Comes the Millennium: It's Still Tough to Be Jewish!: 100 Years in the Life of an Immigrant Family

By Sidney I. Silverman

The stories begin over 100 years ago in Sokolka, Poland, when my father escaped via an underground route, from his forced conscription into the Czar's Russian Army. The stories continue through the ensuing decades after he immigrated to America. The anecdotes describe how the family coped with the ever present stress and accommodations to their Jewishness.
The tales reflect how my wife and I, collectively shared the joy and sadness in our family affairs, our career choices and achievements. Told in chronological order, the stories from my premature birth in 1913 to the 21th century, reveal the foibles, the fortuitous events and experiences during the many years when I was an officer in the U.S army. The experiences also describe my years as a clinician, an educator and research scientist. I relate how I encountered and coped with both professional accolades and overt anti-semitism from medical and dental colleagues here in America and abroad. The stories end with an ambiguous tale of the concerns of Jews in America, in Israel, and in the world at large.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 8, 2006
• ISBN: 9781465333896

Sidney I. Silverman

Dr. Sidney I. Silverman, a Professor Emeritis at New York University, has authored and edited five professional text books and more than 100 publications on medical and dental subjects in professional journals. An educator, research scientist and practicing clinician for more than 50 years, he served in the Armed Forces during the Second World War as a Chief of Dental Clinics during the war against Fascism. He was also the President of a Community Arts Center for five years and a Life Director of the Board of Temple Emanual, both in Great Neck, NY. Now living in Manhattan, he is a sculptor, short story writer, community activist and continues his activity in biomedical research at the NYU Medical Center.

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COMES THE MILLENNIUM:

IT’S STILL TOUGH TO BE JEWISH!

100 Years in the Life Of An Immigrant Family

Sidney I. Silverman

Copyright © 2006 by Sidney I. Silverman.

Published by:

Savant Book Series, New York, NY

Produced by:

Xlibris Corporation

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or

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This book was printed in the United States of America.

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27054

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Prologue

1. God’s Authority (1955)

2

My Father-The Tycoon (1880-1945)

3

Defying Tradition (1896-1944)

4

The Draft Dodger (1901)

5

The Junk Man (1903)

6

Box Rooms (1904)

7

Business Ventures (1904-1945)

8

The Angel of Death (1904)

9

The Incubator (1913)

10

The Steam Baths (1922)

11

The Shoe Affair (1923)

12

Thoughts are Free (1923)

13

Prostitution (1923)

14

The Tent City Fire (1924)

15

School Days (1930)

16

Justice (1925)

17

The Adoption (1925)

18

Christmas Trees (1925)

19

The Sedar (1925)

20

The Bar Mitzvah (1926)

21

Gambling (1926)

22

Strawberries! Strawberries! (1928)

23

My Mother’s Store (1928)

24

Living in Debt (1929)

25

The Gourmet (1929)

26

Money (1929)

27

Punishment (1929)

28

Patriotism (1929)

29

Manhood (1929)

30

Raw Sewage (1930)

31

Body Parts (1930)

32

Alienation (1930)

33

Pride (1931)

34

The Cigar Store (1932)

35

Eleanor (1938)

36

David and Ann (1938-1942)

37

David and Ann (1938-1942)

38

David and Ann (1932-1948)

39

David and Ann (1938-1948)

40

Intelligence! (1940)

41

The Uptown-Downtown Yiddish Theatre (1941)

42

Pots and Pans (1941)

43

The Crisis in Pickett (1943)

44

The WACS (1943)

45

The Chaplain (1944)

46

The Tummler (1945)

47

The Identity Crisis (1946)

48

Blood (1947)

49

The Musical Chairs (1947)

50

The Passion According to Saint John (1948)

51

The Banker (1954)

52

Denial at Nimes (1960)

53

The Authors (1960)

54

The Diplomatic Pouch (1960)

55

Bird Stick (1962)

56

Return to Sokolka (1970)

57

The Operation (1973)

58

The Rivals (1975)

59

Women’s Lib (1975)

60

Finding Love (1990)

61

Poppi (1991)

62

The Wedding Invitation (1991)

63

The Asterisk (1994)

64

The Fur Hat (1996)

65

The March of Dimes (1997)

66

A Very Special Dream! (2002)

67

Epilogue: A Centennial Celebration

DEDICATION

TO

ELEANOR

MY DEAREST WIFE, FRIEND, AND COMPANION

Acknowledgements

This volume of stories is dedicated, first and foremost, to my dearest, loving wife Eleanor who has shared my whole professional and personal life for over sixty-five years. She inspired me to act out my convictions about love, compassion in the pursuit of honesty and integrity, in caring for patients, friends, and family. She also encouraged me to write these stories of my life’s experiences, my professional judgments, and behaviors. She monitored the veracity of my tales and added her own sensitive, insightful comments and advice in the selection of the stories from the hundreds of anecdotes, letters, and essays I had written over the past half century.

Most significantly, of all her contributions to my joy and happiness, was that she works side by side with me as an educator, a co investigator on numerous research projects and as a speech and language pathologist in our joint institutional affiliations. These include both our community public service agencies and our academic affiliations with the New York University’s College of Dentistry and the School of Medicine. Throughout the sixty-five years of our marriage, she encouraged and challenged me to pursue the path of egalitarian and democratic principles and the commitment to social consciousness in all my thoughts and actions.

I also wish to acknowledge the contributions of my daughters, Beth and Deborah, to my insights into the human foibles and noble deeds inherent in my stories. Beth, with her doctorate in social work holds professorial rank at Columbia School of Social Work and is a clinical director of a consortium of shelters for battered women. Her husband David Yam is a sociologist and a dean at the Columbia University School of Social Work. Together they have kept me informed and politically correct with respect to women’s issues and their current relevant psychological and social status. Deborah, with her doctorate in literature and fine arts is the director of faculty and organizational development at Michigan State University, and her husband Thomas, is a senior lawyer and expert in Intellectual Property at the Ford Motor Company.

The four of them, collectively with their respective children, Jessica and Adam, Brendan and Shana, have enriched my knowledge of contemporary human conditions and the living experiences of the new and current information revolution precipitated by the computer and its electronic innovations. I acknowledge their collective judgment and encouragement to publish these stories. I wish also to thank the hosts of patients I treated over the years. I wish to acknowledge my colleagues, who first instructed me, and also my many students, who in turn taught me.

Finally, I wish to express my love and gratitude to my granddaughter, Jessica DeZure, who with great diligence and editorial expertise was my executive editor. She assisted in the selection and sequencing of the stories, and more importantly, prevented my ego from deviating from the central theme of the Jewish experience in America.

Preface

The tales told in this book, describing events, which occurred over the last one hundred years, are a condensed microcosmic version of the oral history of my family. The stories, originally related from generation to generation, describe the life and times of my family, most of whom migrated to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century.

My family brought with them their delusions and expectations of gold in the streets of America and the disturbing and painful memories of their stressful experiences in Poland at the time of the Russo-Japanese War at the end of the 19th century. They also carried with these memories a bottomless well of anecdotes and Geschichtes, stories of their life in the shtetl.

My father, a veritable Baron Munchhausen, who was always in conflict with rigid religious traditionalism, filled his days with real, probable and/or fanciful tales of wit, ribald humor and often scatological working and peasant class satire. He also had spontaneous fantasies of global benevolence when like Don Quixote he would try to save the world with his generous, exuberant energy.

Any tragic or joyous event could spontaneously invoke him to tell a story, whether it happened in one of his many retail stores he had owned over the years, at the Saturday night ritual steam bath or at the synagogue on the High Holy Days. His story telling time for me was usually in the hours when we worked together in the stores during my adolescence, an age when I could best appreciate his ribald humor.

My mother was a different breed of storyteller. She was reared in a Talmudic scholar’s home who was reverentially called a Talmud Chuchim, a sage, by his peers. They were as he was, all middle class, bourgeois, intellectual Jewish friends who were also merchants, entrepreneurs and professional upshtandicka, prominent members of their stetl ghetto in Sokolka, Poland.

My mother, mourned as though dead by her father and her siblings because she married a non-intellectual wageworker, was also a storyteller. Her tales were tinged, sometimes immersed with allegories and morality, even sometimes, kabalistic references. She usually told me the stories of her childhood, adolescence and her marriage in Poland. Her narratives, sometimes including the years of her marriage in America, were told at the end of her workday after her daily ritual bath.

Inheriting storyteller genes from both parents, I too became a storyteller, fusing my two parental styles of spontaneously telling a story appropriate to any given moment or event. Over the many years of my training as a dentist, educator, research scientist, and administrator, I had many occasions and opportunities to tell anecdotes to my students, family, friends, patients and colleagues.

When my younger daughter was 16 years old, considering she might marry and have children of her own, she suggested I should write my stories for posterity. She believed she could never retell them with the same feelings of urgency and fervor that I usually expressed in my recital of the stories describing the events occurring during my lifetime.

I asked, Which stories should I chose to write?

Quickly she responded with ideas very close to her heart and mind, Write about the ambiguity inherent in love, sex, education, and all the moral and ethical dilemmas I and my children will confront in life, which you discuss so abundantly in your stories.

Thus, in 1955, I started to write the tales in this volume and many other stories for my children, my grandchildren, and my extended family members and for some few selected loving friends. From time to time, in family gatherings, I would be asked to read and reread selected stories.

In recent years, many of my loyal readers, all biased of course, have urged me to select and publish for the public at large, those of my stories which embrace the essence of our collective yiddishkeit and its place and effect on contemporary life in America.

Some of these supporters especially urged me to publish my stories because of the recent, yet isolated resurgence of anti-Semitic propaganda and behaviors in America and abroad.

The stories are notated by the year the events took place during the last century. They reflect my interactions with the following people and institutions: my students and my patients; the hospitals and universities where I was educated and worked; the United States Army where I served for three years during the Second World War; my extended family, my friends at home and abroad; my neighbors, professional colleagues and community associations.

The stories begin with a Prologue, a tale titled God’s Authority, written in 1953 about a Rabbi, one of my patients. Though my stories begin in the late 19th century, it took many years for me to feel empowered by my cultural traditional Talmudic and philosophic heritage to publicly challenge authority, to assert my rights and privileges as a Jew, by offering my stories for publication.

I have often paid a price for my independence and perhaps my pride, but I always tried to stand tall and walk forward with dignity and moral purpose to create and live in a society where social justice and democratic governance could prevail.

I conclude the book of stories with another tale, A Very Special Dream, which describes the ambiguity and my anxiety about how Jewish life in an almost egalitarian society like ours could foster. After two millennia of an exponential explosion of new knowledge and technologic development, the conflicts between the fringe groups of the three major monotheistic religions, i.e. Judaism, Christianity and Muslim faiths, are still raging with the brutal intensity and mutual hatred of the charnal house, where daily slaughter and destruction of innocent people occur worldwide.

The Epilogue—The Centennial Celebration is a joyous and festive retelling of many of the salient factors of how and why my family coped with stress and pain of our immigrant parents as they adjust their Jewish traditions of moral, ethical, and religious practices.

In conclusion, I hope and trust the readers of these stories will take pleasure, perhaps solace and even counsel and guidance as they contemplate the moral and socio-cultural, if not humorous resolution of many of the issues inherent in my stories.

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Prologue

1. God’s Authority (1955)

The Rabbi thrust his persona into my consultation room. Standing a full six feet tall-his full-blown beard obscuring his face, his striking blue eyes piercing the soft light of the room, he riveted me as I arose from behind my desk to greet him.

Extending my hand, he paused to appraise me. I noted his long black silk coat, draped from his neck, like a tall narrow tent cut to obscure his portly stature. Satisfied perhaps that my presence conformed to his perception, that indeed, I was a dentist of sufficient professional stature to merit his attention, he extended his hand to shake mine.

Looking back at him, his face, head, and hat appeared in sharper focus to me. The full beard, extending like a yoke hanging around his neck, was essentially still dark brown, speckled with strands of gray and white. It was not a pepper and salt variety of color. It was rather like wispy strands of white and gray radiating from the mouth region, simulating the ribs of a fan holding the black folded fabric.

His mouth however was collapsed. I could see the lost contracted face contour, which indicated he had few, if any teeth in his mouth. Even standing close to him, this imperious figure spoke almost unintelligibly. His muffled tones had no clear separation of vowels and consonants. I strained to understand his first words. Do you speak Yiddish, he asked. I replied, Yes—enough for my professional purposes.

Relieved, his postural tension relaxed, he accepted my invitation to be seated. As he folded his coat, a kaftan style garment, he bent his trunk forward as his fur hat intruded itself into my consciousness. The hat, a Stroymel, was flat topped, with a six-inch broad flat-topped rim extending several inches from each side of the circumference of his head and face. It was of dark, rough-type mink, iridescent in its luster. The fur was an imperial crown, exhibiting his authority as a highly placed Rabbi in his sect of Hassidic Jewish culture.

As he drew himself up comfortably in the chair reserved for patient initial interviews, touching and folding his coat to avoid wrinkling and of course, to make sure the bottom edges of this coat did not touch the floor, I first noticed his Gaba who entered the room with him.

The Gaba, dressed similarly as his Rabbi, but with a less iridescent silk coat and a much smaller fur hat made of a beaver-type fur, was the Rabbi’s assistant. He could be, I learned from the Rabbi, a junior Rabbi, a Rabbi in training, or an unordained scholar of the Talmud. As he sat in a chair, he took out a notebook to keep notes about my discussion with the Rabbi.

I listened carefully to his requests. He asked if I could make artificial dentures for him, which he used primarily for speaking from the pulpit or for the seminars he conducted and the private audiences for his colleagues, associates, and congregants.

He was, of course, interested in his ability to eat, but this was secondary. He did not express any concern about his appearance or his personal connubial interests.

I explained briefly that I would need to examine him clinically and radiographically in order to give him my judgment about the condition of his mouth, the procedures of treatment, and the possible costs and duration of the care. I described the options for the most recent dental implantology associated with tooth replacement to construct the traditional denture treatment. I would give him the fees, the duration, and the timing of treatment procedures after the examination was completed.

Reassured, we moved into the operatory room where my dental assistant seated him and draped his clothing with a protective apron. As I approached him to examine his mouth, he again expressed his request to choose an option to give him his dentures as quickly as possible, no matter the cost.

My examination quickly revealed that he not only had no teeth but that he had lost much of his jawbone, that the muscles of his mouth and face were collapsed with very poor elasticity for a man only 65 years old. It was soon apparent that his bushy mustache and beard was indeed a mask to hide his collapsed face as well as to indicate the tradition of his position as a Rabbi.

I indicated that we needed to obtain radiographs of his jaws and that my assistant, a very attractive and very skillful and experienced woman, would take the X-rays. As she approached him with a holder to place the x-ray in his mouth, he raised his hand to stop her. She may not touch me; in fact no woman may touch me.

Stunned by this turn of events, I realized the treatment outcome for the Rabbi could be compromised. I asked the assistant to leave the room. We had a dilemma about whose authority would prevail during treatment!

I sat before him and elevated the operating chair so that both of our eyes were at the same level. Metaphorically, I rushed to establish our authority roles as equal, as a Rabbi and as a health professional.

Dear Rabbi, I said. God has given you your skill and knowledge, indeed your talent to minister to the spiritual needs of your congregants.

The same God, however, has given me the skill and talent to practice dental health care for patients rich and poor, Rabbi, and congregant. You speak directly to God, as do I when we do his bidding. We speak in his name as equals and we act out our respective roles.

God has directed me, I continued, to employ every force, knowledge, and personal help to guide me to serve our people best. I cannot do my best for you without this woman’s assistance. She needs to touch you!

He sat reflectively for a moment and then suddenly jumped from the operating chair and looked out of the window to obtain his bearings. Noting the setting sun’s location, he faced the wall toward Jerusalem and with clasped fist tapped his chest recanting a prayer of forgiveness spoken on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, to allow a woman to touch him.

He quickly returned to the chair and said in Yiddish, "She can now take the x-ray.

Just as I prepared to leave the room, he grasped my arm, held me in his gaze, and smilingly commented, You should have been a Rabbi!

Many times over the years when confronted with difficult decisions and opportunities, I often thought I should have, could have been a Rabbi.

2

My Father-The Tycoon (1880-1945)

My father’s death was dramatic and futile! It was consistent with his life style-all fury and no substance. He lived randomly with broad, bold strokes, yet performed little, and achieved less. His failures were colossal and his successes small. Only one achievement was noteworthy and successful. So successful indeed that for years I could not live down its dubious benefits.

When the condolence calls and the sympathetic acknowledgements of his death had run their course, a persistent theme mounted with ever-increasing tempo about his life. When I returned from the army after World War II to civilian life, a crescendo of inquiry was directed towards me. Would I invest in real estate? A friend needed money for his business. A relative needed a silent partner,

Why ask me for money? I inquired, I have just returned after years of deficit spending in the army, I soon learned why.

My neighbors commented. How wonderful that your father had left you so rich. They inquired. Do you still own the properties in the Rockaways? Another inquired. Will you sell the acreage in Florida? A third suggested that I should not sell the parcel in the Catskills.

Discretely, I learned that my father had lost several million dollars over the last few years of his life. However, he advised and informed his friends that he would be responsible and care for his family no matter how many bad deals he may have encountered. I learned that he had lost $750,000 on the bungalows he didn’t buy in Edgemere. That he had lost $250,000 on the apartment house complex he didn’t buy in the Bronx. In addition, that the worst loss he sustained was the farmland on Long Island when he lost at least a million dollars by his failure to obtain the land-auction data on time.

Surely, my neighbors thought, a man who speculated on such a grand style had put aside plenty of capital for his children. Could I deny my father’s intent? Could I blaspheme his memory by declaring the deals had been in my father’s fantasy world?

He had always exaggerated his profits and minimized his losses. He was a compulsive storyteller and could not separate fact from fantasy. Since the stories could hurt no one—only himself I never denied my father’s tall tales of his legacy. After a year of staunch and steady refusal to invest in their deals, neighbors and friends of my father stopped offering killings that I might make through their investment advice.

3

Defying Tradition (1896-1944)

Quiet and dutiful, the eldest daughter of three children, my mother, Ida, listened mutely and respectfully attentive to her widowed father urging her to marry a Yeshiva Bucher of his choice. Her mother, gracious and reverent, was also pious in her devotion to Judaic precepts, died when Ida was just entering her puberty. A beautiful woman with lustrous brown eyes, my grandmother blessed her daughter on her deathbed. She gave her the keys to the house and the warehouse storing pigs’ bristles, which she had managed for years while her husband studied the Torah and engaged in other Talmudic activities.

The family lived in Sokolka, Poland as the 19th Century came to an end. A small village about 20 miles from Bialistock, a large, urban, culturally sophisticated city where high Rabbis abounded. In contrast, Sokolka was a small provincial village, where her father’s scholarship was revered. Her father’s scholarly prominence created great pressure on Ida to conform to local custom, especially to revere and respect Talmud Chuchims a title revered by aspiring young Judaic scholars.

The keys and their significance propelled her suddenly from pubescent adolescence into young adulthood. She became mother to her brother and sister, housekeeper, to her scholarly father, and manager of her small family business. Her father had chosen a business that could give him time to study the Talmud. He purchased pig bristles from farmers and butchers who bred and slaughtered pigs for the market. Sorting the bristles they were sold by grade for hairbrushes, scrub brushes and even toothbrushes.

Two young Polish assistants rode to the farms to pick up the bristle’s, sorted them in the small warehouse, dried and processed them for resale to brush manufacturers. It was a cottage industry, giving her father much study time. His religious intellectual pursuit would be considered study time or God’s time. God’s time was to gain insight into God’s divine plan for life in general and Jews in particular.

It was his heart’s desire, his fondest hope that his eldest daughter would marry a student from the Yeshiva who would pursue Talmud studies with him. His daughter’s husband would need only to share the daily-prescribed hours of study at home. Her father would support them both from their Pig Bristle enterprise.

For almost 10 years, Ida tended her father’s home, managed his business affairs. For as many years since she was 15, he would bring home Talmudic scholars for dinner. They were tall, ascetic and pale, some lisped or stuttered, others short, rotund and pink cheeked, others were attractive and had beautiful melodious voices. Some were younger than she and some about twice her age.

She fed them, was gracious and ignored their presence. They were only guests in her father’s house who would spend the evening or weekend discussing issues inherent in the matters of pulpil, a typical subject that was devoted to how many angels there are on the point of a pin. Her father avoided the shatchun, the marriage broker. She was too liberated to presume she would be betrothed by a marriage contract for which he would pay a fee!

She was now 24 years old, a scandal in her village. She rapidly assumed the role of being an alta moyd, an unmarried spinster. She refused her father’s entreaties to marry a scholar, a man who would choose to live off kest on her father’s bounty. However, her inner feelings were more deeply rooted in what she could not say publicly, She didn’t wish to be her father’s housekeeper. She wanted a home of her own with a husband to whom she was attracted, a man with whom she could feel emotionally and sexually involved.

She met my father, her own age who was a worker, a foreman in a leather-tanning factory. To be a worker was one choice for a young Jewish boy. Not as desirable as a Talmudic scholar or a merchant, or a farmer, but nonetheless a suitable husband in the eyes of the Jewish Community.

My grandfather was angry, indignant and shocked; my mother would break with tradition. She would not marry a man of his choice, a scholar. Her defiance troubled him. Instead she chose to marry a worker, who though Jewish and could daven (pray) the great scriptures on holidays, he was relatively uncultured. Not a scholar, he could not quote passages from the Torah. He could not find approval since he could not resolve a sophisticated cultural or philosophical issue. He loved to sing and dance and party. He played cards and told bawdy stories. What kind of Jewish man was this Hillel?

Perhaps the worst indignation was that his mother had a small bakery and it was rumored when the Jewish villagers left the cholnt, the meat and vegetable stew to be warmed in her ovens for the next Sabbath meal, she nipped little from each pot, to serve her own family. It was only a rumor but one must listen because if you smell smoke there must be a fire!

When my mother told him she would marry Hillel, he replied he would disown her. He didn’t speak to her from the day of her marriage. He did not attend her marriage ceremony. She was not given in marriage with her father’s blessing. She had no dowry and she was as an orphan. He recited the mourners prayer, the Kaddish on her wedding day.

My father bought a small house on the poorer, other side of the Jewish quarters and before the year was out, he escaped the draft and came to America. My mother was pregnant and she contracted typhus after her son, my oldest brother, was born.

My grandfather never visited her in the hospital. She was as dead because she didn’t marry a scholar and instead married a man who was just a worker!

Years later she sent him money over from America. He never acknowledged the gifts, but never returned them. Her father, brother and sister died the Holocaust, he in his mid 90’s.

My mother had guilt all her life because of her defiance of her father. However, she lived with strong ego strength, coping effectively with illness and death. With an inner joy and confidence she felt independent, courageous, generous, caring and gentle. She was the first liberated woman I knew and loved. I, too, married a fine, independent and liberated woman. My two daughters are also liberated, independent women. And my granddaughter started her rebellion at 15 years of age and now carries my mother’s genes.

She too will be a liberated woman!

4

The Draft Dodger (1901)

My father’s ventures in American business started in 1904 when he came to America. His voyage started on a bleak midnight during a freezing winter in the village of Sokolka, not too distant from a large city Bialystock, on the border between Russia and Poland. It was the time of the Russo-Japanese war and the Czar wanted cannon fodder for his vast armies on the Siberian border. The Jewish youth were eligible for the draft, but they were adept a draft evasion. Self-mutilation, by cutting off a finger or toe, was the usual practice, and occasionally, puncturing the eardrum or destroying the eyesight of one eye was practiced. The most prevalent evasion, however, was fleeing the country.

The Jewish community had a private communication system that started in the local commandant’s office. He would leak the information that a dragnet would be staged to gather a company of recruits from the region of his command. The Jewish community bribed him from month to month so that all eligible young men could have the option of either serving in the army, of self-mutilation, or escaping the country through an underground network, which the commandant himself operated.

On the night the dragnet was scheduled, my father had sufficient time to inform my mother (who was six months pregnant with my brother) that he would be leaving. He had previously purchased a small one-room stucco and wooden hut in the ghetto, which had a back-enclosed porch for keeping animals. The typical multi-tiered wood burning stone fireplace heated the main room, which were at once kitchen, bedroom, and living space. The house was not expensive, and he had worked for little more than a year to earn the deed. However, it meant much to my mother who feared her husband’s mother might take possession of the house while he was in America. My father, though mindful of my mother’s anxiety, made his first foolish major decision with the purchase of the house. He designated first that his mother would be the heir if he or his wife was deceased, but then he gave the deed to his mother for safekeeping. My mother, like all Jewish wives, was docile and acquiesced to the action. As my father started to leave, he held my mother firmly and reassuringly and said, Have no fear about the house. Mother will care for you.

On the eve of his departure, my grandmother and her daughter, a widow with three children, moved in with my mother. The small house was overcrowded, and my grandmother hostile and penurious, stressed my mother mercilessly under constant harassment, my mother contracted typhus fever shortly after the birth of her child. My grandmother cared for the child while my mother was in the hospital for nine months. Upon her return to the home, my grandmother forced