Tag Archives: Philadelphia Jews

November 13, 2023 · 7:30 am

Outwitting the Angel of Death

By Elaine Freilich Culbertson (Philadelphia, PA)

My mother was extremely superstitious, and her superstitions guided much of what went on in our home. We were held to certain behaviors, what we should and should not do and most importantly how to overcome bad luck. Spitting three times (pooh, pooh, pooh) was a regular practice whenever compliments were given or received. We couldn’t whistle in the house or sit on a made bed. We couldn’t open an umbrella inside or step over someone’s feet. If my mother was fixing a hem on a dress I was wearing, I had to chew on a thread to keep my wisdom from being sewn away. Babies could not be held up to mirrors and if you sneezed while someone was talking about a dead person, you had to pull your left ear up to avoid the angel of death. Never hand a knife to someone with the edge out and most importantly don’t take a direct path home from the cemetery lest the angel of death follow you.

My mother used to say that when a baby falls, an angel swiftly glides underneath to cushion the impact. She believed there were angels and was particularly well-versed in how to recognize and avoid the angel of death. I liked the idea of angels being on guard for babies, angels whose wings provided safety, but I was never sure what to think about the angel of death, in Yiddish the “malachomovitz.” Death was inevitable, this I understood. Outwitting the “malachomovitz?” How could a mere mortal do that? To say someone looked like or acted like the angel of death was the greatest insult. To get the better of the angel of death was the greatest heroic feat.

One day my mother and I were assured of the presence of angels when I told her about an eerie incident that had occurred on the off ramp at 22nd St. and I-676 in Center City Philadelphia.

It was on the way home from work in the western suburbs during rush hour that I was exiting I-676 to my home in the Fairmount section of Philadelphia. I had the reverse commute – everyone coming out of the city while I was coming back in from the suburbs. The myth was that there was less traffic going in that direction, but it wasn’t the truth. Each evening the crawl from I-95 onto 676 seemed to last longer than the evening before. On this night, I was aware as I crept up the highway of how the seasons were changing. The sun had started to set earlier each day as it does when fall fades into winter. It was that time of day when shadows and objects can play tricks on one’s perception, when the sun can blind you with its brilliance as you are driving and then suddenly disappear from the horizon, leaving only the first wan glow of illuminated streetlights as guides. Things look different at that time of day and the eye can be fooled by the descending darkness. I’ve heard it called “the gloaming,” that romantic time of day when the light has mostly faded but it’s not quite dark yet, a time when on this night I was fumbling for my headlights, realizing that I thought I saw a person standing on the 22nd St. ramp.

As I approached, what had been an almost amorphous figure resolved into the shape of a woman clad only in a short-sleeved shirt and a long skirt that almost touched the ground. Her hair was blowing in the wind. It was a chilly day, but she had no coat or outer garment to protect her from the oncoming night air. The expression on her face was one of distress. She was attempting to stop cars as they drove up the ramp, indicating with her hands that drivers should roll down their windows to listen to her pleas. No one was complying. This was years before the stop light had been installed at the top of the ramp, and it was always a bit of a free-for-all as cars tried to merge onto 22nd St. The drivers that evening had no intention of stopping for her and as she grew more frantic, she stepped further and further into the lane of traffic. 

By the time I reached the top of the ramp she was in front of my car, determined to stop me. I rolled my window down and asked her to step aside. She shook her head and began retelling her story of why she was on the ramp. Her car was on the road below, just past the off ramp, broken down. She needed money to get home. Any amount would help. She insisted that she was not a beggar, but a commuter who had a sudden mishap.

Something about her touched my heart. I hated seeing women in desperate straits. A homeless woman on the street was a more pathetic sight to me than a man. Her vulnerability seemed double that of a man in the same dilemma. I imagined myself in her situation. I wondered if anyone would stop for me. Certainly, I was better dressed, but in that helpless moment might I have left my coat in the car and started walking, hoping someone would help? 

I told her I would give her $10 if she would step away from my car. The tears were running down her face as she mouthed a thank you. I found $10 in my wallet and handed it to her. If that was all it took to save her in this moment, then I didn’t feel I had been duped in any way. 

The cars behind me were beeping furiously. How dare I stop to help this street person! How rude of me to extend their commute time by even 10 seconds, for that was all the time it took.

“Please get off the ramp!” I was sure she could hear the insistence in my voice.

“I will,” she replied, and as I started to drive away, I lost sight of her. 

I made the turn onto 22nd St. and just as I was ready to pull through the first intersection on the Ben Franklin Parkway, a car traveling at ridiculously high speed ran through the red light, completely heedless of anyone, vehicle or pedestrian that might have the right of way.

I gasped. 

If I had been one second sooner onto the ramp and into the intersection, that car would have broadsided me, surely injuring or perhaps killing me.

Because I had stopped to help the woman on the ramp, I had been late to what might have been a dreadful fate.

That evening I called my mother, as I did each evening, to recount the day’s events. At this point in her life, she lived in a retirement home, and anything I might tell her was of great interest, as the days stretched out uneventfully for her.  When I told her about the woman on the ramp and the speeding car, she said very determinedly, “She was an angel.”

“Mom. I thought angels only helped little babies or led people to their deaths.”

“You are my baby. She didn’t let you get hurt. She was an angel. I am sure of it.”

Who knows, maybe she was. That angel of life had helped me outwit the “malachomovitz.”

Elaine Culbertson is the chair of the Pennsylvania Holocaust Education Council, a statewide organization of teachers, survivors, and liberators who volunteer to keep the lessons of the Holocaust alive in the schools of the state. She is a member of the Pennsylvania Act 70 Committee and a convener of the Consortium of Holocaust Educators in the Philadelphia region. Elaine represented the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a Museum Fellow and a Regional Educational Consultant in the Mid-Atlantic. She presently provides professional development for teachers using Echoes and Reflections, a curriculum resource developed by the Shoah Foundation, Yad Vashem and the Anti-Defamation League.

Elaine retired as the director of Curriculum and Instruction in the Wallingford-Swarthmore School District, ending a 36-year career in public education. She is the executive director of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants. For the past 18 years she has served as program director of the Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Teachers’ Program, a seminar based in Poland and Germany, that has provided professional development to more than 1100 teachers in its 36-year existence. She works with teachers and students to connect the events of the past with the genocides of the present day. Elaine has written chapters in five different books on Holocaust teaching methods and lectured across the United States, using the story of her own parents’ survival as the basis for her presentations on developmentally appropriate and morally responsible pedagogy. She is working on a memoir that incorporates her mother’s writing with her own reflections on being the daughter of survivors.

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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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July 16, 2018 · 6:11 am

If It’s Friday, It Must Be…

by Janice L. Booker (Malibu, CA)

If it’s Friday, it must be chicken.  Our family’s Shabbat dinner in South Philadelphia was as ritualistic as Torah law.  The menu was chicken soup, vegetables (cooked in the soup), stewed chicken, challah, and dessert.  The day started with the purchase of the chicken.

The chicken store was one of the many storefronts, often mom and pop shops, that lined several blocks of Seventh Street, the shopping “mall” for South Philadelphia.  The shops on Seventh Street supplied all the necessities of daily living, from hammers to lingerie.  But on Friday morning the chicken store was the busiest, opening at 7 a.m., with some women, early risers, waiting in line for the indoor key to turn.

The chickens were also waiting, clucking nervously and pacing back and forth in their cages, as if they knew their final day had come.  The object of the buyers was to find the chicken with the fullest breasts, meaty thighs, and no visible flaws.  The women went to the cages and pushed their hands into the openings to find the chicken that met these requirements. I wondered how they could find what they were looking for through the flurry of feathers and bouncing chickens.  I was sure these fowls were insulted by this invasion of their privacy.

When the ladies found the chicken they wanted, they held onto its feet so it wouldn’t disappear into the crowd of identical looking poultry.   My mother was not among the early risers, so she had a harder time finding the appropriate bird. I started to accompany her for the chicken-choosing expedition when I was about ten, during school holidays and summers.  I worried that I might have to repeat this ritual when I was a grown-up with a family to feed.

The owner approached the cage, removed the chosen chicken, and handed it to the schochet (ritual slaughterer) for kosher decapitation.  This was done in a back room out of sight of the customers.  I thought about what my school friends said—headless chickens could still walk around—but I left that for myth and never tested it.

The headless chicken was then handed to a woman whose job was to remove the feathers and pinfeathers.  My cousin and I called her “the chicken flicker.”  The now decapitated, feather-free chicken found its way into a brown paper bag and was on its last journey.  The destination, our kitchen sink, then became a hub of activity.   My mother, who always found the flicking inadequate, used a tweezers to remove stubborn pinfeathers.  Although she asked me to help, I usually found an excuse to do something else.

The first task to cleaning the chicken, I knew, was to get out the insides.  I visualized this process on our walk home with distaste and averted my eyes at this surgery.  I marveled that my mother didn’t mind doing it.  I suppose she had no choice, but I never liked taking part in that process. The liver was turned into chopped liver which my father enjoyed the next day for lunch.  The chicken was then submerged in a pot of boiling water, accompanied by companions of carrots and celery, which hours later was transformed into our dinner soup.  Sometimes I watched the soup as it cooked, peering into the steaming pot.  The bright pieces of orange carrots seemed to dance toward each other like goldfish in a fountain.

When there was a non-fertilized egg inside the chicken, it was awarded to me at dinner as the older child. The tiny yellow ball was fuzzy like a miniature baseball. I had no idea of its abbreviated destiny.  The chicken parts were apportioned to the family according to seniority.  My father got the breast, my mother the thighs, my brother the wings and drumsticks, and I shared the thighs with my mother.   At the dinner table, the chicken had the company of the very soft carrots and celery and a boiled potato.  If my mother were ambitious that day, sometimes a kugel substituted for the potato.

Dessert was predictable: one week applesauce, the next week Jello.  Sometimes leftover chicken was transformed into chicken salad for a sandwich lunch the next day. But that wasn’t as absolute as chicken for dinner on Friday night for Shabbat.

Janice L. Booker is a journalist, author of four books, including The Jewish American Princess and Other Myths, an instructor in creative non-fiction writing at the University of Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia radio talk show host, and a free-lance writer for national publications.

 

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