My Life in 50 Objects, part 6

            This collage was put together by my grandpa Sam. Sam Leibowitz was my mother’s father, born in what was then Russia (and is now Ukraine), on an estate where his father was the overseer. (One reason so many Russian peasants were anti-Semitic was because so many Russian nobles hired Jews to be their overseers. Thus, the taxes and other payments due to estate owners were collected by Jewish men, who bore the brunt of hatred for what the peasants had to give up.) So the photos are my mother’s family.

            On the left, second from the top, are my parents, Joe and Leah. I think this is from around the time they got married, though they didn’t have a big ceremony. They had to wait until she graduated from William and Mary College, in 1940, because the school (a public institution) didn’t allow married women to be students.

            Going clockwise, the top left corner is another wedding, in 1949. I think the wedding coupkle, in the center back, are Jeannette and Adolph Blank. Sitting around the table, from front left, are the bride’s father, Morris (one of Sam’s younger brothers), Leah with Mark on her lap, Joe with me on his lap, the newlyweds, Sam, Carla (who must be standing on a chair), Grandma Liz, and the bride’s mother, Mary.

            Next photo must be Sam’s family. I’m guessing this was taken once they were all in the United States, coming in at least four different trips: first Sam’s oldest sister (1905), then Sam (1906), then his next older sister (1907), and then his mother with three (or four) of her youngest children (1910). On the other hand, the man on the left looks much older than Sam, so perhaps he is the husband of Sam’s oldest sister. I may be totally wrong about who these people are, but if I am, there’s no one to tell me. Here’s my guess: Seated on the right is Sam’s mother, Yechaved (but she has a different name in the 1910 census), and on the left perhaps his oldest sister, Rose. Between the two seated women is Sadie, who looks about 10 here. She died young, at 13; one story says it was on board the ship New Zealand, but since the 1910 census puts her in the U.S., I think this story isn’t true. Standing from right: Rose, Sam, Max or Morris or Sol, and if this is Rose’s husband, that’s Jack Breiman.

            In the upper right corner, this is clearly Sam, perhaps his mother, and Sadie.

            In the row below, from left, the photo that’s labeled 1929 cannot be right. The youngest girl looks like my mother’s cousin, Honey Lee, who was born in 1930. She might be two in this photo, which would make Anita, next to her, eight, and Leah, standing behind, 14. The next photo to the right is, I think, Leah when she was about two, and that may be her grandmother in the window. This looks like the country, but I have no idea where. And on the far right, from the right, Leah’s mother, Liz; an unhappy-looking seven-year-old Leah; Sam, holding baby Anita; and Liz’s parents, Nathan and Rebecca Ohrenstein. This would be around 1925.

            Below this photo is Anita, probably around 30, with a tiny child photo, and below her, Ben Morreale, her husband for 38 years. Many stories attached to them, which I will relate elsewhere.

            In the center is a photo of Nathan and Rebecca, and below them, Sam, standing, Liz with coffee cup, and Leah, between one and two? These two pictures are clearly studio shots, but if there was an occasion for them, I don’t know what it is.

            Immediately to the left, we’re getting into the modern era: me at about five; my brother, Mark, at three, and below Mark, sister Carla, at age one. I think these photos were taken by a photographer wandering through our Brooklyn neighborhood rather than in a studio. But look, Carla is holding a ball just as Leah is almost 30 years earlier. Do studio photographers still use that prop for tots?

            To the right of baby Carla are two pictures from 1960, in Gladwyne. On the left, Mark, me, and Carla are in front of the back of our new house, and on the right is after my high school graduation, with Grandpa Sam holding our enormous tiger cat, parents to my left, Mark in the back, and Carla with a hand on the cat.

            Below Ben is a studio shot of Sam’s mother and one of his sisters. To the left is toddler Leah, around two(?), with her three grandparents, and parents standing in the back. The wedding couple are, I think, the same couple as in the photo at the top, Jeannette and Adolph Blank. And to their left, another 1960 graduation photo, this time with Liz instead of Sam included.

            The bottom row of photos is less known to me. Who is the man in the lower-left picture? To his right is my mother’s cousin Honey Lee, in the beret, and the date in the photo below her is clearly wrong: Honey looks about 10, so this would be about 1940. Next to her is her grandmother, and behind her, her father, Morris Rappaport, and mother Esther, Liz’s younger sister. The next photo is another mystery, either one of Sam’s sisters or one of his brothers, and presumably their daughter. And could the date be as wrong as some of these others?

            The final three snapshots: Milly, married to Lou (Liz’s younger brother), and Esther, Honey's mother.

            This is one introduction to part of my family.

My Life in 50 Objects, 2: Vermont

[In October 2018, I posted the first of what I intended to be a series. As you can see, I'm good at starting projects, but not so good at continuing and completing them. Let's see how much I can get done in April. Not poems, but writing nonetheless. 

             I don’t know yet whether there will be as many as 50 objects or more than 50. We’ll how it develops. What I am aiming for is to describe the objects in my apartment and why I have kept them, what they mean to me, so that after I’m gone (which I don’t expect to be any time soon) my younger relatives won’t be able to say, “Why did she keep this old thing?” My mother said she would do that for her jewelry, but she never did.]

             This painting and the photos are from Vermont. My Uncle Ben painted this portrait of the house he and my Aunt Nita bought in 1960, when he started teaching history at Goddard College. The house is in the village of Adamant, a few miles north of Montpelier, in the town of Calais (pronounced callous). Built around 1840, that same house is in the old photo (below), taken somewhere between 1890 and 1910, judging from the women’s clothing. Nita found it in the upstairs storage room, and she may have known the names of the people in it, but I don’t.

            It’s actually a photo of a photo; I’m guessing the original was in poor shape, and Nita wanted to make sure she had a survivable version. The sapling next to the woman on the right is the big maple on the right edge of the painting. I wonder if the grandchild or great-grandchild of the baby in the carriage is the person who sold the house to Ben and Nita.

            Between the trees and the house in the painting is a grassy drive, up a slight incline from the dirt road, nameless as far as I know. The snowy photo (left) was taken looking down that drive toward the road and the fields, a beaver pond, and hill beyond, in November 1995. I was housesitting, while Nita had gone to Paris to visit old friends and spend the pension money she had earned while working in Paris in the 1950s. (She had worked there for about six years and accumulated a small amount of pension, but she could only collect and spend it in France.) By this time, she and Ben had

been divorced for 10 or 12 years (a long, somewhat tawdry story for another time), but after long bargaining she got to keep the house, and as she was my mother’s sister, she’s the relative we kept in touch with. I was just a couple of years into writing the first draft of a novel (that still sits in very old Word files in my computer) and took the opportunity to turn feeding Nita’s cat into my own private writing retreat.

           The final photo is from inside the kitchen (the room behind the porch to the left in the photo and painting). The dancing cats is an ironwork, probably made by someone Nita and Ben knew. And the tree outside beyond the window is the larger maple on the left side of the painting. (I've tried to avoid the reflections from the glazing on these last two photos, but not entirely successful, and that's why they are at an angle.)

            Jack and I began visiting Ben and Nita for a week, or two or three, almost every summer from 1967 until 1997, when Nita died. (I’ve never been quite sure who or what I missed more, Aunt Nita or her house.) The house was sold to a friend and neighbor, whose son now lives there. For a time, after Nita was diagnosed with lung cancer, I thought of asking her to leave me the house, contemplating turning it into a writing retreat. The New England Culinary Institute was just down the road; perhaps they could provide meals. One of the upstairs bedrooms was big, with lots of light; perhaps it would suit a visual artist. But then I thought of how much rewiring would need to be done, for phones and for computers, as well as making Internet service available. I would either have to live there or be an absentee landlord, and neither choice was appealing.

            My sister would have loved living in that house, but she never developed a relationship with Nita and Ben. That was partly because Ben intimidated her. He had written a rather unflattering portrait of her in his second book, Down and Out in Academia, and my parents never quite forgave him. At the time, I thought it was fairly accurate, and I must have already realized that writers use whatever is in front of them for whatever purpose they want. Your only defense, if you don’t like what they’ve written about you or yours, is to write your own version.

(To be continued)

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. 

Slice of Life, #9

            It was in the 50s today, and the sun was spring cleaning. The sidewalks looked like the inside of an old-fashioned freezer being defrosted. As the pavement warmed, snow mounds began to melt from underneath (I feel the need to apologize for the litter of cigarette butts, even though none are mine) as well as angular frozen piles softening on exposed surfaces.*

Isolated snow piles resembled icebergs.

Some tree wells were still filled with snow, while in others the snow had melted fast.

One shop owner jump-started the softening process with a hose, 

while around the corner others attacked the frozen piles with shovels.

 

The warmer day with its heaps of dirty snow evokes my inner five-year-old. I crunch the edges of a snowbank with my shoe and watch it crumble. I kick a chunk of snow down the sidewalk like it's a soccer ball. I wish I had a little shovel so I could dig out my own snow cave. 

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* March 9: I must apologize for the confusing placement of the photos. Blogger's editor is clearly not WYSIWYG -- the pictures are supposed to be in  pairs. I must have chosen a very poor template for mixing text and visuals. At least now I know what I need for a template with the most flexibility. 

** March 31: I found a way to create a layout that displays these photos somewhat the way I wanted them. Much, much better.