Roots

Three generations.  This is not the first time in my life when three generations of women lived together.  When I was growing up on Avenue K in Brooklyn, NY, my maternal grandmother, Freida (called Fanny) Halpern-Waltzer lived with us.  At the time, I didn’t realize what a privilege that was.  I knew it made my family different from other families because mostly everyone else had a mother and father and siblings but no grandparent living with them.  I didn’t fully appreciate the benefits I was getting like my grandma’s ancestral, delectable cooking- the mouthwatering knishes, perogies, rugglach and other flavorful treats she would create with those large but soft aged hands of hers.  Those hands told her history.

I can still picture Fanny Waltzer’s hands.  I had a fascination with those hands.

They were large, but gentle; strong, but soft; old, but new.  New- everytime I touched them- the velvety texture, the silky soft and loose wrinkled skin, revealing a snapshot of her past.  Cooking hands, crocheting hands, comforting hands.  They smelled of aromas from her baking and cooking, of sweetness and knowledge, of goodness and courage. I used to love to touch those hands.  I used to marvel at her long fingers that still held crochet needles and would expertly create a doily made from simple beige colored cotton yarn.  I still have a doily of hers sitting under a vase on my dresser in my bedroom, my mother has one under a lamp on her nightstand.  They are reminders of Fanny’s biography, roots from where all of the women in our family came from. 

There are many lovely stories of Fanny, ones told over and over again and occasionally, new ones that are told by my mother who sometimes surprises me with an account I have never heard before.  The one thing that remains constant in these stories is her beauty.  That beauty reaped rewards.  The first time was when she was a child, playing in the mountains of what we believed was Austria; although because the Jewish people were forced to move around so much and the borders changed, we cannot be sure.  She lived near a convent and caught the attention of the nuns who would watch her play.  Her hair was a dazzling shade of auburn and it highlighted her pretty face.  The nuns taught my grandma to crochet with flowers and showed her how to create wreaths to adorn her hair.  Knowing my great grandma, Esther, was poor and had many other children, the nuns came to her one day and asked if they could have Fanny to raise and take care of.  Esther’s response was I do not give my children away. 

The other time Fanny’s beauty caught someone’s attention was when my grandfather, Morris, saw her.  She was working for his uncle as a housekeeper.  It was love at first sight and after that, gave my grandfather reason to keep visiting his uncle to see the red-haired Freida; it was he who named her Fanny and lovingly called her Fanny-coo.  It is said that he visited so often and stayed so late that he would fall asleep on his way home in his horse and buggy.  Fortunately, the horse knew the trip so well that he would bring him safely back.  Morris intended to marry Fanny; however, he wanted to go to America first and get settled in order to give her a better life in the promised land.  And so, he left promising her he would send for her as soon as he was able. 

Fanny waited for her beloved Morris to make good on his pledge, and waited and waited.  Finally, she found a way to go to the promised land on her own. She was 22 years old.  She did not know how to read or write, but still, she left her home, her job as a housekeeper and Esther.  When she had recounted that life-changing event she would speak about hugging and kissing her mother goodbye with the sinking feeling that she would never see her again.  She did send for her eventually when she could afford a ticket, although, her fear did come true; Esther died of pneumonia before she could join her children in America. 

Fanny arrived on the ship, the Kroonland on August 25, 1903.  I found her passenger record on the Ellis Island website.  It was difficult to locate her because she gave her first name as Fanny, the name given to her by Morris, rather than her actual name of Freida.  There were 1814 other passengers on that ship.  I cannot even begin to imagine the courage that my grandmother could’ve had at that age to travel away from everything she knew to a life unknown, knowing she would never return or possibly see her mother again. She had told my mother that she was disappointed in America when she arrived.  She had expected the golden land, as many referred to it; however, living in the lower east side in tenements was anything but golden.  In the seventies, my mother took her to see the show Fiddler on the Roof, thinking it would bring back treasured memories but Fanny was unimpressed with the show.  I lived that, she had said, it wasn’t anything beautiful, it was difficult; I don’t need to be reminded.  The golden promise was that my determined grandmother reunited with my grandfather and they married and raised eight children- six sons and two daughters. They continued to be a loving couple and my grandfather always spoke about his Fanny-coo’s beauty saying men in barber shops would come out to the street mid-shave to watch her pass by.

Fanny Halpern-Waltzer never forgot her roots and her empathy for people less fortunate turned into acts of kindness that I will treasure always through the stories that continue to be her legacy.  The stories of how she fed the hobos in Scranton, Pennsylvania, who would come off the freight trains starving.  The story of how during the depression, a man knocked on the door of her home in Brooklyn and said he hadn’t eaten for days.  He wanted to do some odd jobs around the house to work for his meal.  Fanny insisted on feeding him first, telling him he needed strength to work.

And when I remember my grandmother’s hands, their softness will always remind me of her kindness and their strength will remind me of the pride she felt in who she was.  There are stories that speak that legacy as well.  The story of when her oldest son, Ruby, was a little boy and my grandmother overheard another boy call him a dirty Jew.  The words turned into a physical fight and my grandmother encouraged Ruby to fight back, which he did.  Eventually, Ruby became best friends with the boy, who grew up and went to Europe to become a priest.  When he returned, Fanny was the first one he blessed. 

I can only imagine what a wonderful woman Fanny was who touched someone’s life so, that he would bestow his first blessing upon her.  That is probably why I remember her hands the most when I think of her.  Because what are we if we don’t touch each other’s lives?  What are we if we don’t have the stories that make us who we are?  What are we if we are not part of a generation that thrives in its rich history and gives us a link to our past, present and future?  

Generation Three- Friday’s Child- Kimberly

Monday’s child is fair of face,

Tuesday’s child is full of grace,

Wednesday’s child is full of woe,

Thursday’s child has far to go,

Friday’s child is loving and giving,

Saturday’s child works hard for his living,

And the child that is born on the Sabbath day

Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay.

The first time I saw Kimberly was in a dream.  It was the night that I conceived her.  I remember being handed this perfect little baby with a round beautiful face and black hair.  I heard someone (I don’t know who) say, “Here’s your little girl, Elisa or Elissa.”  Nine months later, after being in false labor three times in July, on Friday, August 1^st, after Dr. Kliot and Karen, the midwife, shouted, “It’s a girl!”, they placed the exact same baby in my arms as in that dream.  This is the absolute truth and I stand behind it 100%.  The only thing is that I didn’t name her Elisa or Elissa.  At first we named her Cassandra and were going to call her Cassie, but then we changed her name to Kimberly and ended up calling her Kimmy.  She calls herself Kim. 

Kimberly, Kimmy, Kim.  My baby. The prettiest baby I ever saw.  Even Dr. Kliot said, “She’s a pretty little thing.”   Friday’s child- as the poem says…Friday’s child is loving and giving.  That would definitely describe Kimberly, now.  She is a very compassionate person.  She has the ability to understand the pain anyone else is going through.  She is also very sensitive and takes everything to heart. 

I very intentionally decided not to have a third child because I didn’t want Kim to have “middle child syndrome” like I had, or thought I had.  I wanted her to be special and always feel special.  That was particularly hard for Kimberly who had to live in the shadow of a very overpowering older sister, one whom she adored when she was very little, but grew to become very frustrated with many times as she was growing up. 

I had the opportunity to be a stay-at-home mom when Kimberly was born.  For two years.  They were probably two of the most rewarding years of my life.  Having a second child, you tend to pay more attention to the significance and magnificence of motherhood.  You’re not so afraid of every little hiccup or bump on the head.  You get to enjoy your baby much more because you’re a “pro”, sort of.  Lindsay would go off to school and I would stay home and enjoy my little baby.  I had arrived as a young mother; I was part of Mahjong games and carpools.  As Kimmy got older, at the end of the day, we would wait for Lindsay to be dropped off from the carpool and she would be giddy with excitement every single time her sister would walk up the stairs to our second floor apartment on East 98^th Street in Canarsie, Brooklyn.  “Sister, sister!!” she would call out with delight and they would hug as if they hadn’t seen each other in months.  It was the highlight of my day- my two little girls whom I adored, adoring each other. 

Naturally, much of the adoration turned to the typical sibling rivalry, as Kimberly realized that she was being upstaged, most of the time, by a sister who always had to be the center of attention.  And as loving and giving as Kimmy was, there was also another side to her….the “dark side” as we used to call it.  The side that emerged, just as a glimmer when she was just an infant, when she would cry for no apparent reason, except to scream her lungs out…for about 45 minutes, nonstop.  That screaming would eventually turn to temper tantrums where she would literally throw herself on the floor, even if it was a concrete sidewalk and bang her head on the ground.  People would ask me how she could do that without causing her own concussion and I would just respond with, “I guess she has a very hard head.”  Actually, she was literally and figuratively hard headed.  I have home movies to prove this if Kimberly ever refutes it, one very memorable one at Sesame Place, when she was two.  The head banging thankfully stopped, but tantrums and outbursts continued and would ultimately land her into her room for a “time-out”, when I would close her door and tell her to calm down.  However, before she would calm down, she would take out the rest of her anger by throwing all the clothes out of her drawers, pulling the lovely purple comforter and all the sheets off her bed, including the mattress pad, and destroy a toy or two.  When she was done, I would go into her room, and very calmly, but firmly ask, “Are you finished?” and she would mutter, exhaustedly…”Yes, mommy.” And I would say, “You know what you have to do now?”  “Yes, mommy.  I have to clean my room up,” she would answer, defeated.  And she did.  Every time.  Until, at some point, she must have realized she could have been doing much more productive and fun things than destroying her room and then cleaning it up.

When Kimberly was still a toddler, she also used to be a little too aggressive, as well.  Bees have stingers, porcupines have their quills, Kimberly  had a special defense weapon.  Her prey- mostly little toddler boys and occasionally, her sister.  It was a little scary.  Some kids are biters; Kimmy was a twist-pincher.  Many of my friends at the time who had toddler boys were afraid to let Kimberly play with their sons because she would hurt them, badly, with twist pinches that would leave behind ugly red marks and many tears.  This behavior almost got her expelled from nursery school, too.  It also got her to spend much of the day in school in the “punishment chair”.  I was exasperated with trying to control her outbursts and feared she would never have any friends.  I would take her away from the situation and she would cry, “I am “being haved” Mommy!”-her interpretation of “behaved”.  Finally, I bribed her with candy.  I would promise her a walk to the candy store- in those days we still had candy stores- and let her pick out one thing that she wanted if she was good in school.  When the bus arrived to drop her off, immediately as she was getting off, she would say, “I was a good girl today, Mommy, can we go to the store for candy, now?”  And as promised, we would walk up East 98^th Street and cross over Seaview Avenue to the candy store and she would usually pick out M&Ms.  I remember one time, while she was eating her M&Ms, I asked her what she did at school that day and she replied, “I played with Evan with blocks and sang songs and I sat in the punishment chair…”  Then she stopped, realizing what she just said and her eyes looked a little to the right and I took away her M&Ms.  Years later, though, she told me that she was put in the punishment chair that time for talking (really telling another child to be quiet while the teacher was talking).  Much to my relief, the twist pinching did stop and so did the tantrums.  So, it was sweets that made my Friday child live up to being “loving and giving”.  Maybe some child psychologists or even Dr. Phil would disagree with my approach; but it worked for us. 

Generation Two- The Middle- Me- Jean Alice

I was the second of four children born to Sylvia and George, also the middle girl of three, ergo; I was always referred to as “the middle one”.  This epithet often annoyed me.  I felt that I was incorrectly labeled, as there are actually two middle children if there are four children.  In any case, in many of my self-diagnosed, self-treated psychological breakthroughs, it led me to believe that I might have “middle child syndrome”.  Upon further investigation I found that I do not exhibit many of the characteristics of “middle child syndrome”, thank you very much, some of which include being a loner, a sense of not belonging, lacking ambition.  I always felt I was quite the opposite of the personality of a middle child, the antithesis, really.  If the middle child is deemed so because of being in the center, I used that fact to try to be the center of attention, most of the time. 

As far as “lacking ambition”, nothing could be farther from the truth.  My unbounded imagination allowed me to conjure up any possibility or impossibility for myself.  I only revealed one of my most extraordinary delusions of grandeur about six years ago on a business trip.  Naturally, I had a glass of wine or it might have been a martini- better known as truth serum for those who travel often and are bored of talking about work after hours.  I never told this to anyone before, not even my mother. 

It happened when I was very, very young, perhaps six or seven.  I grew up in a very non-Jewish neighborhood.  My best friend, Mary Ellen Toal, who lived next door was Irish Catholic.  I wanted to be just like her- don’t we all want to be like our first best friends?  She had a pudgy face and short, thin brown hair and always smiled.  She went to Catholic school and got to wear a uniform every day- a plaid skirt with a white tailored shirt and blue vest.  I wanted to go to Catholic School, too, but of course I couldn’t, for obvious reasons.  However, my mother did allow me to go to church with Mary Ellen and her mother Genevieve, on Sundays.  Genevieve used to separate us because we would giggle during mass, but I still loved being in Church.  I loved the wooden pews, the stained glass windows, the towering ceiling which held within it an echoing hum, above our heads.  I never understood why I was just a visitor and didn’t really belong (could that have been a bit of middle child syndrome?).  One day, when my mother was cooking dinner, I asked her as she bent over the opened oven door, “What does it mean to be Jewish?”  We really were not practicing Jews at the time.  Of course, my grandmother lived with us and she ate kosher food and cooked and baked all these delicious ethnic Jewish dishes.  But that was as far as my Jewish identity disclosed besides for being the only people on my block who couldn’t celebrate Christmas and were granted the “consolation prize “of Chanukah.   What does it mean to be Jewish?

My mother looked at me as she basted the roast beef– “What do you mean?”  “I mean, what makes us different from Mary Ellen and her family?” I demanded.  “Well,” my mother answered, as if she had it rehearsed. “Mary Ellen and her family and other Catholic and Christian people believe the messiah has come.  We don’t believe the messiah has come.  We are still waiting for the messiah.”  And that was it in a nutshell.  I pressed further though.  “So who is the messiah?” I continued.  “We don’t know.  It could be anybody,” my mother responded and with that, went back to basting her roast. 

I went back to my boundless imagination, just like any other 6 or 7 year old.  And for about a week, I believed, I truly believed I could be the messiah.  At one point, I was almost sure of it.  I walked around, feeling very self-important, waiting for people to notice me and my self-proclaimed possible role in being the leader of the Jewish people.  I don’t know why I gave up on it, maybe because the attention span of any 6 or 7 year old is limited or more probably because it was apparent to me that nobody saw a big halo-y glow around my head that signified I was the messiah.  Possibly because I really still didn't quite comprehend what it means to be a messiah and was not quite ready for the demands it might imply.  Who knows?   I just remember that it was a short-lived, although larger-than-life fantasy of mine, one of many, fantastic illusions I conjured up in my formative years.  And maybe knowing it was a bit preposterous, I kept it to myself, until I was having dinner on a business trip, with my boss at the time, Ann, and one of our clients, Myra, who both thought it was rather amusing.  As a matter of fact, for a while after that, Ann used to refer to me, facetiously, as the messiah.

So that’s me- designated middle child and messiah want-to be.  Upon further research, I did discover that one of the best careers for middle children is to pursue something that would use their creativity, perhaps as a writer or journalist. Coincidently, as a middle-aged woman, that’s just where I am right now, so my birth order might be more significant than I considered.  It is ironic that in this blog of three generations- my place is in the middle. 

Generation One- The Beginning- Sylvia

Sylvia Waltzer, my mother, was born on November 5, 1923 in Scranton, Pennsylvania.  I always thought that Scranton made my mother more distinct than most other mothers and I will always mention that fact about her, even though she only spent the first four years of her life there.  I seldom mention that she was the youngest of eight children born to Fanny and Morris Waltzer, one of two daughters and six sons, even though that is unique, too.  I also rarely tell that the doctor who delivered her was Dr. Milkman and supposedly he did deliver milk while attending medical school.  My aunt, Dorothy, who was seven at the time, even said that the baby looked like Dr. Milkman.  This always reminded me of the old joke, the baby looks nothing like the father, better ask the wife about the milkman.  That fact about my mother is a bit implausible, although true. 

I remember the first time my family traveled to Scranton, my mother’s place of birth, to attend the bar mitzvah of her cousin Ruthie’s son.  We visited the house at 816 Marion Street, where my mother was born, the house she spent the first four years of her life.  She stood in front of it for a picture.  That picture is somewhere amidst hundreds of other disorganized photos stored in one of numerous boxes and sometimes I come across it when we dig through those boxes. 

My mother, the lady who has a thousand stories to tell about her life- the kinds of stories I can hear over and over again.  And then, when I think I’ve heard them all, there’s always another story I’ve never heard before that she surprises me with.  One of my favorites is when she lived in Scranton and my aunt, Dorothy and her friend, Gertie Schleis, decided they wanted to run away from home to make movies in Hollywood.  At that time, there were only silent films made, but apparently, the lure of Hollywood was as appealing as it is now.  My mother was a baby, maybe three or two and my aunt, who was nine or ten at the time, packed her clothes and my mother’s, too, because she used to watch her all day while my grandma was very busy with other chores.  She figured she had to take her baby sister along.  I consider that very noble and unselfish of my aunt, who even though was pursuing an acting career, would continue to be responsible as a big sister.  

So, the plan was that they were all taking the freight train, which ran a couple of blocks from Marion Street.  They figured they could hop the freight train just like all the hobos who would come off of it from time to time whom my grandmother would feed; maybe that’s why she was too busy to take care of my mother.  Of course, my mother had no say in the matter– she was just the extra baggage.  Anyway, my grandmother became suspicious when she went to look for a dress to iron for my mother and found that all the dresses were mysteriously gone and that her iron was ruined.  Dorothy had evidently ironed all my mother’s dresses to pack and left the iron plugged in.  It was Mrs. Schleis, Gertie’s mother, who found out about the great escape and called my grandma, thus revealing the mystery of the dresses and the iron.  Gertie, Dorothy and Sylvia didn’t get very far.  Mrs. Schleis was very angry, but my grandma laughed it off; however, she wasn’t too happy about her iron.  

Even though my mother didn’t get to Tinseltown; her small-town girl days ended when the Waltzer family moved to New York when she was four.  All my uncles were musicians and my grandparents figured the best place to be was New York City, where their sons often worked.  My grandfather, who had a window cleaning business, concluded he could clean windows in New York just as easily as in Scranton.  They moved to East 92^nd Street in Brooklyn, first, renting in a two-family house owned by a Mrs. Fader, probably the first person my mother knew didn’t like her.  Mrs. Fader kept insisting that when my mother would go down the stairs, she would touch and soil the curtains on the window of the door and complain to my grandmother.  My mother swears to this day that she never touched those curtains and that her hands weren’t even dirty.  

Sylvia missed Scranton terribly.  She didn’t have any friends, the streets were too big and too noisy, she was just not happy.  Soon after, my grandfather bought a house on East 52^nd Street, between Tilden Avenue and Beverly Road.  That would be the house that Sylvia grew up in.  That’s also the house where many of my cousins lived in, where there were always relatives and friends visiting.  There were even a few weddings there. It was a very busy house. There was always room for anybody.  Legend has it that even the famous playwright, Arthur Miller, came once, a friend of my mother’s cousin, Oscar Saul, who was also a writer.

East 52^nd Street, the Waltzer home- the setting where many of my mother’s famous stories took place.  There is a black and white picture of me in the backyard, when I was very little, 2 perhaps.  That’s the only proof I have that I was once there, although, I do not remember at all. 

My mother grew from little girl to teenager to a young woman in that house on East 52^nd Street.  That’s where she played with her dolls, all of which she named Alice.  My grandfather’s partner and cousin, Joe White, had a daughter named Alice.  She had jet black hair and was beautiful; my mother was in awe of her and so she named all her dolls after her.  My middle name is Alice.  I always think of my mother’s dolls when I think of my middle name.