Tonight is my mother's Yahrtzeit. She would have been 80 years old. This picture is from well before I was born. The baby in the oven is my brother. My mom looks to be about six months pregnant, which would put this photo at around April 1951. I think they are standing in front of my parents' first house on 42nd and Auer in Milwaukee. But actually, those houses in the background look older than the ones in that neighborhood, so it could have been at my grandparents' house on 12th and North. Now both areas are seedy, but then again so is the neighborhood I grew up in (I was just there a few weeks ago). Back then they would have been modest working class kinds of places.
My father took this picture no doubt with his Leica, a rangefinder camera that he got in exchange for a carton of cigarettes back in Germany after the war. A few years after this picture was taken he would sell the thing for 100 bucks to my uncle because he was desperate for cash to build a house.
At the time of this picture, my father was working as a union carpenter making good money. He was strong and worked fast. Even in his fifties he could still pound nails three times faster than me. One set and one slam and it was done. I remember building a fence with him at an apartment building when I was 15 and he was 49. His rhythm was still amazing: set, slam, set, slam, set, slam. His hammer was going so fast it was as if his arm was attached to a gas engine.
My grandfather in this picture is about the same age as I am now. You can tell he was no weakling either. It was at about this time that my grandfather and father got into a slugging match. My father, who had a violent temper, hit my mother one night. When my grandfather saw what had happened, he came over and slammed a fist into my father's face. It went back and forth that night, two strong and willful men. My grandfather swore he'd shoot my father dead if his daughter was ever hit again.
I didn't hear about this event until I was 25 or so. But my father never did hit my mother again. He also never got along with my grandfather after either. They were both prideful. They kept their distance, respectful but cool.
Many years later about five months before I was to get married, my father pulled me aside. He wanted to talk to me about marriage. This was so unlike him. Actually it was unlike anything in our family. We don't give advice in general and it certainly isn't solicited. Everybody seems to want to learn for themselves. This little session was an exception to the natural way our family worked (and still does work).
My father then laid down his view of marriage. He said that a wife was your best friend always. You should trust her with everything and anything. You were a team. And you should never, ever raise your hand to her. He was adamant about that last point. He got all emotional as he mentioned this. I thought it was odd at the time. It was only later when I heard about him hitting my mom early in their marriage that I understood what had been going on in his head. He was trying to share hard earned wisdom.
My brother was born slightly premature, eight months and 18 days after my parents wedding. They worked fast. My parents delayed having more kids until they had enough money. I was born five years later. My mother nearly died giving birth to me. I was an incubator baby. Her doctor told her that if she ever had another child, she'd likely die. It was probably the one major disappointment of my mother's adulthood. She loved babies, absolutely adored them. She wanted far more than two children and especially wanted a girl. She wasn't big on regrets, but she would mention this one at least two or three times every year.
My grandmother was in her early 40s in this picture. She never once went to a doctor during all of her years in the US. My grandmother was convinced that doctors removed internal organs when you weren't looking just for spite. She was of course completely crazy. She also had horrible vision, probably as bad as my mom's vision, but she never wore glasses. Mostly she relied on sound to figure things out.
She did keep herself clean. The one health related thing she did was check her weight now and then. She didn't have a scale of her own, but whenever she would come over to our house, she'd pull me aside and take me to the bathroom. She'd stand up on our scale, but she couldn't read the numbers. That was my job. I don't think her weight changed more than five pounds during all of her years in the US. But if it went up a few pounds, she'd get fretful and say that was it for sweets for awhile. And it was. Both my grandparents possessed iron wills.
I never really saw the resemblance between my mother and her parents when I was a kid. My mother had fair skin, freckles, and brownish/red hair. My grandparents were swarthy. When I was little, I more or less assumed that my mom was adopted. Somehow using kids logic I thought my grandparents - with their dark skin and black hair - were Native Americans who spoke Yiddish. I'm not joking. I really did think this when I was very little. But in this picture you can see the resemblance between my mom and her dad very clearly. You can also see the resemblance between my grandparents, who were first cousins. They definitely weren't Native Americans. Instead they were the Polish-Jewish equivalent of rednecks, possessing a family tree with few branches.
0 comments:
Post a Comment