Yiddishe Mamas (22 page)
Authors: Marnie Winston-Macauley
On her first visit home from college, Lynda felt like a bigshot academic. Arguing with great intensity, she discussed Darwin and the influence of heredity and environment. Finally,
bubbe
spoke up.
“Heredity … environment. Young girls, thinking about such things?
Feh!”
“It’s a very complicated issue,
Bubbe,”
said Lynda, somewhat condescendingly.
“Complicated-shmomplicated! Please. Even sixty years ago in Russia, we knew the answer, 1-2-3. If the baby looks like his father, that’s heredity. If he looks like the milkman,
that’s
environment!”
“When my second grandson was born, his parents named him Connor. Mom instructed me NEVER to tell him that in Yiddish, a ‘kaneh’ is an enema.”
— Marjorie Gottlieb Wolfe
One day, while attending a mock trial at her East Coast university [Harvard], Natalie Portman, the young Israeli actress, was approached by someone
else’s
Jewish grandmother. “You’re Natalie Portman?” the woman asked. Natalie admitted that she was. “I just wanted to thank you,” the woman declared, “for being so short.”
“T
WO
BUBBES
IN THE
B
RONX WERE HANGING CLOTHES TO DRY.
O
NE ASKS, ‘
H
AVE YOU SEEN WHAT’S GOING ON IN
P
OLAND?’
T
HE OTHER REPLIES,
I
LIVE IN THE BACK
—I DON’T SEE ANYTHING.”
—Myron Cohen
In
Modern Maturity,
Billy Crystal related that Louis Armstrong came to a seder at Crystal’s childhood home. He was a guest of Crystal’s uncle, the famous music producer Milt Gabel. Armstrong, of course, was noted for his very raspy voice. Crystal’s grandmother came up to Armstrong and said, “Louis, have you ever tried just clearing your throat, just coughing it up?”
B
ubbe
was directing her granddaughter who was visiting her for the first time how to find her apartment in her new Florida condo.
“Darling, come to the front of the complex. There’s a panel by the door. With your elbow, push 14T. I’ll buzz you in. The elevator is on the right. With your elbow, hit 14. When you get out I’m on the left. With your elbow, hit my doorbell.”
“No problem,
Bubbe…
but why am I hitting all these buttons with my elbow?”
“What…? You’re coming empty-handed?!”
In 1896, Nathan Birnbaum (George Burns) was the ninth of twelve children born to Polish immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side. Burns wrote of his grandmother, who struggled to provide food for the family after the death of his father:
“She used to go around to all the weddings in the neighborhood whether she was invited or not. She wore a petticoat under her skirt that had a big, deep pocket on the right side. … When we’d see her coming home, if she tilted to the right, we knew we had something to eat.”
“Bubbe,”
said Herschel, “do you realize it cost the United States $10 billion to put a man on the Moon?”
“Tchk, tchk—including meals?”
Joan Nathan, in her marvelous
Jewish Cooking in America,
recounts a first-hand description of a late nineteenth century San Francisco boarding house. J. Lloyd Conrich of San Francisco describes his grandma’s strictly Jewish boarding house. As such, no food was served on Yom Kippur. It was here that he first learned, as a boy, about the glories of imported cheese both with and without holes, bagel and lox, herring in sour cream, gefilte fish, cheese blintzes with jelly, anchovies, King Oscar sardines, olives soaked in olive oil and garlic … good coffee and homemade pastry … plus other goodies, intended to make life less painful.
Of course, today, the Jewish grandma is often young, active, and “modern,” enjoying her new freedom, and starting new ventures and adventures.
“I’m a modern
bubbe,”
says Jody Lopatin. “I have a life of my own, as do my children. I want my children to respect my growth and development. I want nurturing in return. I’m still involved and very much in touch, but I closed up the kitchen, traded in the pots and pans for the yoga mat—and moved to Vegas!”
PORTRAYED
The year is 1942. The family matriarch, shaped by hardship and driven by survival is forced to examine what she sacrificed when she takes in her two grandsons—love. Neil Simon’s
Lost in Yonkers
won four Tonys and the 1991 Pulitzer Prize. Toward the end of the play, as the boys are leaving and thanking her, they realize they learned a great deal from the experience—some good and some bad. Most of all, they learned to speak the truth that everything hurts—whatever good life offers, you also lose something. Her truth? Even if they hate her, it’s only important that they live.
Sometimes when my eyes hurt so bad, I close them and watch the images on the back of my eyelids, just enough light comes through and I can see everything… it’s not so much my imagination as my memory:
like the little brook
in the back of our house
in the old country.
… When you’re as old as I am…you have a lot of memories.
… Here, eat some liver, some challah, baked fresh yesterday. How many matzo balls do you want…? I can never remember who likes what combination. But when you were younger, you always wanted no soup, just matzo balls.”
—Abbe Don,
Bubbe’s Back Porch,
“No Soup, Just Matzo Balls”
AKHES
(P
RIDE)
S
ince family—especially children—are the center of Jewish life, should it not also follow that all those years of devotion reap rewards? Right? Of course, right. Pronounced
nockiss
(a little throat clearing on the “ck”), the word means pleasurable pride. Not just because Junior learned to tie his shoe. Big pride. So now you can die a happy person.
According to author Tim Boxer, when the late Brooklyn judge, Louis Heller, was a young lawyer, he and his mother went into a store where
The Jewish Hour
radio program was being broadcast. During a break, Heller’s mother was asked to sample gefilte fish, then express her opinion on air. She did—and more.
“My grandmother couldn’t make fish as good as this and, by the way, if you need a good lawyer, my son Louie just graduated Brooklyn Law School!”
“But Ma, you can’t say that!” Louis cried, as lawyers couldn’t advertise.
A
fter his father deserted them, the late great Walter Matthau was raised by his mother. Years later, when Matthau had risen to the height of his film career, hoping he gave his mother a little
nakhes,
he asked her how she felt about his triumph. Her answer? “If you had had a decent father, you could have been a doctor.”
“Why not, Louie?” she said. “About the gefilte fish I was lying. About you I was telling the truth.”
It used to be that in the case of sons,
nakhes was
attained from their religious, then professional status, while for daughters, the word connoted a good
shiddach
(match) and becoming a good Jewish
baleboste
(homemaker).
M
RS.
G
OLD AND
M
RS.
B
LOOM RAN INTO EACH OTHER IN THE STREET AFTER TWENTY YEARS.
“H
OW’S YOUR DAUGHTER,” INQUIRED
M
RS.
G
OLD, “THE ONE WHO MARRIED THE SURGEON?”
“D
IVORCED,” ANSWERED
M
RS.
B
LOOM.
“O
Y.”
“A
H, BUT THEN SHE MARRIED A BRILLIANT ATTORNEY.”
“M
AZEL TOV!”
“A
H, THEY WERE ALSO DIVORCED.
B
UT … SHE’S NOW ENGAGED TO A MILLIONAIRE DEVELOPER.”
M
RS.
G
OLD SHOOK HER HEAD FROM
SIDE TO SIDE: “A
I
A
I
A
I
! S
O MUCH
NAKHES
FROM ONE DAUGHTER
.”
Naturally today, pride in daughters has expanded to include their accomplishments outside the home—especially when mama feels part of it.
According to Zora Essman, her daughter Susie doesn’t like her mother to see her shows, since she talks a lot about her, but
Mrs. Essman is still extremely proud of her daughter’s success. “It feels good [to be the mother of a star],” says Mrs. Essman, who then quips. “Though I have to hold my tongue and not say she got it all from me.”
“Nakhes
is the goal, not
kvelling
[to brag or gush],” says businesswoman and Connecticut politico, Rona Ginott. “If you honor your child, with luck, you get the honor. The child should be happy is the underlining issue.”
Melanie Strug’s greatest
nakhes
comes from her daughter Kerri’s grounding. “I went with her, traveling first class,” she says. “People are very surprised at how humble and down-to-earth she is.”
“I had a famous mother,” says Mallory Lewis. “It was wonderful—the vacations, the VIP treatment. And [Shari Lewis] had a famous father, Abraham Hurwitz, who was the official magician for New York. Now, I’m thrilled to give my son the same pleasure.”
Then, of course, there’s reality.
One day, Miriam met her old friend Lilith in a dairy restaurant.
“So how’s your son the lawyer?” asked Lilith.
“David’s fine. Please God every lawyer should be as clever as he is. Soon his practice should take off.”
“And your daughter Rebecca?”
“She’s so talented, she could play piano in every major concert hall around the world.”
“And what about your youngest son?”
“Oh, Mordecai? OK, I suppose. He’s selling
shmattes
[cheap clothes] to all the street markets in the Lower East Side, denks God. If it wasn’t for my Morty, we’d all be starving.”
OW
A
RE
Y
OU
? D
ON’T
A
SK
— C
LEANLINESS AND
H
EALTH