Have You No Shame? And Other Regrettable Stories

The Russians Are Coming: Part 2

My grandmother, my mother’s mother, came to this country from a small village in Lithuania in 1922.  Her mother had died of tuberculosis several years earlier, during the war, and their aunt, to whose care she and her younger brother had been entrusted, followed soon after in its aftermath.  Left alone with their cousins, the children were sent for by their father, my great-grandfather, in Ohio, whom they barely remembered and who, by all contemporary accounts, was a real bastard.  Leaving their orphaned cousins behind, they traveled unaccompanied, the journey from their village to the ship alone lasting several weeks.  My grandmother was about 12 at the time; her brother, my great-uncle, two years younger. 

My mother would often tell the story of her great adventure, often attempting to leaven its underlying, though not atypical, sadness with amusing shipboard anecdotes.  The time my bewildered little bubbe tried to eat a banana with the peel still on!  The time she followed a woman with false teeth around for days, fascinated by the notion that one could have a full set of teeth and then, just as suddenly, be as toothless as a baby.  The time a sailor roughly told her to move from a heap on canvas on the dock, and violently ill with seasickness, she threw up all over his chest. 

“Isn’t that funny?” my mother brays cheerfully.

“It’s still really sad,” I say.

“Well, consider the alternative!”

“What do you mean?”

“If she hadn’t come to America?”

I think for a moment.  “We’d be living in Lithuania+, in a house with dirt floors?”

My mother throws back her head with a peal of delight.   “No!  She’d have been sent to the gas, silly!  Just like the rest of her family!  We’d never have even been born!”

This is my mother’s idea of a funny joke. 

For me, the most salient point of these narratives was the simple circumstance of their ages.  My grandmother was 12 and my uncle was 10 and they came by themselves to a foreign country to live forever with a strange, mean man.  This knowledge was difficult to reconcile with the fact that I was not yet permitted to visit a shopping mall without adult supervision.

“Things were different then,” my mother says.  “Safer.  Except, you know, for the pogroms.”

There was an old photograph of my grandmother, stained and sepia-tinged, taken just before they left Europe, and because she died of breast cancer long before I was born, this was the way I always imagined her.  Her clothing, undoubtedly her best, is old-fashioned and girlish; a high-waisted dress of illegible calico, low-heeled boots with a neat row of buttons marching primly up her ankles, a large bow perched stiffly in her bobbed hair.  I wonder about her hair in this picture—surely the Jazz Age hadn’t reached the shtetl?  Was her hair cut off especially for the voyage, to cut down on lice?  Had she been ill?  I dimly remember a phrase from a storybook in the library about a band of wandering minstrels in the Middle Ages: “Never mind Pearl’s hair; it fell out with the fever.” 

My grandmother was also named Pearl.

Also pictured is her younger brother, who would grow up to become my nonagenarian uncle who, after a long, happy life of being universally beloved by all who knew him, currently occupies his time playing with his dentures and laughing uncontrollably.

“Better than weeping uncontrollably,” my mother says.

 He sits in front of her in the photograph, clutching for dear life a toy horse he’ll have to return at the end of the session, a photographer’s prop to lend the illusion of affluence to another unhappy child.  They both look so old, so worn.  Weary, perhaps, at the prospect of the long journey ahead, of schlepping all that shit, the trunks, the snacks, the heirloom menorah, on trains, on boats, across the ocean, yet they don’t look afraid.  Something in their dark eyes is strangely opaque, beyond fear, as if after what they have gone through—the fitful deaths of their mother, their aunt, the various and sundry pogroms, the lying-in-a-hole-covered-in-straw-so-the-drunk-peasants-won’t-rape-you—nothing could ever scare them again.