My mother frequently expressed the feeling that she had been born too soon. I heard the regret and sadness many times when I was growing up. She said it when she felt her life had been too limited, that her dreams would never be fulfilled and that she had missed out on many things she yearned to do and that she later saw were possible, but not for her. In my eulogy, I described her as a woman who “dreamt grander dreams at night than she lived by day and who stretched for greater heights than were within her grasp.” Her life, indeed had been circumscribed by when and where she was born and the family and circumstances she was born into.
She was born in a shtetl in Europe, a small village comprised mostly of Jews, early in the 20th century. The family was of modest means and like most in her shtetl they were observant Jews, living strictly according to Jewish law. Her father was literate and could read Hebrew having gone to a Heder, a small school run by the local rabbi where boys learned to read Hebrew, study Hebrew prayers and the torah.
My mother never went to school. There were no government schools in her small town, and the Heder the religious school set up by the Jewish community only educated boys.
Her father left for America when she was four or five years old, to see whether he could better his lot and ultimately that of his family. The family who had been left behind comprising my mother, her sister and her mother subsisted on earnings from a small family store and the money they periodically received from her father in America.
She was about nine years old when World War I broke out and her family became refugees, moved from town to town by the Russian army who threatened to take them to the front. When they got to Sniatyn, a small city with a well-established Jewish community, ransom money was raised to free the Jews. The refugee families were taken in by the Jewish residents, who also helped them find housing and work. My grandmother became a baker’s assistant and my mother and aunt helped as they could. Their major job was to sell hot rolls to soldiers passing through the town on troop trains
My mother was still a teen-ager when she came to America after World War I. The family settled in New York City where her father had been living. Within a short period of time, she learned a new language; the ways of her adopted country, and went to work to help support herself and her family. She had at most a year of schooling through a program teaching English to immigrants before she started work in a millinery shop trimming women’s hats. Most of her co-workers were like her, newly arrived Jewish immigrants learning a new trade. They worked long hours under sweat shop conditions, but they also became friends because they shared a personal outlook and similar life experiences.
Fortuitously, my mother took to her work in the millinery trade. It appealed to her creativity and her skill with the needle and she became quite good at her work. Later she applied her sewing skills to mending clothes, designing and sewing outfits for me and later a pair of drapes for the living room windows. When they moved from their house in Brooklyn to Florida, my mother turned the white cotton percale drapes she could no longer use into a dressing gown, which hangs in my closet to this day.
Like many women of her generation, she also knitted and crocheted. I was about seven or eight when she crocheted a maroon necklace in wool for me to wear as a chocker. Though it was quite unique it was also itchy on my neck so sadly I don’t think I wore it even twice. She also saved left-over wool to make afghan blankets, two of which currently sit on the sofa in my den.
She also loved being out in the world and the opportunity to enjoy the rich cultural life of the city, which she was discovering. Those were the years of a vibrant
Yiddish theatre where Shakespeare and the classics were performed by outstanding Yiddish actors , who later became successful in the legitimate theatre and Broadway. My mother also discovered the Metropolitan Opera and how she could afford to attend by buying standing room tickets. That was also when she developed a life-long love of opera and regularly tuned in to hear the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts on Saturday afternoons.
Her view of the world and its possibilities grew large when she came to America, yet she felt her options were limited and she was forever frustrated by the comparison between her day-to-day reality and possibilities that existed in the larger world.
I understood her frustration, yet I never felt it myself. I was fortunate to be able to take advantage of the opportunities my mother saw but couldn’t avail herself of; an education, an opportunity to pursue a career, travel the world and become independent. Although sometimes I reflect on the world of work and opportunity that has opened up to my granddaughters and its contrast to the limited options that women of my day had ( school-teacher, secretary or nurse), I revel in the progress we have achieved rather than rue the time of my birth.
Recently I was at a party with friends and was introduced to a friend’s grandchildren: Stella, a young woman of 23, a recent college graduate and Joshua, her brother, a college student. I listened to Stella talk about her upcoming trip to Indonesia to study turtles in their natural habitat and to Josh’s tales of going to college in Leiden, The Netherlands. They were young, articulate, focused and self-confident and for them the world seemed to be theirs to inhabit. As I listened, the feelings of being born too soon came to me and for the first time I felt some sadness about how much more accessible the world has become for the next generation than it had been for me.