Bits and Pieces

By Lois Sockol

Bits and Pieces, a loosely formed memoir, contains some family histories, essays on life experiences, and some short stories also informed by the authors life, as well as some family recipes. The audience for the book are her children, grandchildren and beyond. Now in her mid-eighties, she feels the cold breath of time. If she doesnt speak now, when will she?

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jul 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781546200673

Lois Sockol

Lois Sockol is a mother of four sons and grandmother to nine. She lives a full life with her husband of 63 years in Needham, MA. This is Mrs. Sockol’s second book. Her first, The Promise, was a fictionalized tale of a family tragedy.

Book preview

Prologue

My recollections won’t follow a linear line. I am too old and tired to attempt a disciplined memoir. Instead I wander, beginning with some historical information about my family and rather quickly move to some childhood memories. The final pages contain some favorite recipes and some pictures from the past.

Dad’s story begins in Chapter Three, which is more or less the same format: some history, some recollections. They are but bits and pieces, but perhaps as you poke through you will find us there.

Chapter Four deals with our beginning years and a collection of reminiscences. It is not until we moved to Needham in 1967, that your dad chose to alter his name to Ron, so until then, I refer to him by his given name, Aaron.

In Chapter Five you’ll find some of the short recollections born of my experiences.

Chapter Six contains some short stories I’ve written over time. Although they are pieces of fiction they are informed by my life.

Chapter Seven contains a few recipes of foods we enjoyed at family gatherings. So enjoy this attempted personal recounting at your own pace, no one will prod you along. I begin with the first poem I’ve ever attempted.

Where am I from . . .

I am from the shards of the depression

from the ashes of crushed dreams

no longer imagined or possible

I am from dirt back yards and cement sidewalks,

from stoop ball and punch ball,

From a time of thistles and thorns,

A time of budding wonders

I am from a time when I did things because

because my mother and father said I must

A time of self-consciousness, and doubt,

of moments of shame and regret

I am from the time when darkness turned to dawn

from Pearl Harbor to Iwo Jima,

from patriotic hymns, inspirational movies,

and victory songs,

a time when all things seemed possible

I’m from a time of Shoah

when evil hung heavily in the air

A time when an indifferent silent world

crushed the innocent, hated other,

a time when few souls were saved.

I’m from time of passion and love,

of devotion and uncertainty

a time of diapers and sour milk,

of sneakers and ballgames,

of growth and discovery,

A time of wonder, of small disappointments and great glee

I sit silently in my familiar easy chair, my mind now closed to memory,

I am at a time near journey’s end, a time of contemplation

A time where pain exacts its payment for past joys,

A time of recurring tears, of abandoned ambitions,

A time of new surprising delights, and simple pleasures

A time of countless blessings, a time of freedom,

A time where sorrow hovers.

Chapter One

The Story Begins…

My sisters and I were born of a time when the nation struggled to keep afloat, a time of massive poverty and unemployment, a time when the American Dream was dissolving. Neither Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath nor the movies you’ve seen exaggerate how The Great Depression wrought economic misery and desperation to millions.

In 1929 more than half of all Americans were living below the poverty level. Annual per-capita income was $750, the equivalent of $10,221 in 2014 dollars; for those clinging to their farms it was only $273. Over 13 million Americans had lost their jobs by 1929. New jobs were becoming will of the wisps. Meals were spare. Stomachs grumbled. Children cried. And for many Hope died.

In 1933, the year I was born, Franklin Delano Roosevelt became President. For so many he ignited hope. Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, inaugural words powerful enough to lift the aspirations of a nation. Although it took World War Two to finally end the depression, FDR’s administration put men to work criss crossing the nation with hundreds of thousands of miles of roads, public and private buildings, and hundreds of airports. Labor brought dignity, put money in pockets, food on tables and the return of confidence.

FDR’s often maligned predecessor, President Herbert Hoover, also tried to stimulate the economy, spending 3.5 billion dollars on public works, including the extraordinary Hoover Dam.

My Dad, a casualty of the great collapse, could no longer keep the clothing store he had labored so hard to build. The plummeting stock market snatched it from his grasp, morphing his dreams into a nightmare.

Three small children… Ellen born 1930, me, 1933, and Joanne 1935… made my father’s load a heavy one. My mother’s too. She sewed our clothes, keep the house, feed us well, and managed the best she could. My sisters and I felt safe and cared for, but not especially loved. I never did figure out what in her own life made my mother unable to make her children feel truly loved.

Perhaps, being young and unprepared for hardship, life used up her quotient of motherly love before she had a chance to nurture it. Or perhaps we were too young to understand that her tending to us was her true statement of love.

As light glistens through the dust of my memory album, I pause imagining my mother thumbing through pages of her own. My mother’s immediate family was small in number. Her mother, Sarah(maiden name Drosch) born on Dec. 12, 1884, immigrated from Russia. Her father, Edwin Goldstein, was born in New York City on April 11, 1877, and died in April of 1940. I know nothing more of my grandmother even though for several years we lived in the same apartment house at 83 East 18th street in Brooklyn, she on the first floor, and we on the third. It was a building bequeath to my mother and her brother by my mother’s grandmother, Josephine. My memory of my grandmother is that of a quiet woman who keep the records of the other tenants’ payments and the building’s expenses. Sometimes she would give me a coin, a dime or quarter, and then record it in the ledger. On hindsight, I know she had little or no income save what my mother supplied her.

My mother’s younger brother, Irwin, with whom she had a close youthful relationship was born in 1912 in New York City.

My mother’s ancestors left their home in Germany and arrived in the New World in the mid 1850’s and since then each member of the family had been born in New York City.

Irwin was a pleasant looking boy, not of exceptional good looks like my mother. From things my mother said over the years I came to believe that she thought their mother favored him and that proved to be a sliver of irritation between them. Still they loved each other and fought little.

After retiring from his job at a ship company, my uncle moved to Florida with his wife in the late 1950’s and I had barely any contact with him before his death in 1980.

The most vivid memories I carry of my uncle are from the war years when he served in the Army of the Pacific. I was ten then, a fourth or fifth grader, and very proud that my uncle was helping to win the war. Every week, I sent off a letter to exotic places like New Guinea. His returns were always upbeat, he was well, the battle was going forward, and please write him again, which I always did. I begged a map of the Pacific from my father and tapped it on the wall by my bed. With a red crayola crayon, I highlighted New Guinea.

Years later, when going through my mother’s things, I uncovered a pension slip from the U.S. government. One of my great-grandfather’s uncles had battled in the Civil War. How proud I am of that! How I wish I’d kept the pension slip!

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My father had been a successful New York City business man with a clothing store near Times Square where he’d sold high fashion suits to Wall street tycoons as well as bank executives, until he was struck down by the unyielding losses of the depression. It was 1937, when he no longer could hold on to his store, when his creditors stripped him of everything of value, taking his remaining inventory along with the store fixtures. His store was never replaced, and I never remember him speaking of it. Once it was gone, he had nothing, no income, no savings left, his investments worthless. What he did have was a young wife as well as three small children who depended on him to sustain them.

What I witnessed one night in the kitchen was my Dad at his lowest point. I was probably not more than four or five years old when a sound awoke me, an unfamiliar sound traveling down the narrow hallway from the kitchen. I untangled myself from my blanket then sat a moment on the edge of my bed until sleep left me. A pale light traveled with the sound. I stood a moment before walking toward it, toward either my mom or dad. Who else would be in the kitchen so late at night? My throat was dry with thirst and whoever was there would give me a glass of water. I was too short to reach the faucets without pulling a chair to the sink, and the kitchen chairs were made of wood too heavy to push. As I approached, the sound grew louder. I stood very still, hugging the spot where the hall turned slightly so I could not be seen.

The light emanating from the ceiling fixture glared down sharply upon my parents. My dad sat at the table, his sweeping shoulders hunched forward, his bowed head cradled in his hands. His dark hair curled at the nape of his neck.

They want to make me a stock boy, he mumbled.

My mom sat on a chair pulled close beside him. She was dressed in her green night gown that pooled on the floor beneath her chair. The palm of her hand rested on my father’s back. Every few moments she’d speak, yet, I could not make out the words, just her velvety voice, the soft quiet voice she used when I hurt myself, when I fell or scraped my knee. My dad was weeping. Never had I heard so terrible a sound, never had I been so frightened. I bit my lip hard to keep from crying out, and felt my way back along the wall to my room where I climbed into bed and pulled my blanket over my head. This had to be a bad dream; my dad would never cry.

I pushed the memory away, never speaking of it to my parents. As I grew older I came to understand what the scene had meant, and I, too, wanted to put my arms around my Dad and hug him close, but I never got to do that.

My mother, Beryl, as beautiful as the precious blue-green gem she was named for, studied at the New York Ballet. She was lovely with long flowing dark hair and sparkling sapphire eyes. At seventeen, she pirouette out of her junior year at Erasmus Hall High School and onto the Broadway stage, dancing in shows with Helen Kane, the Boop, Boopy, Doo girl, and George Raft, a hoofer before he transmuted into Hollywood gangster roles. In one production, she was Venus Di Marlo breathed into life by a lovelorn admirer. Prophetic really, for it was the gaze of the handsome man in the second row at every performance that won her heart.

My mother married my father in 1927, the summer Babe Ruth hit his 60th homer run, and two years before the worst of times. At 26, Will Katz was a successful business man with a clothing store of his own located less than a five minute walk from Time Square. Beryl was just 20. She struggled with a competing offer to go to Hollywood and chance a try out for a part in a musical, but Bill’s dogged devotion won out. Harbored away, her regret frequently surfaced. Do you know what I gave up… what I could have been, was her oft heard refrain in moments of frustration or fatigue.

Her grandmother, Josephine Rothschild Goldstein, spoiled the pretty Beryl with abounding attention and gifts. Slightly faded, yet still amazing clear are my memories of my great grandmother, her stories still stored in niches of my mind. Her parents left Germany in 1850, settled in New York where she was born