OUR PEOPLE
Linker, Moliie
OUR PEOPLE Moliie Linker edited by Sydelle Kramer and Jenny Masur I think the whole story is about my mother. We were of a poor class. In Russia, they would send their children to be like a...
...It doesn't have to be...
...Everyone looked up to her...
...Naturally, we were third class (on the boat), you know...
...That was the immigrant woman...
...we had a gramophone...
...They think about women's liberation — I think that the mother, the immigrant mother, was a real woman because the children looked up to her, the community looked up to her 'cause she was the leader...
...pay out fifty cents a week...
...She never wrote and said she needed help...
...Do you know what I read at that age...
...My two daughters, it's their home, I don't tell them (what to do...
...We really were, every one of us...
...In our family) we were all pretty girls...
...and I must have sneaked down one day in the first class or second, I saw children were given fruit or candy...
...The fathers worked, the mothers worked at home, cleaning, scrubbing, cooking, taking in boarders, if they couldn't make it, and did their shopping...
...She came and said to my mother — she was a widow with three girls and a boy — she says, "Look...
...I fell in the basement of the glass factory...
...it was in an orchard, and she said, "I'll charge you two dollars a year rent...
...We went to a dance...
...But I always wanted to see a lot...
...You wanted to make your money...
...The machines were all in a row...
...It was one big street: we had the melting pot there...
...When I must have been about sixteen, my father used to have our pictures to show off at work...
...It's the heritage...
...She couldn't see me, but she would smell my hair — I had two long red braids — singeing, you see...
...It'll be good for me, too...
...they had two years of high school...
...It seemed to me that there were beautiful brownstone homes...
...I was given something to do on the machine...
...My grandchildren call me the Communist, the rebel...
...You were actually always in fear because of big pogroms...
...This is how I met my future husband...
...we rented...
...In summer, you'd sit outside and talk...
...She had that house ready for her...
...You bought everything on payment...
...You had to be careful not to stitch your fingers in...
...Windows were open, of course...
...Post office...
...I was always doing those things...
...As for her marriage — she never knew him before...
...Then the babies came...
...They called it Deutschland...
...I came up on the deck — I always used to be on the deck to see fish and the ocean...
...It was a big apartment...
...We lived above stores...
...There was mostly Italian women and girls (working there...
...They finished grammar school...
...So (if we didn't have a business) I worked in the neighborhood in a bakery...
...But we got along nice when we lived there...
...The family was small...
...She was encouraging them for music, and the better things in life...
...it was so clean...
...And with a sandwich, I went to school...
...We worked side by side for fifty-five years...
...He fixed umbrellas...
...And it was so hot, not even a decent fan...
...I was the second...
...Each floor had a shop chairman...
...So when I got married, I got six sheets, some pillowcases, tablecloths...
...She went without shoes, without personal things, but the fifty cents a week for the piano was there...
...Then someone must have told my mother to tell the boss 'cause it was his factory and he probably had insurance...
...They tried to make a social life for the young people, and they would have picnics in the summer and while they had the picnics, they would lecture...
...They say like Romeo and Juliet and Elizabeth Browning...
...It was either an organization (the landsman hasten) or a union dance...
...He spoke fluently German, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian...
...We had a kerosene lamp, and in order my mother shouldn't see me reading...
...We had a very nice life...
...So I worked in a factory (at first...
...I gave it all to my mother...
...We were neighbors to all...
...We're both alone and I need you...
...Now I know that I looked up to my husband...
...And he came here, he spoke English...
...That's why my grandchildren call me Red...
...What are we going to do...
...We used to call to each other from our windows...
...Tz'dakah means to help a person, to help you do something...
...This is the kind of people we both were...
...We marched all the way to the union...
...It'll be good for you...
...Right after Passover, I entered school...
...and school started at seven thirty, and there was a few blocks...
...So my father said to me, "Mollie, do you think you would care for him...
...they couldn't help her and she was too proud to tell them...
...she's with four children here, and she's sick...
...And there were dances, there were parties, boys and girls...
...I had two blouses...
...It was like a third floor, and we had to walk up...
...There were kissing games, too...
...He was a scholar...
...With the union, we worked shorter hours...
...we crossed on the ferry...
...We played ball across the street...
...There was no radio, there were no TV's...
...And that I told them — how I felt walking in that building...
...We lived in a mixed neighborhood — a lot of Italians, and some Polish people...
...Mothers of that era have the peddlers...
...they all liked me...
...But then later on, you're content with your lot, and maybe sometime there was a rebel in me...
...And my father, of course — he left it all up to my mother...
...So he came to the house with a car...
...The peddler would come in the house...
...That was my first fight...
...So, as we stopped off in Halifax instead of Ellis Island, we had to cross the border...
...And my regret, I always regret — I should have gone back to school, and I should have kept up...
...we used to go quite often...
...I must have been ten...
...You ran after it like you saw the first train...
...He loved her very much...
...And he looked at me and I guess he said something the next time to my father...
...And every time, I went for a book to the library twenty blocks away...
...There was more singing than anything else...
...He must have been twenty-seven...
...And she ran — it was a cold day — and when she came in the house, she couldn't speak, and she said to my mother, "Dress her...
...Apples and plums would fall in the window...
...I read Uncle Tom's Cabin when I was ten...
...A woman came in with ten girls, and those girls were taken away from broken homes...
...She would take six sheets, tablecloth...
...Then we had a store in Evanston...
...So I read the (New York Jewish Daily) Forward...
...We worked eighteen hours out of twenty-four...
...She was raising her children...
...There was a beautiful shul where we were, near Roosevelt Road and Ashland — it was the most magnificent building, with lions...
...As you know, they're lovers of music...
...About once every week, we used to go to the old Auditorium...
...And the garlic smell was awful but they liked it...
...But I don't regret it because we have friends all over town...
...My mother did it...
...You had to heat your own water...
...I really can't express up to this day what love is, you know what I mean...
...I went for about nine months...
...It wasn't an undercurrent...
...That's how I met the captain...
...it's embedded in me...
...Everybody watched over me...
...they called you what you are and that's it...
...The next day, the elevator was fixed...
...My mother put a heavy kerchief on me, and we both ran...
...We didn't have a house...
...I was one of the youngest ones...
...One morning, the teacher said whoever will bring a sister, whoever will come first, that one gets in...
...But I was always happy...
...They called us Romeo and Juliet...
...You know, he's got a factory...
...Meat (people) bought maybe a pound for a whole family...
...When I worked, I worked twelve hours a day...
...And about six weeks later, I felt I couldn't walk...
...I'm not going to change...
...So this young man, when he saw my picture, he said to my father he wants to come and see me...
...I got up at six in the morning...
...There was a shoemaker next door to us...
...The independence came from education: that you weren't a-fraid...
...It was the mother always there...
...I was not afraid...
...We had trouble...
...I injured my leg...
...I got married at eighteen in 1918...
...I feel that I want my grandchildren to remember me, say, "My bubhe or Grandma did that," just like my children remember what my mother did...
...I didn't feel it was right for me to work when the two children needed me...
...It came after the High Holidays — October...
...There was respect...
...You see, we all tried, even the parents, to speak English as much as we could...
...I saw operas...
...Someday I'm going to write a story about that street...
...And holidays were observed and they went to synagogue...
...I was invited to speak about Russia (by) my granddaughter Linda's professor...
...As young as I was, as soon as I could put ABC together in Russian, I started reading...
...But we moved a lot because we had one store here, one store there...
...It was large families...
...And on my father's side was the aunt and her family...
...That's how you helped your husband...
...I keep a strictly Orthodox home, the dishes and everything...
...We went straight from work...
...When we came here, my sister, with the help of my aunt, already had an apartment for us in Chicago in the Old West Side with dishes and everything...
...And it would slip and you were handling glass...
...we were up in seventh heaven...
...We were never just business people...
...When I worked there, already I was sixteen...
...T read anything I could get a hold of...
...And the wedding was in back of the store — we already had the store, a little school store and candy store...
...And I started night school...
...She had a piano in the house and a violin for the younger ones...
...If a man, a simple worker, had a sack of onions or potatoes, or a sack of flour and oil, he was rich...
...So I was a tall big girl, and there was a job for me in a glass factory...
...When I walked in the hallway of that building — I call it a "house of learning" — I felt myself ten feet tall that / can walk in such a "house of learning...
...but we had plenty of salt herring and fresh fish — that was cheaper...
...So this is what he said to me, to bring out that they did not force us to marry who they wanted — there was no pressure...
...It was a happy home...
...For my trousseau,) here is what happened...
...What if she dies...
...There were no charities like now — it's the women that got together, collected food...
...It was a very beautiful old town called Rogacov in Moghilev state...
...If a child didn't have any money — if I saw one buy and the next one didn't, he got the candy anyway...
...I always thought there was somebody that was worse off than I am, see...
...Right on the outside (of the building it said that...
...But maybe keeping kosher isn't a good Jew...
...and I would sit down...
...That's how much reading I loved...
...flies too...
...She was a Gentile woman, and she was wonderful, kind...
...and then we used the elevators...
...And I remember, my mother knew a woman — a Polish woman — and I ran to her and I told her...
...She was encouraging them to go to school...
...It's the older ones in every family that had to help out...
...I remember that scare that was in us all the time...
...you were working piecework...
...So this is how we struggled, and this is what I saw...
...That day we stayed out of work...
...There was room for one more...
...And I was always a fighter...
...Well, my parents thought I was the prettiest of the lot...
...I feel like I'm obeying my tradition, from my father's and mother's side...
...As you know, in Russia there was only twenty-five percent of Jewish Sydelle Kramer is at work on a book about professional women who are raising children Jenny Masur is a doctoral candidate m anthropology at the University of Chicago This autobiographical essay is an excerpt from JEWISH GRANDMCTHEPS by Sydelle Kramer and Jenny Masur, editors Copyright © 1976 by Sydelle Kramer and Jenny Masur, to be published later this month by Beacon Press children that were allowed in public school...
...There was a union hall...
...That's all...
...That I remember, too...
...The foreman wasn't around — you'd get fired...
...I wouldn't tell my mother...
...We worked together and we loved being together...
...If you had to help out in the store, you were still home...
...We came here in April 1914...
...I didn't know what it was all about, so naturally, all the boys, they would take me Post Office...
...And you know how many years ago this was — maybe sixty 'cause I'm seventy-four — I'm not ashamed to admit it...
...I don't know...
...Our life was so different...
...I was very fast...
...After working about a year and a half or more, I was bringing home about thirty-five, thirty-six dollars a week...
...And he respected me and I respected him...
...Summer, we'd take the streetcar and the Elevated and go to Jackson Park...
...When they saw a woman in the butcher shop or the grocery not buying enough and they knew how many children she had, my mother would go to a few neighbors, collect money and bring food, and put it under the door and walk away...
...We were cutting out little round (pieces) for frames, not for eyeglasses...
...I would pore over books — biography, Mary Antin, until my sister or my cousin would pull me out to go someplace...
...As long as they respect me when I come...
...We would sing American songs in English...
...The younger sisters, they had it easier already...
...If one came to your house, you helped him if he stretched out...
...You had to wait a long (time) or walk to the fifth floor, or you'd be late to work...
...I knew Henry, my husband, for more than three years...
...We'd go downtown...
...And I came home, it was on a Friday, and I said to my mother, "Ma, the teacher cried," and I broke out sobbing, because I liked school...
...What did they give us to eat...
...My father-in-law said to me — years ago, was a shame to go to work — he says it was all right to stay in back of the store and help in business, that was nicer than going to work...
...So I had just time enough to wash up and change a blouse...
...If you had bread and butter or a piece of herring, whatever you had, you offered it to him...
...I think they must have been flabbergasted that a young girl can do things like that 'cause there was no comment — we just went...
...He did work for a while as a bookkeeper in another town, but children were being born, you know...
...I had a lot of suitors...
...At my age, at that time, what could I do...
...Well, most of them were strictly Orthodox so they couldn't eat meat anyway, so they gave us herring and potatoes...
...In Russia, they would send their children to be like a servant (apprentice), even the Jewish mothers...
...In Albany Park no Jew was allowed...
...And she gave her a little house, one room...
...The conditions of working girls were very bad...
...And I said, "Pa, no...
...Our boat — either it was torpedoed or (something happened to) the stern, — but instead of going through Ellis Island, the natural way, we were sent out a tugboat, pulled us into Halifax, Canada...
...In that town wasn't much, but there was the fear...
...Saturday afternoon, when we had to go to Field's on State Street, we girls would dress up...
...I would get on my knees over the table and read, so I would shade...
...I went to work at seven thirty...
...He says, "Oh, a couple hours...
...The building was an old tall building and there were only two small elevators...
...At fifteen, I took almost three hundred people on strike...
...And you had these big heavy winter coats on your lap, and you worked, and you sweated...
...I didn't have the opportunity...
...Boys were in a different room and girls in a different room...
...We were moving north to mixed neighborhoods...
...So whoever got in, got in, and the rest couldn't get in...
...But you kept so busy and the machines were roaring — the machines were in back of you and the pressers were in back of you — but you talked...
...I stood up a couple of times...
...and I came up and spoke to the captain...
...It started even in Europe...
...We would talk...
...Everybody, through the curtains you know, was looking out because a car at that time was something...
...So it isn't hard for me to have my Passover dishes and make my traditional Seder...
...He used to sit down and talk to us of the Talmud...
...The next day, there was a big basket of fruit and candy for the children...
...She just saw him maybe a week or two before they were married...
...Yes, yes...
...you could go ahead and try and do anything...
...We lived poor but very clean...
...My honeymoon was spent in the back of a candy store...
...Then there were quite a few Jewish merchants on Olson Street...
...The.president of the union worked in our factory...
...1 I read Robinson Crusoe in Russian...
...the mother was the backbone of everything...
...And that was the largest boat that came across...
...But you have) to be good and tz'dakah...
...My mother didn't want...
...It's not hard for me to have dinner at the High Holidays...
...Near the library was a park, and in the summer, they had the army band playing every night...
...they didn't show a preference but...
...It was arranged marriage because he was a scholar from a very fine family...
...so she sent him a ticket...
...Once you got in, you didn't pay — it was a government school...
...When he got married, he wasn't quite twenty-one, and he was in the theological college...
...He had a sister here, and she thought maybe here he can do a little better...
...I says, "Let's go to the union...
...So I went down to have my shoes fixed and my husband came in, and I said to the man, "How long will it take to fix the heels...
...We struggled...
...On Friday nights, when my mother lit candles, my father said a prayer over the twist of challeh...
...We had holidays...
...So when I found out — we had games, we had books, we had magazines, we had things to make — I gave it to them for cost...
...My sister was two and a half years (older) — we were six girls...
...From then on, my sister took me into Hart, Schaffner, and Marx — that's men's clothing...
...We had German, we had Swedish, we had Italian, Norwegian and Jewish...
...and I got it good from my mother...
...My mother was something great in our family...
...I overheard the woman where we lived — the landlady —say to her husband, "The man went to America...
...and it went on for three years...
...We moved) three times...
...My mother did an awful lot...
...I says, "How will I go home...
...On big overcoats, I had to do a certain stitch...
...And one day, it dawned on me — why should these older people, old men and women, walk up to the fifth floor...
...there was no picketing...
...We got along) beautiful...
...Of course, when my husband got sick, everything went...
...I came home at seven...
...But then I got married young and I shackled myself to the store...
...And we came first, and that's how I entered school...
...The house was immaculate — very poor, but immaculate...
...She wanted us to be educated...
...The Old West Side was started on Canal Street, Maxwell Street...
...We did not have anybody here except mother's cousin...
...We lived across the street (from each other...
...She wanted always something better for her children, especially for girls...
...We scrubbed the sidewalks...
...I lived in back of the store on and off...
...I guess love comes, with caring and doing things for each other...
...Piecework...
...My mother wanted to be in the better neighborhoods because of the girls, always going a little higher...
...In that era, the women that didn't go to work had a little business...
...And he didn't get the last degree to be a rabbi...
...Then) one wasn't working and they didn't bother to fix it...
...I lived once with my mother with one child, and then I came back with two because of circumstances...
...My father was a great debater...
...I think I respect it and I love it...
...And we only had one room — it was with partition and with a curtain...
...We had the best teacher, and that was my mother...
...As you worked, you joined...
...You'll have everything your heart desires...
...We went to meetings and dances...
...We struggled very much...
...She was so good to my mother...
...You were supposedly going to learn a trade, like a dressmaker, but you had to take care of a flock of children and do other things before you learned how to thread a needle...
...And you talked...
...The mujiks would bring in their wares, and you went and you bought things...
...In certain areas, we couldn't get an apartment...
...They called Jews something, they beat them up — but it wasn't so important...
...She never sent us away from her...
...It was the respect to bring and give your mother the money...
...his hand...
...In our heritage, the first thing is tz'dakah...
...I'd come home, my hands were cut up...
...Whether you get used to a person, whether it's physically, I really don't know...
...When school was out in June, I knew I couldn't go back anymore, so coming home I cried all the way...
...And I would always pore over books...
...That's how our courting started...
...And we just had our own family...
...And I said to him, "How come there are so many children down here and they don't get fruit or candy...
...He had a hard life and I had a hard life...
...Then my father left for America to better himself...
...I remember sitting by the window if my mother was away, and looking out...
...You had a little half hour for lunch (we worked close to ten hours...
...But if I would have had an education, with my mind, if I had the time, I probably would turn out to be something else...
...Probably I spoke in Russian because we spoke Russian more than Jewish...
...You bought milk, potatoes, onions, and flour...
...You go to the open market on the main street...
...One bathroom to six rooms...
...Those things I remember just like they were now...
...we had thirty-seven nationalities on the boat...
...When I started school, I loved to read...
...And the love for reading was always there...
...We never started eating before my father made a prayer...
...And I said no...
...Their home is theirs...
...And she'd bring in milk from the cow, and we played together, the kids...
...There were pianos in most of the homes...
...I had a private room, everything was taken care of...
...The father went out to make the living...
...I was cutting glass...
...Some people couldn't walk up that high...
...That was a big pay...
...My husband was a laundryman in between times...
...Each one does something else on the overcoat...
...Somebody came in, they wanted to eat, or a beggar, you sat him down at the table, you made coffee...
...Must have been (there) about six months...
...The pay was twelve dollars a week...
...It was a pretty hard life...
...That's when they started to organize the Amalgamated...
...So I had to stop from school...
...My mother's parents were far away...
...And I think I like it, too...
...We sang songs, we played games...
...Most of the men, I believe, at that time left the bringing up of the children to the mothers...
...When it got dark, you close the shutters, you were afraid...
...So Henry pipes up, "You can take my shoes...
...I would take out a book, sit under the lamp, finish it, and then go home...
...It belonged to my husband's side of the family...
...I guess the war was already going on in Europe...
...Our train crossed from Canada into Detroit...
...they each had a little piece...
...I was in the hospital for maybe two months...
...But they give me respect and I give them respect...
Vol. 1 • January 1976 • No. 6
