CHAPTER 1
MATERNAL FOREBEARS
I. The Goose Girl and theNext Two Generations
This is the story my mother told: My mother's great-grandmother, BerthaBallin, was the first Jewish woman in her village in Germany to refuse toshave her head and wear a sheitel (wig) after she married. Her husband(whose first name never figured in my mother's stories) was handsome butgood-for-nothing. Bertha raised geese as well as children. By diligentlydriving her geese to market, she earned enough money for passage toAmerica. Leaving her husband behind to look after the children and makesure the pigs didn't bite their hands off, she sailed for New York. There shegot a job as a cook in a fancy apartment on Fifth Avenue, during the timeGeneral Grant was president (1869–1877).
When she had saved enough money, she sent tickets back to her familyin Hesse Darmstadt, near Frankfurt am Main. After her family joined herin New York, she looked around to find a husband for her daughter Rosa.Unimpressed by the Jewish young men she saw in the New World, sheremembered the tall, good-looking redhead from a neighboring village withwhom Rosa had danced at folk dances across the ocean. Over her daughter'svociferous objections ("Mother, don't you dare!"), Bertha purchased yetanother ticket and brought the adventurous Franz ("Fritz") Oppenheim toNew York. Rosa took a second look and changed her mind.
Rosa and her husband—my great-grandparents—ran a furniture storein the Yorkville section of New York City "at a time," as my mother put it,"when Jews thought they were Germans." When the store went under inthe Crisis of 1893, the enterprising Rosa and Fritz opened a clam chowderbar in Far Rockaway. There, while still a relatively young man, Fritz wasstanding and talking to his wife when he suddenly dropped dead. Rosa wasso sad that she closed up the clam chowder bar and moved with her children,Mina, Charlie, and Henrietta, to Brooklyn.
When Henrietta—my grand mother—fell in love with Abraham Marks,Rosa disapproved. Abraham came froma Russian Jewish family. As a GermanJew, Rosa didn't want her daughter to "marry beneath her station." Henriettaand Abraham were forced to wait five years before they were able to wed. Inan era of chaste propriety, they "kept company" on bicycles.
Henrietta had been apiano teacher before she wasmarried, but once she becamea wife her husband forbade herto work for money; so she gaveup teaching. Evidently, the NewWorld was uncongenial to theindependent spirit of BerthaBallin. Or perhaps Henrietta'srebelliousness had simplyexhausted itself over the five longyears in which she steadfastlyresisted her mother's oppositionto her marriage choice. It is, ofcourse, also conceivable thatHenrietta was just as happy notto continue working as a pianoteacher, or was even complicit inAbraham's prohibition—thoughthis is not the way my motherpresented it. In fact, Henrietta did not entirely cease teaching; my mother'scousins were the unpaying beneficiaries of my grandfather's prohibition.Henrietta's musical accomplishment, however, had an intimidating effect onher own daughter, my mother, also named Bertha. Discouraged, as she toldit, by the ridges that her mother's constant practice had worn deep in theivory keys, "Little Bertha" eventually abandoned the study of her mother'sinstrument.
I never heard my grandmother play the piano, though there was one inher house. I remember her above all in her kitchen and garden. When I wasgrowing up in Sunnyside, Queens during the 1940s and early 1950s, we usedto drive out to Jamaica every Sunday afternoon to visit my grandmother. Shelived in her own house, along with her son, my mother's younger brother,Uncle Murray; his wife, Aunt Bea; and my cousin Bob (Bobby at the time).It didn't seem odd to me then that they were all living there together. If Ihad ever thought of the situation as requiring explanation, it would neverhave occurred to me that this might reflect any financial difficulties my unclehad. As far as I knew, Murray and Bea were better off financially than myparents were. They always had a car, which we did not, and their cars werealways bigger and fancier than ours (when we had one).
All the conventional wisdom I've heard since, about how two grownwomen can't live together comfortably in the same house, was far frommy experience. From what I observed, Grandma and Aunt Bea had anadmirable division of labor. My grandmother looked after the house, doingthe cleaning and the cooking. Aunt Bea did the shopping and helped Murraywith his work. I had, of course, only a hazy idea of what this work involved.He was a salesman of little girls' dresses, called "Rainbow Dresses." (Thefirm's motto—"Girls look best when Rainbow Dressed"—appeared onthe pencils Murray gave me, which I was always happy to get.) He would"go on the road" and also "into the showroom." Often Bea would go withhim. Thus, as far as I could tell, the home situation was a cushy one for her.During the summers, Bea and Murray would go on vacation by themselves,sending Bob off to camp, which my parents told me he hated. OccasionallyMurray and Bea stayed at a resort not far from where we were spendingsummers in the Adirondacks. They would visit us, and we would go have ameal with them at their resort.
Grandma also helped with raising her grandson, Bob. When Icontacted him while writing this memoir, his recollections of this "help"were surprising. He recalled our grandmother's telling him repeatedly,"You're good for nix. You'll never amount to anything." His father wouldecho her, but not his mother. We never witnessed such terrible abuse. But,of course, such things are rarely said in front of others.
Bobby was six and a half years older than I. At the time, he seemedmuch older. My sister, Judy (my senior by two years), and I looked up to himwith a kind of awe. He was a glamorous figure in our eyes—tall, dark, andhandsome. Sometimes he condescended to play with us. More often, he hadfriends over. Frequently, they would write radio plays and perform themfor us. When I shared this memory with Bob, now living in California, hereplied: "At one time, I had ambitions to be a `radio announcer.' Remember,those were pre-television days. I could tell you what was on what stationon the radio at what time any day of the week. Harry [his close friend] andI used to go to radio shows in Manhattan regularly. We would send forscripts and perform them. We built a microphone out of wood and recordedparodies of those shows—or we would write our own scripts. I owned a reel-to-reelWebcor tape recorder. I'd love to hear some of those performancestoday" (Robert Marks, e-mail, January 2, 2009).
My other main memory of Bobby is that my aunt worried loudly andpersistently that Bobby "wouldn't eat," that he had "an eating problem,"something I found difficult to understand. I thought my grandmother wasa wonderful cook. I don't remember clearly what she served on those Sundayvisits (was it roast chicken?), though I do remember her holiday meals—Thanksgivingand Christmas—when it was always turkey and sweetpotatoes with marshmallow topping. As a German Jew, my grandmotherdidn't hesitate to celebrate Christmas, though she never had a tree. Presents,including those to and from Aunt Bea's relatives, who joined us on theseoccasions, were stacked in front of the fireplace in the living room. The ritualof these festive meals was that Grandma, a vigorous, solidly built gray-hairedwoman, would bring the whole bird into the dining room on a platterand hold it up proudly for us to view. Everyone would ooh and aah inadmiration. Then she would return to the kitchen and later reappear withthe meat nicely carved.
What I remember mostabout those Sunday meals wasthat you could accompany themwith soda pop—somethingunheard of in our house!—ormilk flavored with a variety ofheavy sweet syrups. Judy drankchocolate milk at home (I'd beentold I was allergic to it), but myrelatives offered the option ofstrawberry milk as well as gingerale or cream soda.
The real pièce de résistanceof my grandmother's dinners,however, was dessert. She baked!Often it was a white cake witha sticky sweet icing. Other timesit was a kind of two-part cookie,filled with jam and nuts. For eachone she would place a circle of dough judiciously on a cookie sheet, drop asmall amount of the jam and nut mixture on top of it, cover it with a secondround of dough, and when the sheet was full, put the whole batch in theoven. Looking back, I'd say that her repertoire was neither extensive norimaginative. But it seemed wonderful to me. My mother rarely baked.
The trip to my grandmother's house was a long, tedious car journeyfrom our house in Sunnyside—along Queens Boulevard, past a drearylandscape of apartment buildings, stores, and a cemetery—punctuatedby stops and starts at innumerable traffic lights. But I can't say how longwas long. Half an hour? Forty minutes? An hour? We "gave up our car"at some point during my childhood, and there was an interval before wegot another, so there must have been at least a period in which we didn'tregularly visit Grandma every Sunday. Still, this remains in my mind as anabiding childhood ritual.
I'm not sure why my parents—especially my father—did it. Was itguilt? Affection? A sense of obligation to my mother? A desire to give mysister and me some structure to our Sunday afternoons? Or just to keep usfrom being at loose ends and in each other's and our parents' hair? It couldnot have been a great pleasure for him. He once commented that in the eyesof the Jamaica relatives, he was a dumb intellectual. He saw that Aunt Beashowed contempt for him and our way of life. One example: Murray andBea were the first family I knew to buy a television. Our visits to Grandmaantedated this period, but once the television arrived, our ritual Sundayvisits to their house became dreary, Bobby's imaginative radio programs athing of the past. After the meal we were all obliged to sit in their tiny backporch and watch variety shows. Murray and Bea were also fond of a seriescalled Mr. Peepers, about a milquetoast schoolteacher. During each show,Bea would squeal with glee, "He's such a typical schoolteacher." It is unlikelyshe could have been unaware of the insult to my father, a real schoolteacher,after all.
Bea was an attractive woman with short, wavy dark hair. Murray washandsome, in a dapper way. He sported a pencil mustache and wore colorfulfloral-patterned shirts, suggestive (I later thought) of Caribbean cruises.When once or twice my mother bought my father a similarly lively shirt, heregularly referred to it, with some amusement, as "my Murray shirt." Beforethe arrival of their television set, we were occasionally present at Murrayand Bea's mah-jong parties. They would invite three other couples and opentwo folding card tables—one for the men, the other for the women—atwhich they would sit with their colorfully engraved mah-jong tiles arrayedin individual racks in front of them. I had no understanding of the gamebut was always enchanted by the beautiful, exotic ivory pieces that Murray,Bea, and their guests all handled with such assurance.
In addition to cooking and cleaning, my grandmother kept a gardenbehind her house. When we visited in the right season, she would alwayssay to my mother, my sister, and me, "Now you must come and admire myroses." And we would walk outside through the lanes of what I now realizewas quite a tiny garden, surrounded by a wire fence, and admire her roses.Before we left, she always cut some for us to take home. My mother did nogardening at all, even though our Sunnyside house had a small backyard.
My grandmother's house was not a large one, though larger than ours. Ithad both a small front and back porch. The front one had a glider that I usedto lie on, daydreaming. Two gargoyles with planters in their mouths hungfrom the wall. My parents had brought these back for my grandmotherfrom their travels before my sister and I were born. (Later, as a young adult,I recognized the gargoyles as replicas of those on Notre Dame Cathedral inParis.) The back porch, overlooking the garden and the garage, became thepreviously mentioned television room. In between the two porches was astandard layout: moving backward from the front porch were a living roomwith a fireplace (I assumed it was fake since it was never used), a diningroom, and a kitchen.
In the basement, Murray had a workroom where he made woodenbowls and Bobby had an electric train set. (My father always generouslyexpressed his admiration for Murray's technical skills.) Upstairs werethree bedrooms. My grandmother's bedroom, in the front, always seemedparticularly elegant to me because the main part of the bedroom, which hada large double bed, was connected by a kind of archway to a smaller dressingroom, with a mirrored vanity table and a stool. Murray and Bea had a largeroom in the back, with twin beds and two closets (something that struckme as a great luxury). Bobby's bedroom, right at the top of the stairs, nextto the only bathroom, was small, rather like mine at home. All the roomswere wallpapered and, with the exception of Bobby's room and the kitchen,the pattern everywhere was one of large boldly colored (I remember deeprose) flowers.
My memories of my grandmother are very much bound up with herhouse. Almost always it was we who went to visit her, not she who came tous. I suspect she wanted it that way. After we moved to Manhattan duringmy last year in high school, I think my grandmother visited our apartmentonce, then firmly said it was too far for her to go. But while we were still inSunnyside, she would visit whenever I was sick. My mother would go offto teach school in the morning, leaving me in bed, and somewhere aroundmidmorning I would hear the key turn in the lock and know that Grandmahad arrived. I was always glad for her visits and her warm, comfortingpresence. She would invariably bring orange soda. Perhaps she had an ideathat this provided some health-promoting benefit (as opposed to, say, creamsoda). Sometimes she brought me sour balls, multi-colored fruit-flavoredhard candies with a sweet-and-sour citric kick to them. Perhaps, as with theorange soda, she believed they too carried some obscure medicinal value.
Occasionally during the summers Grandma would come to stay withus for about a week in whatever cottage we rented. This was always a lot offun for me, especially as she would bake regularly and allow me to lick thebowl after she had put her cake or cookies in the oven. On a few occasions,I stayed over at Grandma's house in Jamaica for one or several nights.
What did I talk about with my grandmother? Almost everything Iknow of her life, which is little enough, comes from my mother's account.I probably never asked her about herself. She gave me a book of Grimm'sFairy Tales and read aloud to me the stories of Snow White and Rose Redand The Goose Girl. She told me that when my parents were first married,before they had children, they led an elegant life and my mother used todress for dinner. But the most prolonged story I remember her telling wasabout my uncle's courtship of his wife. The details are hazy, but the essencewas that Murray had been "going around with" Bea and they had brokenup. Then at some later point he went back to Bea, and she said to him, "Idon't want to start going around with you again unless it's serious. I criedover you too much last time."
Nonetheless, he persisted and they started "going around together"again. Then Murray went to his mother and said, "Ma, I hope you won'tmind, but I'm seeing Bea again," and he related what Bea had said to him.
To which my grandmother responded, "Why should I mind, if you'reserious?"
There must have been other details that have fled from my mind, and ofcourse still others that I was never told, but I suspect that the brief accountI remember was what my grandmother presented as the essence of herson's story. To her, this unmistakably prosaic tale had obviously remaineda glamorous saga of romance. What is interesting to me now as I look backis simply the fact that this was The Story my grandmother told, the tale ofworldly life she chose to pass on to her granddaughter. Did I wonder whyshe didn't have a comparable "love story" to tell about my mother? PerhapsI asked and her response was to tell me about my mother's dressing fordinner. (But how could she know this?)
