Tag Archives: immigrant experience

March 11, 2024 · 7:00 am

My Grandmother’s Hands

by Arlene Geller (East Petersburg, PA)

Her hands, swollen with arthritis, don’t fail her
as she plucks the chicken for the Sabbath meal
kneads the dough for her must-be-dunked poppy seed cookies

Her hands once supple worked her Singer machine
                          (prized possession)
sewed my clothes, homemade creations 
marked her status as a working-class immigrant

She and my grandfather
tailors from the old country
opened a store and plied their craft

The old Singer humming along
sustaining their livelihood
as they raised a family, three sons and a daughter 
                          (prized possessions)

Fulfilling their Russian dreams of an American life
now envisioned through the rolling fog
as they drew nearer to Ellis Island
the Statue of Liberty waving them in

Poet/lyricist Arlene Geller has been fascinated with words from a young age. Two poetry collections, The Earth Claims Her and Hear Her Voice, were published in 2023 by Plan B Press and Kelsay Books, respectively. Her poetry has also appeared in Tiny Seed Journal, Tiferet Journal, The Jewish Writing Project, White Enso, and other literary journals and anthologies. Collaborations with composers include commissioned lyrics, such as River Song, featured in the world premiere of I Rise: Women in Song at Lehigh University and since performed in numerous national and international locations. Learn more at arlenegeller.com.

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March 4, 2024 · 7:30 am

Sestina On Changing The Name                                         

by Roseanne Freed (Burbank, CA)

for my Dad. Maishie.     

When my Dad left Israel at nineteen he changed his name

and I was his link to the past as I look like his mother.

This is Dad’s story from the grave:  Born in bed—

no need for details—we never had enough food

to eat. Like beggars we slept in the clothes

we wore all day. A religious man Tevya, my father

had nothing. God forgive me if I don’t praise my father—

but he never achieved anything, and I had to share his name.

I didn’t know people slept in special clothes

called pajamas—we only survived because of my mother’s

tenacity. Always hungry, you feel cold without food 

and Jerusalem is cold in winter—a thin blanket on the bed

to cover us, we four children sharing the one bed.

His only job to sit with the dead, my father

earned a pittance, so our stomachs cried for food.  

I’m the first one to change the name.

Cleaning houses of the rich my mother

worked for a dentist’s wife who gave us clothes.

We didn’t go to the dentist but wore his childrens’ clothes.

No furniture in our room except the two beds—

one night, falling asleep on top of the baby, my mother 

smothered it. If he got carpentry work at night my father

bought us herring and pita. I didn’t want his name

when he’d wake us up after midnight to eat the food,

but not all of it — god forbid—we had to save food

for tomorrow. We were shnorers, our clothes

full of patches, I couldn’t wait to change the name.

My poor mother, I never saw her resting in bed.

I had to go work at thirteen because my father 

couldn’t feed us. On special holidays my mother 

cooked meatballs, oy such delicious rissoles my mother 

made, my mouth waters to think of the food.

After I emigrated I celebrated my freedom from my father 

and his religion with bacon on Yom Kippur. I bought clothes

for the trip —a double-breasted suit. I never went to bed

hungry after I moved to South Africa and changed my name.

When I married at thirty I had a successful factory making hospital beds.

My four children and their mother always had food and clothes, 

and clean sheets. I hope my kids aren’t ashamed of their father’s name.

Roseanne Freed grew up in apartheid South Africa and now lives in Los Angeles, where she takes inner-city school children hiking in the Santa Monica mountains. A Best of the Net nominee, her poems have appeared in MacQueens Quinterly, ONE ART, Naugatuck River Review, Silver Birch Press and Verse-Virtual among others.  

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January 29, 2024 · 7:30 am

Unwelcome and Unwanted

by Esther Erman (Mountain View, CA)

These days, now that most of them are gone, Holocaust survivors are honored and revered. But, from my experience, this was not always the case. 

I remember hearing that the mother of a famous Jewish writer became angry upon seeing a newsreel about Jews in Nazi labor and death camps. To whom did she direct her anger? The Nazis perpetrating the crimes? Alas not. Her ire went against the Jews who were – what? dumb enough? unlucky enough? to get caught and thrown into those places. 

I arrived in the United States as an infant, the child of my survivor parents who had lost everything in their place of origin, Poland. To say that we were unwelcome and unwanted is putting the case mildly.

Each of my parents was the sole survivor from their family of origin. To the best of my knowledge, most of my family perished at either Treblinka or Auschwitz. Both of my parents survived ghettos, labor camps, and Auschwitz. My mother also survived the death march and Bergen-Belsen. Calling my parents traumatized is also putting the case mildly. Despite this extreme trauma, they had the resilience to meet and marry in their DP (displaced persons) camp in Germany and produce a child (moi), born eighteen months after my mother was liberated from Bergen-Belsen.

At the  DP camp, my father managed to connect with an uncle in the United States who sponsored us to emigrate. By the time the requisite paperwork arrived, my mother was too pregnant to get on a ship. We had to wait until I was born and then able to lift my head – around age three months. 

By the time we managed to leave Germany, it was March of 1947. We set sail from Bremen on the Ernie Pyle. The crossing was so bad that my mother was sure we’d die in the middle of the ocean. I think that the Ernie Pyle was not the most seaworthy vessel. It foundered in the middle of the Atlantic, and we were towed back to Plymouth, England. There, for the seven days it took to get another ship for us to transfer to, we were not allowed to set foot on British soil. I expect it was a long seven days. 

We arrived in the United States on April 1, 1947. The uncle who’d sponsored our journey left us to fend for ourselves. He was a miserly bachelor who kept our existence a secret from a large branch of the family in Chicago. Perhaps they might have been more generous than he in providing support for my traumatized parents and me? His motivation for all his behavior remains an unsolvable mystery. It’s only been in recent years that the folks in Chicago learned that anyone from the family in Poland had survived the war.

Soon after our arrival, we settled on the Lower East Side. It was not trendy then. Given the post-war housing shortage, a building on Suffolk Street that had been slated for demolition was removed from the demolition list. Our first home was a rat-infested firetrap that had my crazy clean mother weeping with frustration daily. My father worked two jobs and was so rarely home, I cried when I saw this stranger. When my mother first attempted to tell an American Jewish woman about her experience in Auschwitz, the response was: “We suffered here also. Sugar was rationed.” Any wonder that my mother became depressed?

As I’ve come to reflect on my family’s experience, I can’t help wondering what might have been if my parents had had some support – any support – in those early days. Might it have made a difference? Or were they just too traumatized for there to be any meaningful help for them? I know that regular Americans were not thrilled to welcome us refugees. I think many Jewish Americans – maybe insecure themselves, maybe not long enough distanced from their arrival in the United States – did not welcome this reminder of where they had come from. 

I think about this feeling of being unwelcome and unwanted – which stayed with us as we made “successful” lives in the United States – when I hear about the plight of current refugees. Even for those more fortunate in their settlement than we were – the stigma of being a refugee lingers long after the initial trauma might reach some degree of resolution.

Like Rebecca, the heroine of her novel (Rebecca of Salerno: a Novel of Rogue Crusaders, a Jewish Female Physician, and a Murder), Esther Erman was a refugee. As an old “white” woman who speaks good English, she realizes she doesn’t typify the usual image of a refugee — but, despite the passage of time, the scars remain.The daughter of two survivors of the Shoah from Poland, Esther was born in Germany. A naturalized citizen, she early developed a passion for language. After receiving her BA and MA in French from different divisions of Rutgers University, she returned there for her doctorate in language education. She wrote her dissertation about Yiddish, her first language, which she had abandoned at age five. A multi-published author still trying to settle on her next big project, Esther now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband Lee. When they’re not traveling—especially to be with family in other parts of the United States and in England—she loves to bake, quilt, and add to her monumental book collection. Check her website for upcoming events: EstherErman.com.

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January 15, 2024 · 7:30 am

What My Zayda Taught Me About Tikkun Olam

By Jessica Ursell (Campania, Italy)

My beloved Zayda Nachman Libeskind’s life consisted of circumstances finding him in the unlikeliest of places, such as when he was escaping Poland on a rickety craft in the dead of night on the River Bug with two warring armies (the Soviets and the Germans) shooting at each other from opposite sides of the river, and later when he was framed, interrogated, and beaten by Soviet agents in the remote reaches of Kyrgyzstan because of a mysterious envelope he was forced to take with no knowledge of its contents, or when years later, during a ceremony pertaining to the Jüdisches Museum Berlin, Gerhard Schröder then federal chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (1998-2005) made a point of personally approaching my Zayda to express contrition for the horrors perpetrated against the Jews by the Nazi regime during the Shoah.

So when Nachman, a survivor of brutal Soviet gulags, shootouts, starvation and all manner of deprivation, traveled to the deep American South to participate in my official “pinning on” ceremony when I was promoted to the rank of Captain in the United States Air Force, it was another in a long line of the unlikeliest places for a man of his age and experience and, for me, the greatest honor of my life.

Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama was about the unlikeliest location conceivable for the youngest son of an unemployed carpenter born to an impoverished Jewish family in the industrial city of Łodz, Poland in 1909.

Jewish and proud, my Zayda actively sought to join the Polish army during the period between the first and second world wars because he was a patriot and wanted to resist the ugly Polish caricature of Jewish men as weak and cowardly.

His attempts to join the army were met with a considerable amount of skepticism by the Polish military authorities who rejected him multiple times due to his being underweight (read Jewish).  But Nachman was determined and kept applying until finally the Polish military authorities, surprised and confused by his persistence, accepted him.

When, immediately after finishing law school, I chose to join the United States Air Force (USAF) as a lawyer in what was then known as the Judge Advocate General’s Department (now USAF JAG Corps), it was nearly as unusual a choice for me who had been brought up with a European Jewish Bundist ethos as my Zayda’s was back then. 

Like my cherished Zayda, I too, wanted to prove to anyone and everyone what it meant to me to be Jewish. I wanted to defy ugly stereotypes and demonstrate that Jews are able and willing, even eager, to serve their country, in ways that historically were exceedingly difficult, or even impossible, for Jews. I wanted to battle the hateful concept of Jewish inferiority and expose the oft promulgated lie that Jews living outside of Israel are loyal only to Israel. I felt that by actively making a choice to serve my country in uniform as a lawyer, it would be a tiny, but personally meaningful way, of demonstrating my desire to be a part of something greater than myself, and to, hopefully, engage in work that would bolster democracy – a value that I find inherent in the concept of Tikkun Olam. In this respect, when I served as Chief of Operational Contracting, I was fortunate, among my other duties, to be the officer responsible for interpreting, applying, and ensuring compliance with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

Promotion day arrived as did my parents and my beloved Zayda. I adored my grandfather, and was thrilled that he would make the trip with my parents. Driving all the way from New York City to Montgomery, Alabama, where I was working my first assignment as a JAG, the distance they traversed was not only through several states, but into an entirely different world. They journeyed from the urban diversity and the Yiddishisms spouted by all New Yorkers, Jew and non-Jew alike (oy vey!) into the deep south, with all of its not so distant past, and still simmering present, laden with racism and overlaid with a veneer of southern homeyness, hospitality, and homogeneity.

The entire experience was, I imagine, a bit surreal for all of them.

It was definitely surreal for me. What I remember most all these years later is the juxtaposition of my background and my new reality – my New York Jewish family and my new friends and fellow airmen from all over the southern United States and the midwest – virtually everywhere else other than New York.

Zayda Nachman, with his sparkling cerulean eyes, enchanted everyone he encountered. This was nothing new. His optimism and zest for life and colorful experiences, despite all that he had endured, was contagious.

Unlike many others, who chose not to talk about and thereby relive the horrific brutality and nightmares they endured during the war, my Zayda made the deliberate choice to speak out, and bear witness to the unspeakable.

Yet, my Zayda rarely spoke about the instances where his own actions helped to prolong and save the lives of his fellow prisoners in the merciless Soviet gulag of Opalicha in Yaroslavl oblast. We know of Nachman’s actions only because they were relayed to us by those whom he helped, and on the rare occasions my Zayda referred to these events, it was only tangentially in talking about the entirety of his experiences of extreme deprivation, starvation, and brutal forced labor in the Opalicha gulag.

Years after the war, my mother heard from several of Nachman’s fellow prisoners at Opalicha who moved to Israel. They explained that my Zayda Nachman drastically understated the consequences to himself had he been caught sheltering fellow inmates. He would have been executed – not “merely” beaten. 

When I think about my Zayda Nachman’s experiences during the war and the way he met the very worst of humanity with the very best of his humanity, I am struck by the awareness that Nachman lived his life through the lens of Tikkun Olam, while he also embodied the core values of the United States Air Force – Integrity, Service before self and Excellence in all he did.

Everyone at my promotion ceremony was so warm, welcoming, and genuinely full of joy and affection for me and my family. I was deeply touched to see how everyone delighted in meeting my family especially my wonderful Zayda. It all happened as though it were a dream. Even during the ceremony I had to keep reminding myself that it was actually real – that I was standing in front of my parents and beloved Zayda and all my new Air Force friends achieving something that would have seemed inconceivable to me only a few years earlier.

My commander Colonel Turner was respected, indeed revered, by all of the junior officers. He treated us with kindness and respect and was gentle in correcting any of our errors. We all were better officers because of the way he modeled leadership. So it was a monumental honor that he and my Zayda pinned on my new rank. Colonel Turner treated my Zayda with great warmth and respect. When I look at the photo of them with their raised arms poised above my shoulders pinning on my new silver Captain’s bars the surge of pride I still feel is profound.

Reaffirming the oath, the ceremony, the cake, and being surrounded by my friends and family made for a memorable experience but the one thing that stands out above all else is the way my Zayda Nachman was beaming with pride throughout the entire ceremony and afterwards. It was, I think, a vindication of all that he had endured to make it to America, the Goldene Medina – that his Jewish granddaughter was proudly serving the country that he believed stood for truth, justice, and the American way.

Now when I reflect on the burgeoning and violent acts of antisemitism that have metastasized throughout the United States since my Zayda passed away in 2001, I know deep in my gut that my beloved Zayda Nachman’s optimism and vision of America as a safe haven from pogroms, persecution, and privation has been shattered. 

Tikkun Olam, the uniquely Jewish concept of repairing the world that my Zayda held so dear, is more crucial now than ever before. 

Nachman would be horrified and brokenhearted to see the promise of America betrayed as neo-Nazis, marching at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017, shouted “Jews will not replace us” and one year later the deadliest antisemitic terrorist attack in US history that killed 11 people and wounded six including Holocaust survivors at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in October 2018.

Antisemitism, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and all forms of bigotry are now openly touted as patriotism and not just by fringe political figures. Such beliefs are now horrifyingly mainstream. 

Nachman’s famous optimism sprang from the idea that learning, knowledge, and understanding can breed tolerance. Tolerance leads to respect for differences and respect can lead to peace and even friendship.

My beloved Zayda Nachman taught me that the essence of Tikkun Olam means standing up for the rights of others even when one’s own rights are not in jeopardy. 

Besides voting, as my Zayda did faithfully in every election (he viewed it as a vital act of citizenship), my efforts at Tikkun Olam are to continue speaking out, and committing to never being a bystander to injustice. 

Daughter of an immigrant Jewish mother from the foothills of the Himalayas and a South Bronx born Puerto Rican Jewish father, Jessica Ursell is a veteran JAG officer of the United States Air Force, poet, and ardent advocate and public speaker against antisemitism, racism, and bigotry. The granddaughter of survivors of the Holocaust, Soviet gulags, and a descendant of a Taíno great-grandma, she understands in her bones what happens when intolerance, indifference, and ignorance take root in society. 

Raised by scientist parents, Jessica’s early environment was steeped in an atmosphere where questions were welcomed and asking “why not” was encouraged. Jessica lives with her husband in Southern Italy where she writes essays and poetry addressing the complex interplay between trauma, power, love, loss, and madness. 

Her essays, “At the Country Club with Superman” and “Standing Up for the Voiceless: My Fight with Royalty in Anne Frank’s House,” were published by The Jewish Writing Project in July 2022, and October 2022, respectively. Jessica‘s poem, “Sedimented Rock,” was selected by Beate Sigriddaughter, former poet laureate of Silver City, New Mexico and was published by Writing In A Woman’s Voice on 18 November 2023. Jessica’s most recent poem, “A Still-Life Collage of Lost Objects,” will appear in the February 2024 print issue of Down in the Dirt magazine as well as online (v. 216 Scars Publications).

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September 18, 2023 · 7:30 am

One People, Many Faces

By Steve Pollack (Woxall, PA)

My son’s bar mitzvah year called us to the northernmost Israeli seacoast town of Nahariya in the summer of 1991, the year that 15,000 Ethiopian Jews were airlifted as part of “Operation Solomon.” We wanted to lend our hands to the historic and miraculous effort.

The Israeli government provided the new immigrants with temporary housing, Hebrew language classes, and job training. Local B’nai B’rith leaders collected clothing and other personal needs. One day we were assigned to distribute various powders & liquids—soaps for bathing, washing clothes or cleaning dishes—and to demonstrate their use for people accustomed to washing in a river, not certain the purpose of each plumbing fixture in a hotel bathroom. That assignment is what sent me to an upper floor where I met a man whose priestly position in the tribe I learned only later. 

I did not ask his name nor speak mine. I did not speak Amharic, the official language in Ethiopia. Yet I stood before him, an elder among recent immigrants ravaged by famine and civil-war, awed by his dignity and personal warmth. His coarse cotton robe, white ragged beard, and distinctive scepter of smooth wood and horsehair held upright looked to my Western eyes as unfamiliar as my shorts and baseball cap must have appeared to him.

The elderly man motioned for me to sit by him on the bed and opened a well-worn leather-bound volume. He turned the thick book to a page inside the back cover and together we recited the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet—Alef, Bet, Gimel… This was no test or school lesson, no bland reading. The experience felt like a joyful song, an ancient chant of profound connection.

Our group of B’nai-B’rith volunteers visited the new immigrants most afternoons. We strolled the mosaic promenade parallel to the Mediterranean Sea holding hands with the youngest children while their parents prepared evening meals served in a common dining hall. Lean teenagers walked with us, their English vocabulary more extensive than my Hebrew. They taught us their Amharic names, articulations unpronounceable by my lips. 

While at local playgrounds or on Nahariya sidewalks, we were greeted with broad smiles from Israelis going about their everyday routines. A tribe of African kids parading with North Americans was a sight that became a local headline. We were hosted like celebrities at the Mayor’s city hall office and gifted commemorative pins; the city’s name, from nahar, Hebrew for river, its iconic water tower and idyllic position by the sea symbols on the crest.

During an evening talk with our group, an Israeli-educated anthropologist who had fled from Ethiopia only a handful of years before highlighted his community’s history and customs on the Horn of Africa. I learned that the elderly man who I had met was much respected. His scepter was a sign of sacred wisdom, not kingly wealth. 

I learned, too, that to be married in their tradition, young couples presented him with family documents going back seven generations, proof they were not too closely related. It was quite a contrast to the way my wife and I had applied for a marriage license in Philadelphia. We had gone to city hall, passed blood tests, and then a rabbi in tailored business suit witnessed our names and wrote the wedding date on our ceremonial ketubah. 

Sitting among new friends during that informal evening, and often during the many years since, I thought about the many leafless branches on my family tree—before immigrant grandparents I was privileged to know. Of those who never boarded a boat, I know nothing. How many millions of lives could have been saved if US quotas had not been imposed, if safe harbor had been open ten years before 1948, when the modern state of Israel was born in my lifetime? 

Social scientists have researched several theories about the Ethiopian Jewish community, and notable rabbis authenticated their origins to the tribe of Dan, one of the ten lost tribes. I wondered also about millennia before, which of Jacob’s twelve sons, which mother carried my seed—concubine or wife? I must be satisfied with Biblical narratives, stories of struggle and strength, grateful for names and traditions passed forward, one generation to the next. 

During our month-long adventure that year, we also took in sights and tastes as tourists from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, from chalk cliffs of Rosh Ha’nikra to sandstone mountains of Eilat, from Galilee to Dead Sea, from Nahariya to Jerusalem. But it was those minutes that I shared with a black African man who had traveled across a desert and flown through clouds to a Promised Land thatheightened my pride in being Jewish and broadened my sense of Am Yisrael. 

Although Jews are dispersed in different lands, across seas and circumstance, all of us are bonded through an alphabet, the poetic language of urgent prayers, and the covenant of an enduring faith.

We are one people of many faces.

Steve Pollack hit half-balls with broomsticks, rode the Frankford El, sailed across the equator on the USS Enterprise. He’s been an usher, delivery boy, engineer and administrator. Creative writing found him later. “Bashert”, appeared in Jewish Literary Journal. His poems in print and on-line, most recently Poetica Magazine and Schuylkill Valley Journal. His poetry chapbook, “L’dor Vador–From Generation to Generation”, was published in 2020 by Finishing Line Press. He serves on the One Book One Jewish Community team sponsored by Gratz College, and sings bass with Nashirah: the Jewish Chorale of Greater Philadelphia.

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April 17, 2023 · 6:30 am

Birthright

by Lori Rottenberg (Arlington, VA)

For my grandmother, Margot Butterfass Rottenberg (1912-1996), and her father, Shaya ‘Max’ Butterfass (1872-1932)

The past is not decent or orderly, it is made-up and devious. 

—Robert Pinsky, “Gulf Music” 

A diamond horseshoe  

to pin the cravat of a man    

smart and squat, grand liar   

and survivor, continental pinball— 

gold to fix him   

to some ground  

after so many homes   

passed beneath his feet.  

Warsaw, New York, London, 

Berlin—Max decided  

truths carved on forms would be  

chiseled by him alone:  

Birthdays, dates, names, 

sworn oaths to bureaucrats  

whose countries didn’t want him— 

interchangeable as the chickens he raised.

 

What mattered were the chances 

he forged from an alchemy of blood:  

escaping pogroms, documents that unlocked  

borders like keys, wealth he could wear. 

***     

My grandmother transformed  

Max’s bit of glittering luck caught   

in the Weimar sun, turned tietack to ring  

after he died. She carried him  

on her pinky to America,  

sailing on the paper boat  

of citizenship that was his  

legacy. She wore him  

for 60 more years, married  

another hard man who bent  

only for her. The ring  

became promise—for me,  

granddaughter made daughter—  

while she lived, piecing  

a new life, joining  

family to family.  

She offered me everything   

else before dying but  

could not let go of her father’s   

sparkling horseshoe.  

When I die you will have it.   

This was a lie.   

It disappeared where I was not  

but should have been: at her side. 

 

*** 

Now without the light  

from her twinkling ring, reminder   

of the man who birthed my future,   

I pull strings of truth from tangled memory.

Almost as old as Max would live to be, 

I am bloodbound to tend his words,  

to pick the paper bones of his life:  

all that remains of my birthright.   

I am the one supposed to know,   

the one to smith our story into words   

that will last like gold, like diamonds.   

Max’s horseshoe can’t help me   

tell truth from lie—all   

I see is history’s churn,   

countries changing every generation,  

life’s work scattered; the ring’s one   

more thing lost in the journey.   

But its luck is my life, my great wealth  

the pinky it graced: an estate  

I will claim the rest of my days.

Lori Rottenberg is a writer living in Arlington, Virginia who has published poetry in many journals and anthologies. Her most recent work on her Jewish family history will be appearing in 2023 in Minyan Magazine and Open: A Journal of Arts and Letters. Through the 2021 Arlington Moving Words competition, one of her poems was chosen to appear on county buses, and she served as a visiting poet in Arlington Public Schools for over a decade. She works at George Mason University, where she teaches writing to international students and poetry to students in the Honors College. She is in her third year of studies at the George Mason University MFA Poetry program. For more information, please see  https://lrottenberg.weebly.com/ or https://yetzirahpoets.org/bios/lori-rottenberg/.

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April 10, 2023 · 6:30 am

The Baba

by Mark Russ (Larchmont, NY)

The Baba, as she was called, was not my baba, nor was she my bube nor my bobe.  I must have first set eyes on her when I was two and a half on a frigid February day, my first in Philadelphia, having been carried in tow by my parents from Cuba, my birthplace, along with my older sister.  I don’t remember the Baba at that first meeting, but the image of her that grew in my mind in the ensuing years was indelible.  Short, wiry, sporting a stern, weathered face, and piercing green eyes, her gray hair in a bun, she was a force to be reckoned with. A look from her was enough. 

Like I said, she was not my Baba.  She belonged to my six-year-old cousin, or better put, he belonged to her.  She watched over him intently, such that no evil, and, no evil eye, should befall him. Pu pu pu! As doting as she was to him, that’s how nasty she was to me.  Why?  What had I done to deserve such treatment?  For him, she tolerated his fondling her soft dangling earlobes with his fingers.  For me, a cold stare.  The Baba, doubtless, regarded me as an intruder.  Truth be told, my entire family was the intruder.  The four of us moved into my aunt and uncle’s already crowded row house for several months until my father could find work and we could rent a house of our own. Doubling and tripling up in bedrooms, competing for the single bathroom, and accommodating Cuban cuisine, were only some of the tensions. For the Baba, I became the focus of her displeasure.  

The Baba, I later learned, actually had a name.  Khave.  She was the youngest of nineteen children, and the only person of that generation that I had encountered in my early life.  I had assumed all in her generation, the generation of grandparents, had died before the war or were murdered in the calamity.  The Baba, in sharp contrast to my parents, was tied to traditions against which many in my parents’ generation rebelled.  She lit candles on Shabbes, wearing a delicate white lace on her head when she did so, and recited the brokhe in an undertone.  Unlike my parents, aunt and uncle who were “modern” Jews despite their Eastern European roots, she was a relic from the old country.   

She also happened to be a terrific cook and literally made everything from scratch.  No dish more so than the gefilte fish she prepared for Peysakh.  I learned this in dramatic fashion when I wandered into the bathroom of my aunt’s house and saw several very large fish swimming in the bathtub.  They moved in the tub, ever so slightly, suggesting they were not dead, yet.  I was startled, a bit disgusted, but asked no questions.  I imagined the fish ended up in Baba’s kitchen but did not dwell on the thought.  And I certainly never dared poke my head into the Baba’s command center.  Entrance was strictly forbidden, lest I risk meeting the same fate as the fish. 

As may seem obvious by now, I found life with the Baba frightening.  Her demeanor toward me was unkind.  She was harsh and uncaring.  In one instance, she barred me from riding my cousin’s tricycle, even though he was at school.  Of course, I was a bit of an antikl (a rare piece of work, a “pistol”) myself.  Once, when she proclaimed I was not permitted to sit on the sofa in the living room for fear I might soil it, I decided to pee on it out of spite.  To finish the story, my father, in what I still regard as among the greatest acts of kindness I have been blessed to receive, bought me my own tricycle with his very first paycheck.   

These early years in Philadelphia were difficult for my family and I recall them as being somewhat dark.  But Peysakh, and the seders we shared with my aunt and uncle, my cousins, and yes, the Baba, were bright spots of those years.  The Baba would start things off with candle lighting.  My father and uncle, both lifelong Bundists, Jewish socialists who abandoned religion in favor of a Yiddish cultural milieu, took turns chanting from the Haggadah in fluent Hebrew at lightning speed.  They had attended kheyder in Poland as boys, and the words and trops returned each year as reliably as monarch butterflies.  The effect was hypnotic, albeit strange and out of character.  They stopped reading when they got tired, or when the rest of us clamored that it was time to eat.  Whatever commentary accompanied the seder was in Yiddish, the lingua franca of our families.  There were nine of us sitting around the table; five in my aunt and uncle’s family, and four in ours.  These were the survivors, and these were their children.  Except for my father’s sister and her family in New York, there were no others.  As a boy, I was both aware and not aware of the smallness of our group.  They were the only family I knew, and no one spoke of those who were absent.  What was the point? 

But there were other unseen spirits at our seder.  My cousin took pleasure in secretly shaking the table, causing the wine within Eliyohu’s kos to lap the insides of the cup.  This was presented as evidence that the prophet’s spirit was among us.  I was taken in by the deception which made me anxious.  I was already fearful of a prophet-ghost who wandered from seder to seder.   My angst reached a climax when we opened the door to allow him to enter.  I hid, terrified he might actually show up.  

Later in the seder, after the meal consisting of kharoyses, an egg with salt water, gefilte fish, with roe, carrots, jellied fish yokh, and khreyn, chicken soup with kneydlekh (the small, hard kind), some version of gray meat, a peysekhdike kugl, and tzimmes, I felt comforted.  This feeling of well-being only increased after we broke out in Yiddish Peysakh songs: Tayere Malke, gezunt zolstu zayn, a Peysakh drinking song.   

As Peysakhs came and went, I grew less afraid of the Baba, and less afraid of Eliyohu.  My fear was replaced by an empty sadness, a yearning for the ghosts who might have distracted me from the smallness of our seder table.  It was a longing, perhaps, for even more than a brand-new tricycle, a Baba of my own.     

Mark Russ is a psychiatrist in Westchester County, New York.  He is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. Dr. Russ was born in Cuba and emigrated to the United States at the age of 2 with his parents and sister. He was the first in his family to achieve a baccalaureate degree and attend medical school. Dr. Russ has contributed to the scientific psychiatric literature throughout his career and his short fiction pieces have appeared or will soon appear in The Minison Project, Sortes, Jewishfiction.net and The Concrete Dessert Review.  

Click on the link to read Mark’s previous story on The Jewish Writing Project: https://jewishwritingproject.com/2022/03/07/yosl-and-henekh/

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April 3, 2023 · 6:30 am

What I know

By Marilyn Schonfeld-Davenport (Louisville, CO)

I am a first generation American and a second generation Holocaust survivor. 

My mother was born in Korosten, Ukraine. 

My father in the shtetl of Oleszyce, Poland. 

They came to this country in 1950 with my three-year-old sister who was born in a displaced persons camp in Ansbach, Germany.

They were lucky, my mother always said. They were not in concentration camps.

They met during the war on a Russian state-owned farm (Sovkhoz) in Aktyubinsk, Kazakhstan.

I do not know the name of the farm. I do not know how my father ended up there. Only that while in the Russian army, he jumped off a train to escape banishment to Siberia and found himself on the same Sovkhoz. 

They were lucky, my mother always said

They were not tortured. They did not starve.

They did not have to hide underground or in sewers or cellars with rats. 

They did not have to strip down naked and suffer inhuman conditions and humiliating treatment. 

They did not have to forage for food in the forests. 

They did not have to watch their children die.

My parents were lucky. 

Not like their dear survivor friends whose tragic stories I overheard as a child, amidst the shuffling cards and the clicking chips of the poker table. 

But still, their young lives were thwarted by the horrifying rampage of a madman.

They were scared. They were on the run. 

They were separated from their families. 

They scampered to strange places, seeking refuge and safety.

Their fate collided at the Sovkhoz where they fell in love and lived in relative peace. And waited. And wondered, when will it end?

They worked in the fields, repaired small machinery, slept in bunkers and occasionally had a decent meal of more than watered -down soup.

My mother worked in the canteen and snuck my father extra bread and cigarettes.

That’s all I know about their life there.

After the war, they got married and returned to Korosten so my dad could meet his in-laws and my mother could say hello and goodbye to her family. 

My dad set his sights on America. 

The land of promise. The land of opportunity.

She was going with him.

But first he wanted to go back to Poland to see what happened to his family. 

He had no idea if anyone was still alive.

Somewhere, somehow he discovered they all perished in Belzec. 

Except for one sister.

She escaped with the help of a priest and was in a displaced persons camp in Ansbach, Germany. 

And so they went there.

My mother said they walked.

But how? How did he find out about her? How did they walk all that way? 

Who helped them? How long did it take? 

My past is a patchwork of fragmented stories and unanswered questions.

They hang suspended looking for a place to rest, to make me whole.

My father never talked about his past or his childhood.

I try to seam it together through any research I can do, any tidbit I can find. 

A box of papers from the DP camp; sponsor forms, luggage tags, passport pictures, a diploma from ORT that said my father could make a shoe.

But I reach a dead end when it comes to my Polish family. There is so little.

There are only imagined faces of my relatives instead of photos that do not exist. 

Imagined lives in places I cannot fathom.

I never asked enough and they never said enough. 

I do not know enough. 

But I do know this.

I am a first generation American and a second generation Holocaust survivor. 

I am defined by that more than anything.

Marilyn Schonfeld-Davenport has always held the stories of her parents and her ancestors deep inside her, those few that she knows, those fragments that she can piece together. These stories composed the backdrop of a relatively carefree childhood in the suburbs of Chicago, but beneath the surface was the lingering impact of her parents’ trauma: her mother’s anger and fear, her father’s quiet introspection.

Throughout the years, Marilyn has returned to those haunting stories of her youth to try to weave the pieces together and better understand her past. She is currently working on a memoir of sorts, based on her mother’s notebooks of recorded minutes as the secretary of the Trossman Family Club. Uncle Sam Trossman, the patriarch, brought her parents and sister to this country after the war.  She lives in Louisville, Colorado with her husband Mark and dog Wilson. Her two grown sons live in Portland, Oregon and Minneapolis, Minnesota and she misses them every single day. 

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November 28, 2022 · 6:30 am

Where Do We Begin?

Elan Barnehama (Boston, MA)

My childhood home in New York City was within walking distance of several congregations, but my parents rarely took us to synagogue. And I was fine with that. And it wasn’t because my father wasn’t within walking distance to anything, what with him being confined to a wheelchair since getting infected by polio in Israel, ten years after his family fled Vienna, and one year after Israel became a state. His polio made mobility difficult, but it had never stopped him and my mother from going anywhere or doing anything.

We did, though, observe the Jewish holidays, rituals, and traditions with as many friends and relatives as could fit around our dining room table. Those who joined us eagerly engaged in robust conversations, lively debates, and detailed storytelling, with thick accents that seamlessly moved between Hebrew, German, and English. 

Later, when I had children of my own, I continued the tradition of skipping synagogue in favor of gatherings around our table which we expanded to capacity. I was, by then, a writer and teacher, so I did my thing which was to choose Biblical tales to retell, discuss, and  analyze the stories. But in order to teach, I had to learn. And that meant re-reading the Torah.

I started at the beginning. Or tried to. As a child, I was confused when I realized that Bereshit wasn’t read during Rosh Hashanah, even though the holiday celebrated the beginning of the year and creation. Also confusing was that Rosh Hashanah fell during the seventh month, and not the first. 

It seemed to me that those early rabbis were comfortable with inconsistencies and contradictions, with nuance and context, and that appealed to me. I mean, they put two different stories of creation right next to each other in the opening chapters of Bereshit. There were valuable lessons to be learned from each version and each sequence of creation.

So, when I began again at the beginning during Simchat Torah, I found a different translation for the beginning for Bereshit. This translation didn’t translate the word Bereshit as “in THE beginning,” but rather “in A beginning.” Several internet searches reveled that the translation of the word Bereshit had been fixed by Rashi and Ibn Ezra about a thousand years earlier, though it had not caught on everywhere. Still, it explained much. Beginnings are a constant. Sometimes they happen by choice. More often they are prompted by, well, life. 

The thing is, I’d been raised on stories of new starts as my parents and their parents had endured several demanding beginnings. And on their belief in that old Jewish proverb that stories are truer than the truth. My parents’ stories brought them to the United States, their third county and their third language, all before the end of their third decade.

My mother’s family-tree chronicled 500 years of German residence before her parents fled Berlin for Jerusalem in the fall of 1933. My father’s family, fortunate to have survived Vienna’s Kristallnacht, made their way to Haifa in the days that followed. While participating in the push to create a Jewish state, my father gave himself a new Hebrew name in honor of this beginning. But polio forced another beginning as doctors sent him to New York City for medical care that was unavailable in Israel at the time.

When I was a kid, I liked to slip out of my bedroom window onto the roof of our house in Queens. Safe in my own fortress of solitude, I replayed my day and planned for the next one with renewed optimism and possibility. 

One thing I learned from my parents’ stories was to trust not knowing. Sure, what’s ahead might be horrible and miserable. But that moment of not knowing also holds the promise of possibility, of a beginning that lies ahead.

Elan Barnehama’s new novel, Escape Route, is set in NYC during the 1960s and is told by teenager, Zach, a first-generation son of Holocaust survivors, and NY Mets fan, who becomes obsessed with the Vietnam War and with finding an escape route for his family for when he believes the US will round up and incarcerate its Jews. Elan is a New Yorker by geography. A Mets fan by default. More info at elanbarnehama.com and Escape Route, available now

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September 5, 2022 · 6:30 am

Memories of My Grandmother Adele

by Christopher Bailey (Geneva, Switzerland)

For two summers I lived in San Francisco with my Grandmother Adele while I was with the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.  

Over the meals the two of us shared together, my grandmother often talked about what lore she could remember about the Jewish village in Romania where she was born, or at least the stories told to her, (she couldn’t remember the name of the village), her passage as a little girl in steerage with her sister and their mother to the United States, and their hard life living in tenement housing on the Lower East Side of New York, sharing an apartment and one bathroom with three other families.  

Her last name was Itzkowitz, not her given name, but the name the clerk at Ellis Island gave the entire boatload of Jews as he could not understand Yiddish.  But even seventy years later, my grandmother would tell me how her mother would take her and her sister Tillie up on deck twice a day from the hold for air—women and children were allowed this luxury—and how above them the ‘white people’ (she described their 1908 clothing as white dresses and jackets, like angels…)  would stand on the balcony looking down at them in pity, and toss leftover items from their breakfast to the hungry steerage passengers below.  Her mother would try and catch what she could to give to her young daughters. 

Once she caught an orange for my grandmother.  As she described the sensation a lifetime later, my grandmother told me she had never even seen an orange before and did not know how to eat it.  But it looked like sunshine.  When her mother helped her peel it, she could smell the anticipated taste from the spray of citrus oil released from the torn peel, and her ancient face lit up with the retelling.  

As she described taking her first bite, and feeling the sweet summery juice explode in her mouth and comfort her insides, she exclaimed as if again experiencing it for the very first time, “It was like tasting sunshine…”

Life was not easy on Essex Street.  The women from the earliest ages worked in the garment industry. Her father, who eventually joined them, could not find a job.  She remembers him sitting in a corner, holding up his Yiddish newspaper, looking for news of home, and trying to block out the chaos of the families beyond the wall of his newsprint paper, all the while holding in his regret and anger and sorrow for leaving Romania, anger which planted the seed of the colon cancer which soon would take his life, the same cancer that very nearly took mine a century later.  

My grandmother also described her ‘pet,’ a mouse in the tenement, which she slowly taught to trust her by saving scraps of food furtively stolen from the dinner table and laying them out for the mouse, a little nearer her little hand every day, until the mouse learned to eat right out of her hand, its tiny lungs and heart beating in double time in her tiny palm.  

Eventually, after growing up in the sweatshops, and as a young woman joining the labor movement, she eventually left New York with my drunken hard scrabbling grandfather for California, because in her words, “It’s where oranges come from.” 

Gabriel, my son, last year did a little ancestry research and actually found the village where my grandmother was born, a place called Lasi.  As he read up on it, he discovered that it was the site of the most systematic slaughter of Jews in Romania during the Holocaust.  As far as we know today, only those members of my family that took the boat survived.  

When my grandmother died some years ago, my father and his brother went to clean out the house.  I asked him months later where he kept the boxes of letters and journals she had shown me in her basement.  I mentioned it too late.  He had thrown everything out.  

That Thanksgiving, when he told me that he had emptied the house and kept nothing, I told him some of the stories that his mother had told me.  He knew nothing of them.  As I told them, I felt a chill coming over me as the realization began to sink in. My memories of those conversations were all that was left of that world. 

Christopher Bailey was educated at Columbia and Oxford Universities, as well as at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. After a career as a professional actor and playwright, he is now the Arts and Health Lead at the World Health Organization, where he co-founded the Healing Arts Initiative, which looks at the evidence for the health benefits of the arts. As an ambassador for the field, he has performed original pieces such as Stage 4: Global Stories on Empathy and Health, and The Vanishing Point: A journey into Blindness and Perception, in venues around the world, hoping to spread the WHO’s definition of health as not merely the absence of disease and infirmity, but rather the attainment of the highest level of physical, mental and social wellbeing. To view some of his work, visit: The Vanishing Point and Chris Bailey at The Met in NYC

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