Happy and Healthy 101, Mom!

The Greatest Generation, Indeed

Marcia Siegel was born just a few years after her family arrived in America. It is a very long, complicated and horrible story that isn’t going to be told today. They came from eastern Russia, what is now Ukraine from a small peasant village in the Kiev District. The town was called Tetieve. Her family experienced unspeakable brutality. So many were killed. About 80% of the village was Jewish. By the end of the pogroms more than 4,000 Jews were killed. They were raped, plundered and slaughtered by all of the armies involved in the Russian revolution, by Cossacks and bandits, and by Vladmir Peasant, their next-door neighbor.

I knew my Bubby and Zadie very well. I was ten years old when my Bubby died. I was in my mid-twenties when we lost my Zadie. They wore these most horrible life experiences with great dignity and courage. They were pious Jews. They were observant in every sense of the word, and my Bubby kept a strictly kosher home. They were extremely proud to be Jews … despite all of what they endured. Neither of them assimilated. My Bubby never learned English very well. My mom didn’t know any English until she went away to elementary school. My Zadie never learned to drive a car. My Zadie referred to everything with a motor as a machine … the lawn mower that I used to cut his grass was a machine. The rocket he watched carry our astronauts to the moon in 1969 was a machine.

Mom had an older sister, Sally. They were about two years apart. My great grandmother, Bubba Libba, escaped the pogroms with my Bubby and my Uncle Heil. My Uncle died at the age of 13 before my mother was born and a year after arriving in Cleveland. My Aunt Sally and my mother shared a bedroom with Bubba Libba. They came to America with no education (they were not permitted an education in Russia, nor to own land) and with no skills. My Zadie learned to be a tailor. He opened a business with another man, and they had a store in downtown Cleveland. My Zadie made the pants. His partner made the jackets. They sold beautiful suits.

The Jewish villagers from Tetieve were escaping to Cleveland. Thus, my family followed the herd. My Zadie was a founding member of the shul and an officer. Their temple was the center of their spiritual and social lives. My brother and I were bar mitzvah in this shul. My sister was confirmed there. We grew up in this shul. I can remember sitting in services with my Zadie and my father thinking about all of these old men around us … these were the little boys who grew up with my Zadie in Tetieve. It was a profound thought for me even as a child. My Mom, Aunt Sally and my Bubby sat together in the women’s section. And so it is to be an observant Jew. They followed all the rules.

Judaism and family. That was their lives. Often on Sundays, the extended Soroky, Spevak, Brodsky Clan would come to my Bubby and Zadie’s home to visit with the matriarch, Bubba Libba. They all spoke Yiddish. That was their first language, even in America. I can vividly remember watching my Zadie read his Yiddish newspaper. My Zadie also knew Russian, because he served in the calvary in the Tsar’s army.

This is the world in which my mother was raised.

When she looks back at those days, she usually remarks that her sister was the good one. She says that Aunt Sally was perfect and that she was the spoiled brat. While that is hard for me to imagine, I also have to accept that my mother never lies. Ever. You might not get the whole story … but there was never any lying from either my mother or my father.

I can’t really imagine what it would have been like to be raised by parents who had been through such unmitigated hell … literally. My mother never has anything to share but the most warm and wonderful memories from her childhood. I saw and experienced all of that myself from my Bubby and Zadie … and still …. I wasn’t raised by them. My mother was, and I can’t say what that might have been like. They never quite shook the peasant out of their lives, which included a very heavy dose of superstition and the impending notion that all hell might break loose at any minute. Those were the difficult life lessons taught to them through their very intimate life experiences.

My mother was an excellent student. She excelled in Hebrew school. Her teachers begged my grandparents to keep my mother in her Jewish school classes, but that wasn’t the focus for a girl. My mother also excelled in the public school system. She graduated from Glenville High School near the top of her class. And this was saying something because Glenville was producing some really smart and talented students (i.e., Jerry Siegel, the creator of Superman).

While my mother was in high school, she met my father. She asked him out to a Sadie Hawkins dance. And as they both describe it… that was it. My father had been a student at East Tech and was learning to be a draftsman. He was three years older than my mom.

All of life for both of them … and everyone else, came to an abrupt halt after World War II came to their doorsteps. My father went into the army. My mother had just graduated from high school. My father was in a unit of the Army Air Corp and they went out to a base in California to prepare to go overseas. My mother got on a train in Cleveland and went out to Fresno, California to be with my father. They found a rabbi and they got married. The only ones at their wedding were a couple they had befriended in California and the rabbi. My Bubby and Zadie didn’t know that she was going to get married. To say that this was a rather bold move by my basically high school age mother is to put it mildly. Periodically, through our lives, I would make note to my mother that if her children ever tried to pull something like this, we would be toast.   

My father went about his training, and my mother took a job at the military base working for the Judge Advocate General’s Corp. After a few months, my father was shipped overseas and my mother returned to Cleveland. During the war, she worked for a company that distributed films. It might have been Paramount.

My father was stationed in Naples, Italy. He was a cryptographer. He was there until the war ended in Europe. He was going to be sent home and then they were preparing our troops for an invasion of Japan. My father was spared that experience when President Truman decided to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My generation has expended a lot of ethical energy debating our use of atomic weapons. For those of our troops who fought around the world for the United States, there was only gratitude. The war was over and they were coming home to their families. Perspective.

My father came back to Cleveland and was very sick. It was soon discovered that my father had tuberculosis. There was no cure for TB in those days. My father was hospitalized in a sanitarium with other TB patients for about a year. This illness ruined his life, and it definitely gave my mother many years of stress and worry. It wasn’t until years later that we learned that many of our soldiers in that area of Italy came home with TB.

My father fought with the Veteran’s Administration for decades to receive his disability designation and the benefits. It wasn’t until toward the end of his life that he won his case. My father would be so gratified to know that my mother receives his death benefit today. The lip service we pay to the support of our veterans is beyond shameful. When we’re not being the greatest country in all of history on the face of the earth, we suck.

My father was the only one of his siblings that got a college degree. My father got a business degree from Western Reserve University (which would become Case Western Reserve) on the GI bill. He had three small children, and it was torment for him to do it … but with my mother’s urging, he got it done.

My mother never went beyond high school. She would have excelled in college, and she could have gone into any profession of her choosing. She was one of and remains one of the smartest people I’ve ever known. She is an avid reader, and she’s taken many courses throughout her life. She has taken classes in creative writing and poetry. She and my father both wrote their autobiographies. My mother wrote poetry throughout her life. My brother, sister and I had an exceptional editor at home to review all of our papers.

My mother spent her life working for small companies as an administrator and bookkeeper. None of these companies was large enough to pay her what she deserved or to offer her any great benefits. The most substantial benefit entailed their accepting that she was going to gone during the numerous Jewish holidays during the year. On Easter one year, one of her co-workers asked her if she felt any guilt at all for killing Jesus. My mother told him he was out of his mind.

My brother, sister and I grew up in what I consider the golden age for Jews in America. I don’t believe that antisemitism ever disappeared, but during our formative years and through most of our lives, Jew hate was not in our faces (as it is today). It lived under the rocks that have been turned over today. The evil morons of the world again feel license to spew their venom. So, we are back to having to warn our children and grandchildren about Vladmir Peasant, our next-door neighbor with the menacing pitch fork.

There was no golden age for my parents. When my mother was on the train both to and from California during the war, she talks about hearing soldiers blaming the Jews for the war. Ignorance and hate at its finest. But that was the world they grew up in and lived in. I can remember my father driving through Forest Hills and telling me that a Jew or black person was not allowed to buy a home in this neighborhood – that it was in the deed restrictions.

My father could never find a decent job in the business world. If you ever wonder why there are so many Jews in the professions and why there are so many Jewish owned businesses, ask yourself why there would be such a thing as a Jewish country club. Would they start a Jewish country club if they were allowed to belong to the regular old not Jewish country club. Jew hate lived in the business world, in colleges and everywhere else right out in the open. Today, when you interview a person for a job, you can’t ask them anything about their religion. That was not the case in the past.

My father spent a lifetime of challenging health issues, which means that my mother spent a difficult life with my father’s health issues. Likely related to having TB, he had cardio vascular and lung problems. He had a heart attack when he was 42 years old. In 1969 he was one of the first heart by-pass patients at the Cleveland Clinic. They weren’t using vein grafts … they did a six-hour microsurgery implanting his mammary vessels into his heart. It kept him alive until he was 90 years old. There were other health issues along the way, and we lost count of the number of stents he had placed … they were going through stents to place stents. My mother spent a lifetime of hours sitting in surgery waiting rooms.

My parents lived a life of incredible financial stress. And my brother, sister and I didn’t feel much of it. We had a pretty good sense about what was going on, but we were sheltered from so much of it. We had great lives and wanted for nothing. They were the greatest generation. We were a pretty spoiled generation.

My parents moved up to the Heights (Cleveland Heights) a few years after my father returned from the war. It was a truly remarkable neighborhood. I keep thinking about writing a book about it. I might. My neighborhood consisted of Severn, Shannon, Bendemeer, Berkley, and Bainbridge from South Taylor to the golf course. It was a Jewish Country Club and no one from my neighborhood knew a single person who belonged to this club. We lived in a mostly lower middle class neighborhood. Most of the fathers worked in the trades or owned small businesses. Many of the mothers were stay at home moms or worked in small businesses like my mother. There was a smattering of parents who did better … like David Adelstein’s father who played trumpet in the world renown Cleveland Orchestra (conducted by George Szell). He was most definitely an outlier, which is why I remember it so many decades later. It left an impression. There were a lot of Jewish families who had lived in my mother’s neighborhood in east Cleveland who moved up to the first suburb up Cedar Hill … the Heights. When my mother went to PTA meetings, she knew all the parents from going to school with them at Glenville.

When the men came home from the war, they started having families. These first children were my brother’s age. A year or two later, these families had their second child. These children became my thirty best friends in my neighborhood. All boys. All Jewish. All from the same origins … Eastern European Ashkenazic Jews. They came over during the pogroms or they were Holocaust survivors. We spent most of our time at the elementary school playground playing baseball, football or wild man in the woods. We rarely spent time in each other’s homes … but we pretty much knew what everyone’s lives were about … because the same thing was going on in our own home. Maria Trentaneli was the only one who went to school during the Jewish holidays. And, by the way, we all loved Maria, and still do.

All of us graduated from Heights and most of us went to college. Education was of paramount importance for my mother and father. Two of their children received doctorates (clinical psychology and cultural anthropology) and one of them has a master’s degree (occupational therapy).

My mother had a tough life but an amazingly fulfilling life. She and my dad did lots of traveling, including a once in a lifetime trip to Israel. They came out to Montana when Susie and I were living on the reservation. They borrowed my truck and made a trip to visit Yellowstone. Then my mother flew back to Ohio with Susie who was about eight months pregnant, and my father made the drive home with me in our truck. Just before they left, they attended a pow wow and received a blanket from the dance committee during a giveaway.

For a lower middle-class family, they saw a lot and they did a lot. They spent their lives traveling around the country. They made good friends wherever they went and they accumulated a lifetime’s worth of wonderful adventures. They took lots of classes at their temple and were always involved in the Jewish community.

My mother came from a very small world but grew up in an incredibly complicated one. The amount of social, political, and technological change she experienced during her lifetime is staggering. From the social, religious and psychological world of the shtetl life she grew up in, she had one child in a gay marriage and another who married a Catholic Arab. Over the past seven decades, her children threw a ton of very complicated crap in her path. We were college age kids during all of the social unrest in the 60s and 70s, and were a part of all of this turmoil, including the antiwar demonstrations.

She managed all of what we regularly brought home with great intellect, incredible grace and loving acceptance. From the family on the front porch with Bubba Libba, to the three children who grew up during the generation of sex, drugs and rock and roll. She went with the flow.  If we were involved with good people, she was okay.

She saw so much, and she managed all of it with grace and dignity. I just don’t know anyone who is more intelligent, dignified, rational, thoughtful and kinder than my mother. She has wonderful values and she and my father instilled those in the three of us. We owe them everything. She is loved by her family and by all of the friends she’s had in her life.

When you live to 101, you experience so much loss. Fortunately, she has all of her three children, her four grandchildren, and her nine great grandchildren.

She and my dad were married for almost 70 years. My father had Alzheimer's disease and my mother cared for him at home. Those were some impossibly difficult years. It went on for a long time, but because my mother is who she is, she remembers it being a lot shorter and a lot less difficult than it was.

She is a truly remarkable human being. We know how blessed we are to have her in our lives for all of these years. We are grateful that our children, our grandchildren and our great grandchildren have gotten to know their grandmother in the way that they have.

My brother and sister insisted that we each give my mother a toast at her 100^th birthday party. This was mine.

I was in the produce section of the grocery store the other day. I noticed an elderly woman, probably in her 80s, standing over the bing cherries. She opened a container and picked up a cherry to try it out. She paused to evaluate the taste. She repeated this trial on five different cherries, depositing the pits back into the plastic container. At the end of her trial, she made a face, indicating that she didn’t find this batch to her liking.

If I had been raised only by my father, I might have punched her in the face.

Because I was also raised by my mother, I took a deep breath and finished putting my gala apples into the cart.

Nancy was concerned that my comments might be interpreted as being disrespectful to my father. So, I would like to clarify. We were so lucky to be raised by two really smart people with just loads of life experience and common sense.

My father was very emotional. If you were in the same room with him, or even sometimes in the same house, you knew precisely the emotions he was experiencing. The challenge for us was that there was a lot of emotion going on. The great benefit, and especially for Larry and I was that we learned from a very early age and throughout our lives, that it was normal for a man to feel and express their emotions and that it was healthy to do so. I have little doubt that I developed my passion for causes from my father.

Mom was the anchor for all of us. Regardless of the situation, you got rational, thoughtful, sensitive and measured from mom.

Immediately after Pauline died, I somehow made it back to Mike and Ligia’s house in the middle of the Bear Paw Mountains. I managed to make two phone calls. My first call was to Pauline’s parents. I was in an altered state of consciousness and for all I know, I could have been speaking to them in tongues. I must have described to them what had happened.

My next call was to my mother. I probably went through the same script. What I do vividly remember was that the first thing my mother said to me was, “I am going to move in with you.” A wave of rationality washed over me, and I responded to my mother, “oh, no you are not.”

Mom, thank you for taking such good care of me for all of my 74 years. I’m trying my very best not to die before you … but you aren’t making it easy.

Having you in my life has been a blessing. I love you.

Happy and healthy 101 truly remarkable years, Mom.