Is recall being too dour? Maybe. The smell of my mother’s cold cream and the scent of her perfume; the look and feel of the cloth of her worn dress; the swish of her house slippers against the wood floors; the smoothness of her voice; the sounds of her sipping tea and the clink of the saucer; her tired voice in the morning asking what I would like for breakfast; the pattern on the window drapes in her room; the joy of coming in from a frigid walk with my little brother after services during the winter, entering an envelope of warmth and calm, singing “Shalom Aleichem,” reciting the blessings, sitting down, and beginning to eat. These were the little things that underpinned my world. But in those lean days, there was a lot to underpin.
Mother also supported my beloved grandmother, Pauline Fox. We called her Grandma, or Bub. Born in Poland, Grandma was a survivor of Jewish ghettos, poverty, and pogroms. When she was eight years old, she suffered a bizarre accident that resulted in the loss of her left eye. While babysitting in Poland as a young girl, a spring popped out of a crib and hit her in the eye. She never spoke of her partial blindness, but on late evenings Joel and I would see her remove her prosthetic eye and place it in her dresser. Sometimes we would secretly open the drawer, shivering at the specter of the eye staring back.
Grandma escaped pogroms in Poland by resettling in London, where she operated a candy store in a less-than-posh part of town. Shortly after arriving in Buffalo early in the twentieth century, she fell ill and continued in poor health for the remainder of her life. The only things standing between her and a sense of personal annihilation were family and the weekly Sabbath. She and my mother used to cover their eyes when they lit the candles for the Sabbath. We do the same today. It is a ritual, and it is impossible to separate one set of candles from another, even across great distances and across the many years.
Her illness may also have been an expression of relief and exhaustion, as when a marathoner crumples after the finish line. She had eluded death in Europe. She had supported herself at a marginal business in an alien and not especially welcoming land, England, with a language new to her, and had made her way to the United States across a famously cruel and capricious ocean. It was all a mammoth endeavor for this rather slight woman who had come from a tiny, insignificant place in Eastern Europe. But within her still burned the spark of life, the stability, endurance, and wisdom that had surely sustained her throughout her erratic movements across a troubled world. It was a spark that she passed on to her grandchildren. So long as I draw breath, I will think of her with unutterable gratitude.
She lived with us, and we thought of her as a second mother. In our tribe, she was the Elder, the Matriarch. She was also like a sage. We received doses of advice and wisdom from her, more than we sought. She was mythical. It was possible to believe she had the ability to do magic. Moreover, she was dignified, which lent itself to the effect. To sit with her was good fortune. Her hands were solid—they had experienced so much. In them there was great knowledge. We would be lucky if one day our hands would know half as much. It was almost too much to be close to her, as if you might not be worthy of it. We were around her like excited pullets—always at her feet. When I grew taller than her, it was still the same way. To hug her was to be anointed; you left feeling stronger. Her age was the source of her strength; the false eye was the source of fear.
She would sit on the porch watching us play ball in the street. She never had to say anything to us, never had to shout, “Good hit” or “Good catch.” It would have demeaned her. She supervised. She was beyond language, perhaps. When she did speak, it was in Yiddish. We listened to every word as if no one else in our lives would ever say something like it again, as if what she told us was how we ought to be. She was like an angel that way.
I remember the feel of her cotton housedress against my face as I hugged her. Her papery hands on my neck. Her lips on the top of my head. The layer of white sand she kept in the bottom of my old baby dresser—brought back by friends, at her request, from trips to Israel. Her black rocking chair on the left side of the porch. The solitude of listening to the radio with her on Wednesday and Thursday evenings: Paul Whiteman and the Firestone Orchestra playing “Rhapsody in Blue”; Mr. Chameleon; Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons. Our alone time. Those times lasted past childhood, into my adulthood, and even past her death—a death that took something sacred from me but left behind something sacred, too.
3
Brighter Days
I was still in grade school when my life took two dramatic turns for the better. The first involved my Uncle Carl. Carl had been a confirmed bachelor, but in the Jewish tradition, he began courting my mother a few years after my father—Carl’s brother—had died. When I was ten, they married, and my uncle became my second father.
Carl was a
