detail of still life oil painting by Elaine Wenger

On My Blog

Review of a book: The River Midnight

This week I converted my blog to what is known as Responsive Web Design – in other words, the blog should look good both on large windowed browsers and on small mobile phones. You can see what I mean by shrinking the corner of the browser page.

Elsewhere in the Blogosphere

• First, I want to show you Robin’s cherries. This luscious photograph inspired a whole post that is still in my head. I will let you know if the post becomes reality. Speaking of Robin, if you have summery photos, you might want to participate in Summer Stock Sunday.
• Miriyummy reminisces on childhood memories of the Catskills. And be sure to read her interview with Batya Medad.
• Ilana-Davita has written of the 2011 Philosophy exam in France. Which question would you pick? I chose “Can liberty be threatened by equality?”
• Among other books, Rayna Eliana reviewed The Coffee Trader which transports the reader to Seventeenth Century Amsterdam.
• Laura at Pragmatic Attic has some tasty fish recipes.
• Know anyone who runs a small business? They should check out my post Ease of a Facebook Business Page.

My mother’s yahrzeit (anniversary of her death) is next Thursday evening, right before the bar-mitzvah. I already missed doing a post on her birthday; for the life of me, what were we so busy with this past Labor Day Weekend? I can’t even recall. But I am remembering Simchat Torah 11 years ago, when instead of going to shul, as I do every other year, I spent the days with my mother (who was dying and died a few days after Simchat Torah) and with my then two year old son. And I also recall Simchat Torah 13 years ago, when someone told me to dance a lot so the baby would come out that night, and I replied that after all that dancing I would like to have a good night sleep. And I did have a good night sleep…my son was born two nights later.

Simchat Torah is on Saturday night (on Friday night in Israel); it is a holiday in which observant Jews celebrate the Torah with dancing, reading the beginning and ends of the Torah, and of course, food.

Pictured in the above photo is a happy little Leora (age 7?) celebrating her birthday with her mom (I hope you aren’t confused by the “her”; I mean “my”, but the 7-year-old seems like a different person). My mother was great at celebrating birthdays.

A few past posts about my mom:
Birthday Post for Elaine
Mother and Grandmother
Elaine Greets a Model

If you have a loved one to remember, what do you do to remember? My mother-in-law says it never gets easy to remember lost loved ones.

This next one is definitely in New York City:

And the one at the right seems to be my mother as a young teen, probably about the age of my eldest child.

In the New York City photo, one can see my grandmother, my mother at about age 5 or 6, and my grandfather, whom I never met. In many of the photos he seems to be holding a cigarette in his hand. I’m sure that played a factor in his dying when my mother was only 14 years old. My grandmother used to smoke; it was what one did, back then. When it was reported in the early 1970s that smoking was bad for one’s health, my grandmother threw her cigarettes away. I remember finding chewing gum in her purse. I don’t believe my mother ever smoked.

All her life my mother made friends easily. Here is a photo of her with a friend whom I suspect is named Hilda, because I found the name “Hilda” written on the back of a different photo:

I think they were graduating from Smith College (thank you, Jendeis; see her comment #8), where my mother did a masters in physics.

Here’s a picture of my mother (far right) and grandmother (next to her) with two friends. I do not know the friends. Perhaps someday someone will read this post and say, hey, that’s *my* grandmother:

Years ago, someone told me that Jews don’t celebrate birthdays, we celebrate “death” days (the name for this in Yiddish is Yahrzeit). Well, in my family we *do* celebrate birthdays, but a yahrzeit does have extra special meaning, in a different sort of way. My mother’s yahrzeit (the anniversary of her death) is soon after the Jewish holidays. So in late October, I’ll do another post about my mom.

One of the photos I found was of Mariampole, which is the town in Lithuania from which my maternal grandfather came. That photo is now in a post called Greetings from Mariompole.

My posts on my mother

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.

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 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.

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.