My mother was 16 years old when in 1910 she and her sister Ida who was 17 went to America from a small village in what was then part of the Austrian Hungarian Emplre. Their father was in America already hoping to earn some money, but was unsuccessful. It was Ida’s intention to tell their father he had to go home because he had a wife and several children there. He was told my mother and Ida would remain in America for a few years, earn some money and then return to Europe. So he left America.. In 1914 World war one erupted in Europe and it was not possible to return. The war ended in November, 1918 at which time my mother and aunt Ida were both married and each had a chid. They were not going to leave. In 1919 there was a world wide influenza epidemic that killed millions of people. My mother’s father and mother both died within two weeks of each other. In the 1920s with the exception of a younger brother, the sisters in Europe did not want to go to America. The brother did come to here but sadly, the sisters and their families who remained, were all victims of the Holocaust . During the next ten year period my mother gave birth to five children of whom I was the youngest. Knowing what happened to much of her family, my mother was overly protective raising her children. I considered it very fortunate to grow up with immigrant parents and understanding how they had lived their lives and did everything to make sure their children did better. My father died at the age of 52 and my mother at the age of 93. Right up to the death of my mother, I was grateful to have had my parents’ DNA.
There was a section in Irving Howe’s book World of Of Our Fathers in which he seemed to describing my Jewish mother. He wrote,
“ Yet even behind the most insufferable way of the Jewish mother, there was almost always a hard-earned perception of reality. Did she overfeed ? Her mind was haunted by memories of a hungry childhood. Did she fuss about health? Infant mortality had been a plague in the old country and the horror of diphtheria overwhelming in this country. Did she dominate every one within reach? A disarranged family structure endowed her with powers she had never known before, and burdens too; it was to be expected that she should abuse the powers and find advantage in the burdens. The weight of centuries bore down. In her bones, the Jewish mother knew that she and hers, simply by being Jewish, had always to live with a sense of precariousness.”
Howe went on to say, “ Venerated to absurdity, assaulted with venom that testifies obliquely to her continuing moral and emotional power, the immigrant mother cut their path through the perils and entanglements of American life. Everyone spoke about her, against her, to her, but she herself left no word to posterity, certainly none in her own voice, perhaps because all the talk about her “role” seemed to her finally trivial, the indulgence of those who had escaped life’s primal tasks. Talk was the a luxury that her labor would enable her son to taste.”
Momma, thank you for enabling me to talk.
Ben Haber
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