This is Rose, my maternal grandmother. She’s holding her third son, my uncle Harold. Grandma had eight live births and as many as five miscarriages. Three of her children died, one at two, another as an infant and the last at age ten. The latter two died within six months of each other. She once miscarried outside in the snow, in front of her apartment building.
Her husband was my grandfather Sam. He’d been married in his early teens to a deaf mute girl with whom he had one son, Benny. Ultimately that first marriage was annulled. Subsequently he married my grandmother who’d moved in with his family after her mother died. Her father had remarried and his new wife wasn’t fond of Rose. My grandfather’s parents, her aunt and uncle took her in, and soon after, Rose married Sam. Yes. My grandparents were first cousins.
They lived in a town of several thousand residents called Wyszkowa, Poland, not far from Warsaw. About half the citizens were Jewish. An uneasy friction existed between them and the rest of their community. I know that my grandma’s father was a tinsmith who at one point worked on the roof of the tsar’s summer palace. So he was a skilled laborer. But most of their friends and neighbors were scratching out a living and were essentially poor. Frequently Cossacks raided their town and my great grandparents dug a deep hole in the ground where they hid their daughters to protect them from assault and rape. My grandparents, along with my grandmother’s siblings, all wanted to go to America to begin a new life.
Sam left Poland in 1913 when he was nineteen years old. He and Rose had an infant son. He hoped to send for my grandmother, his son Benny and their boy Robert quickly, after he found a job. But World War I intervened. My grandmother stayed in Poland for seven more years. Their baby Robert died of pneumonia during the war. Rose and Benny survived. She finally made her passage to the United States on the SS Rotterdam in 1920.
I’ve often thought of what she must have felt on that journey. Her baby was dead. She hadn’t seen her husband in seven years. She was packed into steerage with what was undoubtedly a wide and confusing array of unknown travel companions. She spoke no English. She was illiterate. She grew up in a society that, like many, viewed women as second-class citizens. Being Jewish, she was accustomed to being treated as other, with great prejudice. But like so many before her, she stepped off into the unknown, equipped with her native intelligence, a good deal of superstition and no idea what the future held.
Seven years is a long time to be apart. My grandfather, although not particularly attractive, was evidently a ladies’ man. That meant little in terms of his marriage. My grandmother became pregnant almost immediately and spent the next decade and a half conceiving. While not caring for her babies, her primary occupation was cleaning and cooking. She was masterful at both those tasks, much more so than parenting. Her life experiences eroded her emotionally and the sustenance she provided her children lacked a strong emotional component. My mother often said she couldn’t remember her mother ever saying that she loved her. Rather, as the only surviving female child, she became my grandmother’s unwilling accomplice in making sure that the house was so clean, you could “eat off the floors.” The ability to cook was the legacy which benefited those of us in subsequent generations.
While she walked her challenging road, grandma learned to speak English, albeit with errors. I remember her saying she needed to get a description filled at the drugstore. Minor and entertaining mistakes. She paid attention to politics. All her sons were soldiers in World War II and her youngest son went to Korea. The family members left behind in Poland all vanished in the holocaust. My mother remembered a frequent exchange of letters between my grandfather and their relatives prior to 1940. They were written in pidgin Yiddish and my grandparents would enclose one or two dollars in those sent back home. During the war, all communications ceased.