Lil, Mom, and her “Mama,” Grandma
Koroschetz, 1922.
Mom began recording her mother’s bizarre behavior on August 15, 1942, two months before she and Dad were to be married. In June of that year, my grandma Koroschetz had peered out the kitchen window of their Near North Chicago apartment on a blustery day, demanding, “Who’s making those doves fly around out there?”
Mom looked through the glass, caught in her own swirl of confusion. “Mama, that’s just the wind blowing some scraps of paper.”
“No! Someone’s made those doves come here just to aggravate me!” Grandma K shouted. It was the beginning of a downward slide. Always quick to anger, Grandma K was now not just bad-tempered but also paranoid and delusional.
Mom arranged a vacation that August with her parents at Lake Como, a resort in southern Wisconsin, hoping the country air and peaceful surroundings would soothe her mother’s nerves and give her seventy-one-year-old dad a break. When they opened the door to their rustic cottage, a strong smell of gas assaulted them. “They’re trying to kill me!” Grandma screamed, backing out, her eyes wild.
“It’s okay, Mama,” my mother said, running into the darkened room, straightening a burner knob left askew. “Someone just forgot to turn the stove all the way off.”
Throughout the trip, Grandma K either remained locked in a morose silence or went on the attack. If Mom or her father attempted conversation, Grandma shook with a fierce anger and yelled, “Keep your big mouth shut!” or, “You’d be better off with plaster in your mouth!” When Mom was silent, her mother accused her of “hiding something.”
“She told Papa to get out of her sight,” Mom wrote. “She said to me, ‘You do nothing but make trouble!’”
Page after page, Mom documented her mother’s paranoid thoughts and behavior, but one scene captures it best.
At two in the morning, the darkness blazed to light in their cottage. Grandma ripped off the covers from her sleeping husband and glared down at him, screeching, in her drawn-out Austrian accent, “You cr-r-r-rook, you!” He lay blinking and astonished.
“You’ve hidden my pills in your bed!” she screamed, eyes blazing. “Get up! Get up! I want them. You’re both cr-r-r-rooks!” Mom and her father finally were able to calm her, but Mom’s dread and confusion wouldn’t let her sleep.
After fourteen days of living with Grandma K’s frenzied accusations, Mom broke down. Wracked with sobs, she choked out to her mother, “You have made these the most miserable two weeks of my life.”
Mom was bound to her mother by a paradox: “My mother was so good to me,” she told us kids, but just as often remarked, “I was afraid of my mother.” It wasn’t until I came upon Mom’s youthful diaries, which she began at the age of ten, in 1927, that I came to understand the provenance of her loyalty—and fear.
Grandma K was good to her daughter. A graduate of a prestigious Viennese dressmaking school, Grandma often worked an entire weekend to create a gloriously detailed blouse or layered skirt for Lillian, her only child. Mom was the only girl in the neighborhood who had matching outfits for herself and her dolls. For birthdays, Christmas, and graduation, Mom’s parents showered Mom with the most beautiful gifts they could afford. She was the center of their world. At times my mother wrote, “I sure do love her.”
But Mom’s diary entries also reveal swift and harsh punishments. Grandma K smacked Mom in the face, hit her on the head, or gave her a “good licking” for “not following the rules” or “being fresh.” Mom accepted consequences that logically followed disobedience, but Grandma K’s irrational anger gave my mother every reason to be “afraid of Mama.”
Any minor misstep—placing cream precariously in the icebox, mixing Thanksgiving stuffing in the “wrong” way, smiling in a manner her mother didn’t like—triggered Grandma into a full-blown rage, raining blows on Mom and calling her “ass,” “animal,” “streetwalker,” and “whore.”
Over the years, Mom wrote with deepening frustration about Grandma K’s explosions—like the time Mom mistakenly tossed out a scrap of fabric she found on the floor, intended as a pocket for a suit Grandma was making. Mom apologized and confessed her error.
Grandma K raced at Mom, screaming, “You ungrateful wretch! You lazy hussy! Now that I’ve finished your suit, you don’t give two cents for how much I have to work!” Eyes alight with fury, she yanked Mom’s hair and smacked her about the head, hurling insults and blows. “Selfish ingrate! Careless, useless girl!” Mom vainly tried holding back tears.
“She reminds me of the sea,” Mom wrote afterward. “First she’s calm, and suddenly, without warning, she’s so wrathful and furious you hardly believe she’s the same person.”
Over the years, Mom’s parents had tried multiple ways to earn a living, modeling a striving work ethic and frugality. They saved their money and bought a two-flat. Grandma K started a dressmaking business; Grandpa K founded a small machine shop, skipping dinner and working late into the night. They even opened a delicatessen, but each entrepreneurial venture failed. Still, Grandma’s occasional seamstress work, their rental income, and the salary Grandpa earned as a talented tool and die maker gave them a decent life.
Then the stock market collapsed in October 1929, plunging America into the Great Depression, devastating my grandparents’ income. The Depression hit manufacturing and machinists, like my grandfather, the hardest. Chicago lost 50 percent of its manufacturing jobs between 1929 and 1933. My grandpa K was one of half a million people in the city without work.
In the spring of 1932, when Grandpa K was already sixty-one years old, my fifteen-year-old mom wrote, “The Depression is getting worse. Papa has had no work since before Christmas.” Hoping to garner some extra income, her parents divided their flat in two, planning to rent out the back bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom, hot water included, but renters were rare.
By April the family’s finances were so desperate, they had to apply for food assistance. “Nothing fresh,” Mom wrote with dismay at the contents. “Rotten coffee, dried prunes, raisins, canned peaches, beans, split peas, etc. Five cans of tomatoes.” Later that summer, Grandpa K found temporary machinist work, making about forty-five cents an hour4 the few times he was called in.
One of those calls ended in calamity. On January 19, 1934, a punch press crushed two of Grandpa’s fingers. Mom’s knees buckled. Her face turned white. “Papa lost two fingers when he was twenty-two, and now these two. Goodbye, guitar.”
At the time of the accident, Mom was entering her senior year in high school. Her father couldn’t work, rental income was hard to come by, and the bank began harassing the family for missed mortgage payments. “Why don’t you pull your daughter out of school and send her to work?” one bank representative suggested.
“Oh, no!” Mom’s parents were united. “Our daughter has to finish high school.”
Mom graduated from Waller High School in January 1935 at age seventeen, the highest-achieving girl in her class. After a dogged search for a job, she landed a typist position at Sears Roebuck, earning a raise after just a few months for her “excellent work.” She became the family breadwinner, giving 75 percent of her wages to her parents.
It wasn’t enough.
Foreclosure and eviction notices began arriving at my grandparents’ house, but Grandma K declared, “These aren’t for us,” and scrawled, “Return to Sender” on every one— because the family last name had been misspelled.
Arriving home from work on March 3, 1937, Mom came upon a devastating scene. Her mother sat on a chair in front of their house, head buried in her hands, Grandpa K’s arm around her shoulders. Tables, chairs, lamps, dishes, clothes—everything they owned—lay piled on the sidewalk, as neighbors gawked and whispered.
Mom surely was overcome with guilt and despair. “My parents were so good to me” was true, but Mom’s fear of Grandma K would prove to be as potent as her love.