Cracks in the Ceiling: Tales of a New England Girlhood and Beyond

By Rollene Waterman Saal

My family’s story begins just about at the turn of the twentieth century, when my grandfather, fair-haired, blue-eyed, escaped conscription into the army and came to America from Lithuania. My grandmother followed him months later and her story is one of being stranded, pregnant and alone in London’s Petticoat Lane and how she made her way to reunite with her husband waiting for her in Massachusetts. That is a story that I would like to tell for her.
What is it that seems important about the Plymouth past, about those families, that assortment of aunts and uncles, cousins and neighbors, that resonates as part of my own personal history while being a story that reaches deep into the American past?
These people, their lives and all those who touched my youth are what link this memoir together. The memories are indelible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665539265

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© 2021 Rollene Waterman Saal. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 02/18/2022

ISBN: 978-1-6655-3925-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-3897-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-3926-5 (e)

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Introduction

Svea

Grandmother Tells

The Doctor and Mrs. Parker

The Doctor and Mrs. Parker, Part 2

That Summer

Vera Part I

When Vera Went Bananas

The Gone with the Wind Lamp

Red Sails in the Sunset

Ralphie

The Lucky One

Mind Your Business

The Brother

Little Louie

The Buttners

Mother’s sayings

My Father Said

About The Author

To Theodora, Matthew and Drusilla who always

loved the Plymouth stories.

And especially for my Editor, Drucie, who took my

writing and made it a book.

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Introduction

Virginia Woolf once wrote that nothing was ever so familiar to her as the cracks in the ceiling of her childhood bedroom. In Cracks in the Ceiling: Tales of a New England Girlhood and Beyond, I will follow the thin lines as they intersect and branch out into myriad and unforgettable patterns.

As a girl, I was embarrassed by the sign on the roadway leading into town: America’s Hometown: Plymouth. It seemed so old-fashioned, just as I was trying to shed the skin of provincialism. For this is the story of that town, varied, shaded and culturally far different from what we have today. Plymouth had a definite social range. The highest tone was struck by the Mayflower descendants who were among the original one hundred twenty bold souls who crossed the ocean from England to the New World to seek religious freedom. Half of them died during that first winter of 1621 but the descendants of the few dozen who endured held an honored and unique social status in Plymouth. To be a Bradford, a Chilton, a Winthrop was flying in high social skies. It didn’t have much to do with money— one of the Bradfords ran a local liquor store— though some had gone on to become part of Boston’s banking class. Those who remained in Plymouth settled in, simply pleased that their lineage was recognized.

My family’s story begins just about at the turn of the twentieth century, when my grandfather, fair-haired, blue-eyed, escaped conscription into the army and came to America from Lithuania. My grandmother followed him months later and her story is one of being stranded, pregnant and alone in London’s Petticoat Lane and how she made her way to reunite with her husband waiting for her in Massachusetts. That is a story that I would like to tell for her.

What is it that seems important about the Plymouth past, about those families, that assortment of aunts and uncles, cousins and neighbors, that resonates as part of my own personal history while being a story that reaches deep into the American past?

These people, their lives and all those who touched my youth are what link this memoir together. The memories are indelible.

Svea

It is quite a story of how my grandmother Celia Resnick (née Yutan) came to America. Svea, that was her name that all her old friends—the Shermans and the Toabes and the Penns called her. Svea. Orphaned by a flu epidemic in Lithuania, she was brought up by an older sister, Riva Gita. Riva never came to this country, but she must have waved her young sister goodbye, knowing she would never see her again. Her baby sister whom she had raised, seen married, then said goodbye to on the first lap of the long trip to Boston. She must have been very important to my grandmother because when I was born, the first grandchild, I was given her Jewish name, Riva Gita.

Svea’s older brother went off to Zanzibar, in order to escape the Czarist army. Yes, that was part of the family lore. And he sent Svea a plume from some exotic bird. That brother settled in Johannesburg and years later, his daughter, Betty, came on a scholarship to study teaching in the United States. I remember, when I was a little girl, she visited Plymouth, but the family got a call that the last convoy was leaving and she had to get on a ship and go home to South Africa. Maybe someday we will find our lost South African relatives.

But back to Svea who married Morris B. Resnick in the old country. He left first, sponsored by the rich Uncle David, though perhaps he was really a cousin whom they honored with the avunuclaid. He paid for Morris’s ticket and later helped with the one sent to London, for Svea. How did she get from Lithuania to London alone? I knew her as a shy older woman so heaven knows what a bashful girl she must have been! As she told me, and how I loved those stories, she lived in Petticoat Lane, working in a factory making men’s shirts and, imagine she was there while Queen Victoria was queen. While she waited for my grandfather’s letter with the ticket to America, she found out she was pregnant. Despairing, confused and worried about how to get in touch with him, she heard the mailman knock on her door one day and opened it to find the mailman had a letter US. On it was a stamp depicting the Mayflower. The story gets a little confused here but somehow this amazing letter carrier made the association with the pregnant woman upstairs waiting to hear from her husband in America! Why not? She had a ticket and was on her way to meet her husband in some place called Plymouth. She told me how on the voyage, crowded with other immigrants, the nurse would follow her around the deck, asking, Frau Resnick, Frau Resnick, why not have a shipboard baby? My heart swells when I think of my young grandmother leaving her Lithuanian village for Boston by way of London. She must have been about seventeen then, but she knew how to survive.

When Svea smiled, she would duck her head and cover her mouth with her hand, in the classic Japanese geisha gesture of concealment. I remember how she told me with a slightly embarrassed smile that when she was first in London, living in a rooming house, people wondered if she was really married. But she knew Morris would be waiting for her after a two or three week voyage to Boston. And he was. She remembered being driven home in a wooden wagon, packed with cushions and blankets for the fifty-mile ride to Plymouth, which must have been a bone-rattling journey for her weary full body. She arrived in September 1902 and my mother was born the following month, practically within sight of Plymouth Rock. A regular Yankee baby.

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The Shermans and the Toabes, who were interrelated, and our own family, the Resnicks, were the three founding families who in 1909 helped to establish the Jewish community in Plymouth. They were highly respectful of one another and although it would seem as if they might have vied for position of power, I never heard a cross or disparaging word among them.

The women of the families, Mrs. Sherman, Mrs. Toabe and my grandmother gathered for a weekly game of whist at my family’s white clapboard house on 88 Sandwich Street. I didn’t think anything unusual at the time, but now I think it is odd that my grandmother never went anywhere. She was probably agoraphobic which seemed not to trouble anyone or get them to try to have her change her patterns. She did go to the synagogue on the High Holidays, sitting upstairs with the women. Once seated, she never moved from the beginning of the service to the final sound of the shofar announcing the end of the holiday, her smooth silver head bent low over her prayer book, her finger tracing the words of the prayers.

In later years, the walk to the synagogue was too difficult for her to make and she of course would never have ridden in an automobile on a religious day, so she stayed at home, sitting in her chair near the kitchen window glancing up from her prayer book at people passing on the street.

I can take a walk even now down Main Street, stopping first at the post office where my father kept his post box, #85. I could walk on past the hardware store and Smith’s news store, on to Cooper’s drugstore with its marble counters and little stools that twirled when you spun around on them. That was downstairs from where my father’s first office was. There must have been fifty steps