Friday Old Country and Beyond Stories Part 4

Passover and My Grandmother's Craziness

We'll leave my father on the cusp of attacking Warsaw with the Russian Army for next week. Passover is coming up, and I've been thinking about my childhood Passovers quite a bit.

My family was very small. There were my parents, my grandparents, and my uncle and aunt all living within 20 miles of each other. But somehow this tiny family was incredibly Balkanized. There were tensions and strange alliances that held for decades. Here is the breakdown.

First off, there was never any worry that the husbands and wives would get divorced. Each couple seemed to be joined at the hip. There were no affairs and no flirting with others; they all seemed to have their hormones in check. For example, my father and mother loved each other dearly, and trusted each other completely. They even started to look like each other as time marched on, something that I found to be a little eerie.

Then there was my grandfather and grandmother. They truly did look like each other; then again they were first cousins so that's not hard to believe (yes, I come from Jewish rednecks). They had deeply tanned leathery skin from working outside all day, black hair that never seemed to gray (no they didn't dye their hair), high cheekbones and brown eyes. When I was little I thought they were Indians. Their relationship was stranger than my parents because my grandmother was truly certifiable as I'll probably talk about below; but again, like my mother and father, they were true partners in every way and worked together in business six days a week.

Finally, there was my uncle - my mother's kid brother born in 1939 right before the war started - and his wife, also a child of survivors. They were newly married, but joined at the hip as well.

It was the interactions between the couples that were a mess.

My father was always jealous of my mother having any surviving family, and he was particularly envious of my mother having a surviving father. There was never anything resembling closeness between my father and grandfather as a result. Plus before I was born, they once came to blows over something I'll probably tell about in another posting. They were both very strong physical laborers, very prideful men of few words with a history of pummeling people they didn't like. I can imagine that fight was nasty. And it was never forgotten.

My father and grandmother surprisingly got along well. But I think that was my grandmother's way of making my mother angry. She tended to be very affectionate and solicitous of my father, and not at all affectionate to her own daughter. There were probably a number of reasons for her dislike of her daughter. First off, my mother and my grandfather were extremely close. They had very similar temperaments and saw eye to eye on almost every issue. I could see the jealousy in my grandmother's eyes whenever she saw my mother and grandfather exchange confidences.

But mostly, it was because my grandmother was out and out crazy. She could function quite well in the day to day. She worked in the office of my grandfather's junkyard and sold stuff. But her grip on reality was not even tenuous.

For some reason, no one in my family recognized this but me. There were the little things that people should have noticed. She never went to doctors. Not once in all of her almost 50 years of living in the US did she ever go to a doctor's office. I asked her why once. She looked at me fiercely and said, "A doctor? He'll charge me money and take out my heart with a knife!"

Her fear of doctors also meant she never went to an optometrist and she was as blind as I was. When she would come to our house, she would shuttle me off to the bathroom so I would read the scale and tell her how much she weighed.

She loved me dearly, and I think that's why she would tell me things she didn't tell others. She would give me strange life lessons. For instance, she once told me that I should run as fast as I could when I saw a policeman otherwise, "He'll kidnap you, take you to a doctor and they'll cut out your liver." I didn't even know what a liver was at the time, but I knew my grandmother was nuts.

Then there was the way she would show her affection to me whenever we saw each other, which was once or twice a week. She would come looking for me, grab me, put me over her knee, pull my pants down, take out her dentures (she lost her teeth in the war), and bite my ass with her gums, shouting out between the bites in Yiddish, "He's so sweet! He's so sweet!" She did this until I was about six, when I was finally big enough to squirm away. Like I say she was crazy.

For some reason, whenever I told my parents that my grandmother was crazy, something I did quite often, they would deny it. They would never believe me. Years later, in Israel, I mentioned that my grandmother was nuts in a room full of relatives. They just nodded their heads. "Oh yeah," my great uncle said. "Ever since she had cholera, she was never the same." I didn't believe cholera caused her madness. But I felt relieved that at least someone else recognized what I first knew when I was five.

Anyhow, my grandmother, crazy or not, was by turns mean and distant to my mother. And this would hurt my mother terribly. When my uncle married, my grandmother seemed to immediately bond with her new daughter-in-law, another act of affection that my mother found difficult to witness. My mother would ask me quite often when I was in my teens, "why does she do these things to me," whenever she was slighted. I gave up trying to tell her that her mother was crazy by the time I was fifteen or so. I never had a good answer.

So the dynamics were thus. Each couple was like a tidy and well walled city. Outside those walls, things became very complicated. My grandmother liked my father. My grandfather loved my mother. My grandfather hated my father. My uncle hated my father for taking away his big sister and marrying her. My grandmother hated her daughter. My mother hated her sister-in-law because she wasn't good enough for her kid brother and because my grandmother showed her the affection she never received. It was even more complicated than this, but I'm purposely avoiding some issues of my own in this messy family.

Now this story, which has rambled more than a bit, was supposed to be about Passover. And the question is, where does a family like this - so close and yet so perpetually unhappy with each other's company - hold a Seder? And the answer was almost always at our house. While no one in my family was willing to recognize that my grandmother was crazy, they all knew she lacked the wherewithal to hold a Seder.

She also lacked basic sanitation skills. Her refrigerator was always filled with spoiled foods. Mold grew rampant. My mother would clean it out now and then and hear my grandmother's shouts and insults as she did it. Whenever I visited on my own, I would sniff everything she gave me to eat. I'd take food that was bad, pretend to eat it, put it in a napkin when she wasn't looking (which wasn't hard to do even when she was looking since she had, like me, 20-200 vision and as I noted above didn't wear glasses) and flush it down the toilet. That all said, she fed my grandfather every day and he lived to be 92. I still don't understand how. He probably did the same as me.*

Most years we'd hold Seders both nights at my house. My grandfather would lead the Seder the first night. My father would lead it the second night. My mother loved these events. She loved to cook and host people; she was a natural balaboosta. And here's the funny thing about my family. As contentious as it was the other times of the year, somehow people would behave themselves at Passover. But it was more than a truce. They would actually get along famously. They were relaxed. They would tell stories. They'd joke and laugh.

I never understood how this happened. It just did. I used to watch these people on Passover and just bask in the calm and good cheer. I'd wonder why on Earth we couldn't be like this the other 363 days of the year, but I never asked that question. It would have been considered impertinent. And I know what the answer would have been more or less. "What do you mean? We get along. Always. We're family. This is how family is. Such a question. What are you, crazy?"

Those childhood seders are why to this day Passover is my favorite holiday of the year. I don't like matzah. I don't like macaroons, sponge cake, matzah balls or any of the food associated with Passover. But when I think of Passover I think of relationships and how the human spirit can sometimes surprise you in a good way. Animosity in a family, and all families I'm sure possess a good amount of it, can be like a cloud that suddenly disappears. Even if it only disappears for a few days, it's still a miracle.

*I do note that my grandfather would sometimes come to eat at our house alone. The look of gratitude on his face as he ate just radiated from him. He would pause between bites. "Oh, this is good," he would say. "So good." It was as if he hadn't had a good meal in months, which was probably fairly close to the truth.