Yiddishe Mamas (16 page)
Authors: Marnie Winston-Macauley
“She taught us to laugh but allowed us to cry. Laughter at the end of her life didn’t heal her, but it gave her dignity and strength and helped us to find those same qualities in ourselves,” wrote Lee M. Hendler, author of
The Year Mom Got Religion,
about her mother, Lenore (Lyn) Pancoe Meyerhoff, politician, activist, and philanthropist. “Mom’s life was one long lesson in attention. Life matters, she taught. Pay attention. Do your best.”
All mothers worry. But, as we’ve seen, for the Jewish mother, optimism is often a long-range
plan,
but in the immediate, we’re emotionally and traditionally a
bissel
(little) more pessimistic. These are our jewels, our children. And given our history, such concerns are not unnatural. Yes, we’re out of the shtetls, but we carry a sense-memory of our forebearers. And world conditions, along with some local conditions, aren’t reassuring.
“I had started earning enough money by writing
The Steve Allen Show
to get my own New York City pad,” says writer, author, producer, and composer Bill Dana. “I called to tell my mother. ‘Ma, wait till you see it! It’s in a great neighborhood—Fifty-second and Second Avenue. You enter and there’s a kitchen level and you take three steps down to a living room area, then you step up right to my nice-sized bedroom and bath. Then you step back down from the bedroom to the living room area, then two steps down to a den with steps up to a lovely garden behind glass!’ Nothing. Then after a minute, she finally said … ‘Don’t fall.’”
B
ill Dana (“My name: José Jimenéz”) wrote the multi-Emmy-winning
All in the Family
episode “Sammy Davis Visits Archie Bunker” that featured Sammy Davis Jr. kissing Archie. The episode is number twelve in the “TV Guide Best One Hundred Episodes” in the history of television.
Our legacy of worry, of course, came from our shtetl mothers, who, in addition to all the real stresses in the world, had demons to ward off, since the shtetls were hotbeds of superstition (for example, slapping a newborn if the baby laughed during the night so that the demonic Lilith would not kidnap the babe). By keeping vigilant, the Jewish mother could fight back the evil spirits with her
keyn eynhores
and spits. Active worry: The mother who would rather be sick or hungry than see her child suffer— while to many a child is a nuisance, is also seen by some as the height of mother love.
L
ITTLE
I
SAAC HEARD A NEWS STORY ON
TELEVISION AND RUSHED INTO THE KITCHEN
WHERE HIS MOTHER WAS MAKING DINNER.
“M
AMA!
M
AMA!
T
HEY SAID ON
TV
THERE’S GOING
TO BE AN ECLIPSE
! C
AN
I
GO OUT AND WATCH?
”
“G
O, DARLING
,”
SAID HIS MAMA
. “E
NJOY
. B
UT
I’
M
WARNING YOU … DON’T GET TOO CLOSE.
”
The renowned rabbi and author, Joseph Telushkin, tells the story of Chaim Bermant, an English-Jewish writer, who, while a correspondent during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, was asked by soldiers to phone their parents and reassure them they were OK. His record of one of the conversations is almost a classic conversation of “worry,” where the mama continues to question the harried reporter, disbelieving his reassurance. After all, if her son was OK, why wouldn’t he call himself? There must be a way—even from a desert.
How many of us have a wafting sense we’ve done something like that ourselves—questioning like an attorney general to get the “real” scoop—only to find wormholes we can disbelieve? A show of hands, please. (Wait… I can’t type with two hands up.)
We Jewish mother-worriers, as active as we are, may at times turn to overprotection, interference, and yes, boundary busting—even when our children haven’t been children for ten years, or forty.
“I do everything. You rule that roost,” says Mallory Lewis. “We not only feed them, but know what’s best for them. I do everything. The sadness is, nobody … listens (as far as the mother is concerned).”
“
A
Jewish mother knows where her kid is until he’s ninety-eight. She’s calling: ‘Did you eat yet? Did you sleep yet? Did you go to the toilet yet? Did you put on a sweater? Did you take the sweater to the toilet?…’ A toilet to the sweater?… When a Jewish kid goes to an out-of-town college the whole family follows him… 3,000 relatives are running to give him extra jackets, coats, blankets, sandwiches… extra telephones in case the carpenters are fixing… two of everything just in case.”
—Jackie Mason
“H
i, Amila. I had something on my mind that I wanted to
tell
you, but I don’t want you to get mad at me. I just wanna make sure if you get involved with someone, that you don’t use lambskin condoms. Because if you’re worried about AIDS, using lambskin is the same as if the guy had a totally naked
shmekel.
And y’know, they used to make graduation certificates out of sheepskin. So before you do anything foolish, you may wanna ask yourself, ‘How safe would I feel with his shmekel wrapped in a diploma?’”
—Mother of comedian Amy Borkowsky, creator of the hit comedy CDs and book,
Amy’s Answering Machine: Messages from Mom
OY!
“I found many a Jewish mother who’s trying to take care of you, and control everything that goes on around them. No matter how old you get,” says Harry Leichter, “she wants it her way.”
“My
father
was the typical very controlling ‘Jewish mother,’” quips Dr. Ruth Gruber. “In our household my mother and father were the odd couple.”
“We talk about what should be, we’ll think about it, then we warn each other to shut up,” says Zora Essman. “We know she’s [the daughter] not going to listen, but… we’re still the mother.”
“I’ve spoken many times about my mother, Jeanette Gottlieb, who passed away last year at age eighty-eight,” says writer Marjorie
Gottlieb Wolfe, author of
Are Yentas, Kibitzers, and Tummlers Weapons of Mass Instruction? Yiddish Trivia,
who found her mother to be a source of both information and misinformation. “She told me that ’VD’ (venereal disease) meant
‘voden’
(Yiddish for ‘what else’?). She said that ‘debris’ were leftovers at a circumcision!”
A
forestry graduate received a five-year post in the middle of nowhere. In his survival gear, much to his surprise, he found a recipe for matzo balls. Confused, he asked his superior, Goldberg, about it.
“A few years from now, when you’ve had it already with the bears and trees and you’re going a little meshugge from the solitude, you’ll remember your matzo ball recipe. Get it out and start making some,” said Goldberg.
“And what will that do?” asked the graduate.
“Before you know it, you’ll have ten Jewish mothers looking over your shoulder, shouting, ‘You think that’s the right way to make a matzo ball?!’”
“My mother never got into the guilt. ‘You never write, you never call,’ wasn’t her thing,” says Amy Borkowsky. “But what she lacked in guilt she more than made up for with the advice-giving. There was the time I moved to an apartment on the twentieth floor, and she leaves me a message: ‘Hi, Amila. I’m just thinking, if God forbid you needed to get out of your apartment real fast and the elevators weren’t running, maybe you oughta get yourself a parachute.’ Then there was the time she warned me not to wear my red bathrobe when I take out the garbage because her friend’s grandson said that red is a ‘gang color.’”
And why shouldn’t the Jewish mother interfere? Get involved? After all … we would do anything for them. And they know it.
Consider this excerpt from
All Roads Lead to the Jewish Mother
by Stacey Marcus:
“Where’s my pink shirt?” says the Jewish daughter.
“In the laundry,” replies the Jewish mother.
“Oh my gawd, I planned to wear that to school today!” shouts the Jewish daughter.
“I found it rolled up in a ball near the trash can so I thought perhaps I’d wash it,” says the Jewish mother.
“Can you stop yelling at the kids?” pipes in the Jewish husband from behind the shower door.
“Why are you so stressed out?” asks the other Jewish daughter.
I walk into the living room to reclaim my equilibrium and step directly into a dog poop.
“You really need to train me,” says the Jewish dog’s eyes.
Thus begins another day where I am blamed for everything from late laundry to puffy hair to the tsunami and Hurricane Katrina and the clock hasn’t even struck eight. I have been held accountable for everything from the Gap not having the right color capris to the nimbus clouds on vacations. One of my favorites is the fate of the puffy un-Jennifer Aniston hair.
Deep in my heart, I understand that the reason they feel so comfortable dumping their worries and woes into my open arms is: 1.) I am the Jewish mother and my arms are open. 2.) There wasn’t a long line of applicants who want to be responsible for everything under the sun including planning a vacation where there are no airline glitches or clouds in the sky.
It’s like Charles Schulz said, “Sometimes I lie awake at night and ask why me? Then a voice answers nothing personal, your name just happened to come up.” I am glad it did.
N
INETY-YEAR-OLD
M
RS.
B
RONSTEIN VISITED HER LAWYER WITH A REQUEST.
“I WANT YOU SHOULD MAKE ME A DIVORCE.”
“B
UT
M
RS.
B
RONSTEIN,” SAID THE LAWYER, “YOU’VE BEEN MARRIED SEVENTY YEARS!”
“D
AT’S IT. I WANT YOU SHOULD MAKE A DIVORCE NOW.
I
’VE SECKRIFICED ENOUGH!”
“B
UT WHY NOW?” PROTESTED THE LAWYER.
“I WANTED TO WAIT UNTIL THE CHILDREN WERE OUT OF THE HOUSE.”