Tag Archives: family legends

March 10, 2025 · 6:30 am

My Mother Museum

by Lev Raphael (Okemos, MI) 

First Gallery

My father lost her cookbook after multiple moves, the black-and-white student’s notebook in which she wrote down her favorite recipes in bold, foreign-looking script. It was the one possession of hers I wanted most after she died.  I relished watching her cook with the ease and flair of a professional chef in our dimly-lit Washington Heights kitchen with a view of another Depression-era apartment building across the street.  Same gold and brown bricks, with an equally ridiculously English name like The Windermere in a neighborhood that had been filled with German-Jewish refugees and was slowly becoming Hispanic.  But the book was unique, my mother as curator.

Second Gallery

The small cameo brooch of a woman in profile must be fifty years old or more but looks brand new because she never wore it.  A friend brought it back for her from Italy is all I remember her saying.  But who?  Was it the Polish man I heard about from a family friend after she died, the man she “should have married,” a socialist from Vilnius like her instead of my born-on-a-farm father?  Why did she keep it if she never put it on/why did she never put it on?  What did it mean to her?  I’m asking these questions too late.  It nestles in its white cardboard box lined with cotton, untouched, pristine, a buoy in a mysterious sea.  

Third Gallery

The cream-colored enameled compact weighs over half a pound, is embossed with leaves and a bird in flight.  Embossed in gold and made in France: modèle déposé, registered design.  There’s room for a lipstick, there’s a mirror inside on the left, there’s a lidded compartment for face powder on the right.  It’s an object out of a film noir, the kind of thing a lustrous femme fatale would use with magical, elegant hands to make herself up while people stared at her effrontery, her chic.  Oh, she was definitely chic.  One of her students from Belgium said “Elle avait du chien“: French for desirable, intelligent, and strong.  I see that in some photos from the late 40s.  By the 50s the look has disappeared and she’s an American housewife.

Fourth Gallery

Hanging in her closet in a plastic dry cleaner’s bag like any ordinary dress was the slave labor camp dress she was wearing when freed by Americans in eastern Germany, April 15, 1945.  Dark gray strips that seem almost purple on light gray stripes.  Thin, grim cotton with a roughly-sewn beige number patch above her heart.  The number helped me access German records of her incarceration in ghettos and camps.  Was this relic kept as evidence that she might not have survived if WWII had lasted longer?  That the crimes she endured were real?  It won’t tell me.  Can you really call it a “dress” or even a “uniform”?  Reality seems too big for such small words, for the bomb lurking there day after day. 

Last Gallery

This particular lined notebook has not been lost, but I wish it had been.  Black-and-white exterior, starker still inside: a record of her deepening dementia caused by years of chain smoking.  Here, instructions are repeated about when to take which pill.  Bits of news randomly copied from the New York Times.  Worst of all, grotesque, are the definitions of “Memory” she transcribed from a dictionary.  Remember, Remember, Remember says every miserable page.   The desperate lament of a mind drifting out to sea, the words of a voluble, witty, multi-lingual woman ordered at first, then scrambled, finally misspelled, broken, gone.  I want to destroy it but I can’t—it’s her anguished Last Will and Testament.

Gift Shop

CLOSED

Lev Raphael is an American pioneer in writing about the Second Generation, a project that he began in the late 1970s.  He’s the author of Writing a Jewish Life, Dancing on Tisha B’av, My Germany and 24 other books in many genres.  His work has appeared in fifteen languages and he’s done invited talks and readings in Israel, France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, England, Scotland, Canada and all across the US.  Venues included the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Oxford University, and The LIbrary of Congress. Lev taught creative writing at Michigan State University and Regents College in London, and has been invited to teach at Leipzig University in Germany.  Michigan State University has purchased his literary papers and they are available to students and scholars for research.

The piece first appeared in The Chaffin Review and is reprinted here with permission of the author.

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May 4, 2020 · 9:04 am

The Genuine Article

by Herbert J. Levine (Sarasota, FL)

My father’s grandfather, in photographs always an old man wearing a long black coat, his white beard gathered in two points, was the genuine article, the Jew who had never passed through Western Europe’s ordeals of civility. Because he loomed large in his grandchildren’s life, Peretz Satran of Sered, Romania and Winthrop, Mass. became the stuff of family legend, as exotic to me as his one-foot-high silver-covered spice box, which he, a dealer in scrap metal, had assembled out of the base of a lamp and other metal odds and ends and decorated with little copper bells hanging from the bottom of the two silvered tiers. At the top there was room for three small glasses–– for a l’chaim toast, I suppose, at the end of Havdalah. 

Sitting atop that huge spice box, engraved in Hebrew with the names of the patriarchs and matriarchs and the twelve tribes, he had placed an American Marine Corps eagle, for after all, had not God carried our ancestors on eagle’s wings out of their slavery in Egypt, and here was Peretz in yet another exile, where the trolley conductor sent him to Arlington Heights, seven, eight miles away, when he had plainly asked, so he supposed, for Orient Heights. After this misadventure, his grandchildren sought to correct his pronunciation to save him from getting lost again, but he said back to them in his best King’s English, “kiss mine hass, did I said it right?” 

In his synagogue, he may have been the only mystic. The story goes that he was so deep in the Shmoneh Esreh prayer each Shabbat, that he never noticed the little boys throwing sticky, purple cockle burrs into his beard, which they had collected from bushes growing just outside. A parallel story is that the birds wouldn’t leave him alone either, but this time he took action, tying tin cans on a rope hung in his beloved cherry tree; morning and evening, he would go out to shake the cans and scare them away from the maturing fruit. 

When this eccentric patriarch announced in 1928 that he was leaving America and going to the Holy Land to die, no one was surprised; the surprise came when he returned two years later in the midst of Arab rioting, saying, “you can get killed over there.” So he chose America after all, where I see him standing in his sunflower-covered booth on the eve of the Sukkot holiday, surrounded by two daughters and their children, holding the brimming wine cup that he is about to bless. The intensity of his gaze is not lost on me, even knowing that this image was posed by a photographer from the Boston Record American to show that some Jews in America still observed the ancient customs they had brought with them from over there. 

When his Hasidic rebbe was moving from the West End to East Boston and needed to set up a mikveh, the ritual bath collected from flowing waters that women use after their periods so they can resume having sex with their husbands, Peretz Satran traveled in his cart and horse to Walden Pond and there collected a large block of ice. I like to see him in that cart on the long road from Concord, transporting the frozen water of Walden Pond––which our transcendentalist sage, Henry Thoreau, likened to the eye of all the world, as sacred in its own right as the waters of the Ganges––and delivering that small block of eternity to a narrow house in East Boston, where it would be placed in a room dug out of the earth, melt into purifying water and set the stage for still another sacred rite, bringing husbands and wives together to produce new generations of Americans like you and me. 

Herbert J. Levine published his first book of poetry, Words for Blessing the World, at the age of 67. His previous books were scholarly treatments of Yeats and Psalms. To learn more about Herb and his work, visit:https://benyehudapress.com/books/words-blessing-world/

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