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Toby Axelrod
Black and white and color
[English] [French]
[German]
When we arrived at his house, my Zede
would be sitting in his metal rocking chair, his Vilna Talmud lying open on
the washboard he placed across the arms of the chair. He would look up and
chuckle when he heard our station wagon crunch up on the gravel driveway of
his ramshackle house in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Then he would rise
from his chair with a happy grunt, lead us into the kitchen and get us "a
little eppis", a little something: coffee, a piece of cake. We would stay a
while, chat, and then we would go... to the home of Grandma and Grandpa, my
mother's parents.
They lived a few miles outside of town,
in an old farm house on a mountainside. When we arrived, Grandpa would be in
the vegetable garden, down on one knee, snapping green beans from their stalks
and collecting them in a bowl. Grandma, wearing a white apron over her
flowered dress, would be hanging fresh wash on the clothesline. A broad field
of wild flowers and thyme swept up toward the woods. ÈWell, well!Ç my
grandfather would say, as if surprised to see us. Grandma would forget that we
were wearing mosquito repellent and would kiss us and nibble our ears until
the bitter taste would register.
I was supposed to be lucky to have all
my grandparents in the same town. Everyone else had one set in Florida and
another set in Brooklyn, at best. As a child, I thought we were one big
family. So it was a shock to me to learn that my two sets of grandparents did
not get along.
In fact, the contrast was sharp: Zede,
already a widower since 1961, was a rabbi with a shul. My other grandfather
sought spiritual sustenance in nature. Zede never spoke English perfectly.
Grandpa, on the other hand, read modern poetry. Zede lived in a run-down house
with tenants upstairs. Grandpa and Grandma lived in a big farmhouse filled
with antiques. Zede sometimes wore a bathrobe as a coat. Grandpa said you can
judge a man by his shoes.
Zede had brought the old world with him
from Poland, trying to recreate a shtetl atmosphere in a Massachusetts town.
He and Bubbe had moved there in 1927 with my father, Itzie. Later came Eadie,
Rosie and Duddy. Their lifestyle was low on material niceties but high on the
spiritual sustenance.
My mother's father also came from the
old country – Lithuania. But Grandpa's family tried hard to shed the old-world
stigma. They changed their name from Kerensky to Caron. They got rid of their
Yiddish accents. Grandpa married Grandma, born a Cohen in New York City. They
named their kids Herbert and Margaret.
My mother's parents moved from New York
City to the hills of western Massachusetts after the Great Depression ruined
the Caron Brothers clothing business. My grandparents started a summer camp
for children.
It was there that two immigrant worlds
collided. My parents met when my father delivered kosher meat to the summer
camp of Conan and Emma Caron – for a while they did serve kosher meat. But
mom's parents were never big on religion, although it was a shonda when a
cousin married a non-Jew. They did not go to synagogue. "This is my temple",
my grandfather would say, stretching his arms out to embrace the hilly
landscape.
I, too, felt that the forests and lakes were something holy. But across town
God was in the small shul of my father's father, where the men and women sat
apart but children wandered freely. Zede led a simple and pious life. Wake up,
bind the tefilin around the arm and forehead, daven. Then shuffle into the
kitchen and make fresh orange juice. Have some matzah farfel in milk, a strong
cup of coffee, and settle down with a Yiddish newspaper or the Talmud. Zede
lived alone since my Bubbe died in 1961.
Zede told great stories about life in
"the old country", and all his stories, whether funny or sad, had moral
lessons. Right and wrong were clearly defined. Everything was written in black
and white, right there in the Torah and Talmud. There was holiness in that
contrast of ink on paper. When the family once bought Zede a color TV, he
rejected it, saying, "I want it in black and white – the way God made it."
Zede still lived in the same house
where my youngest uncle was born in 1936. It was an old Victorian-style house
that had seen better days, with a sagging porch and tar-paper shingles. But it
had character: a bathroom sink that sneezed loudly when one filled it with
water and let it drain fast; a "cold room" where my aunts "hid" the
traditional holiday cakes under a dishtowel; a huge gas-station clock in the
dining room, with a green and red glowing neon frame; the pantry that
occasionally housed a skunk; and the shed that doubled as a sukkah, the two
halves of its roof parting like the red sea. Across the yard and beyond the
vegetable garden was the little Orthodox shul, "Ahavath Shalom" where my Zede
had been rabbi since 1927. Zede's house was where we had Shabbas and holidays.
The home of mother's parents was where
we had adventures. The forest was for exploring and the house for getting lost
in. It had a twisting staircase that threw off my sense of direction, so that
I could never remember what room was directly below me.
By the time I was five, my grandparents
had sold their camp at the lake. But when all our cousins were visiting, there
was a camp-like atmosphere in the house, with noisy yet orderly mealtimes,
chores and even entertainment: one cousin would play guitar, another the
violin, and we would sing Israeli folk songs.
Amid all the hooplah I would suddenly
remember that a few miles away Zede was probably still sitting and reading his
Talmud, alone except for Shabbas and the holidays, when we would always be
with him. It was only fair that we should divide our time between the two
sides of the family. But the older I became, the more I felt the tension
between them. I started feeling guilty leaving one's house and going to the
other. I wondered why I seldom saw them together.
I started noticing that both would ask
me what I had eaten at the other's house. Then I picked up on the look on my
Zede's face when he asked yet again if mom's parents were coming to shul for
Rosh Hashanah. And I saw how my mother's parents smiled patronizingly at my
Zede's heavy Yiddish accent and poor handwriting.
After my grandmother died in 1977, and
Grandpa began living with a "lady friend" Fanny, Zede did not mince words.
Fanny was no better than a prostitute in his eyes. As for himself, since my
Bubbe had died, Zede had never been behind closed doors with another woman.
Zede lived to be about 90. A few years before he died in 1986, he made a
speech for his birthday, which coindiced with Thanksgiving (as a child I
thought it was a Jewish holiday). Listing the stages of life, from childhood
to old age, he seemed to be announcing that he had lived long enough. We
toasted: "Bis hundertzwanzig" you should live to be as old as Moses.
I remembered this scene a couple of
years ago when my other grandfather announced that he was 120. He was only
102, but I wondered if he was really saying he had lived long enough. When he
said he would be 130 on his next birthday, I felt relief.
Grandpa died in May, at 104. The last
time I saw him, in January, he barely spoke except to ask us to push his
wheelchair "uptown" as if he were still in New York City as 90 years before.
After he died, he was returned to Great Barrington to be buried next to
Grandma. Before the funeral, the hearse drove up to the house on the hillside,
where today his great grandchildren play.
All my grandparents now are in the same
cemetery on a thyme-covered hillside, in the section that belongs to the
Jewish community. When we visit the cemetery before each New Year, my father
reads the memorial prayer for both sides of the family. We pull weeds from the
footstones and leave a few small rocks to show we were there.
In the town, the place where Zede's
house stood is now an empty lot posted with a "for sale" sign. The cement walk
leads nowhere. Bits of tar paper litter the same grass where I once found a
magic yellow marble.
When I close my eyes I can still see Zede, sitting in his metal rocking chair,
protected from the sun by a plastic tablecloth draped over parallel
clotheslines. He waves as we drive away until none of us can see each other
any more.
Toby
Axelrod, Germany correspondent for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and London
Jewish Chronicle, was born in New York City in 1956. From 1988 to 1997,
she was a staff writer at the New York Jewish Week. She came to Germany in
1997 as a Fulbright scholar and is writing a doctoral thesis about non-Jewish
German confrontations with the Holocaust. From March 2000 until June 2001, she
was the assistant director of the American Jewish Committee Berlin office.
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