No Tales To Tell

     

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.

        

Some twenty years ago, the youngest of us, Karen Bernstein Angel, collected the relevant paper documents - ship manifests, a record of detained aliens, census lists for 1920 and 1930, evidence of citizenship.  Zayde was 24 when he arrived in 1910 on the S. S. Amerika. He was held one night, until his brother David claimed him.  Their surname was then Dmocher. 

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.