Deducting the year I spent in Syracuse earning a master’s degree in newspaper journalism, I lived 22 years in my parents’ home in Brooklyn before starting my professional career in Connecticut at The New Haven Register.
Twenty-two years. My mother passed away on this date 22 years ago. As it is this year, February 16, 1996, was a Friday.
Two years ago I chronicled some memories of Sylvia Forseter on the twentieth anniversary of her death (http://nosocksneededanymore.blogspot.com/2016/02/twenty-years-ago-today.html). Naturally, there were more that never made it into that blog post. Here are some from my first 22 years with her, mostly from the years before my bar-mitzvah.
Mom was the antithesis of the “early to bed, early to rise” practitioner. She stayed up late and did not enjoy waking up early. Mom and Dad worked together in their lingerie factory. Dad would leave the house between 6:30 and 7 am for the near one hour drive up Ocean Avenue, then Flatbush Avenue, across the Manhattan Bridge and through the streets to the parking garage near their factory of the moment on Broadway, anywhere between Houston and East 8th Street.
Mom would not walk to the subway, the elevated BMT line at Neck Road and East 16th Street a few blocks from our house, until after 9 am. It’s not that she stayed home to shuffle her three children off to school. I have no memory of her making breakfast for us. Nor did she make lunch for us as our school served a hot lunch every day. She just wasn’t ready for the morning. She enjoyed a leisurely cup of coffee and a cigarette before the hourlong ride on the train, less crowded at her preferred time than during rush hour.
When you run your own business there’s no clock to punch in, or punch out. My parents rarely left the factory before 6 pm. My father navigated the stop and go traffic down Broadway, onto Canal Street, then back over the Manhattan Bridge and the return trek down Flatbush Avenue (idling only to secure a New York Post—back then a liberal tabloid—at the end of the Flatbush Avenue Extension near Prospect Park) before chugging down Ocean Avenue to our home on Avenue W.
She was different than most of our friends’ mothers. She went to work every day in “the city,” an uncommon practice in the 1950s. She liked to say my poor eating habits—she claimed I used to throw green peas at her from my high chair—prompted her escape from housework. In truth, her father had trained his four daughters to be vital participants in commerce, either on their own or with their respective spouses. She’d proudly tell people she was a full-charge bookkeeper, the equal of any CPA, without the high-falutin degree.
Every Wednesday night she’d do payroll at our dinette table, tallying up the piece-work tickets each sewing machine operator completed the prior week and the time cards filled out by the hourly workers. The next day she’d walk from the factory to the nearby Chemical Bank branch to secure the necessary bills to stuff their pay envelopes. I wasn’t trusted to get the money until after I had graduated college.
The dinette table in our row house attained unparalleled status in our home. It was on that table that Sylvia emerged as an impresario of Jewish culinary arts and social entertaining. Before Rosh Hashanah she would roll dough into small triangles filled with shredded brisket for kreplach (Jewish wontons, or ravioli, your choice of international comparisons). Or she’d sit at a chair while stuffing and then sewing up helzeleh, chicken neck skin filled with matzo meal, schmaltz (chicken fat), and spices. Sounds gross, but it was yummy. (Heck, if the Scots can eat haggis, Jews can swallow helzeleh. On the subject of eating the unimaginable, she also boiled chicken feet in her soup, a, ahem, “delicacy” I never sampled, but was relished by my father and his brother, Uncle Willy—must have truly reminded them of meals back in the Ottynia shtetl of their youth.)
For special occasions, particularly if they pertained to my brother Bernie, she’d make a crown roast, lamb chops stacked vertically in the shape of a crown.
Among her other savory treats: sweet and sour lamb tongues, sauteed sweetbreads, gefilte fish, kneidlach (matzo balls), breaded veal cutlets, and the best chicken soup you’d ever slurp off a spoon. She never met a vegetable anybody would like eating. She was not a baker. That last task was assigned to our housekeeper/cook who made dinners for us after our mother returned to work. I’ve never, for example, tasted a more delicious pound cake than the one Bertha baked. My sister Lee agrees. Bernie was partial to her apple cake.
Even on weekends she abstained from rising early enough to prepare breakfast for her family. If we did eat a cooked meal it was our father who played the short order chef. His specialities were French toast made with leftover challah and what he called “army eggs,” scrambled eggs with fried salami circles.
During my pre-adolescent years my parents socialized quite often. Mom enjoyed dressing up but rarely disposed of any ensemble, explaining that sooner or later the outfit or dress would come back into style and she’d be Johnny-on-the-spot-fashion-ready if she simply stored it in a closet long enough.
To my mind she had two things that distinguished her when she dressed up. Depending on the weather, she would wear a mink stole (several tails could be attached as optional accessories), a black Persian lamb coat or a silver fox three-quarter length fur coat (she wore that coat to my bar mitzvah reception).
And, as the daughter and sister of jewelers, she had some impressive pieces of jewelry. I would always wonder from where her jewelry would emerge as it never could be found in her bedroom. It wasn’t until my late teenage years that I was let in on the family secret. My parents has secreted a safe in a closet under the staircase leading to the basement. Dad had built a wooden frame around the safe. He placed a piece of wood in a slot in the front of the frame and draped a blanket before it to conceal its presence. Only after it became difficult for him to crouch inside the cramped closet did they share the safe’s combination with me so I could retrieve the family jewels my mother required that evening.
The dinette table also served as the location of the Friday night poker, hearts or Fan Tan card games my mother organized. The five of us played deuces-wild poker for penny-two-three stakes with two or three of my brother’s friends who would arrive shortly after we finished dinner. We kept a kosher house, but too often in my recollection I was forced to bring a pig to the table as I shook out coins from my glass piggy bank to fund my losses.
I don’t have that piggy bank anymore, though sometimes I still have to dip into cash reserves during poker games with my friends. Not too often, but enough to remind me of fun times back in Brooklyn those first 22 years of my life.