My Mother, My Grandmother, and Me

By Rabbi Elyse Winick
KOACH Assistant Director
United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism

I have the luxury of reading the pieces submitted for our E-zine before I write my own contribution, so I hesitated before I began to type this one.

This issue seems to be very mother-focused and as a mom myself, I don’t really have an objection to that. On the other hand, the fathers and the brothers, the spouses and the siblings (and even children!) in our lives are equally important. Still, when I think of family, this is always the story I need to tell.

My mother was born in Hungary in 1929. She can name the village in which she was born (which I am still unable to pronounce, let alone spell) and the series of a dozen or so villages and cities in which she, her five sisters and her parents lived over the course of the nearly eleven years she spent there. She can still speak Hungarian, if a bit rustily and she makes a mean palacsinta (a Hungarian blintz equivalent, pronounced pahl ah chinta. Her blintzes are really good too.). Like most kids, I was a great fan of the bedtime story when I was growing up. My mother never used a book, she never made them up. She just told me about growing up in Eastern Europe and what it was like when she came to America (like the first time she went into a shop and asked where “across the street” was).

My mother and her sisters shared but two beds. At night, when my grandfather lost patience with their girlish giggles, he was known to stride angrily into the room and flip over one bed or the other, dumping its multiple inhabitants onto the dusty floor. It was dusty, of course, because it was a dirt floor, no carpeting or floorboards to cover it. There was constant sweeping, worse in the winter when the geese came to live inside near the cast iron stove for warmth. The geese were friends and food, particularly at Hanukkah time, when roast goose was the traditional delicacy. My grandmother kept a large wedge of rendered goose fat on the windowsill all winter long, cutting from it as necessary as she cooked to feed her family.

My grandfather was a man about town, when he wasn’t trying different trades to keep food on the table (mostly he was a shoemaker). In his spare time, he hung out at the tavern, where he was always fast friends with the local authorities. This turned out to be the best possible use of his time.

In 1937, the town constable let on that bad times were in the offing for the Jews and he would do well to get his girls out before it was too late. But as a lowly shoemaker, he was without the requisite funds to bring eight of them across the sea. He went alone, with the mission of finding enough work to bring the rest of the family to the States in as little time as possible. In 1938 my oldest aunt joined him, in the hopes that with two incomes they could expedite the process. By 1939 he could wait no longer. He borrowed the rest of the money he needed and sent word for the journey to begin.

The talk in town was that my grandfather would never send for the burdensome family he had left behind. It was only in the days before their departure that my grandmother told the girls that they would soon leave, lest word get out and someone try to stop them. A carriage came for them in the middle of the night, to take them to the train. They left the house with the table set for breakfast, as if they had just stepped out for the moment. They took little more than they could carry. By train they traveled to Italy, to await the boat on which they would depart. It was a whirlwind journey of sights and smells. They boarded the SS Vulcania for a two-week steerage journey. They tasted their first bananas and oranges, the Italian crew looking on with laughter as they tried to figure out how to eat them.

This afternoon I’ll finish packing the car, load in the three kids and we’ll head to my mother’s on our way to Camp Ramah. I’ve already delivered a duffle bag larger than two of my kids and two suitcases to her house. My husband will stay behind, visiting us on weekends during our several-week camp stint. The kids will snack on Pirate’s Booty and Snapple and they will squabble over electronic toys and choice of music on the radio. It’s a far cry from my grandmother’s journey -- though the streets are flooded because of the unending rain – yet in one small but significant way the journey is the same. We’re both headed to a transformative Jewish experience, though hers was also a flight for life. As I think about it, living in a bunk for a month will be more like my grandmother’s geese-filled house than my usual suburban digs, but it is the opportunity I want to give my children that overshadows the loss of creature comforts.

Like many of their peers, my grandmother gave up her sheitl (wig) when she came to the New World and my grandfather kept his shop open on Saturdays. But it’s the stories of their household, in dusty European villages and working-class American neighborhoods, that pulled me closer to my roots. From the vat of chicken soup my aunt poured down the drain one Friday afternoon, mistaking it for dishwater, to the leaf-crunching walks as the six girls hopped from shul to shul on Rosh HaShanah, those stories warmed my childhood and tied me to people and worlds I never knew.

My grandmother was only 54 when she died, just 15 years after arriving in this country. Her life’s experiences were well beyond her years. I often wonder what she’d make of my life. She’d be appalled that the candlesticks are far from gleaming when we light on Friday night, she’d probably shake her head at the idea of a woman as a rabbi, but she’d forget it all when she saw my curly-headed three year old shrieking the words to Birkat HaMazon (grace after meals) at the table after dinner. And she’d know that that was why she took the risk, wearily dragging her four girls on a lengthy journey to a land where she’d never quite learn the language and never quite learn the ways.

My children ask for stories too. I read from books, I make them up, I tell my mother’s stories. It doesn’t seem to me that my life in Brooklyn, with just one brother, a nurse for a mother and a civil servant for a father, is really all that interesting. On the other hand, my mother says that about her childhood as well. I think I’d better stop writing now. I have some stories to tell.

[Posted 6/25/03]