So many of us are living in the US today because our immigrant grandparents made the struggles necessary to come here. It seemed a good day to post the story of My Two Grandmothers, Immigrants Indeed!
My Two Grandmothers
I’ve always wondered if my Grandmothers ever met, or if they knew each other and maybe even were friends but I never got to ask them about that – or anything else. Nonetheless the things I have learned about these two remarkable women always fascinated me. Hopefully it will fascinate you too and maybe encourage you to find out more about those who came before and impacted you.
Yetta Geist and Fanny Wolf lived in Paterson, New Jersey in 1912. They each had come to Paterson in very diverse ways from the same small village in Minsk, what was then in Polish Russia. They lived in apartments buildings right next door to each other while each woman was carrying a child in her tummy at the very same time. Those two unborn children, it turns out, were to become my parents.
Notwithstanding that they literally lived side by side in urban America in the early 20th century, my grandmothers’ sagas are different in many ways. And yet these two women shared so much as each forged ahead in unique and pioneering ways with very little societal “backing,” and certainly many to criticize them.
Yetta, my Mom’s Mom, was then carrying Lillian, who would be the last of her six children and the gap between her first and last child was so great that my Mother was already an aunt the day she was born. In April 1912, early in her pregnancy with my Mom, Yetta was traveling with several of her other children when my uncle Joe, then 3, got a cold; as a result the whole family had to miss boarding the fateful Titanic to come across from Europe. No sick Joe – no me!
My Dad’s Mom, Fanny, was then carrying the first of her four sons – many years younger than her two daughters – so my Dad, Jack, was the third child in a family of six children when he was born in Paterson.
Fanny’s Herstory is one of a courageous life. As a teenager, Fanny was in a position to help Jews escape from tyrannical conditions in Poland as she got them headed to the US. Using that same route, Fanny brought her husband and two daughters to Paterson in the early part of the 20th century. Later Fanny returned to Europe bringing with her my young aunts in order to run a “hat store” in Berlin; the hat shop was actually a Communist front. The story I’ve been told was that she was being watched and the head of the unit spying on Fanny fell in love with her. He warned her of the impending raid on her shop and Fanny immediately fled back with her daughters to Paterson where my Dad, Jack, was soon conceived.
Yetta’s marriage was proudly described to me by my Mom as a “love marriage,” although arranged marriages were still very common in the old country. Lillian pointed out that Fanny’s was not a “love marriage,” although I don’t know how she knew. Fanny’s marriage to the last in a long line of rabbis was likely “arranged,” and I know they didn’t agree about politics but their marriage seemed calm if distant. William Wolf had his challenges since he didn’t believe in God and the job of rabbi his whole line of predecessors lived didn’t therefore fit at all. He re-organized his life in New Jersey by going into the insurance business.
It was unexpected and unfortunate circumstances that pulled Yetta into employment in 1917 from full time child-rearing when Lillian, my Mom, was only five. My Grandfather, Harry, had become so overwhelmed by his diabetes that he could no longer work. Instead he sat at home with his feet warming in the fireplace, likely depressed – a memory Lillian could never delete – and soon thereafter, he died.
In order to feed her family, Yetta was left with the only thing she felt she could do – run the candy store that Harry had started. But there was at least one major problem: Yetta neither read nor wrote any language, nor did she know any mathematics. How would she possibly run a store with ordering, inventory, making signs or even make change for the customers? Not seeing her illiteracy as an obstacle, apparently Yetta decided: I will create my own language and mathematical system!!! OMG. To make her life and family viable, Yetta had to create from scratch the most astonishing basic tools that I – with all my formal education- can hardly imagine.
Fanny returned from her life in Germany to raise her brood of six and began her “less adventurous” but equally influential life as a journalist. Unlike Mom’s Mom, Fanny was so well read that she had a column in the Jewish Daily Forward during the nineteen teens when just about no one cared about a woman’s political opinion and when American women couldn’t even vote. Fanny was also befriended by Emma Goldman, often known from the Warren Beatty film “Reds,” as a champion of a host of progressive issues like women’s equality, free universal education, free love and Fanny presumably did her part to support those causes. At 16, Fanny was spiriting people out of Russia and, when she was still a young mother in Paterson, she was similarly hiding Communist IWW workers under my Dad and the other kids’ beds: Jack told me she gave them safety and a dry place to sleep before getting these workers out early enough so that her more conservative husband, William, wouldn’t find out. What courage that woman had!!
So here I am, 112 years later. I am at 77 now older than all my grandparents were at their death except for Yetta who lived to be 78 and died when I was only three. My cousin, Harriet, who lived with Yetta when she was young described our grandmother as having a huge empathetic heart. Harriet told of Yetta’s returning from a long day at the store sitting down next to the radio with her hat still on as she empathetically cried with the callers who spoke of their life problems.
Eventually Yetta got Parkinson’s and spent her last years in a nursing home that I recall as being smelly on my rare visit there. I also saw how sad those visits were for my Mom. I never really spent time with Yetta, but I imagine that I share her remarkable ability to “figure out any solution when it was needed.”
I never got to even meet Fanny who died many years before my birth. I always saw her as a strong physical resemblance from the few photos I was shown. I liked to imagine, especially with the publication of my book, that I inherited her “writer’s gene,” along with her son, George, an Ad Man like Mad Men, (George’s son, Dick Wolf, from Law ‘n Order fame) and of course my lyrical, songwriting Dad.
And despite not really knowing them, Yetta and Fanny set me up with the genes they sent my way and by the way they lived their lives. No wonder I was able to do some of the “things,” I did in my career: like take on landlord-tenant cases in my poverty lawyering days in the ’70’s that led me frequently into neighborhoods so dangerous that the Boston Police refused to enter or patrol. Somehow I never had a problem nor a concern there. And no wonder I was able to head up an organization that passed a law in California in 1980 that protected the music industry from imminent unbearable taxation. No wonder I found the courage to lead support groups for people fighting AIDS through the ’90’s and for children living with Alzheimer’s parents in this decade. I am so grateful to have helped hundreds of individuals find a
more contributory life and greater happiness through my life as a therapist, coach, author, lawyer and law professor.
It may be that those two women, my remarkable and inspiring Grandmothers, never met each other – or really me – but they left their unborn children and grandchildren a legacy of love and courageous innovation…I am so proud to be theirs!
Hopefully my story will encourage you to find out more about those who came before you and how they may have impacted you.