For Seniors : The Eternal Value of Old-World Wisdom

I never made much of Mother’s Day. When my son’s first-grade teacher told students to make their mothers jewelry boxes out of old milk cartons, he said innocently, “My mother doesn’t believe in Mother’s Day, so I don’t have to.” The teacher was so horrified that rumors began to circulate that I was a communist.

But on this Mother’s Day, I would like to honor my grandmother, Sarah Mellender.

Just after the turn of the century, she fled poverty and the Bolsheviks and came to America, steerage class. She never learned to read, speak or write in English or her native Russian, for that matter. She spoke Yiddish. But she did put her X down on a government paper giving her youngest son, my Uncle Al, permission to fight in World War II at 16.

She knew a lot of things. She crocheted tablecloths with intricate patterns. She knew how to cure earaches by filling a woolen sock with coarse salt, heating it in the oven and placing it behind the hurt ear. She knew all about exercising newborns before “gymboree” was a misspelled word. She knew the secret to a successful relationship:

“Find a friend,” she used to tell me.

Her wisdom holds up to this day, but I didn’t recognize it years ago. She moved into my house in 1941, when I was a year old, and was still there when I left to be married 23 years later. Her indomitable spirit runs through four generations of women--the latest being my granddaughter’s. She will know my grandmother through our memories and the mysterious DNA that was Sarah’s. It’s more than mere survival, though she lived well into her nineties. It’s about willpower.

How else could she have made it through 10 pregnancies in 20 years; cleaning toilets in an office building when my grandfather became ill, so she could feed her seven remaining children; moving every year; losing her house to foreclosure.

My grandmother was also the best defense attorney a girl could have. She stood with me against my mother. I was always innocent in her eyes and completely guilty in my mother’s. She was the one person on my side in the creative chaos that was my childhood. And I loved her for it.

Her own children were afraid of her. When my Aunt Sylvia finally decided to adopt a baby after miscarrying half a dozen times, the family was petrified of having to tell Sarah. No one ever adopted a baby before. It was left to my mother, the oldest, to tell her on the day the baby was to be picked up from the hospital.

My grandmother demanded to see my aunt. Since she never left the house anymore, except to walk the four miles to synagogue on Yom Kippur, everyone was nervous. But she surprised us, as usual. Sarah instructed my aunt to go to bed, not the hospital. “The baby should be brought to you, just like you gave birth to it yourself,” she said. From that moment, no one doubted that Sarah would accept the baby.

She never trusted modern technology like phones or central heating. She said the walls have ears, that anti-Semites were everywhere, and that girlfriends will betray you. She loved to watch Italian movies on television. How she understood what was going on baffled me since she couldn’t understand Italian or read the English subtitles.

I once took her to see the Mary Martin play “Peter Pan” on Broadway, and she believed Martin could really fly. She also believed Ed Sullivan (pronounced Solomon) and Abraham (pronounced Avram) Lincoln were Jewish.

When I married, she insisted on wearing pink, which really steamed my mother since it wasn’t the chosen color for the wedding party. She also insisted on walking down the aisle by herself. And when we all sat down for dinner, she turned to my mother and told her that the wedding must have cost a fortune because there were two gupples (forks). The gupple rating system is still enforced to this day by my family. The more gupples , the more expensive the meal.

She lived long enough to see my children. She spent her last days in a Florida nursing home filled with thorazine. I went to see her a week before she died. I’m not sure she recognized me, but her eyes stayed fixed on me. I think she still saw that disobedient, chubby little girl, the same one she refused to teach how to cook or clean because she was sure that child would someday be a great lady.

All her children were there in the lobby the day I came to visit, and we spent a hilarious couple of hours trading memories. We all agreed the best wedding we ever shared was the one where she told my cousin Michael’s new mother-in-law that she was related to the Queen of England--and the poor woman believed her.

So here’s to you grandma. You gave me a lot to laugh about, a love for my culture, a love of family, and the spirit that runs through me. I can still hear you say, in the Yiddish I so miss: “Never lie down, strengthen yourself.”