She was a child, really
with long blond hair
and a fist raised
Laced up work boots
faded patched jeans
and a tie-dyed tee shirt
1-2-3-4
We don’t want your
f----ing war
A boyfriend with a mustache
and curly brown hair
scraggling around his ears
Carrying a camera to record
the police in helmeted riot gear
wielding their batons
Not seeing then that
they were different
because they had choices
and a safety net behind them.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
Grandma Bessie
My grandmother, Bessie met her husband, Isaac when she was a child. Together they left their Lithuanian shtetl, Ushpol when they were teenagers. Ushpol was 180 miles north of Vilna. I try to imagine what it was like for them to leave their parents, grandparents and multiple siblings. I think about Bessie’s guts. She was such a small woman with a bun carefully pinned on top of her head. I remember wondering if I could ever measure up. When I was eighteen, I’d take the subway to her apartment and listen to her stories over cups of milk tea. She drank her tea with a cube of sugar dissolving between her teeth.
From the shtetl, Bessie and Isaac went to Baden Baden, Germany where they hand-rolled cigarettes to make enough money to sail steerage on the SS Friesland from Hamburg. I guess they were there for a while. By the time they set sail, they had a toddler daughter, Mary and were expecting another baby, Ben.
Cousins in Boston welcomed them in the summer of 1906. I didn’t realize then that I should have asked her how she felt during those early days when she was home alone with Mary trying to teach herself English in a strange land while her husband worked at a tobacco store. With Isaac’s experience rolling cigarettes in Germany, picking up the same business in Chelsea, Massachusetts made a lot of sense. Meanwhile Bessie figured out English words by scanning the American newspapers. She taught her husband how to read and speak their new language. I marvel at her intelligence and her resourcefulness and wonder if she was lonely. Did she have neighbors and relatives who could empathize with her challenges?
In her nineties, Bessie’s memory understandably became confused. She mixed up fleeing the pogroms and the fiery torches that could decimate a village with the great Chelsea fire of 1908. Both were terrifying events in her family’s history. The pogroms prompted her to leave Ushpol while the Chelsea conflagration destroyed her home and sent her family to a different part of Boston, the West End.
While expanding their family to include five children, Bessie and Isaac migrated from the West End to the North End to Revere to Malden to Charlestown. Isaac was always looking for work as a merchant. When cigarettes could be rolled by machine, he began to measure yard goods in fabric stores. Eventually Bessie worked by Isaac’s side in several variety stores. Over the years, her children have joked that she was more of a professional woman than a housekeeper. Yet I can picture her presiding over her Seder table made up of multiple folding tables attached to her dining room table. This giant table began at her kitchen door and extended to the sills of her living room windows. It was covered with white lace cloths that were pieced together.
Pregnant with my first son, Aron, I recall eating candied carrots while sitting across from Bessie at her kitchen table. It was an autumn afternoon and the waning sun beamed shadows on her curtains. Always retaining her Yiddish accent, she exclaimed: “You have a golden a belly!” She spoke with a sparkle in her eyes and a smile that lit up her whole face. I can feel my shoes brushing her linoleum as I lean back in my chair and listen to her stories that were often sprinkled with her political views and her firm belief that we should always vote and never take that right for granted.
From the shtetl, Bessie and Isaac went to Baden Baden, Germany where they hand-rolled cigarettes to make enough money to sail steerage on the SS Friesland from Hamburg. I guess they were there for a while. By the time they set sail, they had a toddler daughter, Mary and were expecting another baby, Ben.
Cousins in Boston welcomed them in the summer of 1906. I didn’t realize then that I should have asked her how she felt during those early days when she was home alone with Mary trying to teach herself English in a strange land while her husband worked at a tobacco store. With Isaac’s experience rolling cigarettes in Germany, picking up the same business in Chelsea, Massachusetts made a lot of sense. Meanwhile Bessie figured out English words by scanning the American newspapers. She taught her husband how to read and speak their new language. I marvel at her intelligence and her resourcefulness and wonder if she was lonely. Did she have neighbors and relatives who could empathize with her challenges?
In her nineties, Bessie’s memory understandably became confused. She mixed up fleeing the pogroms and the fiery torches that could decimate a village with the great Chelsea fire of 1908. Both were terrifying events in her family’s history. The pogroms prompted her to leave Ushpol while the Chelsea conflagration destroyed her home and sent her family to a different part of Boston, the West End.
While expanding their family to include five children, Bessie and Isaac migrated from the West End to the North End to Revere to Malden to Charlestown. Isaac was always looking for work as a merchant. When cigarettes could be rolled by machine, he began to measure yard goods in fabric stores. Eventually Bessie worked by Isaac’s side in several variety stores. Over the years, her children have joked that she was more of a professional woman than a housekeeper. Yet I can picture her presiding over her Seder table made up of multiple folding tables attached to her dining room table. This giant table began at her kitchen door and extended to the sills of her living room windows. It was covered with white lace cloths that were pieced together.
Pregnant with my first son, Aron, I recall eating candied carrots while sitting across from Bessie at her kitchen table. It was an autumn afternoon and the waning sun beamed shadows on her curtains. Always retaining her Yiddish accent, she exclaimed: “You have a golden a belly!” She spoke with a sparkle in her eyes and a smile that lit up her whole face. I can feel my shoes brushing her linoleum as I lean back in my chair and listen to her stories that were often sprinkled with her political views and her firm belief that we should always vote and never take that right for granted.
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