Having just read Timothy Egan’s
tribute to his father in The New York Times (http://nyti.ms/SRE4HZ), I considered
writing one for my dad. But it occurred to me that when I write about my
parents it is mostly about my patrimony. So, with the comment my mother used to
make, that without her Kopel Forseter would not have been a father, here's a
posting about my maternal heritage.
The second of four sisters and an
older brother, Sylvia Gerson came to New York from Lodg, Poland, in 1921 when
she was four. Her father, Louis, was a jeweler, successful enough to move his
family to an apartment on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx that cost her a
boyfriend. With an air of upward social mobility she enjoyed conveying, my
mother would relate that the boyfriend stopped calling on her because, he
explained to her years later, she had attained an address status beyond his
station.
A mutual friend set up my parents.
Perhaps the story's apocryphal, but the way she told it, my father fell off a
ladder in his store when he first saw her. It wasn't from her good looks.
Rather, it was her wild and frizzy hair. They agreed, nevertheless, to go out
that Friday night to a performance of Die Fledermaus, a comic opera. When Kopel
came to her family apartment he didn't recognize her. She was all dolled up and
beautiful. They were married six weeks later, Labor Day weekend 1942.
If six weeks seems like a whirlwind
courtship, consider this. For several weeks they were apart because Sylvia went
on vacation. During one of their times together my mother garnered one of her
favorite stories.
Kopel took her back to an apartment
he shared. Speaking Yiddish, his roommate asked if they would like to be alone,
to which my father replied, also in Yiddish, “No, this one I am going to marry.”
Unbeknownst to my father, Sylvia was fluent in Yiddish.
Their union was also a work
partnership. As a full charge bookkeeper Sylvia ran the one-person office while
Kopel ran the factory where they produced half-slips and panties sold mostly to
chain stores across the country. For a little more than four years Sylvia
stayed home to raise their three children. I propelled her back to work with my
poor eating and an exasperating habit of flinging peas off of my high chair
tray. Funny. Today peas are among my favorite vegetable.
Sylvia taught my brother and me to
play ball. She made sure we went to Broadway shows and the opera. She took us
to the Catskills. She enrolled us in private Hebrew schools and eight week
sleepaway Jewish summer camps. She made our house the center of activity.
Friday night poker games with my brother’s friends. Passover seders with as
many as 40 participants. Overnight guests that prompted her to call our home
Malon Forseter, malon being the Hebrew word for hotel. Her dinette table was
never too full. Unexpected guests were met with the standard retort, “I'll just
add another cup of water to the soup.”
Though I wrote earlier that my poor
eating sent her back to work, truth is Sylvia was a woman ahead of her time. Not
just a homemaker and club woman—head of the PTA and active in temple and social
groups—she also was an accomplished businesswoman not content or fulfilled in a
stay-at-home mother role. Because of their business my parents could not always
vacation together. My mother was confident and independent enough to travel to
Israel and Europe by herself in the mid 1950s when she was just 40.
These are memories from my youth. As
she aged my mother's joie de vivre deteriorated. She chain smoked. She was
diabetic. She suffered bouts of congestive heart failure. A little dementia.
She had one leg amputated below the knee because of her diabetes. A few years
later on the eve of an amputation of her second leg she died of cardiac arrest.
My brother sister and I don't dwell
on the last decade or so of her life when she no longer was the vibrant source
of our family life. It is enough to know that together with our father she
molded us into the people we are today. And we are happy with the results.
