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.”
