Areas of Unrest

14 May 2000 - All About My Mother

QOTD: "People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves." - Albert Camus

Reading: Mary Daheim, Bantam of the Opera

Listening to: Cats & Jammers, Too Close For Comfort

My performance last night went okay, but I am wondering something. Why is it that when there is nobody preserving my storytelling for posterity, I can be letter perfect, but if I am being recorded or videotaped, I inevitably flub something? In this case, I fumbled over the word "concert." I started to say "conference" instead and for a second just could not think of the right word. The audience didn't seem to care though at the very least Greg noticed because I talked to him about it afterwards. (I brought it up; he would never mention something like that first.) Oh well, at least I recovered reasonably well.

Today being mother's day, I thought I'd list some random factoids about my maternal ancestry. I was once at some workshop or other in which women were instructed to introduce ourselves by stating our names with the names of our female ancestors. Thus, I am Miriam, the daughter of Beatrice, the daughter of Lili, the daughter of Molly, the daughter of Bina.

Nobody know whose daughter Bina was. I don't mean that it's forgotten, but that nobody ever knew, at least officially. The family story is that she was a foundling, left in a basket on the steps of the synagogue. My guess is that she was illegitimate and that people did know because they would know in a small community.

I don't really know a lot about my great-grandmother. I've seen photos of her and she's really a rather non-descript elderly woman in them, undistinguishable from any of the thousands of other Eastern European women who came to New York around the time of the Russian revolution. I remember hearing a story about the family leaving via Siberia and China, because of connections my great-grandfather had in the silk trade, but my mother denies ever telling me this and my brother says I must have imagined it. But I do have a necklace of hers from China, bronze, enameled with black lacquer. And we had a pair of bamboo fans from China as well, though I sold one of them at a garage sale before my mother decided that I shouldn't have, so there's just one left. I also have her silver thimble, inlaid with marcasites, and my mother has some other marcasite jewelry of hers and a pair of her eyeglasses. The most memorable story about her has to do with the voyage to America. Religious Jewish women cover their hair; in some cases, they shave their hair off (or cut it very short) and wear a wig, called a "sheitel" in Yiddish. Apparently, Molly secretly let her hair grow under her sheitel as soon as the family had decided to go to America. In the middle of the ocean, she threw her sheitel overboard - and told everybody else it had blown away. She wrote to her parents that she'd lost it and had loved that sheitel so much that she couldn't dream of getting another one. In the photos I've seen, her hair is long and (presumably) her own.

I did know my grandmother a little, though not well as I was only 9 or 10 when she died. She was always called Lili, but Lillian was her middle name and her first name was actually Esther. I remember her as very old, slow-moving, and fussy. She was always cooking, whether it was an entire meal at my grandparents' apartment or just a pot of soup in the back of grandpa's shop. Now I wish I'd known her in better health. Her fading vision must have been a particular torture since she had worked as a dress designer. (It is always said that way to emphasize she was no common seamstress.) I've seen several photos of her in dresses she made and it's always hard for me to reconcile the glamorous woman in the pictures with the grandmother I knew. The best story about her is about how she met my grandfather. She was engaged to a man in New York and found out he had false teeth. She wanted to break off the engagement right away, but a friend persuaded her to take a vacation and think about it. She went to Cuba, met my grandfather (either on the ship there or because he lived next door to the friends of friends she stayed with in Havana), mailed her engagement ring back to the guy in New York and married my grandfather two weeks later. It wasn't until she was pregnant with my mother that she reconciled with her family and brought her husband to New York. (She had already had a son who hadn't survived and is buried in Havana. And she didn't want to go through another pregnancy in the tropical heat.)

And then there is my mother. Officially, she is Beatrice and my father usually called her that, but most people call her Bea. My brother and I use either "Ma" or "Mom" but never "Mother" or "Mommy." I couldn't think of a single cute story about her, so I think a list of random factoids is in order, instead.

• She is not very domestic, in general. She used to come into my bedroom and write "dust me" on the furniture, in hopes that I would do it. I can cook just like her merely by buying the same brands of frozen food and making dishes "just like Mom used to thaw". She will deny this if asked.

• She is definitely a packrat. She has the largest collection of half-used rolls of contact paper in the state of New York.

• She was glad when she began to need reading glasses because she's always thought she looked good in glasses.

• She is insane about cats and has one, despite being allergic. The cat is her excuse for not going away for more than a few days at a time.

• Her favorite authors include Lilian Jackson Braun, Rona Jaffe, and Harold Robbins. She also loves Reader's Digest. My brother and I insist we take after Dad.

• Most of her working life was as a secretary. She met my father while she worked as a secretary at the United Jewish Appeal. She was a real estate agent for a while and later sold Avon. When she went back to steady work, she got a secretarial job at a wholesale travel agency, which mostly arranged package tours for professional groups. Then she worked for a long time in the travel department at B'nai Brith, until they closed the New York travel office.

• Her fantasy vacation is to fly the Concorde to Europe, travel on the Orient Express, and return via the QE II. I've pointed out that she could do this if she really wanted to but she said "then I'd have nothing to look forward to."

• She didn't get a passport until she was in her late 30's, when my parents took a tour to Italy, Israel and Greece. In addition to at least three more trips to Israel, she's been to England, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland (all with my father). She went on a trip to "the Orient" (Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore and Tokyo) with her brother and has been on two Caribbean cruises. Her favorite place is Aruba because she likes the beaches and casinos. She is completely puzzled by my fondness for remote and uncomfortable parts of the world.

• She majored in archaeology in college, but dropped out when she was pregnant with my brother. He refuses to feel guilty about this, despite my best efforts.

• She always insisted she would go back to college after my brother and I were through. It's been 20 years since I graduated and, despite all of the times I've written away for brochures on her behalf, she comes up with excuses. In more recent years, I've tried to interest her in Elderhostel, but she's afraid she'd have to stay somewhere where she'd have to share a bathroom.

Every now and then, I do something and startle myself, screaming "help! I'm turning into my mother!" And then I stop and realize that there are much worse things to be.