Our grandparents rarely referred to their childhood
or teen-age years, they didn't speak about their own parents or other
relatives. We knew they had both
lost their mothers early and that their fathers had remarried as soon as
possible. So, two half-orphans, a painful truth. Other than that, to us the world they came from was formless
and void like the time before Creation.
When I was in sixth grade, in 1956, our social
studies theme was A Nation Of Immigrants. For
homework, I asked my mother, "Where did Bubbie and Zayde come from?"
"Poland," she said shortly, because she
knew I already knew.
Then I tried to stab at a puzzle no one else seemed
to notice: "But we don't say we're Polish?"
"No. Jewish."
"Polish-Jewish?"
"No. Just Jews. Jews from Poland."
Oh, I see.
Well, not really. I'm not sure my mother did
either. But she wasn't interested in the problem. The knot of it - from a
place, but not of it - twisted around my mind along with other mysteries of the
adult world, some of them deep, some slight - like why do we write JacksonHeights, New York as our return address and not Jackson Heights, Queens.
It's not that I was obsessed
with these mysteries back then.
Not at all. Like everybody else in Class 6-4, the smartest in P.S. 69,
I was busy piling up A's, keeping slam books hidden from my friends, having
arguments and making up, playing stoop ball or box ball or going to Hebrew
School three times a week. But these knots - the questions the adult world
couldn't quite answer - returned now and again, year after year.
I was in graduate school before I understood how
remote Jews and Poles were from each other, even in the same town or on the
same street. Only a tiny percentage of Jews knew more than a few words in Polish
and an even tinier percent of Poles spoke or understood Yiddish. Yes, in the
villages and towns they traded with each other, passed each other on the road,
but that was it. You don't need
much language for that. Here's an
imaginary interaction:
Jewish housewife: "Hello, Pan." She is
thinking: You bully, you drunk. I fear you.
Polish grocer: "Hello, Pani." He is
thinking: Why are you so weird looking with that ugly wig. Christ-killer.
Accursed.
Jewish housewife points: "Potatoes?"
Grocer: "One Zloty."
She bought or she didn't. It was a good price or it
wasn't. The end. A thousand years
of minimalist relations.
Once, when I was an adult, I asked my mother why we
didn't have more family information. She said, "We didn't ask
questions. Bubbie and Zayde worked
very hard. They made a good Jewish home. I was busy with a boyfriend or school
or something. We didn't ask questions."
Occasionally I would berate myself for not being curious when there was still
time to find out. But then I consulted Uncle Harry, the only living brother of
my mother's original four.
He said, "Actually, you couldn't know them too
well. That was part of it. They came from Russia, Poland - it was really Poland
at that time. They didn't have an easy life there. But we never got a true
picture of what went on there.
"We tried, my brother Benny and I tried. We
were always digging, questioning, never got good answers. The time would be
Friday night or Saturday afternoon, after shul. That was the only time. Time for family.
So my mother would be busy
preparing, she didn't butt in at all. So if we questioned my father, how did he
get out of Poland, how did he get to the boat, we never found out. My father
had his own agenda so to speak. Take care of the Jews. Follow the commandments.
All we knew is that his brother David, from Philadelphia, met him at the pier.
That's all we really knew."
So nothing, even when asked directly. Okay. I moved on to a different kind of inquiry: Why not? The
historian Ruth Gay attributes this extreme reticence about their personal pasts
to the whole generation who arrived between 1900 and 1920. In her book UnfinishedPeople that is part memoir, part historical narrative she writes,
"They knew that their world was primitive - without paved streets or
sewers, without running water - and it made them ashamed. They were not quick
to admit that they had started young to work for little wages and lived poorly.
They did not think that such memories would bring them honor, but on the
contrary would diminish them in the eyes of their delicately raised American
children."
There's something to what she says. Especially if
you bypass the Fiddler-On-The-Roof nostalgia and look in detail at photos from that time. The streets are unpaved, rutted and muddy, the children are barefoot and equally dirty.
But maybe a more generous interpretation of Zayde's
Saturday-after-lunch refusal is possible.
May he didn't know where to begin. Not everyone is a good tale spinner.
Maybe he didn't like the spotlight. I don't think he did. Or didn't consider it
important. It's a relatively
modern concept, after all, that the narrative of an ordinary person's life has
significance. And Bubbie and Zayde, for all that modern life had allowed them
to flourish, were not modern people, did not wish to be modern people.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaRUyFm4f9kKlK0fZElOC9rw1qem8CVNxScoaq6hzZY93wTjCrReXp_4kPXQHWrULYxnS5_EoTY1r6o5q1-Z4e4jW4ymBf1KxP4NEjkKMc31o8eGcTgB34VJqLzjPJ-kIFJSxTwyzT9Fg/s400/170px-SS_America1907.jpg)
Two years later, on July 24, 2012, ,
Bubbie arrived on the S. S. Leeland, her
surname was Bernstein by then, and so was Zayde's. Who knows why. Bubbie arrived with our uncle Sol, then aged four, and our aunt Yetta, then aged
two. Nine months later to the day, our uncle Ben was born, or so goes the
family joke.
To fill in around these demographics, this is what
I can tell you. About Zayde, we know that he grew up in Andrzejewo, a village
of maybe two thousand people, 34% Jewish in 1905, says the internet. We know he was dedicated to that
village because his religious home was always the tiny Anshe Andrzejewo shul, a
renovated first floor apartment in a brownstone on Henry Street.
He had other choices. He could have joined the much larger and more prosperous Bialystoker Synagogue on Willett street, since he came to manhood in Bialystok and since he himself now had a large reputation and had prospered. Instead he remained bound to those from his childhood village. And alongside them, he and Bubbie chose to be buried, in a cemetery plot purchased by the members of the congregation.
What Andzrejewo was like in the years around the
turn of the twentieth century, the internet does not inform us. Of Bubbie's village we don't even have
a name. Data being so available these days, I could probably find out. But data
doesn't speak to the thickness of her experience: how she learned to read, to
cook, what made her laugh, had she time to play?
About the city of Bialystok, where they met and
married, many particulars are available in English. The historian RebeccaKobrin in Jewish Bialystok and Its
Diaspora describes it in 1900 as an expanding industrial center that drew
Jews from the many small nearby villages.
It offered rural youth every twentieth century option. There were
factories to work in, small shopkeepers with whom one could apprentice, paved
streets down which to stroll, Yiddish theaters to attend, motor cars to admire
and yearn for. Carpentry and other work in the trades was available, also real
estate to buy or sell if you could afford it. Plus several left-wing political organizations: Zionist, Socialist and
Socialist-Zionist.
Which brings to mind one scrap of specific incident
that I learned when I was a sullen teen-ager and my parents insisted I
accompany them on a visit to relatives in Colchester, Connecticut. There I met Zeidl Goldberg, our
grandfather's cousin. He told this story: While still in Bialystok he, Zeidl,
took part in a demonstration for fair wages for factory workers and was jailed
for his efforts.
"Your grandfather," he said, "bailed me out."
"Was he a socialist too then?"
"Schmulka?" said our cousin. "No.
Always religious."
Now I take this moment and enlarge it. There he is
- originally
Shmul, the formal Yiddish version of Samuel, called by the diminutive Schmulka, little Samuel - unusually short but robust, quick on his feet, rushing to the bailiff's office with cash tucked into those hands that look like my hands. He was ma-tir a-su-rim, freeing the captive, an act of charity we appreciate three times a day in services. Later, he returned to somewhere - home or work or shul - and said the evening prayers. Many belief systems were on offer in that city in those years, but Schmulka's choice remained the Eternal One, Blessed Be He.
Shmul, the formal Yiddish version of Samuel, called by the diminutive Schmulka, little Samuel - unusually short but robust, quick on his feet, rushing to the bailiff's office with cash tucked into those hands that look like my hands. He was ma-tir a-su-rim, freeing the captive, an act of charity we appreciate three times a day in services. Later, he returned to somewhere - home or work or shul - and said the evening prayers. Many belief systems were on offer in that city in those years, but Schmulka's choice remained the Eternal One, Blessed Be He.
Enjoyed reading this and related to it very much.
ReplyDeleteIris - Hello. So glad you enjoyed it. Who are you? Are you a cousin? Friend of a cousin? Other? How did you find out about the blog?
DeleteLove your blog!
ReplyDeleteGood and good Karen, I'm so pleased that you read it.
DeleteMy Father was born in Colchester, Ct. He and his family used to buy homemade ice cream from a man named Zeidl. I am wondering if this may be the same person? I recall that he mentioned that a Mr. Mintz was the butcher, so Zeidl probably sold the ice cream, or possibly been a butcher as well. My Father and his family had resided in Colchester from 1912-1930. When the Great Depression set in, they sold their home. I had contacted the town historian who is now deceased, and he informed me that the house had burnt down in the late thirties. I do have family photos of it. I was so amazed to find this information about Zeidl on the Bialystoker website. Thank you so much, and keep up the good work on your part as well.
ReplyDeleteHello, Anonymous - I treasure the one time I visited with Zeidl. He was also mayor of Colchester at different times, said my mother. His license plate read: ZEIDL which I thought at the time was quite bold to be right out there with such an old country name. Nice to hear from you. I just received/noticed your message.
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