The Goose Girl, the Rabbi, and the New York Teachers: A Family Memoir

By Deborah Heller

Part history, part memoir, The Goose Girl, the Rabbi, and the New York Teachers: A Family Memoir recounts a narrative of lives lived in dramatically changing times. In the background loom author Deborah Hellers distant forebears: a maternal great-great-grandmother, the first Jewish woman in her nineteenth-century German village to refuse to shave her head and wear a wig (sheitel) after marriage, who earned her passage to America by driving geese to market; and a seventeenth-century Talmudic scholar, successively chief rabbi of Vienna, Prague, and Cracow, who wrote an important commentary on the Mishnah and was arrested and imprisoned by the imperial authorities.

Echoes of the rebellious Goose Girl and the scholarly rabbi reverberate in the lives of Hellers parents, born at the beginning of the twentieth centuryher mother in Brooklyn, her father in a Russian shtetl. Emerging from very different worlds, they came together as New York schoolteachers, sharing the radical hopes and fears of a generation marked by strong political passions.

Drawing on written and oral history, legal records, and her own memories, Heller follows her parents from their early years through the McCarthy years and beyond. Focusing both on individuals and on the worlds in which they lived, The Goose Girl, the Rabbi, and the New York Teachers illuminates significant moments in Jewish and American history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475969085

Deborah Heller

Deborah Heller was born in New York City. She received her BA in English from Cornell University, studied German literature at the Free University of West Berlin just before the wall went up, and received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. She taught in the English and Humanities Departments at York University, Toronto, Canada for more than thirty years, during which she spent two sabbatical years in Florence, Italy. She has published book chapters and articles on British, North American and comparative literature, including Wordsworth, George Eliot, Mme de Staël, Dickens, Kafka, Ibsen, Anna Banti, Alice Munro, and Grace Paley. She is the author of Literary Sisterhoods: Imagining Women Artists, Daughters and Mothers in Alice Munro’s Later Stories, and is co-editor of Jewish Presences in English Literature. She lives in Toronto, Canada.

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A FAMILY MEMOIR

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Heller.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-6907-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-6909-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-6908-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013900460

iUniverse rev. date: 3/19/2013

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

I. MATERNAL FOREBEARS

1. The Goose Girl and the Next Two Generations

2. My Mother’s Early Years

II. PATERNAL FOREBEARS

3. The Rabbi: Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller

4. Koidanov, the Shtetl

5. Beyond Those Distant Seas: Immigration

6. The Lower East Side: Working and Learning in America

7. Isaiah and Judaism in the New World

III. BERTHA AND ISAIAH

8. Foreign Travel and Lake George

9. Becoming Parents: Sunnyside, Early Schools, Summers

10. A Childhood on the Old Left

11. The Cold War and the New York Teachers

12. The Other Fifties

IV. TRANSITIONS

13. The Author Moves On

V. LATER YEARS

14. Bertha and Isaiah on the Upper West Side

Appendix A: Selections from Bertha Heller’s Letters

Appendix B: Where Shall We Forward Your Mail? (Bertha Heller)

Appendix C: Selections from Isaiah Heller’s Letters

Notes

Works Cited

About the Author

For the succeeding generations:

Jules, Daniel, Lisa, Oleg, Sophie, and Isaiah

And to the memory of Bertha and Isaiah Heller

Chi fuor li maggior tui?

Who were your ancestors?

Dante, Inferno X, 42

This history is chiefly concerned with the private lot of a few men and women; but there is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life, from the time when the primeval milkmaid had to wander with the wanderings of her clan, because the cow she milked was one of a herd which had made the pastures bare.

George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical, Ch. 3.

I make it real by putting it into words.

Virginia Woolf, A Sketch of the Past

PREFACE

Part memoir, part history, this book recounts a narrative of lives lived in significant moments in Jewish and American history. Its starting point was my desire to construct for myself and my children and grandchildren a family history—both of my subjects as individuals and of the changing worlds in which they lived. In its broadest outlines, my tale extends from central Europe at the end of the sixteenth century to New York City at the end of the twentieth.

Though inevitably partial and selective, this family memoir is also part of a wider story. To help contextualize memories and oral histories, I consulted biography, fiction, memoirs, legal records, and historical accounts of Jewish immigration to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and of the investigations into the political affiliations of teachers in the New York City public schools during the McCarthy years. With the possible exception of one rabbi ancestor, no one in these pages can be said to have mattered to History. Rather, by tracing the ways in which history mattered to them, I hope to help illuminate their complex worlds while remaining true to individual experience.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am happy to take this occasion to thank all those who have been kind enough to add their memories to my own: Shirley Katz Cohen, Judah Gribetz, Charles Gross, Ann (Scherel) Heller, Robert Marks, Vivian Narehood, Gary Portadin, Marjorie Roemer, Barbara (Morton) Sargent, and Judith Ruth (Heller) Weber.

I would also like to express my gratitude to friends and family who have read and commented on this book during one stage or another of its development, including many of those mentioned above: Gisela Argyle, Gail Chiarello, Ann (Scherel) Heller, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Jules Heller Roazen, Louis Madonna, Vivian Narehood, Gary Portadin, Marjorie Roemer, Barbara (Morton) Sargent, and Judith (Heller) Weber.

I. MATERNAL FOREBEARS

1. THE GOOSE GIRL AND THE NEXT TWO GENERATIONS

This is the story my mother told: My mother’s great-grandmother, Bertha Ballin, was the first Jewish woman in her village in Germany to refuse to shave her head and wear a sheitel (wig) after she married. Her husband (whose first name never figured in my mother’s stories) was handsome but good-for-nothing. Bertha raised geese as well as children. By diligently driving her geese to market, she earned enough money for passage to America. Leaving her husband behind to look after the children and make sure the pigs didn’t bite their hands off, she sailed for New York. There she got a job as a cook in a fancy apartment on Fifth Avenue, during the time General Grant was president (1869–1877).¹

When she had saved enough money, she sent tickets back to her family in Hesse Darmstadt, near Frankfurt am Main. After her family joined her in New York, she looked around to find a husband for her daughter Rosa. Unimpressed by the Jewish young men she saw in the New World, she remembered the tall, good-looking redhead from a neighboring village with whom Rosa had danced at folk dances across the ocean. Over her daughter’s vociferous objections (Mother, don’t you dare!), Bertha purchased yet another ticket and brought the adventurous Franz (Fritz) Oppenheim to New York. Rosa took a second look and changed her mind.

Rosa and her husband—my great-grandparents—ran a furniture store in the Yorkville section of New York City at a time, as my mother put it, when Jews thought they were Germans. When the store went under in the Crisis of 1893, the enterprising Rosa and Fritz opened a clam chowder bar in Far Rockaway. There, while still a relatively young man, Fritz was standing and talking to his wife when he suddenly dropped dead. Rosa was so sad that she closed up the clam chowder bar and moved with her children, Mina, Charlie, and Henrietta, to Brooklyn.

When Henrietta—my grandmother—fell in love with Abraham Marks, Rosa disapproved. Abraham came from a Russian Jewish family. As a German Jew, Rosa didn’t want her daughter to marry beneath her station. Henrietta and Abraham were forced to wait five years before they were able to wed. In an era of chaste propriety, they kept company on bicycles.

Henrietta had been a piano teacher before she was married, but once she became a wife her husband forbade her to work for money; so she gave up teaching. Evidently, the New World was uncongenial to the independent spirit of Bertha Ballin. Or perhaps Henrietta’s rebelliousness had simply exhausted itself over the five long years in which she steadfastly resisted her mother’s opposition to her marriage choice. It is, of course, also conceivable that Henrietta was just as happy not to continue working as a piano teacher, or was even complicit in Abraham’s prohibition—though this is not the way my mother presented it. In fact, Henrietta did not entirely cease teaching; my mother’s cousins were the unpaying beneficiaries of my grandfather’s prohibition. Henrietta’s musical accomplishment, however, had an intimidating effect on her own daughter, my mother, also named Bertha. Discouraged, as she told it, by the ridges that her mother’s constant practice had worn deep in the ivory keys, Little Bertha eventually abandoned the study of her mother’s instrument.

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Henrietta Oppenheim Marks, author’s grandmother as a young woman. Late nineteenth century.

I never heard my grandmother play the piano, though there was one in her house. I remember her above all in her kitchen and garden. When I was growing up in Sunnyside, Queens during the 1940s and early 1950s, we used to drive out to Jamaica every Sunday afternoon to visit my grandmother. She lived in her own house, along with her son, my mother’s younger brother, Uncle Murray; his wife, Aunt Bea; and my cousin Bob (Bobby at the time). It didn’t seem odd to me then that they were all living there together. If I had ever thought of the situation as requiring explanation, it would never have occurred to me that this might reflect any financial difficulties my uncle had. As far as I knew, Murray and Bea were better off financially than my parents were. They always had a car, which we did not, and their cars were always bigger and fancier than ours (when we had one).

All the conventional wisdom I’ve heard since, about how two grown women can’t live together comfortably in the same house, was far from my experience. From what I observed, Grandma and Aunt Bea had an admirable division of labor. My grandmother looked after the house, doing the cleaning and the cooking. Aunt Bea did the shopping and helped Murray with his work. I had, of course, only a hazy idea of what this work involved. He was a salesman of little girls’ dresses, called Rainbow Dresses. (The firm’s motto—Girls look best when Rainbow Dressed—appeared on the pencils Murray gave me, which I was always happy to get.) He would go on the road and also into the showroom. Often Bea would go with him. Thus, as far as I could tell, the home situation was a cushy one for her. During the summers, Bea and Murray would go on vacation by themselves, sending Bob off to camp, which my parents told me he hated. Occasionally Murray and Bea stayed at a resort not far from where we were spending summers in the Adirondacks. They would visit us, and we would go have a meal with them at their resort.

Grandma also helped with raising her grandson, Bob. When I contacted him while writing this memoir, his recollections of this help were surprising. He recalled our grandmother’s telling him repeatedly, You’re good for nix. You’ll never amount to anything. His father would echo her, but not his mother. We never witnessed such terrible abuse. But, of course, such things are rarely said in front of others.

Bobby was six and a half years older than I. At the time, he seemed much older. My sister, Judy (my senior by two years), and I looked up to him with a kind of awe. He was a glamorous figure in our eyes—tall, dark, and handsome. Sometimes he condescended to play with us. More often, he had friends over. Frequently, they would write radio plays and perform them for us. When I shared this memory with Bob, now living in California, he replied: At one time, I had ambitions to be a ‘radio announcer.’ Remember, those were pre-television days. I could tell you what was on what station on the radio at what time any day of the week. Harry [his close friend] and I used to go to radio shows in Manhattan regularly. We would send for scripts and perform them. We built a microphone out of wood and recorded parodies of those shows—or we would write our own scripts. I owned a reel-to-reel Webcor tape recorder. I’d love to hear some of those performances today (Robert Marks, e-mail, January 2, 2009).²

My other main memory of Bobby is that my aunt worried loudly and persistently that Bobby wouldn’t eat, that he had an eating problem, something I found difficult to understand. I thought my grandmother was a wonderful cook. I don’t remember clearly what she served on those Sunday visits (was it roast chicken?), though I do remember her holiday meals—Thanksgiving and Christmas—when it was always turkey and sweet potatoes with marshmallow topping. As a German Jew, my grandmother didn’t hesitate to celebrate Christmas, though she never had a tree. Presents, including those to and from Aunt Bea’s relatives, who joined us on these occasions, were stacked in front of the fireplace in the living room. The ritual of these festive meals was that Grandma, a vigorous, solidly built gray-haired woman, would bring the whole bird into the dining room on a platter and hold it up proudly for us to view. Everyone would ooh and aah in admiration. Then she would return to the kitchen and later reappear with the meat nicely carved.

What I remember most about those Sunday meals was that you could accompany them with soda pop—something unheard of in our house!—or milk flavored with a variety of heavy sweet syrups. Judy drank chocolate milk at home (I’d been told I was allergic to it), but my relatives offered the option of strawberry milk as well as ginger ale or cream soda.

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Author’s grandmother Henrietta Marks as the author remembers her, in her home in Jamaica, Queens, 1940s –50s

The real pièce de résistance of my grandmother’s dinners, however, was dessert. She baked! Often it was a white cake with a sticky sweet icing. Other times it was a kind of two-part cookie, filled with jam and nuts. For each one she would place a circle of dough judiciously on a cookie sheet, drop a small amount of the jam and nut mixture on top of it, cover it with a second round of dough, and when the sheet was full, put the whole batch in the oven. Looking back, I’d say that her repertoire was neither extensive nor imaginative. But it seemed wonderful to me. My mother rarely baked.

The trip to my grandmother’s house was a long, tedious car journey from our house in Sunnyside—along Queens Boulevard, past a dreary landscape of apartment buildings, stores, and a cemetery—punctuated by stops and starts at innumerable traffic lights. But I can’t say how long was long. Half an hour? Forty minutes? An hour? We gave up our car at some point during my childhood, and there was an interval before we got another, so there must have been at least a period in which we didn’t regularly visit Grandma every Sunday. Still, this remains in my mind as an abiding childhood ritual.

I’m not sure why my parents—especially my father—did it. Was it guilt? Affection? A sense of obligation to my mother? A desire to give my sister and me some structure to our Sunday afternoons? Or just to keep us from being at loose ends and in each other’s and our parents’ hair? It could not have been a great pleasure for him. He once commented that in the eyes of the Jamaica relatives, he was a dumb intellectual. He saw that Aunt Bea showed contempt for him and our way of life. One example: Murray and Bea were the first family I knew to buy a television. Our visits to Grandma antedated this period, but once the television arrived, our ritual Sunday visits to their house became dreary, Bobby’s imaginative radio programs a thing of the past. After the meal we were all obliged to sit in their tiny back porch and watch variety shows. Murray and Bea were also fond of a series called Mr. Peepers, about a milquetoast schoolteacher. During each show, Bea would squeal with glee, "He’s such a typical schoolteacher." It is unlikely she could have been unaware of the insult to my father, a real schoolteacher, after all.

Bea was an attractive woman with short, wavy dark hair. Murray was handsome, in a dapper way. He sported a pencil mustache and wore colorful floral-patterned shirts, suggestive (I later thought) of Caribbean cruises. When once or twice my mother bought my father a similarly lively shirt, he regularly referred to it, with some amusement, as my Murray shirt. Before the arrival of their television set, we were occasionally present at Murray and Bea’s mah-jong parties. They would invite three other couples and open two folding card tables—one for the men, the other for the women—at which they would sit with their colorfully engraved mah-jong tiles arrayed in individual racks in front of them. I had no understanding of the game but was always enchanted by the beautiful, exotic ivory pieces that Murray, Bea, and their guests all handled with such assurance.

In addition to cooking and cleaning, my grandmother kept a garden behind her house. When we visited in the right season, she would always say to my mother, my sister, and me, Now you must come and admire my roses. And we would walk outside through the lanes of what I now realize was quite a tiny garden, surrounded by a wire fence, and admire her roses. Before we left, she always cut some for us to take home. My mother did no gardening at all, even though our Sunnyside house had a small backyard.

My grandmother’s house was not a large one, though larger than ours. It had both a small front and back porch. The front one had a glider that I used to lie on, daydreaming. Two gargoyles with planters in their mouths hung from the wall. My parents had brought these back for my grandmother from their travels before my sister and I were born. (Later, as a young adult, I recognized the gargoyles as replicas of those on Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.) The back porch, overlooking the garden and the garage, became the previously mentioned television room. In between the two porches was a standard layout: moving backward from the front porch were a living room with a fireplace (I assumed it was fake since it was never used), a dining room, and a kitchen.

In the basement, Murray had a workroom where he made wooden bowls and Bobby had an electric train set. (My father always generously expressed his admiration for Murray’s technical skills.) Upstairs were three bedrooms. My grandmother’s bedroom, in the front, always seemed particularly elegant to me because the main part of the bedroom, which had a large double bed, was connected by a kind of archway to a smaller dressing room, with a mirrored vanity table and a stool. Murray and Bea had a large room in the back, with twin beds and two closets (something that struck me as a great luxury). Bobby’s bedroom, right at the top of the stairs, next to the only bathroom, was small, rather like mine at home. All the rooms were wallpapered and, with the exception of Bobby’s room and the kitchen, the pattern everywhere was one of large boldly colored (I remember deep rose) flowers.

My memories of my grandmother are very much bound up with her house. Almost always it was we who went to visit her, not she who came to us. I suspect she wanted it that way. After we moved to Manhattan during my last year in high school, I think my grandmother visited our apartment once, then firmly said it was too far for her to go. But while we were still in Sunnyside, she would visit whenever I was sick. My mother would go off to teach school in the morning, leaving me in bed, and somewhere around midmorning I would hear the key turn in the lock and know that Grandma had arrived. I was always glad for her visits and her warm, comforting presence. She would invariably bring orange soda. Perhaps she had an idea that this provided some health-promoting benefit (as opposed to, say, cream soda). Sometimes she brought me sour balls, multi-colored fruit-flavored hard candies with a sweet-and-sour citric kick to them. Perhaps, as with the orange soda, she believed they too carried some obscure medicinal value.

Occasionally during the summers Grandma would come to stay with us for about a week in whatever cottage we rented. This was always a lot of fun for me, especially as she would bake regularly and allow me to lick the bowl after she had put her cake or cookies in the oven. On a few occasions, I stayed over at Grandma’s house in Jamaica for one or several nights.

What did I talk about with my grandmother? Almost everything I know of her life, which is little enough, comes from my mother’s account. I probably never asked her about herself. She gave me a book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and read aloud to me the stories of Snow White and Rose Red and The Goose Girl. She told me that when my parents were first married, before they had children, they led an elegant life and my mother used to dress for dinner. But the most prolonged story I remember her telling was about my uncle’s courtship of his wife. The details are hazy, but the essence was that Murray had been going around with Bea and they had broken up. Then at some later point he went back to Bea, and she said to him, I don’t want to start going around with you again unless it’s serious. I cried over you too much last time.

Nonetheless, he persisted and they started going around together again. Then Murray went to his mother and said, Ma, I hope you won’t mind, but I’m seeing Bea again, and he related what Bea had said to him.

To which my grandmother responded, Why should I mind, if you’re serious?

There must have been other details that have fled from my mind, and of course still others that I was never told, but I suspect that the brief account I remember was what