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Babylon Gardens ... Read more
Yiddish Theatre ... Read more
World War I ... Read more
Spanish Influenza ... Read more
By Laura Simon
Babylon Gardens
I’m growing up. In fifth grade now I was hearing about President Wilson, and how the Lusitania sank, President Wilson saying, “Never. We will never be in that war.” My classmates learned all this in their homes, the twins sitting nearby wore satiny dresses and knew what was going
on in the world.
I raised my hand to show that a bubbe dress knew something too.
“It’s about three years,” I said. “The Titanic sunk. There wasn’t a war then.”
“Well then, tell us about it,” the teacher said.
I kept my head down remembering how the people ran out of their flats crowding the street to get the news, screaming, “Help, help,” in my mind’s eye, a canoe overturning in the lagoon in Humboldt Park. They would all laugh at me.
“Then sit down,” my teacher said just as I was about to say iceberg and how canoes overturned with lots of people going down by ropes. Still ashamed of my bubbe dress that held back
my thinking fast enough.
I’m going someplace with my teacher driving an automobile, taking us to the flower garden in Garfield Park on the West Side, bigger than the gardens in Humboldt Park, ledges of flowers that covered the flower house. “Just like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon,” she said. The gardens on Haddon Avenue that I was never to forget.
Yiddish Theatre
On a Saturday afternoon, I couldn’t wait to run to the Yiddish theater to see the drama and music of an immigrant father, as if there wasn’t enough drama in real-life, who had forgotten his
wife in Europe as many such immigrants did in those days, the First World War separating them by years. Some husbands were more loyal advertising for their wives in the Jewish Forwards. “My darling wife, where are you in America?” Not the stage immigrant. He gets himself a second wife.
The children of the first marriage and the children of the second marriage, all grown-up and gathered on the stage, huddle in a corner to mourn for the brother and sister who have married. The first wife is down on her knees before him singing, “You are worthless. Your daughter married your
son. I came from the other world to you. What have I done that you should treat me like this?” crying Desdemona style to Othello in Yiddish, the second wife singing to her, “I don’t give two cents for you and you know it. He’s my husband and I’m keeping him.” And the other is singing, “Ish ville mine man zurick.” I want my man back. While the young married brother and sister are singing a sad love song to each other, the father is singing from the floor, “What have I done to my
family?” While his two wives are tearing him to pieces, we kids up front are choking with laughter, only to be thrown out by the theater people. A tragedy unfinished, the dime still in my pocket that my Uncle Harry in the real estate had given me. By tagging along with a bunch of kids and another mother, I got in free.
World War I
A great parade was taking place over on Division Street one night. We could hear the marching, the patriotic songs, imagining the flag waving. The armistice was signed. “The war is over,” she said, coming to my bedside. At some point we heard that President Wilson went overseas to sign a peace treaty, still not fully recovered from the Spanish Influenza.
When the celebrating people in the parade simmered down, they were again their own sad selves. Within their own tragedies, still trying to pick themselves up from Spanish Influenza, to recount who was left.
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Spanish Influenza
Spanish Influenza took hold of me and wouldn’t let go. Every hour or so my mother sponged me with cool wet towels, my whole body, to take away the fever. Where can she get a doctor without money? The druggist was a godsend. He gave her a bottle of medicine for me and some
pills.
The funerals were going by our house night and day. Funerals on Saturdays and Sundays, around the clock.
Why do some people live and others die? The continuous clod, clod of hooves was telling us that the Malach Hamoves was very busy, “the Angel of Death,” sparing me by making me stay in bed with an excruciating earache. Unable to get off the bed and drop dead. That suffering ear saved my life. The Malach Hamoves must have been scared away by my screams -- at the walls, floors, windows. The ghost of death stayed away. I tossed in my bed in earache agony.
My little sister’s rag doll tossed to me was now tossing with me, taking the punishment of squeezings, the stickiness of that ooze, something burst in my ear giving me some relief from the pain, wiping my hands on her face round as a saucer. Wiping away tears across that crease on her cheek I threw her aside towards the window to the steady clod, clod of horses’ hooves.
I longed for the day when I could go out to see the vines thick with growth up to the tower of Babylon.
My mother had little time to go looking for white flour at the grocery, remembering how she went running with the bowl of yeast dough rising under her arm, her shawl protecting it, hurrying to get it to the baker’s oven before the fire was banked, standing in line with the others awaiting her
turn.
Recalling the Spanish Influenza as I did so many times throughout my lifetime, I rememberhow the uneducated and poor moved up a notch. Those who considered themselves high-born now came down to death’s level, found out that their temples were not all made of gold, the black plague
uncovered the gold and showed them the brass; the high and low cried together over the sick and dead lying in the street like the war victims over there. People were wrapping their heads and faces with towels when walking over the dead to get anywhere -- to find food and water. Here the undertaker came right into your house and took your life away. Coffins were closed and stayed closed.
The rumor was that the Huns were the ones who planted the germs in your sugar and gave us Spanish Influenza. The superstitions brought fears. We were afraid to drink the water. Spanish Influenza struck down a young uncle of mine, leaving a wife and two children. My mother and I heard the women crying out to the heavens as we came up the walk along the alley. Upstairs we walked into a house filled with sobs and wailing.
“How could this have happened to him? He said he was feeling better, sitting at the kitchen table and eating, went to the bathroom alone. Suddenly a terrible high fever and he dropped dead –like a quick pneumonia. The doctors don't know anything.”
My grandmother is sitting in stocking feet near the empty boxes on the floor where they will sit shivah after the funeral, my grandfather with the other men crying silently into their prayer shawls. The mirrors all covered with white cloths, this is a house of mourning, good that they could not see themselves. This eerie scene, taking place house by house, as if death could not bear to see itself hovering over Babylon, over the wall of morning glories, the asters, the snapdragons that made our cottage a welcome sight on Haddon Avenue.
The Spanish Influenza always with me, buzzing in my ear way into marriage. At a lecture one day at Loyola University, I had been auditing classes there in writing and literature, an author
standing at a chart with statistics on Spanish Influenza, how that epidemic took the lives of the young, not the elderly, “My colleagues and I,” he was saying, “we need information from people who went through it and survived. Ask your grandmothers and grandfathers what they remember about the Spanish Influenza. How did it affect their lives and what are they doing now? We go to the cemeteries to the old monuments to see the inscriptions to get just a word about what had happened.”
I raised my hand. “I don't have to ask my grandmother -- I am here -- still here. People just dropped dead after saying they were better, suddenly they got a high fever, and like a fast
pneumonia, were struck dead, and the doctors didn't know how to combat it. They didn't know what it was.”
And I wrote up a paper for him as to what I had seen and heard. No matter what I say about that time in my life, it doesn't begin to cover half of what I had seen and heard, dying people all around me.
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Editor's Note: Today San Diego Jewish World continues the-weekly serialization of I'm Still Here by Laura Simon, a San Diego resident who is still going strong at 103. She wrote this book to mark her 100th birthday.