SOLSC March 5: Who are my female ancestors?

Here is what I read at Creative Expression NYC this evening. 

 

I don’t know the names of anyone before my great-grandmothers, and only three of them.

Yechaved was born in 1863, somewhere in southwest Russia. She is one of my mother’s grandmothers.

The 1910 census says her name was Bessie, but she had just arrived in the U.S., didn’t speak English. Did a neighbor answer 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 and 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.

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, where Nachum changed his name from Mucinic to Ohrenstein.

They had three children.

Their older daughter, Elizabeth, married Yechaved’s oldest son, Sam.

My grandmother Elizabeth, or Liz, was born in Khotyn in 1897.

Her parents ran a lunchroom in their New York City apartment overlooking Tomkins Square Park, for landsman, people from Bessarabia, their area of Russia.

She graduated from high school.

Elizabeth met Sam in her parents’ lunchroom.

He was a union organizer and joined the Communist Party USA.

They married in 1917, late March.

Their first daughter, born in June the next year, is my mother, Leah.

Their second daughter, born in 1924, is Anita, usually called Nita.

Liz was once part of an organizing committee to celebrate Paul Robeson’s birthday, maybe around the time Robeson’s U.S. passport was revoked.

When I knew her, Liz worked at Macy’s selling lingerie. She offered to give me bras, “with a little padding,” just to help. (That was embarrassing.)

She died from stomach cancer in Florida at 70.

Liz had a younger sister, Esther, who married an accountant. Esther was proud of her mink coat. Her vanity had a mirrored tray half-covered with tiny perfume bottles.

Esther had a daughter, Honey Lee. Honey had rheumatic fever as a child, died at 34.

Honey was born when my mother was 12. Honey was 12 when I was born. I was 12 when Honey’s daughter, Randy, was born. But I broke the pattern, since Christie was born when Randy was 18. After Honey died, we lost touch with that twig of the family.

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, or sometimes pronounced Woodge?

Rose came to the U.S. in 1906 with her mother, Sarah — here’s the third great-grandmother. About Sarah I know only what the 1910 census knows: at that moment she was a 52-year-old widow who bore five children, but only four were living (who are the other three besides Rose? did any of them come to the U.S.? or did they go to some other country? or 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 she tells the census she has no occupation.

She didn’t become a U.S. citizen until 1943, though she told the 1920 census her papers had been submitted.

She smoked and died of a heart attack at 65.

She had three children.

Her first child was a girl, my aunt Helen.

Helen was tall, with red hair. Naturally red? Maybe at first.

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, remember the Depression?

She had an abortion, it was still the Depression, but by 1937 she had a daughter, Barbara.

Barbara eloped at 16 with Larry Schultz. They had three boys and finally a girl. I think they got divorced.

Rose’s middle child, Joseph, married Leah, my mother, in 1940.

Joe thought Leah sounded too old-fashioned, asked her to spell it L-E-A and pronounce it “Lee.” Leah took her spelling back when she got divorced at age 65.

Leah grew up in New York City — her first language was Yiddish. After her father was blacklisted from the fur shops where he’d worked, because he was a Communist, they moved to Richmond, Virginia, though few people wore fur coats there.

She went to the College of William and Mary, a state school.

She wanted to major in biology, but her parents thought that wasn’t ladylike. They wanted her to study home economics, so she did. She was a good girl.

She married as soon as she graduated from college because her college didn’t allow female students who were married.

She went to work because she wanted to, as soon as her third child was in school. She was a medical technician in a hospital. Then she became a medical correspondent, joining two of her  loves: science and language.

She was a supermom before that word was created: she worked at paid jobs, and she also cooked, sewed, knit, gardened.

She started a 4-H Club when I said I wanted to be a Girl Scout. She didn’t want me to wear a uniform.

When we lived in the country, she kept a goat, learned to milk it, learned to make cheese, and wrote stern letters to publications that said goats eat tin cans or other trash.

She was an early traveler to China with the U.S.-China People’s Friendship Association, led some tours. She studied Chinese at a summer school in Nanjing with 20 other foreigners — she was one of only two students who took the final exam using Chinese characters instead of pinyin, which uses our familiar alphabet.

She and Joe moved to Florida from Pennsylvania when he had to take an early retirement, in 1970.

In 1983, she divorced him when he moved to California and she wanted to stay in Florida. She preferred the hazards of hurricanes to the hazards of earthquakes, at least that was one reason.

She was a local volunteer at the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami. Also as a volunteer, she organized the annual fund-raiser for Miami’s PBS station; when offered the work as a real job, she turned it down; she didn’t want to feel burdened by responsibility if she was being paid.

In her mid-80s, she moved to a retirement community in Delray Beach. At 91, she moved to an assisted living community in the Bronx. Six weeks later she died.

Her sister, Nita, had died 13 years earlier.

Nita had studied social work. She married Ben, whose parents came from Sicily, not Jewish.

They went to Paris in 1950. He got a PhD in history at the Sorbonne and she worked for the Joint Distribution Committee. She had several miscarriages, never any full-term children.

They returned to the States, where he got a job teaching college upstate and wrote novels on the side, and she taught high school French.

They bought an 1840 farmhouse on a dirt road outside Montpelier, Vermont, in 1959, and I visited almost every summer until she died. I house sat a couple of times, imagining what it would be like to live there.

I felt worse when Nita and Ben divorced in 1983 than when my parents divorced. Nita died from lung cancer in  1997. I don’t know which I miss more, her or her house. 

 

AND NOW AN IMAGINED STORY ABOUT MY GREAT-GRANDMOTHER IN 1910

 

            There’s a strange man knocking at my door. I ask, who is? but he answers in English, and I can’t understand a word. I send Sadie, she’s not in school yet, to get Mrs. Krinsky, she knows some English.

            Mrs. Krinsky comes over and explains, they’re collecting the names of everyone in the country. This man, he’s going to talk to everyone in the whole country? No, no, lots of people are doing this, all over, my husband told me all about it, Mrs. Krinsky says, it’s called the census. What are they going to do with these names? I don’t know, Mrs. Krinsky says. I don’t want to give my name to anyone, what if they send us back? They won’t send you back, Mrs. Krinsky says. Once they let you out of Ellis Island, you’re here to stay. I don’t know, it’s so strange here, I don’t understand anything. But Mrs. Krinsky is here, so I let him come in.

            Sit, sit, I say, pointing to him a chair. I offer this American man tea, he doesn’t understand a word I say. I wave the tea kettle at him, he understands that, but when I pour the boiling  water into a glass in the silver holder from the set I got for my wedding, that I’ve brought all the way across the ocean, hand it to him and push the cup with the sugar cubes at him, he wrinkles up his nose and won’t touch the steaming glass. I watch it sit there, cooling off, and wish I had poured myself some, I need the energy to know what to do with this young man. We’ve only been in this country three weeks and already strangers are coming to my house.

             This American with a leather case full of papers is jabbering at me, waving papers at me. I have no idea what he wants. I understood things so much better back in Russia. It wasn’t always right, but I understood. The house Yacob and I lived in when he was overseer for the estate, when Jacob died the noble sent someone from St. Petersburg to kick us out, we had no more right to live there. First Rose went to America, and then Lena, and then Sammy. Finally, they sent the tickets so we could all go over. But Max had started as apprentice to a tailor and didn’t want to come with us, so I had to leave him there. What will I do if he decides to stay back there? Such a pogrom there was in Kishinev a few years ago. What if one comes to Khotin?

            This American is writing something on his pieces of paper, and Mrs. Krinsky jabbers at him awhile in this ugly English, crackle snap it sounds, not the nice musical Yiddish I’ve spoken all my life, or the chop chop of the Russian the farmers sneered at us on the estate. I understood the Russian, so I knew what they said about us when they thought we weren’t around.

            Mrs. Krinsky says I have to tell the American my name. What is this man going to do with my name? Nothing, Mrs. Krinsky says, everybody’s doing it, see how many pages he has filled with names, nothing will come of it. Yechaved, I say, Yechaved Leybovitz. I listen closely to what Mrs. Krinsky says to the American, but it doesn’t sound anything like Yechaved. I can’t even remember what sounds she said. Now I have to tell Mrs. Krinsky all the children I have living with me, so I tell her, Rose, and Lena, and Sammy, and Morris, and Sol, and Sadie, and how old they are, and when we all came here. Can I read and write? Mrs. Krinsky asks. When would I ever learn to read and write? I had to help my mother with all my younger brothers and sisters, and doing the sewing and the cooking, and making the candles, and cleaning the house and the kitchen for Shabbat. What good would reading and writing do for me? Two of my brothers went to yeshiva, they learned.

 

SOL March 2: Female Ancestors

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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Essay #4: Grandparents, part 3

Grandpa Sam Leibowitz came to the United States at 16, in 1907, the year of the greatest immigration to the U.S. in the 20th century. His older sister, Rose, had come a year earlier, and his next younger sister, Lena, came the following year. And in 1910, his widowed mother, with three of her four youngest children arrived, just in time to be counted in the 1910 census. (I questioned a genealogy librarian about what might have been the reason Max, then 14, might

Sam's mother and one of his sisters

not have come with his mother and siblings, she thought it was just a mistake. Since the mother, my great-grandmother, most likely didn’t know English, a neighbor must have answered the census taker’s questions, and since the family were new arrivals, the neighbor might not have known how many children were actually in the family. But in the 1920 census, it’s confirmed; Max came to the States two years later, in 1912. So what was that about? Was there some apprentice-type program he was in until the age of 16? Was he going to a yeshiva? All the relatives who might have known are long dead.)

           Sam’s mother was illiterate and very superstitious, according to my mother. When she clipped her fingernails, she burned the clippings, to prevent their being used against her. And she never learned English. Her youngest daughter died at 13, according to one story one board the ship bringing the family to the U.S., but her death date doesn’t accord with census records.

            Sam was from the same town as my grandmother, Liz, but they met in New York. My impression is that they met at the landsman restaurant her parents ran, but Jack remembers hearing some story that they met at a union rally outside the Winter Garden Theater. However, they met, they married in 1917, and my mother was born a year later.

Sam's draft card during WWI

            I don’t know how Sam came to work in the fur industry, but in his work he also became a union organizer. He remembered students coming to the estate, where his father had been an overseer, from the big cities after the 1905 revolution in Russia to talk about the revolution. He had a draft card that noted he was working for the Fur and Leather Workers Union in 1917 and 1918. I don’t know how soon after the Bolshevik Revolution he joined the American Communist Party, but he was definitely in the Party because after the Taft-Hartley Act was passed in 1947, there were many conversations at the dining table about what he was going to do about its anti-Communist affidavit. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

           Through much of the 1920s, Sam worked and organized, and his family moved, sometimes every year. There was an oversupply of apartments, so landlords offered a month’s free rent, which was an incentive for working people to change apartments. Sometime in the late 1920s, however, he was blacklisted and couldn’t get work at all. So he moved the family, first to Washington, D.C., where he or Liz, my grandmother, must have known people, then to Richmond, Virginia. At first he tried to do fur repair work, but Richmond was not a place where furs were much worn—it just didn’t get that cold. So he and Liz ran a grocery store in a poor neighborhood, near the street-car depot. But he kept in touch with his comrades back in New York, and when WWII started and now Soviet Russia was an ally, he was called back to New York to work at the union office. Where he worked until that question of the anti-Communist daffidavit came up. (I wrote about this in my red-diaper baby memoir.) His friend,

My grandpa, in the index

Ben Gold, was president of the union and wanted to fight the affidavit, but Sam said he’d had enough fighting, he was ready to retire. Which he did, spending the rest of his life reading and painting, and when they moved to Florida in their 70s, he worked at the University of Miami bookstore. Meanwhile, Granny Liz went to work at Macy’s, in the lingerie department, until they moved to Florida. She once gave me a leopard-skin-patterned bra. But, she said, I should wear something with a little padding—not what I wanted to do in 1962.

            They took me to see my first movie, “Little Women,” at Radio City Music Hall, at Christmas. Granny was my little sister’s protector in any dispute among us children. Grandpa talked to us like we were grownups; when he asked what we were doing, it sounded like he really wanted to know. He was very mild-mannered, not dogmatic in his ideas.

            Granny was a classic worrywart. After a visit with them in Brooklyn, we had to call her collect once we got home so she would know we were home safe. She worked at Macy’s in the lingerie department. When they visited us when we were still children, she gave us backrubs before we went to sleep, and each of us wanted her to stay with us the longest. And she cooked. She made knishes unlike any knish I’ve seen since, with a pastry she stretched so thin it hung over the edge of the table and was translucent. It was more like a potato and onion strudel.

 

Sam & Liz, maybe 1950

           They were not at all religious. In retrospect, I think our spring visits to them in Brooklyn must have been around Passover, and the dinner she served was a seder. But it was never called that. There was a little booklet on the coffee-table, from Manischevitz, in English and Hebrew, about Passover, but we never did the ceremony, never asked the questions, never talked about bitter herbs. Now, in my 70s, when I hear my friends talk about the seders they've been to or hosted through their lives, I’m sorry I missed all that. But it just didn't exist in my family as a tradition.

            I never really talked to Grandpa Sam about politics. But I remember late in his life, he went back to the Soviet Union with his second wife (Liz had died of an abdominal cancer in her early 70s), Gussie, even more political than he was. He told us about flying to Riga from Moscow, where Gussie had relatives, and mentioned that they didn’t get any meal on a three-hour flight. Gussie got very defensive at what she took to be a slam against the Communist Motherland, and Sam said, mildly, “Gussie, I’m not criticizing the Soviet Union. I just think it would have been nice to have a bite to eat.”

            My mother had lots of cousins from Sam’s family, but while my mother may have kept in touch with some of them, they were never part of the family I grew up in. I’ve met a few since, but it’s hard to maintain contact with family who are otherwise strangers. 

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Essay #3: Grandparents, part 2

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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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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Poem a Day, #20 (across the sea)

Across the Sea

Two ships sail west across the Atlantic.

The first carries what the shipowners call "cargo," men, women, children stolen from their homes and turned into property, a notion propped up by the shipowners' religion.

The second carries passengers, many escapees from empires Russian, Prussian, Austro-Hungarian, men, women, children fleeing pogroms, poverty, hatred for their religion, hatred embedded in a religion descended from theirs.

The first ship carries "slaves," a word for people forcibly bought and sold, who some history books tell us had a better life in the United States than in their "primitive," "warlike" villages back home, who other history books tell us came from civilizations older than Europe's.

The second ship carries "immigrants," a word for people voluntarily leaving their homes to, as history books tell us, "seek a better life."

The people on the first ship have skin colors from brown to black. Their "owners," with their paler skin, assign them a different "race" to justify their "ownership" of these human beings.

The people on the second ship have skin colors from pale to tan. They have different religions, come from different countries, but the pale "natives" assign them many "races" to justify keeping them outside the privileges of those who came here earlier.

The passengers on the second ship are greeted in New York Harbor by a statue whose inscription welcomes the "tired," the "poor," the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

The statue does not welcome the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free on the first ship. The statue did not exist when their ship sailed into New York Harbor. When the ships ceased to sail west with their human "cargo," the people consigned to slavery continued to bear children, still called property by their "owners."

A great war ends the institution of slavery, but many of the people freed are kept enslaved by terror and their former owners' power and "tradition."

The children and grandchildren of the people on the second ship melt into the privilege of whiteness even if they do not acquire the privilege of wealth. The melting pot absorbs their culture and heritage and turns it into novelty.

The children and grandchildren of the people on the first ship, as people of color, are not allowed to melt into whiteness, although some do acquire the privilege of wealth.

Some unknown number whose lightness of skin does allow them to melt in, melt at the cost of losing their families of color and their heritage and culture.

Two ships sail west across the Atlantic, the skin color of their human cargoes imposing vastly different futures by forces beyond their control.

  http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/the_carriage.png

This feels a bit labored to me, like maybe it should be an essay rather than a poem. I don't know.