'd seen recently, others not for years. Some stayed at hotels, some with me. It was fun, but also wearing. Family interactions can be intense, with archeological layers,

It's interesting to see certain patterns emerge. When we visited relatives when I was a child, my father was the family handyman. People saved their broken appliances and electrical problem for him: "This radio hasn't worked in years"; "Can you move this outlet?"; "This TV only picks up static." My brother and his wife just gave me an electronic weather station, with indoor and outdoor thermometers and some sort of sensor that offers a forecast. Today my brother labored away at finding a location for the outdoor temperature gauge, installing it (masonry or metal were the only surfaces available, and he had to make a couple of trips to my building's handyman for the right kind of nail), and then setting up the indoor monitor. So he's filled the Mr. Fix-It slot our father used to occupy. (Jack would not have wanted my brother climbing out of windows and hammering into walls to set up some device he, Jack, didn't see any need for.)

Niece R. filled the computer tech slot previously occupied by my brother, though he added input as well, as we tried to divine how to download Jack's old Sent mail into a new e-mail client I wanted to try out. Helpful, yes.

The transition happened when niece and boyfriend set off for home, and brother and wife will leave too early tomorrow for me to see them again. So I went off to meet GirlGriot for a writing date, where I am writing these Slices. Friends and family came together at the memorial, and now move off into their respective worlds.

Slice of Life, #15

            My mother kept a small (it’s only 1¾”x2½”) framed photo in her bag. It’s from my father’s 70th birthday party.

From left, it shows my daughter, Christie; my sister, Carla; my father’s sister, Helen; (in front) Carla’s daughter Emily; me; my father; and my mother.

            In 1987 my parents had been divorced for about three years; he’d moved to San Diego, and she’d stayed in south Florida. It was an amiable parting, at her instigation, and they remained close friends, because physically distant. Carla was also divorced, from her first husband, and had not yet met her second one. Helen was widowed for the second time; the first was when her children were young and she was a single mother for many years. My husband hadn’t come all the way across country for this party; he wasn’t much for family reunions, his or mine, in those days.

            Emily was just eight, looking oddly formal and solemn in cotton skirt and blouse. I don’t recall her being like that. Christie was 15 and seemed to be enjoying her teenage self at this gathering of family and friends.

            Who was taking the picture? My brother? Possibly. He also lived in California. How had our family settled with the men on the West Coast and the women on the East? That sounds like a Disney sit-com, and while my family may have been a sit-com (whose isn't?), it wouldn’t have been a Disney one.

            Four of those in this picture are now dead – but their smiles remain, cheerful as long as the photo exists.