Everything Modern

The oldest and, for over a decade, the only daughter in the family, Aunt Yetta was born Ita in Bialystok, Poland in l909 and arrived with her mother, and older brother at Ellis Island on July 24, l912.   Defined by her determination to make the most of every opportunity, if she were alive today she'd stand up and shout with the chorus in the musical Hamilton: "Immigrants! We get the job done!"

She was a geographic pioneer within the family. When no one else had traveled north of Houston Street, she found her way uptown to the Museum of Modern Art, the Met and the best stores, Saks and Lord & Taylor.  Later, she took my mother, Ida, eleven years younger, and temperamentally more timid, to visit these wonders of the larger city, even and including the giant Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center.  True, it was a Christian symbol, true their Yiddish speaking mother spit when anything goyisch was mentioned, but still, that tree was a marvel!

At a time – the 1930s - when only 12% of American women went on to post-secondary education, Yetta graduated from The New York Training School for Teachers in Manhattan and began her forty year elementary school teaching career.

 “Everyone learns to read in my classroom,” she once told me.  And I imagined her squeezed into one of those miniature chairs next to a struggling first grader, willing that child to link those letters into words.

She made it okay for my more obedient mother to walk the cultural tightrope between exploration and observance.   On balmy Shabes afternoons when the praying and lunching was complete, the two dutiful daughters would together wash, dry and put away the dishes. Then Yetta would announce that she and Morris, her fiancé, and my mother were going for a walk.  And they did walk, but only as far as the Loew’s Delancey movie theater, about six blocks. There they would catch the Saturday double feature; first glancing left and right as they paid their money to make sure no one they knew was passing by. 

Yetta wanted everything modern. Her wedding photos featured only the bridal couple in large and wallet-sized; none of those old-fashioned eight by tens with the whole family in a formal sitting. Modern was the married pair, she is resting against him, a three-quarter portrait, their eyes facing forward into a future they will make their own.

Later she and Morris had two daughters, a house in the neighborhood of Lake Success (really!) in Great Neck, a lawn immaculately mowed, a charcoal grill in the backyard, a dog that didn’t shed. Her girls attended summer camp yearly for eight weeks, so (she hoped) they would grow up to love the woods and nature like real American children (they didn’t).

She was short, unfashionably stocky, outspoken.  She disdained the worn or the used.  One day, when we were both visiting downtown, she said, “Come, I’ll take you clothes shopping.”

           

I had just become a beatnik and dressed mostly in black. 

           

Nevertheless, that day I chose a Scandinavian design in red and white, a heavy, wool sweater that zipped in front. I wore it often that spring, the following fall and the year after that.

           

Then we were downtown together again.   At a moment when I was trying to be particularly mature, I said, “You know Aunt Yetta, this is a great sweater. I wear it all the time.”

           

“You still have that?” She said, incredulous. “You should’ve had three more by now.”

Which sentence seemed to sum up her resolve to admire only the best which was always the newest. 

Yet she wasn't so modern than she abandoned Jewish life. Her home was kosher and she often attended Friday night or Saturday morning services. When adult Bat Mitzvahs became available at her synagogue, she signed right up. 

For those of you who don't know, for centuries the ritual of Bar Mitzvah or reading from the Torah scroll was reserved for males. Aunt Yetta getting Bat Mitzvah meant defying an ancient taboo and months of studying from the Bible in the original Hebrew. Few Jewish women of her generation were willing to take this on. 

Dutiful always, she visited her parents, our grandparents, every weekday because she taught in a nearby school and, with my mother, watched over them as they grew frail.

           

The last time we saw her was in Connecticut at my sister’s house- warming, a hot Sunday afternoon in mid-summer.  Her gift was an ornamental cherry sapling. It looked like a long, naked stick to which a pink bow had been added to inspire confidence.   She was eighty-three, with shortness of breath.  Her heart surgery was scheduled for the following week.

           

“Well, Ida” she said to my mother with a smile, “Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we may die.”

My mother didn’t smile back.  Except for us, her immediate family, there was no one she loved more than her big sister.  Black humor never made sense to her. Bad was bad and no jokes about it. 

The surgery was a failure.  Yetta never regained consciousness.

             

But that unpromising sprig of an ornamental cherry has thrived.  Each spring its flowers and fruit grow thicker and more vibrant. We call it Yetta’s Tree.

           

           

.