I am working on a poem about what I know of the women in my family for Women's History Month. This is only the beginning.
Who are the women in my family?
Why did we stop producing females after 1989?
All the people born since then have been boys.
Is our DNA trying to tell us something?
I don’t the names of anyone before my great-grandmothers, and only two of them, my mother’s grandmothers.
Yechaved was born in 1863, somewhere in southwest Russia.
The 1910 census says her name was Bessie, but she had just arrived in the U.S., didn’t speak English, a neighbor must have answered questions for her.
She wasn’t literate, was superstitious.
She burned her clipped fingernails so no one could put a curse on her.
She was 19 or 20 when she married, but a family tree handed down says her husband was only 13 or 14. Could that be true?
They had seven children, that I know of.
He worked as the overseer on a noble’s estate.
Jews often held that job, enforcing tax collection.
Yet another reason the peasants hated Jews.
When he died in 1904, the family had to leave the estate. They moved to the town of Khotyn, and the three older children moved to New York City,
one by one. Her oldest son, Samuel, married one of my grandmothers.
Another great-grandmother was Rebecca, born in 1876.
She married her cousin, Nachum Mucinic, a love match, I’ve been told.
She had an imposing stature, a match for her husband in size.
She died when I was four. We never met, but I saw a black beaded dress that she wore, in the style of the 1920s.
They lived in Khotyn, where he ran his family’s tobacco factory.
They came to New York City before 1905.
They had three children.
Their older daughter, Elizabeth, married Yechaved’s son.
My grandmother Elizabeth was born in Khotyn in 1897.
Her parents ran a lunchroom in their apartment overlooking Tomkins Square Park, for landsman, people from their area of Russia, which had once been part of Bessarabia and now is part of Ukraine.
She graduated from high school.
She had a younger sister, Esther, who married an accountant. Esther was proud of her mink coat.
Esther had a daughter, Honey Lee. Honey had rheumatic fever as a child, died at 34.
Honey had two daughters, Randy and Nancy, but after Honey died, we lost touch with that branch of the family.
Elizabeth met Samuel in her parents’ lunchroom.
He was a union organizer.
They married in 1917, late March.
Their first daughter, born the next year, is my mother, Leah.
My other grandmother is Rose Schwartz.
Rose was born in 1886, in a city that was then Russia and is now Poland.
Was it Lodz?
Rose came to the U.S. in 1906 with her mother, Sarah, ah, a third great-grandmother, but about her I know only what the 1910 census knows: a 52-year-old widow who bore five children, but only four are living (who are the other three besides Rose? did any of them come to the U.S.? to some other country? did they perish in the Holocaust almost 40 years later? a blank).
Someone said Rose worked as a milliner back in Russia.
By 1910, she was married to James Jaffe and living in New York City, but tells the census that she has no occupation.
She didn’t become a U.S. citizen until 1943, though she told the 1920 umcensus her papers had been submitted.
She smoked and died of a heart attack at 65.
She had three children, the middle child, a son, married my mother.
Her first child was a girl, my aunt Helen.
Helen was tall, with red hair. Naturally red? Maybe.
She never went to college, worked as a secretary. (She was an argument for why I shouldn’t drop out of college when I did drop out of college.)
She and her future husband lived together because there wasn’t yet enough money to marry, the Depression, remember?
She had an abortion, it was still the Depression, but in 1937 she had a daughter, Barbara.
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I’m participating in the 15th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 10 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!
