Dear Readers, this early childhood piece makes very clear that there was nothing in my early childhood that pointed to Godwriting or spirituality. Nothing I could see in any case. If you see anything, please let me know!
But this absence of foreshadowing emphasizes, once again, that anyone can Godwrite. There are no prerequisites, and there are no contra-indications. Whatever one’s life has been up to now, they can Godwrite. There are no exceptions.
In writing this quick run-down of my early childhood, I discovered some things about myself that I had had no idea of. I had never thought that being born Jewish was much of a factor in my life, yet, in writing this, I see that it was huge. I couldn’t seem to get off the subject!
In looking back, how haphazard everything in my childhood was. Or was it? From everything I can see now, I led my life blindly. Or did I?
In writing this short piece, I discovered that I led several lives – two, three, four, five! – and I was not quite at home in any of them.
Was your life filled with so much contradiction as well? Perhaps you will tell me about your early life too.
Now I begin:
I was the youngest of five children. I had one brother who was twenty-three years older than I. My father was a butcher. My mother worked in the grocery store with my father. My parents worked long long hard hours.
My father had come to this country from Russia when he was eighteen to avoid pogroms and conscription into the Russian army. That’s my recollection of the story anyway. His first night in America, he slept on a cousin’s porch and cried. He found his way around by marking X’s on sidewalks with a stone. He got a job at a wholesale meat plant, cutting the fat off meat.
He went to night school one evening. The teacher immediately promoted him to the second grade. My father was so afraid he could not live up to the teacher’s evaluation that he never went back. My father thought he would like to have been a lawyer, maybe even a judge. He thought those were the highest things anyone could be. But in those days people earned a living and didn’t think much about what they would rather do.
My mother came over to this country from Vilna, Poland, which was Russia at the time, by herself when she was twelve. She had had no childhood. Her father had died soon after she was born, leaving her mother with daughters, my mother the seventh and youngest. When my mother was four years old, she took care of other children and washed clothes in the river to earn a penny. When she was seven or eight, she went to work for a cousin who had a bakery. That meant that my mother lived at the bakery, got up before 3 a.m. to start the fire for the oven and to later deliver the bread in the dark.
One morning she found a 100-ruble note in the street. Her mother announced this in the synagogue. The story goes that the man who had lost it said, for her honesty, my mother could keep it, and that’s how my mother had the fare to come to this country.
When my mother got here, she put her hair up and passed for sixteen and got a job in a cigar factory for $2.00 a week. When she was really sixteen, she married a rabbi’s son and had my brother Bennie and my sister Sylvia.
While she was still married, she met my father and they fell in love. My brother Sid, seven years older than I, was hatched and then my sister Eleanor, five years older, and then me.
My mother went back to work at the store when I was two weeks old. I was the only child my mother did not nurse. Not to take it personally, my mother didn’t want another child. I grew up with a bedtime story about how my father saw my mother taking money out of the cash register, how he was suspicious, followed her to a doctor’s office and stopped her from having an abortion. I was told this story over and over again the same way a child is told the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. And each time I heard it, I held my breath to see how it turned out.
Someone named Mamie first took care of me. Then someone named Martha. And then Margaret until I was seven. Interesting that their names all began with the same sound as Mother.
When my mother and father would come home from the store at seven at night on weekdays, (midnight on Saturdays after delivering orders) my mother would cook and my father would spend time with me. It was an adoring time with my father, while my mother cooked wonderful Jewish food. This was in contrast to the white Wonder bread and Campbell’s tomato soup that Margaret gave us.
When I was seven, Margaret left. There was no one at home to take care of me. No one sent me off to school. (My mother would wake me up before three in the morning to give me cocoa and toast before she went off to work, and I would go back to sleep.) No one was home to greet me when I came back from school. No one told me when to get up or what to do. No one told me what to wear or not to wear. When someone invited me to their birthday party, I went to the drug store by myself to buy something. I didn’t know how to wrap presents.
No one told me to do my homework or to do anything. When I became a schoolteacher, I was surprised when I saw how the parents made their children do homework. No matter how alone or lonely, I was spared having an adult hover over me, and I had the freedom to get to know who I was. But, of course, I always tried to be like everyone else.
My mother said we were the first Jewish family to move to Longmeadow, Massachusetts.
was born in the upstairs hall at 123 Colton Place. My parents spoke Yiddish, but there was no religious observance. Actually, religion was made fun of in my house.
In whatever way a child knows these things, I knew to be embarrassed that we were Jewish, even of course not having any idea of what Jewish was.
When the children at school would ask me, as they asked everyone in the class, what are you giving up for Lent, I would mumble that I didn’t know yet.
I didn’t know what Jewish holidays were, and I sure didn’t know to stay home on one. There was some ridiculing of Jewish holidays and me, and I remember rushing home from school to get away from it.
But I did know about Christmas, for it was celebrated in schools. Chanukah was not, but I doubt that I would have felt more a part of Chanukah than I did Christmas. I did not belong with either.
On Christmas Eve my mother and father worked extra late delivering orders.
When Margaret was still with us – Margaret came to us when she was sixteen because her family could not afford to feed everyone – she got room and board and 50 cents a week – she stayed with us until I was seven. Sometimes she put a handkerchief over my head and took me to the Catholic Church with her.
Christmas Eves we took the bus over to her house. Christmas was a big event for Margaret’s family. As poor as they were, they would have a gift for me. Once there was an unboxed present wrapped in paper, and they asked me if I knew what it was. From spending time in my father’s store and being very familiar with everything stocked there, I thought it was a chicken! But, of course, it was a doll! One year Margaret’s family gave me a book. They knew how much I loved books. I can feel now how my heart and eyes lit up.
When I was seven, Margaret moved on, and I spent Christmas Eves alone. One year a neighbor heard that I was alone and came to my door and insisted I come over to their house. I remember their sweet kindness, but, of course, as kind as they were, and also because they were so kind, I felt apart. This sense of being on the outside haunted me most of my life.
Another noteworthy memory is of my going up to the attic and unrolling and rolling this poster of what my mother said was a baby picture of my brother Bennie. There was a beautiful star shining on him. My mother exaggerated a lot, and I knew to take whatever she said with a grain of salt. But I never knew for sure if that was my brother in the picture. Now I am sure it was a picture of Baby Jesus. My mother would only have kept it because it reminded her of my brother Bennie. How she ever possessed the poster in the first place, I have no idea.
My brother Bennie was an angel to me. Not himself a happy man, he was always happy to make others happy. One day he brought me a puppy! He would take me with him when he delivered eggs or picked them up from farms. When I was in high school and college, he would drop off flowers and the New York Sunday Times early on Sunday mornings while I still slept, and I would find them when I woke up late.
My sister Sylvia was already married when I was born. She was the opposite of Bennie, seemingly unaware of others’ feelings.
My brother Sid was always good to me, but not responsible for me.
My sister Eleanor, who was five years older, was demeaning of me. This was made harder because there was no one to tell her no. It was never easy back and forth with Eleanor and me, and yet, in childhood, she taught me the alphabet and how to count, and, in adult years, when I was in need, she was invariably there.
Thank goodness for school. I can’t say I loved it, but I can’t imagine what I would have done without it. Schools were quite strict then and not primarily loving places, but I had a second grade teacher, Miss Bancroft, who loved me. On my seventh birthday, she held me on her lap. She was a bleached blond, which was a horrific thing in those days. She only taught at my elementary school the one year I had her. She married the following summer and moved to New Hampshire. Her name became Mrs. Ballard. Our third grade class wrote to her the next year, and she wrote back and she said that my handwriting was the best of all.
I loved stories and compositions and art and did well in school, but I was not lit up by it. I do remember learning about metaphors and similes in eighth grade and feeling a recognition of something wonderful. Perhaps this was a precursor – or memory – of the beautiful imagery God was later to give in Heavenletters.
In so many ways I led a double life:
Yiddish at home, English at school.
Smart at school, but dumb at home.
Jewish, but not Jewish anywhere but in name. Lived in a very Gentile neighborhood where I was an oddity. But in the neighborhood in Springfield a few miles away where my married sister lived, it was backwards. Everyone was Jewish. It was odd if you weren’t Jewish. I went back and forth into both worlds.
Never went to synagogue, but did go to church once in a while.
As mentioned before, I ate hearty Jewish food – wonderful rye and pumpernickel breads made unlike any today and amazing Jewish foods that my mother spent hours cooking from scratch with all the love in her heart on Sundays. During the week, I filled up on Campbell’s Tomato Soup and peanut butter sandwiches made with white spongy Wonder bread.
We were poor but lived in a well-to-do town.
Margaret, the young girl who took care of us until I was seven and who took me home with her, lived in a neighborhood so visibly poor you would think there was a sign that said so. To Margaret’s family and the children I played with there, I was a rich girl. After all, my father had a black Buick.
And, I suppose, when you come down to it, all of us lead two lives, Earthly and Divine.
Thank you for coming to this web site and reading my story. I would love to hear from you.