"My Brooklyn Bubbe"
by
Gloria Murray
We never thought of ourselves as
underprivileged living in Brooklyn in the
1950’s. Few had a car so we never travelled to other places or classy towns
like Great Neck where my father’s brother, the lawyer, lived with his family, a
maid and a tiny black poodle.
We lived in East New York on Eastern Parkway and Saratoga Ave. My grandma Schwartz, who was called Bubbe
(Yiddish for grandma), was a feisty, funny lady from Romania who sold home-made
knishes on Pitkin Avenue and, in a millinery store, hats to homely ladies, unlike
her—a real beauty. She would tell them
how much a certain hat made them look like a movie-star (and she would name one
of them) to which they would glow, eventually agreeing to buy. She was one of those people who could probably
sell you the Brooklyn
Bridge. I adored her, so unlike my own, mother, her
eldest daughter, who was morose and never cracked a joke or did anything
unusual or lively. I was told she used
to play the piano but when she married my father they couldn’t afford one and
so her desire for music waned with her love of life as well.
But it was my Bubbe
through whose eyes I saw Brooklyn. We walked
to the Orthodox temple around the corner from my apartment building, she in her
Sabbath finery, black lacy gloves and a veiled hat to give her a regal
appearance, me in my special dress for that day. We would pass the closed door of the Super’s
apartment where he, a white man, lived with his black woman. They hardly ever came out because the
neighbors would gasp, pointing their fingers and shaking their heads. But it was the 1950’s and something you rarely
saw. It made me feel sort of sad to see how they would have to hide from the
world and I wanted to knock on the door and just say hello.
Bubbe and I sat
upstairs in the section reserved for the women as we had to be segregated from
the men, who in their skull caps and prayer shawls stomped their feet on the
floor below, waving their arms and singing in Yiddish. The cantor’s voice was like a beautiful bird’s
and each man had a chance to kiss his finger then press it to the velvet cased
torah (the Scriptures of Moses). We
couldn’t understand the service as the females had never learned Hebrew. It was reserved for the scholarly boys who
went to Hebrew school and got bar mitzvahed when they were thirteen.
Her apartment, which was five flights up on the
same block was like a fairy land. It was
filled with knick knacks or tchotchkes and family photos on the walls, her
mirrored closet packed with beautiful dresses, fancy shoes and outrageous hats,
all of which she never really wore, spending most of her time in the kitchen
baking challeh bread, potato kugel and stuffed cabbage for the Sabbath. I would stand in front of that mirror and make-believe
I too was a movie star and with a straw, pretend I was smoking and sipping from
an empty wine glass that only on the high holy days would be filled with
Manischewitz wine.
In
my own home, my mother and father would be silently eating. The air was stagnant
and oppressive. I never heard my mother sing though my aunt told me she had a
beautiful voice. We were on the 1st
floor, my aunt Bea on the second. This
gave me the advantage of crawling out the window and on hot summer days sitting
on the fire escape that faced Eastern
Parkway with the steady flow of traffic or people
walking their dogs. Blowing bubbles and
chewing bazooka gum was my favorite pastime and sketching which I took to
naturally. I remember fearing the swarm of black flies would somehow fly into
my mouth or ears so I stuffed them with cotton balls and tried to chew with my
lips closed.
We didn’t live far from the
market place (in lieu of supermarkets) where everyone went shopping for food
and clothing. There were pushcarts and
stands for everything you needed, especially fresh fruit and vegetables. When I went with my mother she would haggle
with the peddlers for a better price, even if it was two cents less. When we went to the butcher to get a chicken,
she would pick the one she wanted and the butcher, with his machete, would
slice its neck, letting the blood drip onto the sawdust floor. That night I wouldn’t
eat it, which really made my mother furious. Of course I was told again and
again about the starving children in Europe.
When it was
terribly hot my family and neighbors gathered under the large Oak on the
corner, fanning ourselves with newspaper and consuming tons of lemonade. When the ice man came with his lemon ice and
chocolate popsicles our mothers dared not refuse us a dime for one or the
other. We would listen to Bubbe’s
stories over and over; no one ever got tired of them. Soon the flies became too bothersome and we
eventually retreated to our hot, steamy apartments until evening when we would
come out again and sit on the stoop while the men talked baseball and we kids played
hopscotch, hit the penny, red light green
light. Later on we retreated to our sweaty beds where the fan was the only
breeze we could count on.
But there was one majestic place I would never forget—the Pitkin
theatre, where the ceiling was a velvety blue sky with stars, a moon and a
chandelier of all crystal so large if it ever fell, hundreds would be
killed. It was where I first saw The
Wizard of Oz and ran out crying because of the wicked green witch who wanted to
kill Dorothy and, I thought, me.
One day at Bubbe’s,
after helping her roll the dough for the matzoth balls, I went into the bedroom
to ‘dress up’ and saw teeth floating in a cloudy glass of water. I asked her whose they were and she laughed,
saying it was her teeth. I had always
thought they stayed in her mouth. When I
questioned why they weren’t in there, she said lots of people had no money for
dentists and ended up losing their teeth and she had to keep them it in salt
water to cleanse them. Right then and
there I swore I would never have false teeth.
Eventually I did end up with braces that damaged my teeth to the extent
where I now have a mouth fill of caps, but in
my mouth, not in a glass.
She often told me
weird but funny stories— how she had been stolen by gypsies when she was only
ten. Having been orphaned early, she was
living with two aunts. A neighbor saw them trying to pull her into a caravan
and screamed so loud they ran off, leaving her to grow up, marry my grandpa and
come to America
in 1912.
We finally left Brownsville when my sister
was 3. Three rooms could hardly house
four people. My aunt by then had bought
a house in Sheepshead
Bay. Leaving Bubbe was one of the most difficult
things I ever had to do and I wrapped my arms around her stomach, clinging with
the tightest grip my skinny arms could muster, tasting my tears and not being
able to stop.
We were moving to a middle income
project in Canarsie. Yes, it was a real place. We always thought when people
said to someone who annoyed them—“Oh go
to Carnarsie!” that it was just a
figure of speech. But it was more than
that—a large apartment complex facing the pier, that offered us a cool, but
fishy breeze.
We had four small
rooms and two bedrooms, one of which my sister and I shared. We were on the 3rd
floor and because I was claustrophobic I would walk up instead of taking the
elevator. Luckily we didn’t get anything
higher up than that. You couldn’t be choosy when you were on a waiting list for
affordable housing. Each floor had a community terrace where the tenants would
come out and kibitz. Only my mother remained inside. Inside had become a place she always wanted
to be now, missing my aunt and Bubbe, growing further apart from my father and
the world outside.
Since I was thirteen by then I discovered
boys, and we teens hung out at the local candystore, where you could get an egg
cream for a quarter and there is nothing today that can ever compare to a
Brooklyn egg cream. The teens were
divided into 2 groups, the collegiates who wore white bucks and knit sweaters
with neatly brushed hair or the rockers— (of which I became one) guys in
motorcycle jackets, cigarettes tucked under the cuff of a tee shirt, girls in pegged pants and blood red lipstick. Rock and roll had become the new mantra and
we sang it out loud and in our heads all day.
It had become an era of rebellion and Brooklyn
its sanctuary. We hung out at the pier,
making out under the trees and foliage, cracking ourselves up with imitations
of Elvis and Little Richard, throwing half eaten sandwiches to the seagulls. We could see the Belt parkway— the long
stretch of traffic between Queens and Sheepshead
bay. The honking of horns was continuous
until evening when it would finally quiet down.
I was old enough to take a bus so sometimes I took it to travel back to
see Bubbe. She always looked the same;
at least I never saw her aging. I would
curl into her arms again, feel her large, warm body, one breast smaller than
the other from surgery she’d had many years ago. I’d look into her face and see my own—how much
I looked like her. How much Brooklyn had
stayed in our blood so that in the future wherever we would end up some one
would say—Boy, you sound like you came
from Brooklyn and I’d smile and say—is there any other place?
. . . . .
No comments:
Post a Comment