Goldie

On Friday morning Jewish women around the world prepare for the Sabbath, cooking, baking and cleaning at double time to get ready for a day of rest. My grandmother, Goldie, having joined the Communist Party as a young woman had long since given up religious practice.  But some habits persist, and on some Friday mornings she still baked challah. 

I can see her old hands, younger than mine are now, kneading the dough. Her hands were dry and richly veined, the fingers arthritic, the joints swollen.  Those hands had worked hard from her childhood in Poland to her youth in The Bronx, right through to her old age when work was no longer a necessity.  Goldie didn’t know how to not work. She had labored in her parents’ dry goods store in a little town in Poland that she rarely spoke of, and never with nostalgia. She had labored in a sweatshop on the Boston Post Road, sewing and learning English. When she was old enough to collect Social Security she stopped working for pay and moved in with us.

There, in the home of her only daughter and her four granddaughters, Goldie cooked and cleaned and sewed for us. She was, sadly, a terrible cook.  But she made great challah, braiding the bread with the dexterity of a seamstress.

I learned, many years after Goldie died, that she had only had one child because my grandfather had insisted that she abort her earlier pregnancies. My youngest sister, an educator for Planned Parenthood, included a story about Goldie’s abortions in her wonderful book, “Oops!: Tales From a Sexpert”. Reading an early draft of the book I was stunned to discover how much I didn’t know about Goldie’s life that my sister, the last of us to live at home with Goldie, had learned.  Maybe Goldie had been more willing to talk about her life as she got older, or maybe my sister was a better listener, encouraging her to talk in a quieter house.  I had known that our grandfather was a womanizer, but I had not realized that he had insisted that Goldie end her pregnancies.

I feel an ache for all I don’t know about my grandparents, the names of the villages they left in Europe, their struggles to build a life in a new country, their commitment to Communism and then Socialism, and then Zionism, all the choices they made about their lives.  Goldie remembered the first radio in her village, and lived to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon.  I know just the rough outlines of her life, and scarcely even that about my other three grandparents.  

My remembered experience of Goldie’s life starts when she was nearly 61 and I was nearly 5.  I remember her as always being an old lady, but 61 seems young now.  We had all just returned from Israel.  Goldie and my Grandfather, David, had emigrated there some two years earlier to pave the way for our family’s emigration, but in the second year after they settled there he died of a heart attack.  My mother, pregnant with our younger sister, my older sister, then six, and I, at four, sailed to Israel on an ocean liner when Mom finally learned of her father’s death. The family, David’s family in Israel, had kept the news of his death from Mom for fear of affecting her pregnancy. Our Dad followed by plane some months later after he wrapped up his affairs in the US. The plan was for the whole family to stay in Israel, where I would have grown up. But Dad hated it.  My mother wanted to live out her father’s dream of being part of the establishment of the new state of Israel, but Dad was clear – he was going back to the US with Mom and the children or without us.  It was no more thinkable for my mother to end her marriage in order to follow her dream than it had been for my grandmother to not end all the pregnancies she did end – all except the one that became my mother.

Goldie, widowed and probably disoriented, returned to the States with us.  Our family moved into a two bedroom apartment on the third floor in the building where my mother had grown up.  Goldie moved into the same building, taking a room in a ground floor apartment with two other widows. I remember climbing down the stairs to snuggle under her big feather bed, listening to the stories she told about witches and taking small sips of her sweet, milky coffee.  It seems odd to me that I have no memory of her in Israel or of anything about our time there.  But there it is.  Goldie, my mother, my father, and my older sister who were there with me are all gone, so there is no one left to ask about her time there and the choices she and my mother made to follow my Dad back to the US.

I suppose that’s part of the reason I began writing, so that if my grandchildren wonder why I moved to New York at 69 and what it was like for me to live there, they will have my account of it.  Goldie left us her challah recipe. We have photographs of her as a beautiful young woman. I have memories of her awful cooking and her wonderful sewing, and I have a few paintings she did at the senior center she joined. I wish I had more.