Choices

Moving to Jackson Heights, Queens in 1949 meant that my father Max Abramowitz was released from his in-laws watchful, Jewishly observant eyes.  Some men take a stand against domestic conventions by drinking too much or staying out late or buying a motorcycle. My father’s rebellion was characteristically modest. He stopped attending synagogue.  Instead, he spent his Saturday mornings at the Jackson Heights Public Library.

He was thirty-three and had lived his first twenty-eight years in a three room, five story walk -up on Eldridge Street with his widowed mother, a sister and a brother.  His bed  was a metal frame and a mattress that folded in half and was stored during the day against a wall in the kitchen.  When he married my mother and they moved into her parents’ six room apartment, he acquired his first stable berth.  

My father was an unassuming man.  Sometimes  playful and funny, in daily life he was mostly dutiful and dogged. Workday mornings he rose at five and departed before six for his business selling paper products – brown bags of all sizes, wrapping paper, tape and twine. He sold to the small retail liquor, dry-cleaning and grocery stores that line the neighborhoods of the five boroughs. “The smallest of the small,” was how he described his customers. Then he would laugh, thinking of himself in that same way – small, modest but prosperous, safe.  He owned the business he worked for, with his mother and brother and sister. Six in the evening was his homegoing hour, Friday afternoon and Saturday his days of rest.

I’m not really sure if the decision not to attend synagogue was one of light defiance or a reluctance to choose.  Maybe it was a little of both. Jackson Heights offered two options.  One was the Young Israel, a modern Orthodox congregation which met in a storefront.  It was a newcomer to the area.  Members were like us, recent emigrants from more crowded Jewish neighborhoods. But they were newcomers who wanted to abide in the traditional.  Here the services resembled the ones downtown, all in Hebrew, with traditional davening where no one announces the page number because everybody knows, and the men sway back and forth as they pray. The congregation was led by a Rabbi plus a group of learned men who stood on a bimah which is a slightly elevated platform in the center of the room. 

In the opposite direction ten blocks west and up a steep hill was the Jewish Center of Jackson Heights, an imposing three-story structure of brick with fake turrets or crenellations on the top.  Established in 1920, the Jewish Center was part of the all-American Conservative movement.  Here men and women sat together, the services were sedate and decorous. No one would rock back and forth in this imposing sanctuary which was as big as a school auditorium. Not that it was forbidden. It just wouldn’t happen.  Prayer alternated between responsive reading in English and some traditional Hebrew liturgy.  The Rabbi spoke down to his congregation from a proscenium stage.

My father didn't go alone to the library on those Saturday mornings. He took me with him. Hand in hand we walked the length of Seventy-Eighth Street to Thirty-Seventh Avenue. Hand in hand we entered through the second door where the children’s librarian, who already knew us, was setting up the low benches for story hour.

The Jackson Heights library was at that time composed of two adjacent storefronts connected by an inner set of folding doors. By the librarian I was deposited, near the  picture book section.  My father passed through to the adult section with its heavy wooden chairs and high oak tables.

At the end of story hour, my father claimed me. We walked home side by side, each clutching treasure  – four books apiece, the library limit.  At that moment we would have agreed with Jorge Luis Borges when he remarked, "I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library." 

Challah, salad and cold chicken awaited us, laid out on the kitchen table. The same meal my mother would have created if we were returning from synagogue. And, it did feel that way, as if we had spent the morning in a hushed house of prayer. 

  

My mother was accustomed to home being a woman’s place on Saturday mornings. That had been the way it was downtown on Shabes– the women stayed home with the children and prepared lunch. They didn’t mind. Prayer was what men did. It was important, absolutely, but tedious. Of course they would never have said that out loud. 

Then, in 1952, my mother was pregnant again and this time she had a boy. And what a boy! Blonde!  Blue-eyed! Chubby – when chubby was desirable. A golden child. But if he had been bald or brunette it would not have mattered, maleness was what mattered.

   

Within a few months we were paid-in-full members of The Jewish Center of Jackson Heights. A choice had been made. I was enrolled in the Hebrew School Sunday mornings and one afternoon during the week.  No more library dates, just my father and me.  My mother needed him at home. Or, if she didn’t, he went to synagogue because now he had a son and had to set a Jewish example.

Oedipally speaking, it must have been a blow for me, though I don’t remember feeling loss.  Except for this ploy: When visitors arrived to coo over my new baby brother I would close the door to his room and say, with as much authority as I could muster,  “The nurse says you can’t come in.”

A son was a momentous responsibility. He might join my father in business (he didn’t), or ask for guidance (sometimes). And so the mild-mannered outlaw days of Max Abramowitz were ended.

 Max and his first granddaughter,  1984

Jackson Heights, Queens: A Foreign Country

Slowly and then suddenly and completely there was prosperity. I’m talking about the late nineteen forties when post-World War II industrial abundance cranked up slowly and then spread wildly and widely in the early nineteen-fifties.  When everybody loved us, the U S of A, the saviors of Europe.  Slowly and then suddenly and completely the quotas on Jews in public school teaching or allowed entrance into Ivy League colleges were erased and it was as if they had never been.  An apology for the Holocaust?  Maybe.  We’re nothing like those Nazis.

But restricted neighborhoods like Jackson Heights, Queens, were still controlled by the private Queensboro Corporation. Restricted meant no Jews, no blacks allowed.  They didn’t think they owed an atonement to anyone. The state courts, after all, had upheld their right to restrict.   But the Queensboro Corporation couldn’t buy all the land.  New construction was everywhere the Queensboro Corporation wasn't,  plowing under farm fields and vacant lots. 

Into one of these newer buildings moved our Aunt Natalie, her two young sons and our Uncle Murray, four rooms on the fourth floor, apartment B40, next to the elevator.  She was done with the Lower East Side, she said. Done with railroad flat walk- ups. Aunt Natalie was the enterprising one, the one who couldn’t be stopped. One year passed as she watched and waited until she heard of an opening on the third floor, A35 to be exact. And, figuratively speaking, because in 1949 there was still a housing shortage, she lay down in front of the door to A35 and would not let anyone pass through until it was secured for my mother and father, my baby sister, Jayne and me.

            

And so we moved, my mother initially excited about being modern and leaving her parents’ home where the four of us had only the front two bedrooms.  

But Queens was so quiet, nobody on the street. Even though that’s what everyone said you moved for – the trees and the quiet.  Early on she sent me to the back garden that belonged to our building, assuming I’d meet some other kids there. Instead, both she and I were yelled at by the superintendent of the complex.  No children allowed alone in the garden. And during the ten years or so that we lived there no one – adult or child – ever sat or stood or in any way used that tree and bush crammed space.

Why did we come to “this god-forsaken Queens”? She asked herself each morning and wept. And every Friday bundled up my baby sister and I to take us forty minutes by E and then D train back to Rivington Street, to those two, now dear, front rooms, where our father met us and we remained until Sunday afternoon, fed and fussed over by Schmulka and Chinke who were delighted to have us back.

My mother didn’t know a down payment was required in order to become a modern family.  Her fee was this early loneliness. She didn’t know she was gifting me with a hunger for the honks and shouts of the narrow, crowded, treeless streets downtown that would stay with me until I made it back there as a young adult, to the Lower East Side, my true home.

A Little Romancing

My mother, who is not yet my mother, is wrapping a piece of flank steak in a large square of brown, waxed butcher paper behind the counter at Schmulka Bernstein’s Kosher Meats & Provisions.  First, she folds the sharp edges down neatly and tapes them to each other, then snip snap she cuts off a piece of string to bind the package a second time before she hands it to the customer.   A large white apron that is probably stained with tiny dabs of gristle and blood, like all butcher aprons, protects her dress, her nylons, her pumps.  A woman didn’t work in pants in those days.

My mother is Schmulka Bernstein’s youngest child. His darling Chayele in Yiddish, a name that comes from the Hebrew root to live. (As in l’Chayim).  In English her name, Ida, floats through a popular song where it is rhymed with “sweet as apple cider.”

Ida sweet as apple cider shouldn’t be in the butcher store at all. She should be in a classroom at Brooklyn College, advancing her degree in education. But World War II is on and her three older brothers have left the family business for the Army. The butcher store and her parents need help. She is nothing if not dutiful.

Her philosophy of life at this time: “If you do what your parents say, everything will be all right.”

On this particular afternoon in September 1942, Ann Abramowitz who knows Ida slightly from their time together at Seward Park High School, comes in to buy some chop meat. Behind Ann trails her brother, Max.  Ann is unhappy with the girls her big brother has been dating.  She knows my mother is smart because they shared some classes and my mother was awarded the French medal at graduation.   

In telling her part of this story later Aunt Annie would say, “I knew Ida was a girl who knew the difference between spinach and Spinoza.”

My mother would say, “I was ready for a little romancing.”

And, then add, “I knew I didn’t want religious.” Meaning strictly, Jewishly observant.  

Gleeful is the best word to describe my father’s tone when he told this story: “She never took off her apron so fast.”

Soon the three them are strolling down Essex Street toward Chinatown. Somewhere on this walk Ann disappears. Alone together, Max leads my mother to a storefront Chinese restaurant. There she insists on a booth at the far back so that no one who knows her can witness Schmulka Bernstein’s daughter eating her first non-kosher food.

***

That evening my father writes in his diary: “She is cute and intelligent. Will see more of her.”

Two months of uncertainty pass. She is also dating a distant cousin Beryl who is favored by her own mother.  But Max persists.

In his diary he laments that, “She is good and sweet and she won’t go against her mother’s wishes.” He seems to be giving up on her.

Then, somehow all is resolved.  The diary does not tell us how.

In December he takes her home to meet his own mother, who is widowed.

“Mom was duly impressed!!” He writes. Now he can get serious.

No star-crossed lovers here. Neither of them would dream of getting married without their parents’ approval.

 The black and white snapshots of Ida in these years show her looking delighted with herself. Hair sometimes in a crown of braids, sometimes a flyaway pageboy, she has a lush bosom and a trim figure that she kept until advanced old age.  Her smile is bright beneath a big nose that sits elegantly on her face, but makes her self-conscious. “My nose, my nose,” she will cry when someone tries to take a photograph. And yet she allowed many photographs.

Ida Bernstein was a good catch. “When she walked down Rivington Street,” said my father, “people would add zeros to the amount Schmulka was going to give when she married.”       

“So what did he give you?” I asked my father.

His reply was, first, an eloquent shrug, as if to indicate: Counting zeroes was for other men.

Then he would say,  “Nothing. What did I need it for? I had a good business.”

And so he did, five short city blocks away on Eldridge near Delancey. He and his sister and brother had built up a trade in paper bags and stationary supplies which they wholesaled to “the smallest of the small.”  That is the hundreds of mom and pop groceries, pharmacies, candy stores, dry cleaners, and liquor stores that lined and still line the streets of the five boroughs.

  ***

After their honeymoon, a second bed plus a nightstand were added to my mother’s bedroom and this was their private space in the six room apartment with Bubbie and Zeide, on Rivington Street, across the street and up one flight of stairs from the butcher store. Within ten square city blocks lived and worked all their relatives and everyone from school that they knew.  And here, fifteen months later, I had my crib in the tiny front room next to their bigger one.

Five years passed this way. My mother stopped working because now I was her job.

Max walked to work every day and at noon his young wife, pushing the baby carriage, brought him a paper bag with home-made egg salad on a bulkie for lunch.  What could be better?

But Ida thought they should go forward to something more modern.  And so they moved to a four -room apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens, where my mother promptly became depressed from the isolation. Or as she described it, “A little blue. I couldn’t shake it. What had possessed me, I thought, to move to this God-forsaken Queens?”

***

                                               

Ida Abramowitz, nee Bernstein, didn’t get everything she wanted from life. Well, who does?   Her desires were not so very grand. A house, like each of her brothers and her sister had. A garden.

Once a week for ten years a realtor would pick her up in his station wagon and drive her to see houses for sale in the far neighborhoods of Queens – Jamaica, Bayside, Great Neck, even Laurelton. Money wasn’t the problem. There was enough money.

But Max was not handy and he hated driving in rush hour traffic. He was happy in an apartment building where you could call the superintendent if you needed something fixed.  He hated and feared banks.  Anything he purchased, including cars, and trucks for the business, he purchased with cash.

So my mother put her house and garden energy into houseplants in sunny apartment windows.  Her spider plants, ivies and philodendrons were the envy of others. She could cajole avocado and lychee pits to blossom into small indoor trees. Her final crop of these bowed under their own height, so that the front bedroom looked more forest than sleeping place.  We were all adults by then, so she had all the space she needed.

Ida loved fruit. As the God of Genesis hovered over the earthly waters wondering what to do next, so my mother hovered over ripening fruits, touching them lightly each day until she was sure they were at their juicy peak. Once, on the way to a family picnic on Long Island she made my father turn the car around and go home because she had forgotten to pack the avocado that had, that morning, attained perfection. 

She was a faithful synagogue-goer, she was literate in Jewish liturgy. But her appreciation of life’s gifts shone strongest exactly here, at her kitchen table, among her carefully sliced and presented, flawlessly succulent, peaches, apricots and plums.

***

Fifteen years after our move to Jackson Heights, the drapes are drawn in the middle of the day in the master bedroom. There in the semi-darkness my mother the good daughter, the sweet, the nice, lies on her bed weeping. No one has died.

But, “Michele has done a terrible thing,” she tells my sister, age fifteen, who is holding her hand, who describes this scene to me years later.

I have moved into the East Village and proceeded to a City Hall marriage with a graduate student in film at Columbia University.  He is not Jewish. He’s not a practicing Christian either, he’s actually thinking of becoming a Buddhist, but that’s not the point.

In 1964, less than five per cent of Jewish women married outside the group. A demographic I didn’t know at the time, not that it would have mattered. I did know that no one we knew had ever done it. I did know that I was causing great pain.

My mother was in her mid-forties at the time. Pretty, trim, commuting to Brooklyn College to finish her degree. Her family members were still her best friends.

Uncle Murray shouted, “Michele will never set foot in my home again.”

Aunt Yetta tsked and sighed. Ida never could be firm with me.

My father shook his head. From me he had for a long time expected nothing good.

***

That first husband and I parted ways about two years later. After that, for about another two years, I wandered from New York to Chicago and California, to Washington DC and back to New York. Finally, I arrived in the Boston area, got involved in the early women’s movement, met a man I wanted, stayed put. What can I say? The years were longer then.

When, more than a decade later I married this same man, also not Jewish, also a City Hall wedding, my parents sent a bottle of champagne, the real stuff from France, Dom Perignon.

Perhaps because so many years had passed, perhaps because I was pregnant, perhaps because this second husband was a much better person than the first, perhaps for all these reasons, my mother Ida Abramowitz, at age fifty-nine, finally stood up for herself and me, despite the family critics.

“This must be what Michele wants,” she declared. “She’s been with him for ten years.”