Bomb'n Belle

An example of WWII-era plane art! From Sarge's archives.

Note: I have posted this photo before, of Sarge's dear cousin Andrew, and thought it was a fitting re-post for today's Sepia Saturday theme. Andrew, a Technical Sergeant in the U.S. Army Air Corps (later became the Air Force), circa 1944. Rattlesden RAF Airfield, England. The plane with the wonderful art, a B-17 G, was later shot down over Belgium, although the pilot survived.

Tsu Zetik far Maydelehs (Too Rich for Little Girls)

"...And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot"

My grandmother and a chicken: as was the wont of that generation, no bit went unexploited. Chewy heart, tender liver--fried with onions, the smell of it hot and golden. Neck--boiled in a soup, the bone like a strand of coral pieces, sucked, industriously, for every last hiding morsel. The carcass--picked smooth.

And the fat. The fat had its own calling: to become grebenes, the cracklings. My grandma offered me and my sister just one little irregular bit apiece. I don't remember the texture or the taste, or whether I liked it, but I like to think I did.

Grandma Eva's Jewish cookbook, on my bookshelf now, worn to fragments

a recipe for chicken fat cracklings, should you want to make them

for more memory posts, visit the Sepia Saturday blog

Unstoppered

Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours...

Since the beginning of time

(or let me not exaggerate, since Eva first knew Maxie)

there was the bottle on the dresser.

My grandfather didn't believe in doing things by half-measures, and it was real perfume, not cologne. Like the fabled bolt of cloth, it would never run out, for no sooner did my grandmother apply the last precious drop to her skin, than a new bottle would appear nested in its blue velvet box with looping gilt writing: Shalimar.

I remember standing by that dresser, a little girl much too young for ablutions designed to seduce, tilting my head back, exposing my own soft neck like a vampire's girlfriend waiting for the bite...or in this case, grandma's fingertip dabbing the potion...

(I'm making this part up, for my usually generous grandma Eva was decidedly miserly when it came to sharing this gift, and so I never got the chance to wear it, and to smell like her)

So the bottle sat, unshared, sapphire stoppered, lightly signalling, in diffuse sunlight and lamplight, its private message: something I couldn't decipher at the time, a romantic love between two old people, who had once themselves been young. Mouth to neck, inhaling the scent...for why would such a gesture cease with age? After the children, ten thousand nights in the big bed, the mountains and deep shadowed valleys of years and years together, the private jokes and whispers, love letters re-read?

Now I know it all, and none of it: the idea of a love of decades, but not the secrets in the bottle, the letters, the Yiddish whispers, the bedroom after the door closed.

There was always a look that passed between them, not meant for children to see, a glance that contained, like a password to an arcane mystery religion, the whole ancient hidden meaning of love itself.






For more remembering, visit the Sepia Saturday blog

Emilia Romatowska

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

I woke to the memory of a name: Emilia Romatowska. Sometimes it comes to you this way, sudden and contextless as the scent of salt on the wind when you are not near any ocean.

The scene followed in a rush of detail. Curled up in the big leather armchair in my grandparents' formal parlor, hugging my knees, downcast over a romantic reversal. I'm fifteen. My grandfather Max listens to my story and counters with one of his own. The name of my heartache is long gone now, but the name of his remains: Emilia Romatowska.

She was dark-haired and dark-eyed, he tells me, a real beauty. A heartbreaker, I loved her once. But alas, he says, it wasn't in the stars for us. Good thing too or you wouldn't be here!

Is is not in the details that I find comfort--of his days working at great-grandpa Benjamin's tailor shop in Brooklyn, long evenings of night school, fortuitous hours that yielded the prize of Emilia, of the girl and her pretty ways, how he took so boldly her young immigrant hand--not so much in these details, but in the telling itself. He says her name again and there is a note in his voice, a certain delight in the tale of his downfall, as if he has just unwrapped a caramel, and eaten it, and his mouth is still full of the taste.

Sixty years after the fact, there is a fresh feel to it--the hunt, notes passed and walks taken, a pleasant yearning, the very loss of love itself--even at fifteen, I hear my grandfather's words, see his smile (half rueful, half wry, no part sad), and am reeling from sudden epiphany: these old pangs are what keeps one really alive.

p.s. don't forget to check out more Sepia Saturday posts HERE

Liba

By the time I met Liba, she was no longer the girl with the huge dimpled smile and dark tangled hair. She was Great-Aunt Libby, teeny-tiny and very very old. Libby had always been a fine seamstress, and in her 90s, nearly blind, she continued to sew, though in the end her creations ran less to fine fitted garments. My sister and I treasured the collection of simple elastic-gathered little skirts she sent us in frequent batches. What she lacked in fine motor coordination and eyesight, she made up for in choice of fabric--wild, busy, bright and sometimes startling. My most favorite Aunt Libby skirt was of improbably plush faux-leopard skin. I study the clothes in these pictures now, see how stylish and whimsical she was once, and I can imagine that she knew, even in extreme old age, just what would bring delight.





No doubt about it, she was a grand girl. I notice now, too, how there is something about her expression: a passing shadow, a quality of secrecy, common to all the Pollack family; though possibly you wouldn't see it, unless you knew to look.





find more links to wonderful Sepia Saturday reminiscences here.

Baby Carriage

Mom in the baby carriage, 1945

click to enlarge

I played sometimes on the fifth floor of the Castle, high above the streets of Brooklyn, in the old servants' quarters.

Sometimes I lit a ghost fire in the long-unused fireplace there, kneeling at the marble hearth to warm myself in its phantom flames.

I peeked into the bathroom, at the enormous claw-foot tub under a steeply slanting ceiling, or into the china storage room, where I liked to imagine the sound of dinner parties, the laughter and conversation, the clink of glass against glass.

I would dare myself to enter the trunk room, a dark interior closet filled with the luggage of long-ago trips--many steamer trunks, their brass fittings blinking in the sudden light.

And it was there I discovered the derelict baby carriage, and filled it with the toys of another childhood, and tended them: the celluloid-faced Humpty-Dumpty, his stripy legs uselessly dangling; the dusty Steiff dogs, a Boxer and an Airedale; the naked baby doll, its two tiny pearly teeth and eyes that opened and shut, eerily, on clever hinges...

Somber Little Faces

As noted in that funny old-fashioned hand on the back of the photo, this is my grandma Eva by her sister Honey in the fancy stroller, their older brother Simon (from whom I get my middle name, Simone), so protective behind them.

What strikes me is the formality of the children. The white fur and black astrakhan, the bonnets, the embellished hat: in contrast to the modern babies I see, in cotton onesies and bare toes, these children are stiff and overdressed, their expressions serious, worried and a little melancholy.

In his grown-up life, though, Uncle Simon was a kind and garrulous man, generous and funny. My mother remembers him bringing a huge strong-smelling salami, in its casing, often when he came for dinner, and one memorable time, a whole bag of candy-store malted milk balls scooped and measured just for mom...

A Letter Home

In August 1945, my dear aunt Abby Rachel was five years old, living in Brooklyn on Clinton Street with my infant mother and her parents, Eva and Max. In France, Uncle Harold waited for those official orders that would bring him home again. I believe that the waiting was, for him, not without its ambivalence, for the War had been something of an adventure for that Brooklyn boy, showing him the wider world, a new language, another culture.

But wait he did, for what other choice was there, really? The war had ended, the terrible monster vanquished, and his family wanted him home, so homeward he would eventually travel, not war-weary like many, but rather enlivened, and alive in all the true meaning of that word.

With nothing much to do in the army camp (save, apparently, nap, chat, and eat ice cream), he wrote a letter, now a family treasure, to his niece Abby:

(Abby Rachel Pollack, 1940-2001; Harold Pollack, 1916-2004. May their memory forever be a blessing...)

...and please do take a look at the other wonderful entries for Sepia Saturday...

Cousin Sam, Head Cashier

Sam Kisberg, the stuff of small family legend, was a cousin of my great-grandmother Katie Littwin (nee Kisberg).

In his middle age, he lived with Great-grandma Katie in her big boarding house on Ocean Parkway. My mom describes his room as so tiny, overlooking the railroad tracks, furnished with nothing but a bed, a dresser, and a little bookshelf. It smelled of soap; she says he was the cleanest person she ever met. Sometimes she would peek in his drawers just to marvel at how perfectly folded and glowing white his undershirts were.

Sam was the the head cashier at the famous NYC institution, Keen's Steakhouse:

Every Thursday, he came for dinner at my Grandma Eva's, bringing treats from the Steakhouse as a hospitality offering. The Steakhouse staff was allowed to leave work each evening with the best leftovers from that night's dinner seating. Sam would arrive at grandma's house with single portions of cherry cheesecake and brownies. Mom tells me the cake slices would often have a single bite off their pointy ends. Grandpa Max found this shocking, disgusting, and would rail against Sam for his gauche beggarly habits. But Grandma Eva would always whisk the cheesecake into the kitchen and cut off the offending bitten end, whispering to mom "shhh...don't tell daddy..."

Sam brought the dessert on Keen's china, blue and white sturdy Willow-ware plates. The family took to calling this china "Samware," and as a child I would often venture into the little attic room that housed the dishes no longer in frequent rotation, and stare at the hundreds of little Samware dessert plates, neatly stacked in the glassed cupboards...for nothing was ever thrown away in Grandma's house...

He brought, too, from time to time, the white ceramic smoking pipes for which Keen's was famous. Symbols of manly opulence just out of reach, for Sam himself, that soapy-clean Russian immigrant in the tiny room overlooking the train tracks, was a servant, an onlooker, possibly envious, possibly wistful. I'm certain he would have liked to join the ruddy crowds of men in their loud, laughing, drunken steak dinners.

Instead, he made his quiet livelihood behind the cash register, consoling himself with the ill-gotten souvenirs of half-eaten cake and plates and pipes...

The famous Keen's pipes

Servers and staff at Keen's Steakhouse

Tsaddik

This is Andrew. The husband of my mother-in-law's cousin, he is no real relation to me, except in spirit.

There is no way to adequately convey the loveliness of old Andrew, except to repeat what Sarge has often said: that Andrew may very well be a tsaddik, one of the true righteous, living secretly among us, "for whose sake alone the world is not destroyed."

A good, righteous man. Funny, kind, quiet. Once a long time ago, he was an Army Air Corps boy, then a young man who worked hard for his family and played minor league baseball in his spare time ("I loved the way he smelled when he came from a game," his 87-year-old wife confided in me recently. "All sweat and sunshine--he was so sexy, I would lean in and sniff him...")

Devoutly Catholic, now eighty-nine, Andrew is one of the more open-minded and curious people I've met, with great tolerance for differences. He attended a Passover Seder I hosted and followed along in the Haggadah with great interest, asking questions and joining in the Hebrew and Aramaic songs. When it was over, he took my hands and thanked me for the service and the matzoh ball soup.



He is the only real grandfather Hedgehog has ever known. When we visit Texas, Andrew goes out early, trundling patiently along to help my daughter fill the birdfeeders and spread corn for the deer who come to graze on my mother-in-law's land. I love to watch them every morning from the picture window, industrious in their task, often returning to the house hand in hand.

Yes. Tsaddik.

Notes on the photo: Andrew, a Technical Sergeant in the U.S. Army Air Corps (later became the Air Force), circa 1944. Ratlesden RAF Base, England. The plane with the wonderful nose art, a B-17 G, was later shot down over Belgium, although the pilot survived.

Leather-Booted Great-Grandpa

Will you check out those boots? The shine on them?

My great-grandpa Benjamin, on the left, in his Russian Army uniform, late 19th/early 20th century. I do remember my Grandpa Max (his son) showing me this photo when I was little, and telling me that his father had been in the Russian Army. Beyond that, I have no definitive information, though I'm desperate to know more--was he civil service (home guard) as someone suggested to me? Or was he infantry (less likely), serving in wartime? I'm just not sure of the exact dates, so I have no way of knowing whether his service coincided with the Russo-Japanese War, though I think this photo must be earlier than 1904-1905.

I know absolutely nothing about the personal details of this piece of his life, though I wish I did. What is most interesting to me, though, is how this photo fits into the very complex history of the Jews in the Imperial Army. I did a little research on this topic through the YIVO Institute, and learned that Jews in the modern world did indeed serve in the Russian Imperial Army, in droves really, although it was to say the least an uneasy relationship. Their civil rights were honored intermittently: during some periods, they were allowed to celebrate Jewish holidays and pray as Jews with Jewish chaplains, during other times they were segregated or even indoctrinated into Russian Orthodoxy as a requirement of conscription. It so happens that Benjamin served during a period of Jewish segregation.

Anyway, the details of Benny's service are now lost, though I find it very exciting to be able to place my family in a greater context of the meaning and movement of Jewish history.

Visit the other Sepia Saturday participants for more stories of the ancestors!

In Defense of the Death Portrait

Maybe it's the time of year? That the first little knobs on the trees, the sunshine struggling against the chill, the longer days, turn my mind, paradoxically, to death.

Or maybe I'm always thinking about it, somewhere behind the everyday struggles and little bits of joy, the clouds.

Whatever the reason, I'm fascinated lately with Victorian Death Photography. That the Victorians seemed routinely to memorialize their loved ones in permanent death images, many of them posed like regular portraits...it amazes and impresses me. Of course, death was all around them all the time--life expectancies were short, and many died in babyhood and childhood, diseases that are now easily treated, then were lethal. Death was a part of the cycle, in a tangible and public way.

We don't do this now, of course, take photos and glue them in our photo albums among the wedding and baby pictures. My father died upright in his favorite red leather easy chair one morning in January, and my sister and I sat on either side of him as he left. I remember how lightly we breathed in the dim morning, trying our best not to disturb his passage that seemed so precarious--I didn't want him to suffer anymore, and I didn't want to make any noise that would startle him back to his pain. We spoke to him our encouragement in whispers that fell almost soundlessly into quiet air. And as I watched the life leave his eyes, as they opened suddenly, and fixed on a far point in the room, and then died--his eyes died before he drew his last rough breath--I still couldn't believe he'd gone, although no one with eyes like that could ever return to this world. Afterwards, we continued to speak in whispers, even as we hugged and kissed him...it was a long time before we could call the funeral parlor to take him away, we couldn't stand to let him go. In the end, the relatives came swarming and fluttering and hovering, and they made the calls. But I always felt that they simply couldn't stand the sight of us with the dead body, sitting with him, holding dad's cold hand. My sister and I knew that the passage between life and death, though irrevocable, is not such an absolute. Dad was alive, we held his hand, and he was dead--why would we throw the hand away in sudden horror? I saw a terrible fear in their faces; but I was unafraid.

In the weeks and months that followed that day, I thought often about those moments beside dad, and I began to wish that I'd had the presence of mind, or the nerve, to have taken a photo of him, dead in his chair. I had not yet become interested in the Victorian death portraits, and my strange impulse was somewhat sui generis. A photograph would have marked the passing, whose details I returned to, obsessively, again and again in my mind over those weeks and months. Anyway, my mind returned to it: the last breath, the dead eyes, dad cold in his chair. The photo would have helped me, I am sure of it, to be certain of that moment. Was I really there? Did it happen that way? And...was he dead?

Had I been a Victorian girl, I might have had the assistance of the relatives--together, we would have dressed him in his favorite trousers, his suspenders, his special gaudy tropical print shirt, and arrayed ourselves around him arms over his dead shoulders, living cheeks pressed to the dead face, and we would have stared into the camera, eyes filled with grief, but with a certainty also.

As it was, the relatives were disgusted, afraid, and dismayed already by our tender proximity to the dead one. Such a portrait was unthinkable; they would have thought me utterly mad.

But I know the truth. That the dead are among us, that we are among them, that there is nothing to fear, that we should not so quickly hide the body away and with the body, hide away our abject sadness and longing. The need is strong, to rush away to life. But it is, after all, an impossibility: for the ones who attend, who sit vigil as life ends, that death scene is real and we will always carry it with us, the images of it, the feel of it and the sounds and smells in the quiet room. To externalize it, to take it outside of the darkest recesses of one's soul, in a simple portrait--unafraid, unashamed, unhidden, pasted up in an album that could be taken down from a shelf and looked at, until one didn't feel so alone with the secret memories...

Washing Day, Brooklyn, Many Years Ago

Eva Bella hanging wash in the courtyard of her apartment building on Ocean Parkway. It's one of my favorites, and I never tire of its details--the sunshine on her face, the raggedy apron (a hand-me-down from her mama, too worn out for any but the roughest chore), the bag of clothespins.

Although by the time I knew her as Grandma Eva she had at her disposal a very efficient electric washer and dryer, I do think she always preferred to hang her wash, and continued to do so during all our summers at the lake. Though she's not as clear as she used to be, I can still imagine her working at her clothesline in the sunny windy field, reaching up to hang her sheets, a clothespin in her mouth.

Join us for Sepia Saturday!

Great-Uncle Harold: A Photo History without Words

Unexpected Visitor

My Grandpa Max took pleasure in the odd, the surprising. He loved strangenesses and misadventure. If something was out of place, off-kilter, amiss, wrong...even worrying or macabre...I could always catch that glint in his eye (recognizing it because I was exactly the same way). He carefully documented life's mishaps, great and small, with his camera...and he was always on the lookout for mishaps to document.

Imagine his delight, then, when a car landed in his dooryard on an otherwise unremarkable afternoon.

I Will Never Know

She called him Maxie.

The early love letters were written mostly in Yiddish, and she kept them carefully into her old age, tied up with an ivory ribbon and tucked into a corner of her sewing table where we discovered the packet after they had both gone on.

The letters went missing, for the first time in 70 years, when we packed up their house. I came to believe that they had not wanted us observing their secret moments and the letters were lost by design rather than accident...yet several years later, they turned up again, mysteriously. I looked at them this time, even removing the old papers from their envelopes, staring at the Yiddish written out in two very different hands, his bold, dark and straight, hers lighter and with a slant...yet, I put them back without translating.

I can't bring myself to intrude on their private conversation.






for more Sepia Saturday entries, visit Alan's blog

Dvorah and Hemda

Eliezer and Dvorah

In this picture is Eliezer Ben-Yehudah (see the link for his story, if you feel ambitious; he was an enormously important figure in Jewish history, notable for being instrumental in the formation of modern Hebrew), and his first wife, Dvorah. His second wife, Hemda, was Dvorah's sister. Yes, he married two sisters consecutively, and these two sisters were cousins of my Grandma Eva. Yet, cousins could mean anything at all really--and we wonder how exactly Dvorah and Hemda were related to us.

Eliezer and Hemda

Alas, this secret died with Grandma. Although she shared with us few specific details, it was an emotional topic for her. Apparently Eliezer, in his quest to rejuvenate Hebrew as a spoken language, was singleminded and harsh. My sister tells me that Grandma cried when she talked about it, describing how terribly abusive he became toward Dvorah when she continued to speak Yiddish, the language of her home. He demanded that his family speak only Hebrew.

But what strong connection made Grandma feel such empathy that she actually wept in the telling of a story that she could not have personally witnessed, as the Ben-Yehudah family settled in Jerusalem and she and her immediate family in Brooklyn? Had there been a closeness between her mother and this other branch of the family, had she overheard her mother's stories about the abusive tendencies of the charismatic Eliezer? Were there letters, now lost?

Although there is a great deal of information available about the famous Eliezer Ben-Yehudah, there isn't much told about the wives. I'm consumed with curiousity, and wish dearly that I could ask Grandma about Dvorah and Hemda.


photos from online archives

Great-Grandma Manya

Great-grandma Manya, Benny's wife.

She stayed behind in their Russian village for several years, while Benny made his way in the new world. When he was settled, he sent for her (and how I wish I had a copy of that letter!), and Manya sailed to Ellis Island, her children in tow. She took little else from the old country save the gleaming brass samovar, carefully wrapped in woolens, destined to join a little army of its brethren all over Brooklyn; the ubiquitous bequest found even today in the modern houses of many families of Russian Jewish descent. At this very moment it sits, gleaming still, in the hallway outside my bedroom, though the black tea leaves have long since evanesced.

My mom remembers her Grandma as a lovely, lovey woman. And when I asked my mother's cousin, she said, succinctly, "there is a memory of a bosom."

I think of Manya squeezing her grandchildren close, pressing them into the flowered decolletee, the powdery scent enveloping.








take a look at some other Sepia Saturday posts HERE!

Benny

On the left is my great-grandfather Benjamin. I realized, when I set out to write a little bit of history, that I know next to nothing about him. The bare facts, only: he was my mother's paternal grandfather, born and raised in Russia, came to America by way of Ellis Island and set up a tailor's shop in Brooklyn. He spoke at least three languages fluently (Yiddish, Russian, and English). He must have had an accent. He was married to Manya, he had four children: my grandpa Max, my Great-Uncle Harold, and my great-aunts Libby and Tilly. He died early and tragically, before my mother was born, of his injuries a few days after he was hit by a car on Eastern Parkway.





My mother said he was known for being "austere, but likable."

I suppose I also know that as a young man, he was interested in grooming. Just look at those twirled mustaches, that oiled and rolled hair! He enjoyed a glance in the mirror... or two.

And I'll bet my life on some other things too: that he had a sense of humor (for his sons, both of them, were wickedly funny). That he had a sense of adventure (but then, didn't they all, who came over the long rough waters to Ellis Island). That he had a pervasive sense of gloom (for who in my family does not).

But as for the little details, they're lost to me: What was his favorite dinner? the colors he preferred in a suit? the song he hummed as he ran his sewing machine? the way he smelled and talked and moved his hands as he told a story?







for more tales of the ancestors, visit Poetikat, Alan Burnett, and Betsy (among others) on Sepia Saturday. And if you have an old sepia photo of your own, why not share it?