Here in Highland Park, New Jersey

Mother’s Day is a hard day for me. I really miss my mom. My husband is nice; he usually buys me a new cookbook or another book I might like on Mother’s Day. One year he bought me a nice metal watering can that I cherish. And my father brought me some flowers on Friday and wished me Happy Mother’s Day.

But it’s not the same as being able to call your mother and talk to her. Just for a bit.

On the right is my maternal grandmother z”l, whom we called Baba. That’s Russian for grandmother. The slim woman next to her is my mother, Elaine, z”l, may her memory be a blessing. When my mother became a grandmother, almost twenty years ago (eeks! is my niece going to be that old?), my sister-in-law thought she would want to be known as Baba. No, she said, there was only one Baba. So my mother became Savta.

My mother was born in Leningrad, Russia in 1924. When she came to this country (USA) in 1929, she had never tasted a banana. It tasted like a funny potato, she said. Her father, whom I never met because he died when my mother was 14, was already here in the U.S. He was born in Lithuania, came to America as a teenager, and went to Russia as a salesman for some American company–was it Ford? I’m not sure. There he met my grandmother, my Baba, whom he married. At some point they were separated; he came back to America and supposedly pulled strings in the State Department to get his wife and daughter to join him in New York.

When my mother was in kindergarten (same age as my daughter!) in New York City, she knew no English. So her father pinned a note to her shirt. When she needed to go to the bathroom, she was supposed to point to the note. It’s hard to imagine my mother not knowing English, as she later became a technical writer, corrected English grammar errors, and wrote an essay about mothers and daughters in Jane Austen.

There are a lot of stories about my Baba that I would like to share in future posts. My father once said she had experiences by the age of 25 that most do not have in a lifetime. She lived through the Russian Revolution and what was known as the “starvation period”, when people would have to walk many miles in the bitter cold just to get a frozen potato to eat. My Baba told me that the rabbis said it was OK to eat non-kosher food; you ate what you needed to stay alive. If you looked in the back of her mouth, you could see the shiny gold that replaced the teeth she lost during this period. Gold was easier to come by than food.

Enjoy your Mother’s Day, and as always, thanks for reading.

When I visited Newton, MA last weekend, I met a friend of my mother’s. She’s now 84. Last time I spoke with her was when she made a shiva call, so that was in 1998. She repeated many stories as I spoke with her. I introduced myself several times; she showed some recognition when I told her who my parents are, but at the end, when I said it was nice to see you again, she said, it was nice to meet you.

She was the inspiration for my sponge cake recipe. Hers actually had a cinnamon glaze, unlike the one I make. I asked her if she still bakes ten sponge cakes before Pesach. She said, no, she no longer bakes, but someone wanted her to come over to show her how to bake her sponge cake. She declined. She talked about how some people just want to be with you because they want something from you. She said: “I wasn’t brought up that way. I was brought up to be giving.”

She has a sad story behind how she ended up in Newton. She grew up in Rochester, New York and lived there most of her life. Her daughter was very sick with diabetes, so she came to Newton to care for her. Her daughter later died. She became very involved in raising her three grandsons. Her husband passed away as well. Her daughter’s husband remarried; he is very nice to her, she said, but his new wife won’t look at her when she comes over. Lots of hurt.

I can feel how my mother connected with her. Before my mother moved to Newton, she had lived since she was five years old in New York City, except for two years she spent at Smith College. It took my mother twenty years, she used to say, to get used to living in Newton. Once, someone from the shul bikur cholim committee mistakenly called her to welcome her to Newton instead of asking how she was feeling. My mother was not pleased. She told that poor bikur cholim caller she had been living in Newton for thirty years.

Back to the older woman: she told us about the Jewish community in Rochester, and how it used to be much larger. When Kodak hired her husband, they thought he was Italian; they didn’t know he was Jewish until he asked for Rosh Hashana off. His family was originally from Greece; she mentioned the town, it began with an ‘M’. It wasn’t Salonika. Family members also knew where in Spain the family had lived prior to being kicked of Spain in 1492. Her own family was Litvak (Jews from Lithuania).

She spent about an hour talking with me and a friend, and then we set up the shul tables for Seudah Shlishit (the third meal of Shabbat). She said she does this every week, and she was very clear about how the tables should be arranged. One of her grandsons calls her almost every day. It sounds like people look out for her. At the same time, one can feel her loneliness and pain.

I’m older than my mother. How can that be? For years, my mother would say she was 21+. I remember when someone asked her age, she would reply: 21+. At my wedding I remember her face grimacing when I attempted to tell someone her age.

I’m 45. I have no problem saying that: I’m 45. No big deal. Why was it such a big deal for mother? As she is no longer alive, I can’t even ask her that question. Could be a generational thing. She was born in 1924; women were more private, reserved. Could be a personal thing. She married late, when she was 35. I don’t think she felt good about it taking her so long to get married.

Here I am, 45, and feeling fine about being 45.

This a picture of my mom, z”l (may her memory be a blessing), posing in front of some fancy shop in Newton Centre. We used to enjoy window shopping together. I took the photo in the late 1970’s? early 80’s? It captures a little of her personality.

My mother, z”l (zichrona l’bracha, may her memory be a blessing), called it ‘the Big C.’ She couldn’t say its real name, Cancer. That would be too much of an admission of its arrival, of the arrival of this dreaded, unwelcome guest. My mother was diagnosed with colon cancer soon after my wedding. The early years of my marriage and of my sons’ babyhoods were marked by worry about how was she doing, how much longer would she be with us, could we do anything at all to reverse the decree, as it felt to us. The doctor gave her less than two years to live; she lived for more than five. Part of her longer survival might have been due to the force of the chemotherapy. My father’s care for her helped, too. A large part was her own desire to live just a bit longer, to see a few more grandchildren born, to dance at a few more simchas.

Unfortunately, I have been impacted by cancer much of my life. In 4th grade, a dear boy in my class died of this disease. Would I get a lump on my leg, too? I used to think. Every ache and pain for the next few years scared me. There was a little girl whose family had come all the way from Israel to the Boston area so she could be treated for cancer. The little girl lived a few more years, but then she too succumbed. As the years rolled passed, I learned of adults who had died of cancer. A friend’s aunt. A friend’s father. An aunt in Israel.

In my twenties, a friend’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. I remember how warm a woman she was. I loved going to her home on Shabbat, the table spread with delicacies, and her warm smile making me feel welcome. Once, I went with my friend and her family on a hike in Maine. Out in the woods, we cooked hot dogs over an open fire. I remember her mother said: “I never ate these before I was diagnosed. I always avoided food like this (hot dogs). But now, what does it matter.” What a sad, sad day it was when we attended her funeral.

Years later, my friend would blame fat. “My mother made everything with fat, fat, fat,” she would say. What kind of fat wasn’t clear. One can only guess (saturated animal fat at the main course, with hydrogenated fat for dessert? With some rancid, overcooked oils thrown in anywhere?) Her father, too, would be stricken; about a year or two before my mother died, her father died of prostate cancer.

How I got stuck on the cancer and nutrition link and continue to follow this issue is a subject for another post. I can only write so much on this topic without feeling emotionally drained.

But I will say this: remember how my friend’s mother never ate hot dogs before she got sick? I gradually came to the opposite conclusion. Giving up hot dogs wasn’t merely enough. The food pyramid that we are taught about nutrition isn’t enough. There’s a lot to know about nutrition, and all our bodies are different.

In memory of my dear mother, here are some of her paintings.