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By Laura Simon
Uncle Abner
Today is a new day. Early fall weather, cool, lots of sunshine. I notice how the trees are shedding their leaves, reminding me of Chicago when driving from suburb to suburb through trees aflame with colors – red, purple and burnt-orange.
My Uncle Abner was smart. He always had his excuse quick, handy if he didn’t want to see you. “I’m going to Racine,” he usually said. Educated in the law, who knows if he ever passed the bar, he was always busy building up Racine.
I remember years back when my Uncle Abner and I went looking for his parents' graves. The graves were so close together, we had to be careful where we walked. Those were my grandparents’ graves. In his own way he tried to say the Kaddish. Instead, he just cried, failing to get the prayer
together.
It must have been years since I opened my picture album. There is Uncle Abner and Nellice at his 80th birthday party. He wanted the whole family to be there. Sent them airline tickets. Mannie saying, “Wouldn’t it be better if he gave them the money?” Well, Abner didn’t think so and neither
did I. I have that photograph of our family all together. There’s Goldie in the family picture, a surprise. She had separated herself from the family years ago. There’s Mannie and me. There’s Mal and Violet, Marvin and Phyllis, Evelyn and Sam, Berdie and Al, Morrie and Charlotte, Ben and Gloria, Adele and Carl, Jerome and his wife and so many others in our family, grown, with children of their own. Many one by one have disappeared. Even our treasured European cousins, Edith and
Sarah. Uncle Abner, once Master of the Universe of our family, is now long gone.
Great Depression
Just before the Great Depression, the Chicago papers clamored that everything was great. In a few days the stock market crashed. Not once, but twice. Just like a crashing airplane, bouncing on the water, flying up into the air again only to drop and sink.
I learned of cooperation between friends and strangers too for that matter, during the Great Depression. The apple tree that grew in one of our neighbor’s yards came in very handy. The whole neighborhood was supplied with applesauce. My mother sometimes picked sweet corn in an empty lot. Then feeling guilty, the sweet corn did grow over into the alley, public domain. All of my salary from the Famous Players Lasky Corporation Paramount Pictures went to her to help support the family. My stepfather selling the newspapers, counting the pennies every night in the kitchen on that porcelain table. My Aunt Bessie upstairs screaming, “She is dying. We are going to lose the two-flat. Who will pay the second mortgage?” My Aunt Sarah helped by finding a new food -- Jell-o. It shivered and it held together. My Aunt Rosie screaming, “Don’t help us. This comes from pigs. Why is it red? And green?” My Aunt Sarah determined to feed everyone around her, found a wild cherry
tree, spending days filling jars with cherry preserves. I was standing right by her when she opened a jar to find worms swimming on top. She began singing, “I will eat some worms and then I will die,” one of the old songs from the 1900s.
Charity was avoided. People stood now in long lines for cheese, not asking who’s giving it or who was paying for it. It’s the real Depression. Haven’t you heard? It’s the Depression. The grocer hiding cans of salmon under the counter as if it were gold. He doesn’t want to take scrip and that’s what firemen, policemen and teachers had. He can’t pay his rent with IOU paper. Apartment buildings were empty. Tenants just stay to do the landlord a favor to keep the pipes from freezing in
the winter. We’re going to lose the two flat. Yes. I remembered money in the bank. But the banks were all closed and wouldn’t open their doors to get the $5.00 bill you had saved in the box. The teller taking your $25.00 deposit and shutting the window in your face.
“Tough titty,” as our friend Harry used to say when he gathered up all the pennies in the poker game. That was our Saturday night pastime. Esther, Harry, Rose and Dave and Sophie and Weiner and Mannie and I. We had a good time. But we didn’t like losing. As I write this, I think of the high school kids today when I hear they throw pennies over their shoulders. To us a handful of pennies meant an evening’s extravagance for having a little fun out of life during terrible poverty times.
I hear often enough how millionaires wash their money. In those Depression times, I washed my money over a wash board. The dollar I saved bought leftover meat and poultry from a butcher on a late Friday afternoon when he was closing for the Sabbath. That gave my mother and the family their Sabbath.
Today a neighbor was whining about her gentleman friend. “He acts like it’s the Depression. All he wants to do is warm a sofa or take walks in the park. His daughter has her mitts on him. If he has any money, he spends it on her, not me.”
These days the stock market is weak. The economy. Hopefully, things will turn around.
That’s what we thought when we were in our own property on Lawndale Avenue, struggling to pay the second mortgage when the old man came each month for his money. Our tenant paying $32.00 and we paying $100.00. Mannie working then for a lumber company at $45.00 a week as bookkeeper
and credit man.
My Uncle Harry was considered a very rich man and lost it all down to the last penny. How could it happen that a rich man had to go door to door to sell a few groceries to keep himself together when at first he had an automobile showroom all clear that he mortgaged to save the mortgaged apartment buildings. I saw an old woman going door to door to try and get customers for her son so he could become a milkman.
My Mother’s Funeral
“Will I ever get off this life from Potomac Avenue?”
That’s what I used to think once upon a time.
She once stood in front of that portrait of her black up-combed pompadour to see what she looked like with a rose. As usual, pinning up her hair, thin and mousy, hardly holding with the pins, she said, “At my wedding I had a hairdresser.”
The undertaker must have had a hairdresser for her, her hair combed into a pompadour like in her picture. The old man is at her casket, her third husband, weeping “Chaya, why are you going?”
“Look how beautiful she looks,” to one of his daughters, the one who charged him ten cents for a cup of tea. “Chaya, I had the bone in my throat and you got the heart attack. Why are you leaving me?” Bowing, swaying in prayer. “Now I am alone,” the way I felt when my mother married Silverberg and we had to leave our Babylon Gardens on Haddon Avenue, all of us living in one room behind his grocery store, morning glories from rooftop to the asters and snapdragons, in sudden collages, Babylon from the tower.
A far away thought at my mother’s funeral, how my Aunt Jennie sent a big package of white sheets to her husband’s family in Russia, for their need for shrouds.
“Why are you going? Chaya, I am still here.” I stood close to her casket while everyone in the chapel chanted the Kaddish, prayer for the dead.
My Birthday
November is a time to think of Thanksgiving. This year my friend Carol is having me as she did last year for Thanksgiving on Friday. Thursday is reserved for her family. Just so I celebrate my birthday one way or another. Nobody’s birthday comes around faster than mine. When Kitty lived in San Diego, I was always invited there on Thursday for Thanksgiving with her friends and family and then I’d have another Thanksgiving at Carol’s on Friday. Now, I have only Friday.
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That year everyone must have known I was 96, getting so many birthday cards. I am planning a big party for my hundredth. The invitations are formally printed in my mind. No presents please.
There isn’t anything that I need, unless a new white sweater: hand knitted, embroidered something real fancy.
I told my doctor just the other day, “I want to live to get this book published.” Laughing to myself. Up to 200?
Nobody ever made me a surprise party on my birthday. What
is most surprising, I always expected one and never got it. I would visualize walking into somebody’s home in the dark and a bunch of people rushing out yelling “Surprise! Happy Birthday!” nearly knocking me over. A couple
of times I had great birthdays. Once at Mayo’s after dinner was served to about 12 of us around the table, they came from the kitchen with a great big birthday cake, candles like a bonfire.
Another time Syd had the family over. She and Norman brought in a bonfire on top of another birthday cake.
After lunch I sat on the floor opening all my presents. Already making my birthday wish if only I could see all of my family together.
Coping
I got up early this morning to do my laundry before all the machines are taken. While my clothes are washing, I go walking with my walker up the hill and down, get my clothes in the dryer and walk another half hour. I am consumed with the thought of assisted living. I am already over 96.
How am I going to get help into this house? Housework I used to hear is good exercise for you, gets you moving around, bending, lifting. I’ve been neglecting my Tai Chi and my breathing exercises. I am working on this book. Look at me, I reached up to World War III. The goodness of man; thankful to have more energy than the dialysis patients, walk with more strength than they do when they are returning home after their treatments. The bus assistant and the driver have to walk them
into their homes.
I say to myself -- why then am I complaining of legal blindness and hard of hearing? I am still attached to the thread of family, starting with my grandparents, their grandparents to
my parents. Each generation benefits from the generation before, their successes, their weaknesses, their striving many times, learning how they had survived depressions and wars. So I will, too. It’s possible and I see it often in myself that, I am my mother after all. Always hoping for a new life.
A handicapped person doesn’t have as many tools to work with. You have to do the jobwith a little screwdriver, that is if you want to get it done. It’s just the same. It is being all that you can be, trying to do all that needs to be done. It’s a continuous job trying to take on the challenges that life presents.
I saw this in my cousin Benny. He never forgot his poor upbringing. He became an assistant state's attorney, and head of the legal department of the Jewish Federation, still remembering the poor, still helping if he could. He hardly remembered his father. He must have been only four or
five when the Spanish Influenza got a hold of this 26-year-old man and killed him. It was just before I got my influenza. Aunt Rosie was broken up with so much crying. My grandmother and grandfather consumed with tears. And Rosie Bromberg had to raise those two boys on her own. In those days there was no welfare, no social security. I never understood how she managed to give them a college education and turned them into such fine men. Benny had taken on some of my
grandfather’s traits.
Today I think this must have been the busiest day of my life. I get a call from his wife Gloria. She had gotten a special deal for long distance calls through the internet and she thought of me. She needed someone of his family now to go through some of the memories with her about Benny who had died of a heart attack and complications many years ago.
Mannie and I never dreamed one day that we would be talking about independent living, care centers or even needed to think about it then or cared. And in those days we never heard of bed and board places, caretakers. That’s how they earn their living. They have several boarding homes and there you are. They take care of you as if you were a baby – or ignore you. They do the cooking, put the food in front of you, clean your room and tell you what to do every step of the way. And you
just go from day to day like that. Whatever real life you had before is behind you, and the boarders become your family, a new family to contend with, to fit your personality with theirs, to set aside your problems and to have the patience to listen to theirs.
My Cousin Benny
More than assisted living, what I needed today was family. I had a great need for family today.That’s how I felt. And along came Gloria with the call. And I am writing about Benny.
Remembering how he once spoke to me about coming into his court. He did just that. He invited me to spend a day in the courtroom. I expected to hear cases about drunken husbands, beaten wives. Instead from a side door in marched a group of tall, 18-19 year old men, handcuffed. Black and white. I was shocked by their hairdos. Curls all over their heads or pony tails. There were guards alongside of them. The courtroom was crowded and there I was wondering what was their crime?
They stood before the judge. Whether it was an attorney or bailiff, whoever, showed what they had stolen. Empty pie tins a bunch of them. A lot of heavy white socks suitable for Alaska. Why had they broken into a basement to steal such stuff? Looked to me like it couldn’t even be sold to anyone. Why did they get themselves in such trouble? There was no family beside them. If they had any relatives or friends in the courtroom, they were sitting among us, never showing up to plead for the boys before the judge. Sad and forlorn, they were sentenced. Benny took me to the judge’s chambers, which was a treat.
Benny befriended an old man once who had been in a jail, just sitting there, waiting for someone to come and help him. Benny looked up his case and found no reason why the man hadn’t
been brought to trial. He was a forgotten man. He, himself, didn’t remember any more why he was there. They put him in there and threw away the key. It took Benny to get him out.
At home, Benny had a collection of bells that showed his simplicity, his personality. He had a room full of bells that he collected throughout the years as though he were a little boy.
Wherever he traveled, he searched for bells. None of us ever knew why. He was a very sensitive person and capable of deep emotions.
The death of family, seeing them go one by one, is difficult to think about sometimes. I heard a Rabbi once say, “The longer you live, the more good-byes you have to say.” Benny’s mother, Rosie just went about raising her boys. I never heard her praise herself, in a demanding tone expecting great koved, honor, from her sons for all that she did for them.
I watched my mother’s hardships, her helplessness, the trials of raising us alone. I never heard her ever praise herself either. She spent her life absorbing poverty as best she could. The threads of family are very strong. They string one generation to another and to another. And hold us together
in times of need.
Battling Chicago Snow
Remembering our winter days of shopping back in Chicago, Mannie and I would go trudging through high snow along Sheridan Road, the waves of Lake Michigan rushing up to shore, howling as though wolves were after us, wind and all.
The once confident president of a lumber company was struggling through the snow, trying to find a shoveled path and his cart and me at his arm. He wore heavy boots, a long wool scarf, hat over his head and face, flapping overcoat that got in his way with a filled cart of groceries. A man from across the street came climbing mountains of snow to help us. Again the jumping waves would spray us with icy water.
Sometimes we had that problem in back of our building. Lake Michigan determined to knock down the wall, knock down the whole high-rise if necessary. That’s how the roar of waves sounded day and night. In the summer time, the lake was as peaceful as a pussycat and from our 13th floor (numbered 14 to keep away the superstition), we could see the boats sailing along.
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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. 