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Paul Robeson’s birthday, maybe around the time Robeson’s U.S. passport was
revoked.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.
