My mother came to Concordia by a somewhat different route from my father’s—one perhaps less convoluted but at the same time more traumatic. It started with my father’s cousin Schlomo.
Schlomo had been only a kid when my father had left the apartment of Schlomo’s parents—the mishpocheh to whom my father had gone upon arrival in New York—to go steaming away to the South; and Schlomo was now selling baby clothes from a pushcart rented from the warehouse of my mother’s father, my grandfather.
When Schlomo told my father that the alter kocker—a phrase in this case intended respectfully as the “old man,” though more often having a scatological intent—had some daughters, my father said, “Talk to him, Schlomo. What can he do to you?”
My mother was at this date seventeen. She had come to America from her Russian shtetl at the age of nine, had gone to school for two years, had learned to read and write, and had held two jobs. These were as a stuffer in a toy-animal factory and as a belt turner in a dress plant, neither of which had made much demand on her new skills. Currently she was a “stemmer” in an artificial flower factory, which made no demands either. Despite working downtown she was very, very sheltered; in the ways of the world she was an innocent.
She lived in a big Bronx apartment building with parents, two brothers, and two sisters. The building was almost completely occupied by Jewish families. Although there was a sprinkling of Gentile families, my mother never spoke to them. She most specifically never spoke to the Gentile janitor, her impulse being to run the other way when she saw him on the stairs with his pliers and wrenches.
If her home did not ease her way into the larger world, her job was actually an impediment. This could not be helped. Even if she had wanted to be close to her coworkers, all of whom were non-Jewish (German, Poles, and other middle Europeans), there was her secret: At work she was not Jewish.
She could not be Jewish if she wanted to keep her job. It was a lesson learned in her first job when, during Passover, my mother, aged eleven and trying hard to do right, had brought matzos for her lunch. Naturally the foreman, Szymanski, had fired her, exhausting his lexicon of Jewish insults as he did.
My mother had to work hard to maintain the fiction of her Jewishlessness. It was often on the tip of her tongue to have a conversation with the girls, to share, for instance, surely the most memorable experience in the lives of all of them—the boat trip to America, the two weeks on a floating warehouse packed in with strangers and, in her case, seasickness so bad her clothes hung on her “like from a hook on the wall.” But she held back, fearing that some detail might be unique to Jews. So the story of her journey remained untold, like everything else. She would tell us that on those rare occasions when she talked to the girls, she would hold her arms around herself “tight like a bandage” to keep things from leaking out.
Luckily her last name was Malkin, which could be anything, and the girls could not guess. She pretended to be Russian. (This was a real pretense, as she had never once entertained the notion that she actually was.) And then of course she worried that a Russian girl would be hired who would speak to her in Russian, which she could not speak. It was a language, in fact, spoken in her shtetl almost exclusively by the non-Jews. The few Jewish men who spoke Russian bumbled and stumbled—pfumpfed, she said—like foreigners.
My mother would also have denied herself cordial exchanges with her sister workers because she would have thought it not right to talk in a friendly way to girls who spoke so freely against the Jewish people. No doubt at those times she not only didn’t talk, she tried not to hear.
But when one particular girl spoke—an older girl who was going at night to secretarial school—my mother kept her ears open. When the girl periodically blew a breath up to the ceiling and said, “What a way to make a living. Thank God for me it’s only temporary,” my mother heard every syllable.
Temporary. It was a comforting word to her, suggesting as it did that whatever the problem, it lasted for only so long. She applied the word to the boat trip, and it fit: The awfulness had been temporary. She loved the word. It gave her a modus vivendi, one that she explained to me many times: “You can stand anything,” she would say, “as long as you know it is”—and she would carefully enunciate it—“tem-po-rary.”
If there was this distance between her and her coworkers, it was but a hop, skip, and jump compared to the one between her and the cleaning people. They were Negroes. In Russia she had never seen Negroes. It’s a good guess that most Russians—Jews and non-Jews alike—had never seen them.
The presence of these shvartzerim—as the Jewish people she knew, like the ones my father knew, called them—made her uneasy. Naturally she never spoke to them, but she also never looked at them except when she was sure they would not catch her. And oy, their speech! Like from under blankets.
The other workers acted like bosses with the Negroes, addressing them sharply and rolling their eyes back as if whatever chore the Negroes were doing was being done in the most ridiculous way possible. When the Negroes were near, the girls picked up their handbags from the floor and put them on their laps. My mother was advised to do likewise. “You don’t know them like I do,” one girl said to her. “Take my word, they’ll steal your eyeballs if you ain’t looking.”
In the flow of manufacture in the flower factory, my mother sat at a table and attached stems to flower heads. From a store of wires, she took one, wound green paper around it, made a “hip” with a twist of extra paper at the end, and then attached the newly made stem to the flower head by means of a length of unpapered wire. When there was a sizable pile of finished flowers, a pale and unspeaking ten-year-old boy materialized and took it away. The work was tedious in the extreme, as the older girl said, “enough to make cockeyed the eyes.” Still, my mother actually loved those gaudy-colored, scratchy-paper flowers. When she looked at a finished pile, she somehow managed to see tender blossoms of delicate petals. It was perhaps the first hint of a deep love for flowers, one that reached passion status in the Concordia years.
As for social life, for my mother and her sisters there was the shul and the relatives. Friday night and Saturday morning without fail, my mother and aunts went to the shul. There they sat in the women’s balcony and joined in the prayers with the other women. Few of them could read Hebrew, since the cheder, the school where Hebrew was traditionally learned, was the exclusive preserve of boys. The women therefore prayed by rote, though this was not discernible as heads stayed bent over prayer books and pages were turned.
Praying did not mean they knew their religion. This was not only because the cheder was closed to them but also because their fathers were not eager to teach them. Most fathers felt it was not their job, and some shared in the view that it was not necessary for girls to be informed.
I never heard my mother offer an impromptu prayer, though she was keen on ceremonial ones and felt that God was listening. And judging. Her idea was that like the authorities in her family—her bearded father and her superbearded grandfather—God was big on judging. And how did He judge? He judged on the basis of your participation in the religion’s rites and ceremonies, its traditions.
Afternoon calls to and from their female relatives made up the girls’ social lives, though in these visits few social skills were mastered. The girls simply stepped forward for the hello kissing and then sat and listened to the gossip and the old wives’ tales—the bubbeh meisses, as my grandfather called them—until called upon to help serve the obligatory tea and cake.
Refreshments were certainly looked forward to, but gossip was what the women came for. In my mother’s tales of these klatches, it was clear that the women had family matters on their minds. Marital difficulties were openly discussed, the blame most often coming to rest on the husband’s compulsive gambling or on his terrible temper. Not so open were the discussions of sexual matters, and it was here that the girls were obliged to decipher code words, head shakes, and tongue clicks. My mother once told me that she and her sisters had had a big moment when they decoded the phrase about a Cossack having “business” with a Jewish girl, which meant he had raped her; though when my mother divulged this, it was with an understanding that no more questions would be asked.
My mother was immediately dazzled by this Aaron Bronson. Most of the girls she knew had only the pool of immigrants to choose from, and a dispiriting pool it was—men with untidy beards, unshaven faces, stained pants and button-shy vests, and voices hoarse from hawking wares on the sidewalk out of a peddler’s backpack. And here was my father, fresh from adventures in the South, and handsome. His five feet, four inches said “tall” to her, and in truth he had an inch or two on most men of her acquaintance. Surrounded as she was by a people of dark eyes and dark curly hair, she was instantly smitten by eyes blue as skies and hair straight as straight—no twist, no twirl, no spirals—and gleaming as if with sunlight. If she had known the word, she would have called him dashing. Had he stayed in New York like most after being dumped by the boat? No, he had not. “He went to the South!” my mother cried to my aunts, as if penetration of the South was only for explorers in geography books.
On his part, my father clearly found delight in sharing memories of the old country with this young lady who could laugh with him over the frozen bread that had to be thawed in the mouth and the straw beds that made noises in the night like mice, this young lady of the fair skin and the soft dusting of freckles and the lustrous black hair, who praised his English and said, “Just like a Yankee you talk.” And wouldn’t his heart have leapt up that the nimble hands were gentle and the figure trim and the top of her head went just under his chin? And it’s my opinion that it would have been also very gratifying to my father that when he asked my grandfather for his blessing, along with a yes, my grandfather, who had recognized something in my father, said to him, “You ain’t a shlimazel.” A luckless fellow. “You’re a man going places.”
After my parents’ marriage, it was several years before Concordia became something to reckon with. In the meantime Joey and Miriam were born, and though having two children kept my father out of the draft, fatherhood to my orphaned father meant much more than that; for despite the conventional wisdom that you don’t miss what you’ve never had, what my father had never had was a real family, and to say he had not missed one is to misunderstand.
In that long ago time in Podolska, my father had only his grandfather, and he was full of envy for those children who had real families. In his little-boy fantasies of their lives, he had come to believe that no matter what misery descended upon them or, in rare cases, what joy uplifted them, the family shared. He pictured these families at the supper table offering understanding to one another and exchanging stories (even if any humor in them was often black), whereas after his day at his job (which did what it could to save his life, but it could not save everything), all he had was his grandfather’s silence (what did this man have to be chatty about?), a wordless meal, and the shuffling sound of his grandfather making for bed immediately afterward. No, my father had had his fill of “no family,” had had it up to here.
Though the fact of Joey and Miriam went a long way toward softening things, it could only go so far, and soon the feeling that he must leave New York came to my father strongly, especially when he was at his job selling produce from one of my grandfather’s pushcarts, as that was another New York job he would not come to like if he lived to be a hundred. He was now fluent enough in English to have perhaps gotten a job as a clerk even in a non-Jewish store, but now he didn’t want it. Selling in New York might make him a hostage to New York, and, perhaps unbeknownst even to him, in his head the South had been waiting all along.
It would be two more years before he would try to implement his idea of a return to the South. This was for my father a long time to stay put when everything in him was telling him to go.
When he at last he began to try to sell my mother on going, he had no inkling that the South would mean a country town in the most isolated part of Tennessee.
According to my father, each year the strain of New York weighed more heavily. Every evening when he walked home from the subway and looked toward the window of his apartment, except for the prospect of seeing the family, nothing about it beckoned. He saw it as a place that even on a sunny day was dark, with a smell always from somebody in the building cooking cabbage. Whenever he looked toward his apartment, he said he wanted to yell Gevalt!—an outcry of alarm that in this case, meant, Let me out of here!
It was time—past time—to renew his acquaintance with his hustle. He started slowly, telling my mother that his job with the pushcart didn’t feel right, that it wasn’t a salesman’s job. “Selling from a pushcart ain’t selling; it’s arguing,” my father said to her.
What had once seemed to my mother adventurous now seemed foolhardy. The South? That place down there full of strangers and terrors?
Trying hard to sell her on taking a chance, my father quoted her an old shtetl saying: “If you don’t want to risk tearing your shoes, you got to sit at home.” He told her how friendly people were in the South and how she’d find friends.
Shoes? Friends? Right now my mother didn’t care about shoes, and she didn’t care about friends. Anyway, in her milieu, there were no friends, only relatives and mishpocheh.
My father cast about for a city where there would be if not mishpocheh then at least Jewish people. (Why Savannah wasn’t this city was always puzzling to me until one day, while listening once more to this story, it came to me that my father had chosen not to go back to Savannah because of the girl he had almost proposed to.)
He remembered that Nashville had been talked about as having a big Jewish population, and he thought it probably also had a synagogue and maybe even a kosher butcher. He asked my mother if she could see herself in such a town.
One night, after hours of tossing and turning, my mother agreed that maybe, maybe she could see herself in such a town —Nashville, with its promise of shuls and rabbi-blessed chickens, and even a cheder for Joey. Her secret hope, however, was that because they had no money to make such a trip, it would all turn out to be just talk.
My father had already worked out the money part. He said my mother should ask her father for a loan.
“What do you think of this?” My mother had an invisible presence, an unseen third person she often spoke to, as if she were a performer on stage speaking in an aside to the audience. She spoke to this presence now. “He not only wants me to go somewhere I don’t want to, he wants I should ask my papa to lend the money besides.” All right, she would talk to my grandmother and she would talk to my grandfather. My mother had the hope that her sister Sadie, who would certainly be in on it, would come up with a way to nix the thing.
What she was depending on most, however, was the idea of family oneness. She had some confidence that my grandmother would feel that leaving the family to go to such a far-off place would be too foolish to even think about. My mother saw my grandmother giving a dismissive wiggle of her hand, signaling an end to the discussion.
Together with my brother and sister, she climbed the five flights to my grandparents’ apartment. As they climbed, they passed the doors of families my mother had known since she had arrived in America, all of whom had at one time or another come under the microscope of the women.
On the second floor, for example, behind one of the four doors on the landing, lived the Bloombergs, a family characterized as living from hand to mouth because of a father capable of losing his entire paycheck in a game of pinochle on Saturday night.
But above them were the Nussbaums, the shameful Nussbaums, the ones who turned up most frequently in the women’s talk. The Nussbaums were spoken of as badlach. (I have never heard this word used except by my mother and members of her klatch, and it may have been concocted by them. Possibly they put bad, or bath, together with lach, or lack, and came up with “bathless ones.”) The Nussbaums were considered low-class Jews in all manner of ways but chiefly because the Nussbaum housekeeping was judged sloppy in the extreme. It was a shandeh, the women said, especially a shandeh feur der goyim. A shame, especially before Gentiles. The women clung to the hope that the building’s Gentiles would not discover that a Jewish family had a dirty house. How disgraceful if they should know (and say “dirty Jews” among themselves) that the Nussbaums’ drinking glasses smelled of herring and that their beds were infested with bedbugs—the abominable vantzen.
On the fourth-floor landing she gave a special knock on Aunt Sadie’s door, and then went on up the last flight, to the fifth floor. My mother tried to pick Miriam up in case she might be tiring, but Miriam fought against it. Joey was running ahead, trying to produce sparks on the marble steps with the new taps on his heels.
As my mother told the story, she was already sitting at the kitchen table, a glass of tea in front of her, when Aunt Sadie came in. Aunt Sadie had to be in on everything, my father would always say, “like without her nose in it, the world can’t turn.”
My Aunt Sadie was not a favorite of my father’s, chiefly because of this. As the oldest child, she perhaps saw her role as family protector, at which she indeed had had a lot of practice. When the family had first arrived in America, she had been the one to go out and see what was what and to get the family settled. Now, even though everyone had moved out from under her wing in one direction or another, she clung to her old power base as adviser and arbiter. “As boss,” my father said.
When Aunt Sadie came into the room now, Miriam was lying on the floor under the spidery gray enameled legs of the stove, pretending to be drinking from one of her old bottles that my grandmother still had. My mother knew her sister would have something to say about a three-year-old child playing like this, but Miriam had already made it clear that she was in charge of herself. She was, as they say nowadays, firmly inner-directed.
The house would have been quiet. My grandfather would have been in his pushcart warehouse for hours; my mother’s younger sister, my Aunt Hannah, in school; and her brother, Uncle Philip, the youngest in the family, in school as well. My mother’s older brother, my Uncle Meyer, was married and no longer lived at home.
Aunt Sadie sat down. She glanced at Miriam and, to my mother’s surprise, only shrugged. Aunt Sadie perhaps sensed this was to be a special, and intense, convocation and was saving her arguments. My grandmother brought her a glass of tea.
My mother was working on a way to open it up. Finally she got out that my father wasn’t happy. A few words, a lot said.
To give time for this to sink in, she took a sip of tea. My mother, of course, drank tea in the European-Russian-Jewish manner: The glass went to the mouth with a finger curled around the spoon to keep it from flopping into the eye, and then, as an economy measure, the tea was sipped through a fragment of a sugar cube held between the front teeth. My mother finished her sip and repeated to my Aunt Sadie, “He just ain’t happy.”
If my father wasn’t crazy about Aunt Sadie, she returned the favor. Miriam and I have always agreed that Aunt Sadie’s antagonism toward my father was not without its envy component. Vetted or not by a matchmaker, my father obviously had an appeal that her Izzy didn’t, her Izzy having come directly from the immigrant pool.
Aunt Sadie said now to my mother, “If it makes him happy to be happy, so let him be happy.”
Even in later years it seemed never to have occurred to my mother that what Aunt Sadie had said was ridiculous, though she said she was perplexed. So she answered Aunt Sadie only, “So who don’t it make happy to be happy?”
After everyone had been served, my grandmother would have come to the table with her own glass of tea, moving leisurely, in an easy flow. My grandmother was never in a hurry. In the taking of tea there was a gentle sliding into her chair, a thoughtful spooning of a dollop of jam from the pot on the table, a letting fall of the jam into the glass, a slow stirring.
At this small klatch, my grandmother would, as always, be in a black long-sleeved shirtwaist top and a black floor-length full skirt. She was a little woman—perhaps “minute” is the better word—who seemed overwhelmed by fabric.
My grandmother neither spoke nor understood English. When English was spoken around her, she waved her hands about her head as if brushing off spider webs. In her presence, therefore, a rapid shuffle went on between English and Yiddish.
With my grandmother at last sitting, my mother gathered herself to tell it all. Out it came: My father didn’t like New York, didn’t like selling from a pushcart, wanted to go back to the South.
Aunt Sadie was a “spitter.” In Yiddish with its gargling chs and exploding sibilants, she was a-splash, and even in English she sent forth sprays. “To the South?” she said, moisture molecules flying.
My grandmother clapped her hands to her face, and my mother’s heart leaped up at what might be a promising sign. My grandmother, however, was showing not horror but interest. She had brought to mind a family story about a nephew, Zelig—my first cousin once removed—who had left New York to go to Cleveland and who, according to his mother, my Great-aunt Tillie, was doing well there. “Cleveland,” my grandmother repeated.
Aunt Sadie responded with a no-nonsense “Cleveland, schmeve land” and asked if my father wasn’t just trying to get my mother to go out and work for him. My mother immediately envisioned one of my great-aunts, a woman in her sixties who still set out daily with a pack on her back to peddle soft goods—whatever she had picked up cheap—to pushcart vendors. Did Sadie think this was what my father wanted her to do? Did she think my father was lazy, of all things? “He’s just a man likes to do what he likes to do,” my mother answered.
Aunt Sadie said she knew all about the South (though it’s a good guess that she knew almost nothing) and all of what she “knew” was bad. First of all, she “guaranteed” that my mother would not like it there, even if it turned out the place they chose had a confirmed Jewish population. “The Jews they got there I can imagine,” she said to my mother. And oy, the Gentiles—the goyim—my mother would have to associate with, “the hillybillies, the yokels.”
As my grandmother poured fresh tea, no doubt taking the usual pains to pour against the spoon so that the glass would not crack, she had a word for her daughters. Little in stature and underlanguaged though my grandmother was, she knew her imperatives. “Go, go with your husband,” she told my mother, while my mother’s heart bumped around. “Be a warm stone in his pocket on a cold day.” Where, my mother wondered, where was my grandmother’s outrage at somebody leaving the family?
My mother snatched at her one remaining hope, that maybe my grandfather would object. Maybe he would be the one to keep his daughter and his grandchildren from going God knows where.
My grandmother only scoffed. My grandfather would lend the money, of that she was sure. After all, she said, when they had left Russia, had they not left behind a father, three brothers, and four sisters? “Tell Aaron not to worry,” she said to my mother. “Pa will lend.”