How I Remember My Grandparents
All my grandparents had died before I finished the first grade. This post is a combination of memory and speculation
My children ask, how do I remember my grandparents? What were they like? I remember my grandparents practically not at all. From my own personal experience, I have no idea what they were like. I never knew them. While all four grandparents were living when I was born, they had all died, one after another, sometime between my 2nd and 6th birthday. The only ideas I have of them are not from memories of my contact with them, but put together from what I have gleaned from other people’s stories, primarily from my father.
When I was born in October of 1942, Pearl Harbor had occurred less than a year earlier and World War II had just begun for America. At the time of my birth, my parents, with my two older brothers, were living in Detroit, Michigan. We lived very near, or perhaps even with, my mother’s parents, grandma and grandpa Cohn. I was a baby, so I had no memories of that time. My mother always told me that her mother was very ill at the time of my birth, bedridden for the most part. She told me that my grandmother loved to have me lie in bed next to her. I still remember the look of sadness in my mother’s eye when she asked if I remembered her. Of course I didn’t and couldn’t, I was still an infant.
The best I can do, when asked what were my mother’s parents like, is to say they were very small and very thin, and appropriate to our present days of the pandemic, always stayed in isolation behind glass. Or, I would say that my knowledge of my maternal grandparents was limited to a black and white photograph that always hung over our living room mantle in Dallas. That was a formal portrait of a white haired woman in a black dress with pearls, wearing wire-rimmed glasses and standing next to a well-dressed gentleman on her left. I never knew what they were like, but everyone always spoke of them fondly and with respect.
On the other hand, I do have some vague memories of my father’s parents, Sarah and Morris Rosen. It’s not much. Of my grandfather Morris, who everyone called Zaide, I only remember an old man with a grey beard sitting alone on his front porch in south Dallas. We had recently moved to Dallas from Detroit. That memory — as vague and as indistinct as it was — nonetheless contained an element of truth. It said something about what he was like. He was aloof, and was probably more interested in his religion than his family and his grandchildren. No one ever spoke of having any positive relationship with him, including my own father. My older cousins just told stories of him chasing them about the neighborhood with a stick, so they couldn’t skip Hebrew school. He died when I was 5. (Recently, Evan Fetter, posted his death certificate. He died at home on February 16, 1948. A doctor completed his cause of death: (1) Dilaudid - Overdosage - 24 hours duration (2) Adeno-Carcinoma of Prostate - months duration. The document asked “Accident, Suicide or Homicide”: The doctor wrote Accident. If he had metastatic spread to bone, (not uncommon), he would have been in tremendous pain. As an adolescent, he severed the tendons of his trigger finger to avoid service in the army of the Tsar. Could he have hastened his death on his own?)
My grandmother Sarah is they only grandparent who I remember, even in the slightest. My memories of her, as limited as they are, were in line of what others had told me. We all called her Bubbe. She was warm and loving — and always cooking up something delicious to feed to her family. I remember standing in front of her, with my parents pushing me forward. (I was very shy.) We were all standing in her living room in south Dallas. She was smiling and laughing and stroking my hair. How did I feel about her? I felt weird, (but that tells you more about me, not what she was like).
I remember her as being small, having white hair tied in a bun, always moving about, tidying up or cooking. She was usually smiling and laughing. I was in the first grade when she died. She was in the hospital and my parents took me to visit her. It was a cold winter night, wet and rainy. Children were supposed to stay in the lobby. They were not allowed on the upper floors where the patients stayed. I couldn’t ride the elevator, so my parents snuck me up the stairs with my brothers. She was laying in bed but still smiled at us. I think she stroked my hair that time also.
Most of what I learned about my grandparents came from stories my parents told me about their parents. My mother and father got married in Detroit. That was where both their parents lived. They got married on the first day of the year, New Year’s Day, in 1927. My mother’s father gave a wedding dinner and all four of the people who would one day become my grandparents were present.
This was a period of time called the “Roaring Twenties”. America was in the midst of ‘Prohibition’. It was a time between 1920 and 1933 when America prohibited the sale of all alcoholic beverages: beer, wine, whiskey, any alcoholic spirits. My mother always spoke of her wedding with pleasure. Her family had provided a sumptuous affair. Every participant received at their table a small individual bottle of whiskey. It was, strictly speaking illegal, but the Prohibition ‘experiment’ was already seen as a national spectacular failure. Most people simply ignored the law although it would be another 6 years before Prohibition was officially repealed. Growing up in Dallas, I always remember seeing a small 2 ounce bottle of whiskey in my mother’s kitchen pantry. It had a hand-written label but the writing had faded. It was little, like me, so it held a particular fascination. What was it doing there among the canned goods and bags of flour? My mother had saved it as a memento from her wedding celebration, 25 years earlier. The top of the bottle had a wax-like covering but over time it had shrunk, turned sticky and black, and dimpled down into the little bottle’s neck. Only a teaspoon of light brown liquid remained in the bottom.
A lot had happened between their wedding day and the day of my birth, 15 years later. In 1929, the stock market crashed and the country went into the ‘Depression’. The 1930’s were a tough time for everyone, and my family was no exception. Millions of people were out of work and everyone was scraping by. My father, who had earlier graduated law school and had just opened his office, had to leave the law and find work elsewhere. Everything had dried up and in order to feed his family, he found work as a milkman. (Back in those days, grocery stores did not sell milk. Milk was delivered and left outside your front door each morning by a milkman. My father actually delivered the milk along his route, early in the morning, using a horse and wagon. Of course, that was way before I was born, but I remember seeing pictures and hearing my older brother’s stories.)
It was also a tough time for my father’s parents. Sometime in the early 1930’s, they left Detroit and migrated to Dallas, Texas, where there was a warmer climate and better economic opportunities. Six of their 7 children went with them. Only my father, their oldest living son, remained up north in Detroit. So I never met my paternal grandparents until after my third birthday, when we also moved down to Dallas.
So in one sense, I can answer your question simply. From birth until age 3, I spent a lot of time with my maternal grandparents in Detroit. From age 3 until age 6, I frequently got to see my paternal grandparents in Dallas. But they were all gone before I turned 7 and I have almost no memories of them. I wish I knew more about them. I wonder sometimes if my life would have been different, or richer, if they had played some role in my growing up. I wish I could answer your question better.