Last week, I urged all to visit with senior family members to probe their memories. Do those family interviews before it’s too late, or else a “library burns down” when they’re gone and we lose those stories. Ideally, do a video recording of the interviews, like the ones I mentioned of my Aunt Sophia, a centenarian still sharp until her death at 103. Watching those videos rekindled some of my earliest memories of my Blum family heritage.
I’ve previously covered stories of my mother’s parents coming to America from Ukraine and Poland. Last week I focused on my father’s parents coming here from Latvia, telling the story of my grandfather Isadore Blum. Today, I round out the family history with the story of my grandmother, Nettie Falkin Blum. Like my other three grandparents, Nettie came to America as a young adult, starting life in New York. Her brothers Yossel and Morris remained in New York, settling in Port Chester, but Nettie and her sisters Becky and Sarah eventually came to Texas. They never Americanized. They spoke very broken English, preferring their mother tongue Yiddish. Their only newspaper was the Jewish Daily Forward, written entirely in Yiddish.
My grandmother Nettie was small in stature and in her behavior, very soft-spoken and gentle. On the contrary, her older sister Becky Schiffer, was stern and tough. Becky was a seamstress doing “piecework” in New York’s garment district. She was a labor organizer with Socialist leanings. Her husband, Moshe Aaron (whose name was always slurred together and sounded like “Mashiron” to me) was a violinist who shared his wife’s liberal views. Had they not been tough as nails, they’d have never survived their persecution in Dvinsk, Latvia. Like my grandparents Nettie and Isadore, Becky and Moshe Aaron also opened a small grocery, located at 1327 May Street in an impoverished Fort Worth neighborhood. It was very common for Jewish immigrants to own some kind of small retail business and live in cramped quarters behind it. Given my grandparents’ suffering under the Czar’s rule in Eastern Europe, they wanted to own a business and control their own destiny. My father used to say he’d rather own a lemonade stand than work for someone else. My kids and I have evidently inherited that powerful desire to be self-employed.
I have vivid childhood memories of Nettie (whom we called “Bubbie,” the Yiddish word for grandmother). Both of my parents worked at Blum’s Café, so every day after nursery school, I was dropped off at Bubbie’s for the afternoon. Bubbie and her sister Becky (both widowed) lived together on one side of a duplex on Forest Park Blvd. in Fort Worth. Their life was very routine, and I was expected to fall into that routine. We lunched daily on chicken and rice soup at the yellow Formica kitchen table. I recall eating the broth first and saving the rice till the end, whereupon Becky said to Bubbie (in Yiddish), “He doesn’t like the rice.” In truth, I saved it till the end because it was my favorite. I’ve always been one to postpone joy. (I’m trying to work on that.)
Following lunch, we watched “As the World Turns.” Watching TV was not only entertainment, it was how my grandparents learned English. As a four-year-old, that show gave me a different kind of education. I became a couch-potato kid who was addicted to TV (though I preferred “I Love Lucy” over soap operas). Following the daily episode, we all took a nap. I remember saying, “But I’m not tired,” whereupon my Bubbie replied, “You rest before you get tired.” In spite of that admonition, I have never been into napping. I suppose I lean more into my mother-in-law’s view on sleep: “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”
[I feel compelled to add that my dear friend and sleep expert Meeta Singh, MD concurs with Bubbie. In her weekly blog post yesterday entitled What if the real brain hack is…a nap?, Dr. Singh advocates for naps: “A nap is the real shortcut to solving complex problems…. Even a 20-minute nap boosted insight and creative problem-solving.” I guess Bubbie was right.]
We cannot escape our roots. They have a way of informing not only how we look, but also how we think and feel, even as we grow old. Though she seemed ancient to me, I’m now as old as Bubbie was then. My grandkids call me Zaidy, the Yiddish word for grandfather. I wonder if my grandkids think I’m ancient. I wonder if 70 years from now, they’ll be telling stories of their childhood times with me. Bubbie called me “Shayna Punim,” Yiddish for pretty face. Will my grandkids remember all my nicknames for them, and the times we spent together? I hope so, but just to be safe, I’d better get it all documented.
Marvin E. Blum
Marvin Blum’s grandmother Nettie (far left) seated by her siblings Morris, Becky, Yossel, and Sarah.
