My Life in Sticky Notes: Or, How I Got from There to Here

By Marcia Weiss Posner

This is as much a celebration of life as it is a memoir. My husband, Lou, and I each did our own thing but we always helped one another to accomplish what the other needed or wanted. We adored our children and took pleasure in them. I am relishing this pleasure once again while leaving a record for my family to build on and also revealing my personal journey from ignorance to being a student of Judaism. Ah! To have a chance to revisit those times has been wonderful. Not only did I want to leave a record for my children and grandchildren but also for my great grandchildren, but I also wanted to go on that grand adventure called “life” once again. True, it had its tragedies; doesn’t every life? But its pleasures and high points and our wonderful marriage outweighed everything else.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543460452

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Copyright © 2017 by Marcia Weiss Posner .

ISBN:                  Hardcover                  978-1-5434-6044-5

                             Softcover                    978-1-5434-6046-9

                            eBook                          978-1-5434-6045-2

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Rev. date: 10/21/2017

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Contents

Foreword By Tamar Adler

Introduction

Chapter 1   My Paternal Grandparents:From Yonkers To New Jersey And Cream Ridge

Chapter 2   1930 – Lucille And Jack:From Cream Ridge To The Bronx

Chapter 3   December 7, 1941: The United States Enters The War

Chapter 4   The Teen Years: High School

Chapter 5   Lou, New

Chapter 6   Courtship And Marriage

Chapter 7   The Tv-Rental Business

Chapter 8   Jackson Heights: From Fashion To Fission In Spanish Harlem

Chapter 9   Whitestone, Queens: Becoming An Adult, Becoming A Jew

Chapter 10   19 Brookfield Road, Manhasset Hills, New York

Chapter 11   Camp Modin And The Kadisons, Anne And I In Russia

Chapter 12   Ed And Marilyn Moscowitz: From Paris To Purgatory

Chapter 13   Oy, Brucie!

Chapter 14   What A Trip!

Chapter 15   Libraries: Where I Belong

Chapter 16   Uja-Federation And Jewish Book Council: The Consultancy Years

Chapter 17   The Russian Who Crashed Ajl’s Conference On Jewish Children’s Literature, Jerusalem, 1990

Chapter 18   The Holocaust Memorial And Tolerance Center Of Nassau County

Chapter 19   The Welwyn Preserve And The Pratt Family

Chapter 20   Just For The Record

Glossary   Awards

Yiddish Terms

To my

wonderful,

beautiful

family

to help them

remember

their

Nanny and Saba

and all the rest of us

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The rest is up to you

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FOREWORD

BY TAMAR ADLER

I N ASKING ME to write this foreword, my grandmother sent along a few notes, intended to jog my memory. The notes were repeated at regular intervals. This was a tacit reminder of its own: though I treat everything as though I have all the time in the world, this memoir didn’t. That’s not because my grandmother, whom our family calls Nanny, is old or sick. It’s because she wanted, while she was still young enough and her memory clear and her language sharp, to spend much of a year climbing through her past – through its pine trees and jungle gyms and old apartment buildings, through memorable days at Rockaway, through later ones, when things she loved were also the ones that disappeared – and then clamor back to the present with the urgency of a true pragmatist and get it all onto the page and into our hands, which meant my acting pragmatically and urgently too.

These are the chapters of Nanny’s life. She wrote them beginning in the winter of 2011. She’d found herself jotting down memories on Post-it notes and hanging them around her to keep them from disappearing. Adhesive, though, she knew, is as faulty as the mind. So she sat for five weeks in a shady apartment in Naples, Florida, while crocodiles crawled appealingly through humid grasses outside and hot Florida nights crept in over the sullen water and down the asphalt streets of the condominium complex where she spent the season with her daughter, my mother. I visited during that time. Nanny would sit in the same faux wicker chair, in pastel pantsuits, from quiet breakfast time till midday, when we’d call for her to pause her journeying to eat broiled fish and potatoes and sour cream. At dinnertime, the day having darkened without her noticing or moving other than to maybe ask that a lamp be lit, she had to again be netted. She would shake the day’s travels off and – with the shining face of someone exhausted and elated, having roamed the hills and beaches and state lines and national borders of eighty-two years – move to the dining table and, over Florida vegetables and Key lime pie, read aloud what she’d remembered and learned that day.

The weather in New York warmed; my mother and she returned. Nanny’s pattern remained mostly unchanged. Each time a chapter had been painted and framed in clean descriptive words – its outline illuminated, its gnarly parts delicately shaded in – another set of people, circumstances, years, houses, and cars would present itself. Opera and Broadway and ballet were wordlessly cast aside, and other than writing articles and bibliographies and plays for her library, Nanny just went on typing and typing.

I would get phone calls from her all spring and summer, caught in the clasp of memory. I would pick up the phone, and she’d simply continue her thinking out loud: Did you have any idea that Gloria and Arnie were actually there when we . . . or Do you remember my telling you about the provocative survey I conducted when I was in teachers’ college? I loved those phone calls because, for an instant, I was swept up in the wind of the past that kept entering through cracks in the present. I got to feel it on my face as she felt it on hers. Then I would tell her it sounded worth writing down. She’d agree, and I’d hear or imagine the click of her switching on her desk light and get back to typing. So that was the first reminder: that she had done her work, and it was time for me to do mine.

The second was of a story she thought I might like to tell. When I was eight, I developed strange, immediate, all-encompassing stomach distress a week into the summer. I have suspicions – having gone blind of sibling jealousy at four and frequently suffered ailments I’d read about, like nervous exhaustion or consumption – that I invented the problem, at least partially, so that I could stop having to participate in tug-of-war and look at the water and read. Regardless, Nanny was summoned to Maine to care for me. Each day, she cooked the same thing. Each day, I ate it, increasingly, and verbally sure that it was the only food I could stomach. The meal was potted chicken and potatoes with paprika. It was one of the only dishes she ever bothered to make. I say bothered because though Nanny insists she is a good cook, cooking is not an activity she likes. Along with almost anything outside her rich, swarming mind – including meals, exasperating half-hour-long walks, and tedious telephone conversation – cooking just takes her away from her thoughts and words. I did just tell the story of the potted paprika chicken that nursed a sensitive eater back to heartiness, though only because it reminded me of what I had to write about – which had nothing to do with Nanny and meals or culinary memories. She’d be happier if she could simply breathe nourishment in through the atmosphere instead of having to stop what she was doing to eat.

There are other stories I’d rather tell. When I was little, my imagination was where I lived, the place from which I, like her, was constantly getting dragged unhappily for meals and conversations with strangers. For a child whose real world is in her head, reality is pure whimsy and fantasy is a serious matter, in a way that is both incomprehensible and infuriating to most people. But Nanny was the only adult who not only let me live in my head but also knocked regularly and cheerily on its doors and got let in. She seemed to find it not at all frustrating. She expected no simple plots to my games with dolls: Barbie and Ken were allowed to lead volatile, frangible existences. Planets might go tumbling from the sky. The world might be blue. Blue might be a sound. Animals might speak French then be silenced each Thursday by a furious unnamed king. The potted chicken was anomalous.

Nanny got lost driving my brother and me to nursery school; she banged our heads, trying to fit us into our car seats, and dressed us in clothes inside out. She didn’t worry that much about feeding the physical bodies of child me, or my brother, or before us, our cousins, or her children. Children’s bodies are hardy; Nanny nourished imaginations. She made a magical crawl space, only big enough for a child, full of boxes of glass beads and feathers. She made a puppet theater, kept a collection of ceramic turtles, encouraged the painting and adorning of any surface, and believed and still believes that anything and everything should be turned into a book.

That brings me to the third reminder, which came just the other day, in a nudge to start working on this: Tamari, my soul mate, will you do the foreword? The impact of this reminder was dual. First, it was that because of books that Nanny and I have always been joined at the soul. I didn’t sleep like a baby unless I was being read to. Since I was born, there has been a constant stream of text in my life. Books are as quenching to me as water. For Nanny, books are more than water; they are meat and bread. They are more material than the material world. Children need books; grown-ups need books. She understands the world in terms of books. Books are life.

Second is the important one. It was a reminder of Saba, our grandfather, Nanny’s real soul mate. Today, the day on which I finished typing a draft of this introduction, is also the sixteenth anniversary of his death, which seems fitting. There is more in these pages of Louis Poindexter Posner than it makes sense for me to write about here. It is all written too by someone who felt and feels a love for the ages. Nanny and Saba fit together in a way I haven’t seen many people do. It is hard to imagine either of them having found another mind or spirit agile enough to keep his or her own occupied. Saba’s mind was almost unmanageably nimble. After spending the workweek making business decisions one can only describe as virtuosic, he would spend hours in his workshop, building models and tinkering with tiny screwdrivers and handmade circuits. Saba had a wall of tiny cubbyholes, all his own, filled with screws, nails, washers, little tools, and bits of metal. Saba did live in this world. He built things and fixed things. He played tennis and golf. It was he too from whom my mother, who started a whole line of cooks, got her love of food.

My mother tells the story, also recounted by Nanny here, of Saba getting a yen for shoofly pie and piling the family and the neighbor’s family into the big, boat-sized station wagon and driving everyone to Pennsylvania, looking for it. Saba loved to eat raw cherrystone clams and taught my brother and me too. He believed and was right that hot potato knishes and chocolate egg creams tasted best after a full cold ride down the boardwalk. He liked the french fries at my ice-skating rink as much as I did, and though he insisted that all french fries be shared, he allowed seconds. It was he who took the whole family on serious, purposeful pilgrimages to Chinatown for Peking duck.

I could write also about the adventures he insisted on, regardless of whether we were in the woods outside our condominium complex or the dock of a lobster shack in Maine. Or about his teaching my brother to read the business pages, or teaching us both to play blackjack and play the odds. Or about his rounding out the love of words Nanny passed along by playing me hours of vocabulary tapes as we drove from Long Island to Westchester, giving a six-year-old who wanted nothing more than words like effervescent, sycophant, or abstruse. Or about how each person who worked for Saba became a member of his family and was given loans for house down payments and car down payments and was granted amnesty on the loans – every one of them. Or about his belief that there was no way around anything – only through. There was no other place to start working at one of his businesses but at the bottom; there was no other direction to go but ahead – cleanly and honestly. Or that he not only possessed but also embodied that quality so hard to define: character. Except that he defined it well, often out loud. Character, he used to remind us, is what you are when no one’s watching. But a lot of that comes through in these pages.

So the last thing I’ll write is this: that Saba loved Nanny with what he called, in a letter he wrote her during their courtship, atomic fervor. Theirs is what I think of when I read in Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet of the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.

That is some of what I thought of in receiving Nanny’s gentle nudges and in reading this book. It’s a testament to how much fun I’ve had that I felt moved, every time I sit down to them, to make this introduction longer, to muse further on Nanny and her life and the people who’ve shared it. But this is Nanny’s show, and I’ve already held it up too long. Here it is, joyously stitched together: her life in Post-its.

INTRODUCTION

B EFORE I GROW too old to remember my/our past, I will share it with you. I am writing this autobiography for my family so that we will be able to learn something about our families from the distant as well as the more recent past. For instance, I have always wondered about where in Europe my family came from and what their childhood and lives were like. Also, as my niece Mira Bergen commented recently, it gives me an opportunity to write my ethical will. While I know this story won’t be all pluses, it gives me one more chance to revisit those years and to express feelings that I never paused long enough to consider before but now – from a perspective attained only by age – hold precious.

In recent years, every memory that popped into my mind, every idea that entered sideways, every intention I ever had, I noted on a post-it. I have now assembled all of them to write this memoir of my life up to now. Last winter, my daughter Amy and I stole away to Florida to escape the cold of the north – only the north didn’t have any cold that year, but at least I had five free weeks in which to start. Since then, I need no longer find an excuse to write and remember. This journey back has developed an insistence of its own. I offer it to you now, my loved family and friends, and invite you to join me on my journey.

*     *     *

Coincidentally, my brother Bob’s daughter, Kathy Beurer, just sent me this poem written by her daughter, Lucia. Perhaps it was a school assignment. But if Lucia (who was named for my mother, Lucille, and Lou) can, at the age of ten, sum up where she comes from, I am going to do it too.

I Am From . . . by Lucia Beurer

I am from . . . a soon-to-be hanging on a wall,

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows poster, a Do Not Enter sign, and sparkly plastic beads hanging from the ceiling.

Post-it:

He said that she made mamaliga . . .

CHAPTER 1

MY PATERNAL GRANDPARENTS:

FROM YONKERS TO NEW JERSEY AND CREAM RIDGE

I OFTEN WONDERED FROM where my paternal grandmother, Regina – whom I am said to resemble in temperament and interests – had immigrated to America. Each time I went on a tour to an Eastern European country, I would pester our guide with one question: Where do they cook mamaliga? Mamaliga, a dish that resembles a Southerner’s grits, was my only clue. It was all my father had ever told me about his mother’s origins, and I had never thought to ask him more. One guide finally told me, in Romania. And this past Sunday, I found a recipe that sounds exactly like the dish my father described, like a Jewish polenta. I assumed that was my answer until recently when I learned otherwise from a manuscript sent to all of us Weiss cousins by our late cousin, Ted Solotaroff. Questioning our aunt Leah – the only remaining Weiss sibling, my father’s youngest sister – he learned that their mother had come to the United States from Hungary; and all the while, I had thought that my grandfather had come from Hungary, because it was said of him that he had a Hungarian temper. It turned out, though, that he had actually come from Poland and my mellow grandmother from Hungary! But what if she did come from Romania, home of mamaliga? Go know . . .

Regina had become a successful custom dressmaker in Yonkers, where she and my grandfather had lived since the early 1900s. She was talented and resourceful, which was fortunate since she was married to a man who had rather study religious books than work. Although she was the center of the family circle and their main support, she was a modest woman. Designing and constructing clothing was but one of her gifts. She was cheerful, whistled and sang, had a good head for business and still found the time to bake and cook and care for, eventually, seven children: Heschel/Harry, Jacob/Jack, Fanny, Bella, Rose, Leah, and Moishe/Gil. From here on, I will refer to them by their American names only.

Her husband’s name was David Weiss. He had come from Poland to America as a young man in the 1880s and found work in New York’s Lower East Side as a presser in the garment trade. There he met and married my grandmother, Regina Klein, a seamstress in the shop. She was a small, rather plain recent immigrant from Budapest who turned out to be a prodigy in the needle trade. Blessed with an eye for fashion, before she was in her midtwenties she had been promoted from machine operator to designer and from an Orchard Street sweatshop to Russek’s – one of New York’s early, more stylish department stores. Along with developing a line of dresses, she created an efficient process for covering the wooden buttons of a garment with its fabric, which she sold to a manufacturer for $500 – a pittance of the fortune it could have made for the naive young immigrant couple.

Regina flourished as her older husband withered. A cold, stiff-necked, and rigorously observant man, he suffered from asthma as would my father. The family moved to Yonkers to be closer to the Hudson River where the air was supposed to be better for his chest. With his wife’s earnings Grandfather was able to acquire and stock a small grocery store. Regina went into business making custom-made dresses for Riverdale and Westchester gentry, while raising her first six children with the help of a maid. Aunt Rose, my cousin Ted’s mother, remembered playing on the floor of her mother’s workroom while elegant ladies came for their fittings and left with the fashionable dress or gown or tailored suit that Regina had reproduced or designed. Aunt Rose once told Ted, Momma could copy any dress she saw and she never used a pattern. I loved to watch her hands when she was working. They just flew as though they had a mind of their own. She remained the cornerstone of the family as David proved to be an indifferent shopkeeper who sometimes turned the store over to a helper and traveled to his Bronx synagogue, where he davened and studied the afternoon away with his learned cronies.

In 1907, the Bankers’ Panic hit, but David was more concerned about his children’s Judaism – particularly that of his two sons Harry and Jack, who, by his standards, were growing up ignorant and wild in the streets of Yonkers – than about their future income or his moribund grocery store. Also, despite its proximity to the Hudson River, his asthma had not improved. In his search for more breathable air and a less seductive environment, he tried the Catskills and the Hudson Valley. There, he was told about the pine-filtered air of Central New Jersey in and around Lakewood. Investigating the area, he was shown a 160-acre farm that two spinster sisters were trying to sell in the post-Depression market. It was in a little community with the name of Cream Ridge, and its prime tomato-growing land and its spacious Victorian country house made it a prize. Aunt Leah remembered the front hall having a stained glass window over the door and a chandelier in oxblood glass. The hall led to a curving staircase, its banister carved from rosewood. On either side of the hall was a large parlor with a ceiling, beautifully ornamented by mythological scenes molded in plaster, and windows that opened to the long front porch. Each parlor led to a library that featured sliding doors made from frosted glass. Six bedrooms, not counting the servants’ quarters, were upstairs. There was a summer kitchen and a winter kitchen – just right for a family that