Faye Moskowitz

Krakow, the old bobeh used to say, was not built in a day. A pity I didn’t meet her sooner; I might have spared myself some knocks on the way to growing up. All limp hair and baby fat, I was the kind of girl whose doting parents comfort themselves with, wait until she gets to college; by then the boys will have matured enough to appreciate her. In other words, socially, I was a flop.

At ten, I enviously watched the teen-aged girls saunter to Central High in their powder blue and powder pink angoras and I dreamed of the time when I would have my very own fuzzy pastel sweaters to keep in the refrigerator at night. By the time I was thirteen, I was smart enough to see that the sweater set (now cashmere instead of angora) would never welcome me, so I joined the Zionist Movement instead.

In a sense, we in the movement were the hippies of the forties. Our refusal to conform to accepted standards was just as rigid as the so-called individualism of the flower children. Movement girls wore old World War Two army clothes and no make-up in a time when white bobby sox and Revlon’s “Fatal Apple” were standard equipment. We stuck together and snubbed our peers who belonged, we felt, to the decaying bourgeoisie. I was happy in the movement but ultimately, two events convinced me that I wasn’t meant for the true collective life.

The people in my Zionist group had a kind of laissez-faire arrangement with kids in other movements to the left of center. Sometimes we attended each other’s social gatherings or we found ourselves thrown together at cultural events such as the premiere of “Fantasia” where I met my first real boy friend, Sheldon.

Sheldon told me right off he was a trotskyite and I told him he had better shut up about that at my house. My orthodox family, still waiting for the Messiah to carry us on his wings to the Holy Land, found my Zionist leanings heresy enough. I could have brought home a Gentile boy and caused less consternation than if I had introduced them to an uncamouflaged Sheldon. As for me, my reading at the time ran to Rilke and D. H. Lawrence so I was a little deficient in the political ideology department anyway. I did keep a copy of Das Kapital next to my bed that was mostly to annoy my parents. I never could get past the first couple of pages.

Sheldon was terribly exciting, it seemed to me. He dressed like a radical with a belted navy blue trench coat he never took off and a heavy brief case that never left his side. My friends suspected he carried a bomb in the case. We speculated about it endlessly and pictured it as a cartoon bomb, perfectly round and black with a long fuse.

One evening, Sheldon took me to a Socialist Workers Party banquet to hear a speech by their candidate for governor of the State of Michigan. I understood, of course, that the race was more symbolic than anything else. The S.W.P. never garnered more than a handful of votes each election but their slate of nominees for the state administrative offices included a woman and a Black. That was pretty heady stuff for 1947 and I was impressed despite my general feeling of impatience with our entire political system.

There were about thirty-five of us at the gala banquet. We feasted on spaghetti, paper plates piled high with sticking together strands of pasta topped by a thin orange colored sauce which left a puddle of grease at the bottom of the plate. The salad was even more institutional: cut-up iceberg lettuce, lying limply in another puddle of oil. It was alright, of course. Food is not important in movements. In fact, the worse the food is, the move convinced one is that one truly belongs to a movement.

The speeches trailed on through dessert, individual bricks of three-colored ice cream, wrapped in paper. You carefully undid the wrapper and then left the ice cream in the paper on your spaghetti plate. (Movement people make optimum use of everything.) Bottles of “Dago Red,” served throughout the meal, distinguished the banquet from an ordinary dinner. Since my only previous drinking had been confined to sweet Manischewitz on Jewish holidays, I found the sour wine foreign to my taste but I tried to be open minded about it.

We were all expected to help clean up after dinner. I crumpled the sodden paper plates and poured the dregs of the paper cups down a rusty old porcelain sink at the back of the cavernous hall. I felt pretty damn communal about the whole thing until Sheldon grabbed me by the arm.

“What the HELL are you doing,” he hissed.

I poured another quarter inch of “Dago Red” into the sink and tossed the paper cup into an overflowing metal garbage can.

“What does it look like I’m doing?” I asked smartly.

“Let’s get out of here.”

He yanked me out of the hall and down the steep stairs so quickly I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye to anyone.

“Idiot, idiot,” he kept repeating. “You’ll never be anything but middle class.”

“What did I DO?”

“I’ll never be able to show my face with those people again,” he moaned. “Don’t you know you’re never supposed to throw anything away that’s still useful?” He turned up the collar of his trench coat. “You should have poured the wine back in the bottles.”

Me? Pour the wine back into the bottles? Not with MY mother! When my mother came to America and discovered germs, she experienced a kind of epiphany from which she never quite recovered. Even afterward, she drove bacteria from her house with the religious fervor of a rabbi exorcising a dybbuk. My mother’s floors were of the legendary variety you could eat from. You could, but try it. Once, as a small girl, I tried surreptitiously to retrieve a jawbreaker that had dropped out of my mouth and rolled across one of those chaste floors. Mama, eternally vigilant, gave me a clout across the side of the head and left me disoriented for hours. No, no wine in old bottles for me.

I hung around the Zionist Movement for another year or so, dancing the hora, marching in picket lines, singing union songs and even once dropping anti-White Paper leaflets from the top floor of Detroit’s staid department store, the J. L. Hudson Company. Then, in 1948, the State of Israel was created and I went to a training farm in New Jersey, prepared to educate myself for life on a kibbutz.

The farm at Creamridge was all I had expected: dirty sheets, day old bread and uncolored margarine if you wanted a snack. Everyone wore pants and said “mother” a lot, especially the girls, and I was told several of the chaverim were living together; I felt quite grown-up and intense.

By this time I was fairly experienced in the mores of collective living, pouring back leftover milk after dinner and saving crusts for bread pudding. You wouldn’t catch me making the Dago Red Faux Pas again. I spent the first day figuring out where to eat and how to find the B.K., the anglicized shorthand for “house of the chair.” I also selected an outfit from the communal stacks. Like nuns, we left our outer world clothing in little baskets that were tucked away somewhere against the day when we might decide to renounce our vocation.

A handsome, incipiently bearded comrade from Pittsburgh offered to show me the farm, mostly given over to the breeding of chickens. The whole scene reminded me of traumatic visits to the kosher slaughterer when I was a kid. I pretty much decided that if I had a choice, I’d find a collective in Israel that specialized in vegetable farming.

The next day, I was assigned to the egg candling detail. Veterans assured me that it beat cleaning coops, so I was content. My Pittsburgh friend led me to a small, damp, evil smelling room with weeping cinder block walls and a great electric light bulb hanging from a naked black wire.

“O.K.,” he said. “Clean the egg with sandpaper and then hold it up to the light. If you see anything funny, throw it out.”

The last thing I wanted to do was show my utter lack of sophistication in the chicken world so I nodded when he asked, “Do you get it?” He was impatient to take off for the hayloft where I imagined he anticipated some communal living with a fellow movement member and I didn’t keep him.

“One other thing,” he said as he started off. “The dog gets the rejects. Like this…” ZAP!

He threw an egg to the dirt floor and a sleek-looking mongrel with a healthy coat went slurp…slurp.

Feeling important, useful, committed, I organized myself carefully. To my left were stacks of eggs in slatted wooden crates. They didn’t exactly look like what came out of the refrigerator at home. These eggs were brown and besides they were covered with bits of straw and chicken droppings. To my right were crates half-filled with cleaned chocolate colored eggs. Gingerly, I picked up an egg and carefully sanded away some substance I couldn’t even identify. Then I held the egg to the bare bulb…It had a spot in it. No mistaking that. ZAP! Shlup, shlup went the fat dog. I selected another egg. Up to the light. No good. ZAP! Shlup, shlup.

I was ankle-deep in egg shells when my trainer returned, his arms intricately wound around the arms of his girl. He surveyed the carnage. The dog lay in a corner, comatose.

“Boy, did you give me a bum bunch of eggs,” I said as I professionally sanded another egg and held it to the light. ZAP! On the floor. The dog didn’t move.

“What the HELL are you doing?”

By this time he had untangled himself from his girl. I was bewildered.

“But you said…if they looked funny…” My voice trailed off. “These all have spots,” I said weakly.

“SPOTS! You cretin! Of course they have spots! They’re all fertilized eggs. Jesus Christ, you are hopeless.”

I never did end up going to Israel. Somehow that simple communal life always turned out to be far too complicated for me. Instead I got married when I was eighteen and with my husband embarked on another kind of communal living. Like many other couples of the time, we had little to start with but our marriage license and the G.I. Bill. Housing was scarce in the post-war pre-building-boom forties so we moved into my husband’s home with his recently widowed mother, a teenaged brother and his tiny, hunchbacked grandmother. I was determined that the lessons I had learned in my movement days would not be forgotten. There was a right way to live and fortunately I knew what that way was.

My mother-in-law was still in shock from the loss of her husband and presented no obstacle to my master plan. My brother-in-law, courting a young lady, spent more time at her house than at ours; he was no trouble. My husband, of course, had realized for years how inefficiently his house was run. He saw things my way. The old lady was not so easily dismissed.

It seemed to me that she ran the household from her bedroom, where, propped high on feather pillows, she looked out her doorway across the hall to the bathroom. She guarded that bathroom like some dogged little Yiddish Cerberus, shouting “lift up the board” to any unfortunate male who might have need of the facilities. Daytimes, when the men left the house, Bobeh could relax her vigil and attend to her other responsibilities. Bobeh Frieda, too, I discovered, had a vision of the right way to do things.

She and I both saw that unless our meager income was supplemented or drastic economy measures taken, we were simply not going to be able to pay our bills. She also knew that the economic base of our little commune resided rather shakily in my husband, who still retained enough of his adolescent habits to view getting up in the morning as a matter of choice rather than obligation. She could hardly have avoided hearing, in our cramped quarters, the threats, pleas and even tears as I struggled to get the breadwinner out of bed and off to college and work. Yes, Bobeh and I agreed on the problem, but when it came to the solution, as my husband said, we each sang our own tune.

One morning, after the men had done out, I called a meeting of the women. My mother-in-law and the old lady listened as I explained the situation and outlined a few directives: whatever money we earned was to be pooled and kept by my husband in a community purse or Kupah as we had called it in the movement. After paying off the corner grocer who had been only too happy to keep us in permanent debt by “putting it on the bill,” we were to shop solely at cash and carry stores. We would begin to plan menus for the week instead of impulse buying every day. Food storage was no longer a problem since the icebox, I reminded them, had been replaced by a refrigerator ten years before.

The old lady interrupted then to say, “oi Gott,” as if to herself, but I ignored her and went on. We would take advantage of seasonal food bargains, buy day-old baked goods, and can and preserve what we could. All this in the best Department of Agriculture tradition. Between meals snacks were forbidden except for bread and apple butter. The women looked uneasy at that one but since I think they both viewed me as a storm that would blow itself out, they said nothing.

The meeting concluded, I went to my room to plan menus. My mother-in-law snuck into the kitchen to make coffee and the little bobeh, an activist like me, went out to solve the problem in her own ways. Like the enterprising little pig in the children’s story, who was forever outsmarting the wolf, Bobeh was always one step ahead of the junk man. She scavenged the gutters in our neighborhood for pop bottles so she could return them to the grocer for the two cents deposit. Oil drum trash barrels in back alleys were treasure troves to her. She was so short, I wonder how she could see inside them but she did and found plenty, too, to drag to the junk shop where she let the junk man have her booty for a price.

She didn’t look odd to us but I suppose she must have been a strange sight, scarcely taller than a child, a kerchief knotted at the back of her head barely covering thin colorless hair and pendulous ear lobes pierced by tiny brown stones, her body wrapped, winter and summer, in aprons and sweaters with several pairs of thick cotton stockings wrinkling on her swollen legs. She kept busy all day as she had almost all her life, buying and selling.

Her favorite scheme, though, was dealing in handkerchiefs. Fagin, had he only known her, would have made her a full partner. There was nothing dishonest in it, you understand. She only dealt in lost handkerchiefs, ones that tumbled from an ample bosom, that fell out of a handbag, or came out of a back pocket when a gentleman removed his wallet.

Being my mother’s child still, I was certain those bits of cloth crawled with T.B. and Polio germs and I told her so when I discovered what she was doing. She paid no attention, of course, and came home each afternoon, washed the handkerchiefs, pressed them and sold them to the used clothing store. Later, when for many reasons we became intimate, she told me that the synagogue was her most lucrative haunt. After services, she might haul in four or five sodden hankies dropped by mourners in the women’s section who had come to say Kaddish for their dead.

Some aspects of my five year plan were eagerly shared. On Thursdays, we took advantage of a deflated Canadian dollar and shopped in Windsor across the river. Carrying black leather shopping bags, we rode the bus through the long, white tiled Windsor Tunnel bringing back eggs, chicken, and produce from the Canadian markets. One day I found a bargain I couldn’t resist even though my U.S.D.A. pamphlets clearly warned against impulse buying. The egg man was offering rancid butter at a ridiculously low price. I thought of a recipe for doughnuts I had been dying to try and I finally succumbed after a few trips back and forth to the counter. I explained a bit testily to the women when they questioned my purchase, that rancid butter was perfectly acceptable for baking.

Back home, we unloaded our groceries while I gathered the ingredients for the doughnuts, a surprise for my husband when he came home. My mother-in-law went off to nap but the old lady sat down to keep me company.

“Malcaleh,” she asked innocently, “what kind of cake are you baking with that spoiled butter?”

“Not a cake, I told you…doughnuts, not a cake.”

“But you don’t bake doughnuts. You fry them, no?”

“Yes,” I said, mixing and rolling. “You fry them.”

She sat back and folded her arms. “Butter is not good to fry. Butter burns.”

I decided to ignore her. Bagels were her orientation, not doughnuts. Besides, I was stuck with three pounds of rancid butter and I couldn’t possibly admit that I had been in error about using it for frying doughnuts. The admission could have jeopardized the entire five-year plan I had in mind for the household.

Bobeh sat quietly, missing nothing as I heated the butter and cut the dough into shape. The kitchen was silent except for the sound of bubbling fat and an occasional ‘oi Gott’ from the old lady. I dropped the little cylinders, a few at a time, into the pot and held my breath as they puffed, browned and floated to the surface. Perfect! I carefully turned them over, adjusted the flame and prepared to skim them out. I couldn’t believe it. Except that they cooked faster than I had expected, they looked as if they might have come from the bakery, their plump sides touching in a pasteboard box. I drained the fried cakes on brown paper bags and mixed up another batch of dough. I smiled at the thought of my husband’s face when he would hear of my bargain and see what an accomplished cook I was.

I rushed everyone through dinner (my brother-in-law didn’t appear), and announced that dessert would be served in the living room. The two women followed me from the kitchen as I carried the plate. Earlier, each had made clear that she never ate doughnuts. I was on a diet as usual, so we all watched while my husband took a first bite.

“Fantastic,” he said. “How did you get the cream filling inside?”

Cream filling? My stomach lurched in misery. They are raw, I thought as the old lady looked at her fingernails. The butter made them brown too fast. My brother-in-law came in then, breaking what was becoming an uncomfortable silence. He spied the plate of fried cakes.

“Hey,” he said, “doughnuts!”

While I sat back in my chair, unable, unwilling to speak, the bobeh fixed me with glittering eyes and my brother-in-law continued to devour half-cooked fried cakes. My husband finally said, “Take it easy and leave some for someone else.”

The plate was almost empty when my brother-in-law left to take a shower and I waited for the sound of his body collapsing in the tub. Nothing happened and when he came whistling down the stairs to grab a last doughnut and go out the door, I was thankful we couldn’t afford a car; at least no other innocents would be involved when he dropped in his tracks, God knows where.

The remaining doughnuts sat fatly in their plate, a mute reproach to my obstinacy and pride. Like Snow White’s poisonous apple, their flawless exterior hid a lethal heart. Finally alone in our bedroom with my husband, the burden became too heavy to carry. I confessed my ineptness and took whatever comfort I could from his barely muffled shouts of laughter. I couldn’t sleep, of course. It seemed that night as though every other car that passed the busy intersection near our home was an ambulance. It never occurred to me, in my misery, that the ambulance would not reproachfully deposit the victim of my pride at the very threshold of my room.

On to my stomach, over on my back, up on my side, I twisted and turned to elude the watchbird of my conscience but there was the slogan fiendishly printed on the inside of my eyelids: THIS IS A WATCHBIRD, WATCHING YOU. I was all the things the watchbird despised: proud and deceitful, bossy and stubborn.

I cried then for a while because I wasn’t absolutely certain I wanted to spend my life with the boy who lay sleeping next to me. I cried for my bed at home and for my parents and for my two brothers who had somehow become transformed by distance into Louisa May Alcott siblings. After that, I gave up trying to sleep and decided to sneak into the bathroom to read. Bobeh spotted me when I crept past her door.

“Malcaleh,” she called. “Are you alright?” What are you doing up so late?”

Half sitting on the plump pillows to ease her chronic bronchitis, she was reading her prayer book by the light from “next door’s” house, an arm’s length away.

“Yes, Bobeh,” I answered. “I’m O.K. I’m just going to the bathroom.”

“I can’t sleep either,” she said. “Come, keep me company.”

She lifted the heavy quilt and patted the bed beside her. I can remember so clearly how gingerly I crawled into the tiny bed, struggling to keep myself at the edge so I would not have to touch the misshapen little bone-bag that was her body. She pulled the blanket up over us both and said, “When you are old you never want to sleep because there are so many years to sleep soon, anyway.”

“I had a dream last night,” she told me. “I saw your father-in-law and I asked, ‘Frank, are you happy where you are?’ I think he couldn’t speak but he handed me a piece of bread and honey and he motioned for me to eat. You will have a boy,” she said firmly, putting her hand on my stomach. “A fat little boy and he will have Frank’s name. That’s what the dream meant.”

Still keeping a death grip on the edge of the mattress, I started to tell her how the five-year-plan made no provision for fat little boys but I changed my mind. Instead, I let go, rolling to the hollow where our bodies touched, feeling my firm moist arms, embarrassing in their ripeness, against her powdery transparent flesh, fearing my chunky body would crush her brittle, twig-like limbs.

Bobeh threw off the covers and took down boxes in her closet. She showed me her wig, a saucy unexpected auburn, part of her dowry when, as a sixteen year old, she had married her first husband. From another box, she drew out a thick brown braid glistening with naphthalene. I had the strangest feeling touching the crumbling hair that if I stretched my fingers far enough I could touch, too, the tender young bride who must have cried so bitterly when the women came to shear her heavy hair.

Like me, she had gone to live with her shviger, at first. I wanted to ask her if, like me, she had ever wondered just who she was in a household that wasn’t really hers and then I realized she was back in that uncertain position at the end of her life. I thought of how she took her scanty meals of rye bread and herring or a few boiled potatoes, perched on the edge of a chair as if she was always ready to give up her place to someone more entitled to it. Yet one thing was obvious to me: from identity crises, she didn’t suffer. What experiences had given her a hide as stubborn as black walnut shells? And yes, I admit it, I really wanted to know if she found my charts and directives totally ridiculous.

She must have sensed the tumbled thoughts moiling in my head for, standing there with the brown braid curled in her palm, she erased the years between us as effortlessly as chalk is wiped from a blackboard. She collapsed the years in fan-folds and called me, not daughter but sister. “You don’t have to worry; you are like me. Believe me, Malcaleh, you are not a shmatte as most women are today. My Simcha’s wife is a shmatte. My daughter is a shmatte but no one, you should excuse me, will ever wipe his tuchis on you.” She shrugged her crooked little shoulders as if to suggest that such strong sentiments required strong language.

What did I care then for the niceties of language? What mattered was that the bobeh didn’t see me as the proverbial small kettle that soon boils. She didn’t hold against me my watchbird vices. Instead, she was absolutely aware of my efforts to bring order to the house and what’s more, she approved! Such relief. I couldn’t wait to admit everything. “About the butter,” I blurted out.

She waved her hand at me. “Forget that narrishkeit.” There is important work to be done. You must make a mensh out of my grandson and I will help you. Only listen to me and I will teach you.” In her enthusiasm, her kerchief had fallen almost to her eyebrows and she straightened it impatiently. “You must not be disappointed because change comes so slowly. Remember… Krakow.”

“I know, I know,” I interrupted. “It wasn’t built in a day.” What a beautiful bloodless coup and it was all over before I realized that I was the power deposed. Back in bed, we talked together for hours and when my brother-in-law, very much alive, came home and tiptoed to the bathroom, we both whispered in unison, “lift up the board,” and then fell back on the pillows giggling like school girls.

I went down stairs and made toast and we drank tea with cherry conserve and slices of lemon, eating the thick jam from the bottom of the glasses with long beaten silver spoons.

Then, wrapped in blankets we played dominoes at a little table in her room. I can still recall the soft click of black tiles and how the white spots danced in front of my eyes in the thin skim milk blue of first dawn. My husband found us in the morning, sleeping spoon fashion under the feather quilt. He told me afterward that when he saw us he thought we were the two most beautiful women he had ever seen.

Faye Moskowitz  is professor emerita of English and Creative Writing, having retired from the George Washington University in May of 2016. She is author of A Leak in the Heart (David Godine: Boston, 1985), Whoever Finds This: I Love You (David Godine, Boston, 1988), And the Bridge is Love (Beacon Press: Boston, 1991). Peace in the House (David Godine: Boston, 2002) And the Bridge is Love, reissued by Feminist Press, (CUNY, NY, 2011).  She is editor of Her Face in the Mirror: Jewish Women on Mothers and Daughters (Beacon Press: Boston, 1995).