Over the past few weeks, I have read some very moving diaries about old people, parents, voting, and optimism.
My parents came to this country in 1940 and their belief in democracy, and voting, is one of the most important parts of the legacy they left to their children and grandchildren.
When my mother died in 2002, I wrote a long letter to many friends and colleagues who had sent condolences, most of whom did not know my mother. The letter is biographical, but mostly it is about three interconnected things: literacy, democracy, and voting.
I've thought of posting it as a diary for a while but it's a very long story for this space. So I've edited it a great deal, cutting out a lot of biographical and personal details, and leaving those parts that would most interest kossacks.
Best wishes to all on Tuesday, and I wish so much that both my parents were around for this Election Day.
Dear friends and colleagues:
I thought it would honor my mother most and be most in keeping with who she was, to tell you a something about her. At her funeral, my niece, before speaking about her bobbeh (grandma), warned the assembled that the story was going to have a message, and this is a similar warning. As I reflected on my mother’s life in her last months, I knew I would need to write something about her, and this is it.
On the day she died, I had to stop at work to take care of some things before heading to New York. Someone asked me where donations could be sent to. I wanted to think of a local organization that Vermonters would have some connection to, rather than one of the organizations my mother was affiliated with or supported in New York. It only took a few seconds and I knew: Central Vermont Adult Basic Education. But this is not a solicitation. Rather, it’s the starting point for the story, which is about literacy (by which I mean being able to read, but also more than that), and about citizenship. She was a good citizen, a great one actually.
She was born in Warsaw in 1915. Her name in Hebrew means "seventh blessing," and she was the youngest of seven children in a poor, working-class Jewish family. They lived in a small attic apartment, which in addition to housing a large family, always had room for guests. Her parents were religious, observant Jews, whose seven children all became involved in one way or another with the Jewish labor and political movements, and the Yiddish literary scene, which were powerful secular forces among the Jews of Eastern Europe and Russia at that time. Somehow, the old traditions and the new revolutionary forces accommodated each other in this family. My mother’s sister told her children that her father (my grandfather whom I never met), used to follow her and my mother from alongside the crowd while they marched in May Day parades, so he could protect them if trouble broke out (which it sometimes did).
Although reading and being well-informed were valued highly in that culture, my mother never did finish high school. But along with many others of her generation, she did get involved in the youth organization of a major Jewish democratic socialist political party in Poland, which also provided many educational and social services to the poor.
My father's family was part of the movement’s more elite intelligentsia. Unlike my mother, he was formally educated, having become a doctor. It was in this environment that my mother, a girl from the proletariat with flaming red hair, and my father, a doctor, writer and political leader, met and fell in love.
In the 1930s, Hitler came to power, the Nazis took over Germany, and the world began to change. By 1939, the German invasion of Poland was imminent. Although ghettos, concentration camps, gas chambers and ovens were not yet something anyone in Poland could imagine, it was clear that very bad times were coming. My grandfather, my father's father, was in New York at that time, and because he was in this country, was able to make arrangements. My parents left Warsaw literally as the Germans were invading Poland, on their way to America. They left much behind, including family. My mother never her saw her parents again.
With Europe at war, it was impossible to travel west from Poland. Together with some other friends, they entered Russia. They took the Trans-Siberian Railroad across the continent to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast. From there, they went to Japan.
They traveled across the Pacific on a Japanese freighter with passenger service. The United States and Japan were not at war at this time, but that ship was later sunk in battle. My parents landed in Seattle, and were met by friends of my grandfather and put on a train.
They arrived in New York City on Election Day, 1940, a fact that my mother would remind her children and grandchildren about for the rest of her life.
She would always tell the story of how she learned English. She went to classes for immigrants learning a second language. Although this was years before I was born, I have always imagined her as a very serious student there, with strong intentions to learn the language of her new home. She learned the basics in class, but she got her feel for the sounds and expressions from the radio and from Readers Digest. I think her intent always was not just to learn English so she could communicate and survive, but so she could participate.
Although both my parents became fluent in English, we spoke Yiddish at home. That is the first language my sister and I learned, and it was very intentional on my parents’ part. That was the home environment for their children. They understood that we would learn English soon enough. For my mother, language was a beautiful thing, so knowing, and being able to think in two languages was better than just knowing one. For a time after she retired, she tutored Spanish-speaking children in the elementary school I had attended, because she felt strongly that immigrants needed to learn English as she had, even if they wanted to hold on to their "mame loshn" (mother tongue) as she also had.
My mother was an opinionated woman, about things great and small. She was cheerful, enthusiastic and very funny, but was also very capable of giving someone, anyone, a piece of her mind. She needed English to do this, and made a concerted effort from the moment she stepped foot in this country, to work on her language skills, and she only stopped in the very last years of her life, when she was no longer able.
She was a patriot and she loved the flag. She also understood that her patriotism did not restrict her from seeing things that were not right in this country or the world. During the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, my parents understood that racism was the great flaw of their adopted country that they loved so much. My mother supported organizations that fought for civil rights, against poverty, for women’s rights, and for other causes.
While she was always an idealist, she could also get angry and disappointed by people whose actions departed from their rhetoric. She would sputter about some of her old friends in the neighborhood in the Bronx, when the exhibited some latent racism, or who had become more concerned with making a buck than with making a better world. And it pained her when some civil rights leaders departed from the non-violent principles and idealism that she felt so deeply. A few years ago, she was reminiscing about her socialist youth, and we asked her what "socialism" means. My mother was not was not an economics theorist or a political scientist. She thought for a while and said she wasn’t sure anymore, but the one word that came to mind was "democracy." I don’t think she was strictly referring to elections and government. I think the ideals she grew up believing in were simply that the world should be a place where the people had a say in how that world was run, and for whom.
She read all the time. Books, newspapers and magazines, in Yiddish and English. Mostly, the books she read were connected to her life and culture, past and present. But she was full of surprises. And she always maintained a connection and loyalty to the Readers" Digest, in later years the large print version, that stemmed from the days she was absorbing her new American language.
My favorite photo of my mother in old age is one that my wife took. My mother always read in the same chair, a pretty plain one in the corner of her living room by the window and a big lamp. As her eyesight deteriorated, the direction and angle that light came from became critical, and she had things set up so she could read, even though she could barely see by that time. In this photo, she is holding her magnifying glass close against the pages of a pretty obscure intellectual Yiddish literary and commentary journal. I do not think that she was able to actually read or comprehend too much of what was on those pages anymore at that point, but she is making a go of it anyway.
My mother was a voter. The fact that she arrived in New York on Election Day is wonderfully symbolic, but she would have been a voter anyway. It was her duty and obligation. It was her fundamental understanding of America and democracy. It was her most patriotic act. The right to vote was a gift, and it was her sacred obligation to fulfill. She could not for the life of her understand how anyone could not vote. It made her angry. When she could no longer see well, she was not embarrassed to ask for help flipping the voting machine levers. It should be no surprise that my parents’ children both grew up to be civic-minded people who organize, stuff envelopes, write letters to the editor or elected officials, get elected to things themselves, and vote.
What I did not know until my niece told this at the funeral, was that between bobbeh and granddaughter, Election Day was a holiday on which it was traditional that they would talk to each other on the phone. "Bobbeh, did you vote yet?" Reply: "Of course!" And once my neice was of age, also: "Did you?" Passover, Chanukah, the Fourth of July. And Election Day.
Once, back when I was chair of the selectboard in Plainfield where I lived at the time, the townspeople were considering the merger of the village and town, and at a big public hearing, an old cantankerous native Vermonter stood up and accused me and all the flatlanders like me of showing up and trying to change things that had been working perfectly fine all these years before people like us showed up, thank you. Of course the merger was not my idea and had been around for a few generations, but anyway, I began answering patiently. Then while I was talking, my mother came to my mind, and I finished off with a pretty impassioned speech about immigrants, and maybe it’s the immigrants who understand, love and appreciate the place that they have chosen as their home and community better than some people who were just born here but could care less. She had said that herself more than once.
There is a farewell photograph of my mother’s parents, taken when my parents were leaving Warsaw. My grandparents are old and haggard looking and in shabby surroundings. They are both looking into the camera and it is very evident what they are thinking and what they know. It is a photo of parents who will never see their children again, taken by children who know the same thing. My mother was never able to determine exactly where or when in the course of the Holocaust they perished, but they did. When I look at this picture, they are looking right at me, looking right at their grandchildren that they knew then that they would never meet, who would be living in an America that they also could not imagine or know.
The other day as I was driving to work early in the morning through the back roads of Worcester, Calais and East Montpelier, with the beautiful view of the Knox Mountain range behind Plainfield in the distance, this picture of my grandparents suddenly came to me. It was the day after Town Meeting, and I had been involved in making some noise at Worcester’s meeting about reapportionment and the right of voters and communities to be represented. Could these grandparents of mine, who lived in a country where their kind was hated and despised, and where their rights were never a sure thing, imagine their grandson living in a place as special as Vermont, getting elected to things, or speaking out at a Town Meeting without fear of getting beat up or having his house burned down? In the photo, they are looking at their descendants, but they cannot see or know them.
Their connection to this time and place is their youngest daughter, their seventh blessing. She showed up in New York on Election Day, got to work learning and using the language, and left a deep legacy about what is valuable and what is important. She was a patriot and a good citizen, and she made sure that her children, grandchildren and anyone else within the sound of her voice were aware and valued what we have here. Her patriotism was not one of simple or blind loyalty, but was the vocal and questioning kind.
My mother brought with her and carried with her all her life the idealism, appreciation, enthusiasm and dedication of that young immigrant. She also knew the worst that humanity is capable of. Every single one of us is an immigrant, to this country, or to this state or to the communities we live in. Whether we are the first generation to arrive, or whether our families go back generations in the same place, someone came from somewhere else, and picked this place. Although I have now lived in Central Vermont for almost 38 years, I would also like to think of myself as the constant immigrant/citizen that my mother was, learning, appreciating and picking up new words and phrases, being amazed at, laughing at or getting angry at the community that I have chosen, and never forgetting the reasons why I have chosen it.
In wrapping this up, I thank you for taking the time to learn something about who my mother was. If nothing else, she would be very pleased if, on all the Election Days in your future, should someone ask "Did you vote yet?" you would remember this about her, and be able to answer:
"Of course! Did you?"
Peace,
(her son)