by Ezra Glinter
She went pale with nerves. Maybe it was meant to be after all!
She stole glance after glance at her older sister, lying in bed, mercilessly awake.
“God in Heaven! Put her to sleep!”
And just then, the miracle happened! Her sister’s eyes fluttered closed. Another minute, and she had fallen into a deep sleep. The book made a quiet rustle as it fell from her hand.
Libby slid off the sofa.
“It’s meant to be! It’s undeniable—God Himself arranged it!”
And without making a sound, as quiet as a mouse, she slipped out of the room.
The Grandmother
(NOVEMBER 14, 1960)
Translated by Ri J. Turner
SHE STILL MANAGES to drag herself around, but barely. She can barely see and barely hear, but nevertheless, she offers a daily commentary about every member of the household.
“You came home late again yesterday! Where were you?” she asks her twenty-year-old grandson.
Her victim laughs. “Grandmother, when do you sleep? Never?”
She doesn’t grumble, never complains about the changing times, doesn’t wax poetic about the olden days. On the contrary. She admires the new world and she has no nostalgia for the way things were in her day.
“Grandma! You’re a card!” That grandson of hers kisses her wrinkled cheek. “Grandmother, tell the story about how you fell in love . . .”
And for the hundredth time the grandmother tells about how she was sent to a matchmaker at age thirteen, was engaged to Grandfather (who is already long, long gone to his just reward), how she had feared that she wouldn’t recognize him, considering that she had met him once and only once, and that a veil blocked her view at the wedding canopy. It was not until afterwards that she really saw him face-to-face.
“I wept with fear, but he said to me, ‘Don’t be afraid, why are you crying?’ So I said, ‘I want to go home . . . ’ And he replied, ‘You musn’t. You’re married now. I didn’t want to get married either, but everyone has to—I’m already fifteen years old, after all . . . I’m afraid too.’”
Her grandson giggles. “All right, but when did you fall in love?”
“Just then, at that moment . . . that’s when I fell in love.”
The boy howls with laughter. How hilarious their grandmother is. She mixes up past and present. Sometimes she turns to her older son, Michael, saying, “Take your warm scarf, my child, and wind it snugly so that you don’t catch cold again, God forbid.”
“When have I caught cold, Mama?” asks Michael, a vigorous sixty-five-year-old man with broad shoulders and wide, powerful hands. He could probably pick Grandmother up with one hand and wave her in the air like a Kiddush cup. 42
“What do you mean when? You mean to tell me you’ve forgotten your lung infection?”
Michael guffaws in his timbrous bass. “But Mama dearest . . . that was a good fifty years ago. I was still a child then—ha ha!”
“Humph! You think you’re not still a child?” she scoffs, tipping her little gray head back to look up at him. “You’d do better to obey me and wrap up your neck.”
Michael is now married to his second wife. The household’s primary misunderstandings break out between the grandmother and the second wife, Ethel.
“Sarah honey,” the grandmother says to her affectionately, “don’t you think it’s a little chilly in the house?”
“Oy, Mother, I’ve already told you a hundred times that I’m not Sarah. My name is Ethel! Ethel! Ethel!” she yells.
“Oy, oy, oy!” The old lady catches herself, and remembers suddenly that Sarah, Michael’s first wife, has been dead a long time already. Yes, it’s true. This woman standing before her isn’t Sarah. And she goes on to remember how she led her Michael to the wedding canopy with the sixteen-year-old Sarah, only yesterday, it seems. A beautiful bride, that Sarah—a diamond. But Sarah is no more; someone else has taken her place, someone called Ethel—yes. Yes, how could she have forgotten?
“Please forgive me, Sarah honey,” she says. “I forgot.”
She forgets sometimes. Yes, her memory has gotten a bit weaker. On the holidays, when all her children and grandchildren come to visit, and the little ones run boisterously through the rooms—sometimes then, the grandmother seizes one of them, a nice little plump child, and clasps him to her breast, caressing his little head for a long moment. Then she asks, “And whose is this one?”
Her question is answered only with thunderous laughter. Apparently, she said the wrong thing . . . she smiles disconcertedly and fixes her blondish white hair, which has crept out from under her white kerchief. “They’re laughing again . . . every little thing makes them laugh.”
Yes, she has begun to forget. She lifts a spoon to bring it to her mouth, and suddenly forgets what to do with it. And the soup spatters the tablecloth in the meantime. Ethel is displeased. “She’s too old,” she complains to her husband.
Also, they don’t believe her, the grandmother, even when she does remember something correctly.
Once, when the children and grandchildren all came over to visit, the grandmother picked up a little tot, an infant (whose could this one be?), looked him over with a broad smile and assured everyone:
“He’s the spitting image of Michael! Michael was just the same . . . The same little nose, the same little mouth . . .”
“Stop it, Mother!” Ethel cut her off angrily. “You’re being ridiculous!” But the grandmother was beside herself. Why did no one believe her? She dug in her heels and swore up and down: “I’m telling you, he’s the spitting image of Michael!”
It was the truth. A mother can forget a lot of things, but she will never forget how her first child looked on the first day of his life.
Poor Sammy!
(MARCH 12, 1962)
Translated by Ri J. Turner
SAMMY SITS WITH Helen the entire evening and suffers, poor thing. He suffers for a lot of reasons: because he is only sixteen and Helen thinks he’s a baby (she’s fifteen); because he has a name that’s as common and boring as “Sammy”; and, more than anything, he suffers because he’s in love with Helen and he wants to kiss her more than anything . . . but she can’t seem to take the hint!
“Our English teacher,” she says, swinging her oxford-clad foot, “is a real dumbbell. We pay no attention to her and do whatever we please.”
“And our math teacher,” answers Sammy in his deep bass (his voice changed just last year), “is so strict that anyone who says a word gets a zero on the spot.”
He looks deep into Helen’s teasing gray eyes and thinks, “How do I make her understand? This is the real thing—I’ll love her for the rest of my life. When we grow up, we’ll get married.”
“You’re a funny boy,” says Helen, swinging her foot. “When I grow up, I’ll be a teacher.” And as if answering his unspoken thoughts, she adds, “I’m never going to get married!”
Sam’s heart gives a throb. “Why?” he asks, shocked. “Everyone gets married.”
“What’s the point? Really, answer me that.”
Sam doesn’t know how to respond. He just knows one thing: he wants to kiss her at least once. Some of his friends brag about such things, but he doesn’t believe them anyway. How in the blazes does one do it? In the movies, on the screen, it looks so easy. But in the movies they’re usually standing, and in this case Helen is sitting. It’s impossible to do it like this!
He stands up and goes over to the window. Maybe she’ll figure it out and come over too.
“It looks like it’s going to snow again,” he says. “Just take a look at those clouds.”
But she doesn’t get it. She doesn’t budge an inch.
“I haven’t practiced yet, for my piano lesson I mean. My piano teacher is a dumbbell too.”
Sammy understands that this is a hint that it’s time for him to leave. And still he hasn’t kissed her—just like yesterday and the day before yesterday.
He makes up his mind and sits dow
n opposite her. It seems to him that she’s radiating a kind of warmth.
“Helen,” he says, leaning towards her, “Helen!”
Helen’s swinging foot connects with his side. Sammy gets the message. He has failed.
“Dumbbell!” Her voice echoes in his ears as if it had come from far, far away.
THAT NIGHT, SAMMY lies down but can’t fall asleep. Some kind of weight, like a heavy stone, lies over his heart. He has wept already, embarrassed by his own tears. It would be good to become a famous doctor, or a professor or pilot, and win Helen over that way. Then she would understand what a mistake she had made. Or on the other hand he could die, so that she would know that it was because of her, it was her fault—and then she’d poison herself. “Oh, women!” he mutters contemptuously to himself, but the sense of heaviness does not dissipate. How miserable he is, how forlorn!
His mother enters and sits down on the side of his bed.
“What’s going on, darling? You seemed so downhearted all evening. A bad grade, huh?”
She bends over him and feels his forehead, caresses his cheeks, gives him a kiss.
“You’re my whole life, you know that, right? You’re my diamond . . .”
Sammy is suddenly flooded with warmth, the same warmth that radiated from Helen. His mother clasps his head to her breast. He grabs on to her neck and kisses her, kisses and kisses . . .
“Mama, my mama . . .”
The more he kisses her, the lighter his heart feels.
“I CAN’T FIGURE out what’s happening with Sam,” his mother says to his father while she undresses for bed. “He’s gotten so strange, poor thing.”
“What’s the matter?” his father asked with his eyelids half-closed.
“I don’t know,” she says, sitting thoughtfully on the bed.
“Eh, I’m sure it’s nothing!” says her husband, and shuts his eyes the rest of the way.
Soon he can be heard snoring. But Sammy’s mother is still sitting on the bed, deep in thought. Her son’s eager kisses had called forth a murky unease. She thinks and thinks.
“Oh! I’ll start giving him cod liver oil,” she decides, relieved. She hurriedly puts on her nightgown, and soon she too is fast asleep.
Her Dowry
(MARCH 26, 1962)
Translated by Ri J. Turner
FROM EARLIEST CHILDHOOD, ever since Paula could remember, she had known that her mother was amassing a dowry for her. “Dowry” was an oft-repeated word in the quarrels between her mother and her father, who could not seem to agree about Paula’s future.
Her father, a handsome jolly man and a spendthrift, always used to joke about money with her frugal mother.
“What does a beautiful girl need with a dowry? After all, I took you without a dowry!” he used to tease her.
“No, it’s better for Paula to choose a man with a dowry in hand, so that he’ll respect her! It’s easier to save a little money for the child now, rather than spending it later on you know what . . .”
Her mother always stopped at that point, without clarifying her meaning.
Paula loved her cheerful father more than her stingy, pragmatic mother, even though he was rarely home and almost never brought her treats—whereas her mother was always with her and provided for her every need.
Paula was drawn to her stylish, perpetually festive father like a fly to honey.
“Your father is an actor, he performs on the stage!” her friend once told her, and Paula was quite insulted.
“Mama, tell me, is it true that Papa is an actor?”
“And how!” her mother answered, with her typical opacity. “Especially offstage . . .”
She had a tendency to speak in half-sentences when talking about Paula’s father. Cryptic, unclear.
“If you have money, you’ll be able to choose a man who loves and respects you,” her mother told Paula often, while combing her curly hair. She had a tendency to speak querulously to Paula, as if complaining to herself.
“Will I be beautiful?”
“That’s not so important, as it turns out. I was beautiful once, and what did it get me? A girl has to have a dowry. That’s the main thing!”
And she gave Paula a strange, probing look, as if attempting to foretell her future.
Paula grew accustomed to the idea that a girl must have a dowry—that her dowry, or lack of one, would determine her fate.
At school she constantly boasted to the other children that she had a dowry. Most of them did not understand the word, but Harold, who was quite a handsome boy, walked right up to her once and said, “How much?”
“What?”
“How much is your dowry?”
Paula did not know.
She came running to her mother. “Mama, how much is my dowry?”
“Don’t worry your little head about it! It’s enough!” Her mother stroked her curly hair and smiled with satisfaction. “When you grow up . . .” She lapsed into her usual half-sentences. “I’m looking out for your interests . . . And it would be more, if not for those scheming flibbertigibbets . . .”
“My mother says I have a lot and I’ll get even more,” Paula told Harold, and she could see from his face that he was impressed.
But she soon began to have doubts. As it turned out, her first adolescent love affair fell apart on account of her dowry.
Leon with the freckles and the strong teeth vacillated between Paula and her friend Clara. He wrote love letters to both of them on the new typewriter that someone had given him for his bar mitzvah.
Paula was put out. This wasn’t how it was supposed to work. She alone should be his sweetheart—she, and no other! She stamped her foot and scolded Leon with abandon. At the end of her speech, she played her trump card: “I have a dowry and she does not!”
But Leon showed his strong teeth in a display of contempt: “I’m never gonna marry a woman for her dowry!” And from then on, he sent his typed love letters to Clara only.
Paula wept bitterly about that—but then she wiped her eyes and thought with a sigh: “Anyway, I’ll still come out on top, because I have a dowry . . .”
AS PAULA GREW up, she became a beautiful girl—everyone said so. When she went out arm in arm with her father, to the theater or to a restaurant, everyone surrounded them, paying compliments.
“With a face like that, and with your figure . . . you’re just destined for the stage!”
Paula nestled closer to her father, pleased. Everyone was always boasting about her future career. But on the way home, her euphoria would dwindle.
“See here, don’t tell your mother!” her father always warned.
But her mother interrogated her at length, refusing to let her sleep until she told the whole story: Where had they been? Who else was there?
“And the one with the long earrings—was she there too?”
And even though the one with the long earrings had sat with them throughout the entire evening, Paula answered bravely, “With long earrings? I don’t remember anyone like that . . .”
“Sort of pale, thin . . .”
“I don’t remember . . .”
“That’s the one all the money goes to, instead of . . .”
Her mother was against it, but after Paula finished school, she moved to New York to attend theater classes.
TRUE LOVE SMACKED Paula in the face much sooner than expected. It hit her like a whirlwind—a wild storm that tore through her, stirred her up, and left her in ruins. When all was said and done, she washed ashore like a piece of rotting driftwood.
Paula wandered home, dejected, miserable and disappointed—in her talent, in the stage, and in love. By then her father was no longer living with her mother. They had separated. Her mother, who had become even more pragmatic in her old age, took one look at Paula and knew exactly what had happened. Wringing her hands, she lamented, “My little girl! What did they do to you down there? Woe is me! It’s all your father’s fault! The sin is upon his head! The blood is on his hands!”<
br />
Paula was scrawny and her eyes were dull. Biting her lip, she managed to force out a few words:
“But Mama . . . he . . . he promised me . . . I believed him . . .”
And no one could get another word out of her. Who was the “he”? That question she would not answer.
Paula wandered around the house like a shadow, frozen with indifference. Every now and then she heard her mother whisper to someone, saying that she should be married off as soon as possible. Thank God, at least she was no pauper. She had a dowry . . .
38 Small town.
39 A derogatory term for a non-Jewish woman.
40 Meaning, a non-kosher woman, or a woman who doesn’t keep kosher.
41 A prayer book with Yiddish translation, commonly used by women.
42 The cup used for sanctified wine on the Sabbath and holidays.
Miriam Raskin
1889–1973
A LTHOUGH MIRIAM RASKIN’S stories often focus on the inner lives of everyday women, her own life was anything but ordinary.
Born in Slonim, in what is now Belarus, Raskin became politically active as a teenager, joined the socialist General Jewish Labor Bund, participated in the Revolution of 1905, and was imprisoned for a year for her political activities.
In 1920 she immigrated to the United States, where she published her first short stories in the literary and political journal Tsukunft (Future). Her first novel, Tsen yor lebn (Ten Years of Life) was published in 1927.
In the 1920s Raskin began publishing serialized novels and short stories in the Forward. A collection of those pieces, published in 1941 as Shtile lebns (Quiet Lives), earned widespread praise from Yiddish literary critics, including Forward editor Abraham Cahan, who wrote a laudatory review of the book. The same year, Raskin published another novel, Zlatke, which told the story of a female revolutionary much like her younger self.
In contrast with her own early life experience, Raskin’s stories for the Forward focused on the lives of ordinary Jewish women in America and were written in a relatively unadorned American Yiddish idiom. In both “She Wants to Be Different,” which appeared on October 27, 1943, and “In the Automat,” which was published on February 7, 1966, Raskin focuses on the hidden desires of two single women, both of whom are content with their lives but still yearn for something more.