Jewish Short Stories by Leora Freedman

Joseph Baum was a Zionist who supported every attempt to revive the Hebrew language.  He insisted his children speak Hebrew even in Brooklyn.  Every summer he hired a young Palestinian Jewish “governess” to accompany the family on their vacation in the country.  The children, Flora and Edwin, were expected to speak Hebrew with this governess, so they avoided her as much as possible.  In the Hebrew vs. Yiddish linguistic wars of that time, Joseph might have been expected to take a stand against Yiddish.  But he didn’t.  He took the family to Yiddish theatre in an era when Zionists in Tel Aviv put a Yiddish play on trial for promoting primitive folk beliefs (Ansky’s The Dybbuk).  He also had many friends in the Yiddish cultural world of New York.

In the summer of 1920, Joseph and Charlotte sent the children to camp and went to Europe on a pleasure trip.  But Joseph was president of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), so they were caught up in events there.  Tens of thousands of Jewish refugees were fleeing pogroms perpetrated by Russians and Ukrainians.  In Danzig, the community had set up a refugee camp where the Baums came to volunteer.  Charlotte assisted the US consul who processed requests for visas.  Whenever there was an especially difficult case she was sent to plead with the consul because he was known to listen to her. The camp was overcrowded and filthy.  The refugees had to line up to get a ticket for each meal until Joseph convinced the administrators to distribute food stamps for several weeks at a time.  The difficulty of caring for this influx of homeless and traumatized Jews caused the rabbi of Danzig to live under tremendous stress, and he died young.

Many Yiddish actors and playwrights immigrated to the US at that time, when the doors which would later be closed were still open.  It was easier for someone talented or famous to get a visa.  Joseph and Charlotte met wonderful Yiddish artists in this refugee camp and knew the joy of helping them get to America, where the Jews were not persecuted and Yiddish culture could thrive.  It seemed possible and natural at that time to graft an English branch onto the Yiddish tree.  Jewish audiences loved seeing Shakespeare in Yiddish; King Lear was “improved” in translation to become a Jewish family drama.  Scripts like this were more heartwarming than other Yiddish plays produced in Russia, in which Jewish life was ridiculed and condemned in a manner later typical of Stalin’s show trials.

The Yiddish actors of New York also wrote their own lives into the scripts.  In one play, a man is escaping to America and tells his fiancée he will send for her.  She is weeping, “When will he send for me? How will I get there?”  One evening when the Baums attended this play, a spotlight swung around to illuminate Joseph in the audience.  Another character answered, “Don’t worry, Joseph Baum will help you!” This was thrilling for Flora and Edwin.  After theater, their father and mother took the children to the Cafe Royal on Second Avenue and introduced them to all the actors, writers, and artists who gathered there.  Everyone knew Joseph and Charlotte, and it felt like being at the center of the little Yiddish art world.  Later, this world diminished in America where Jews spoke English to their children.  The Nazis murdered millions of Yiddish-speakers.  Stalin murdered Yiddish writers, and eventually this little world was so ravaged that no aid could save it.

Copyright © Leora Freedman 2014

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 Flora used to say that no one should sentimentalize extended family life.  The whole time she was growing up, her grandmother (her father, Joseph’s mother) lived with them in their house in Brooklyn and made an otherwise good life unpleasant.

This grandmother would have Flora’s mother, Charlotte, make many pounds of gefilte fish every Friday and then donate it to charity.  Charlotte made it by hand, with a big wooden chopping bowl and wood-handled chopper.  However, the fish was given in the name of the grandmother, as if she’d chopped and baked it, and she got all the credit!  Charlotte was philosophical about it and would say that her husband, Joseph, couldn’t help having a difficult mother.

Each summer, Flora, her mother Charlotte, and her brother Edwin would escape the grandmother by vacationing on a non-kosher farm in upstate New York.  The grandmother was unable to accompany them because she couldn’t eat the food.  (At home they kept a kosher kitchen because Joseph and Charlotte wanted any Jew to be able to eat in their home).  They had wonderful times on these farms, riding horses and helping with the chores, and were often invited to come back and visit for Christmas or Easter.

One spring, they were all looking forward to Easter on a farm, but they didn’t get to go because of an innocent mistake of Edwin’s.  One evening, the grandmother said to him:  “Bring me my bread.”  She had some special bread that only she ate.  However, due to her thick Yiddish accent, the word sounded to Edwin like “braid.”  She also had a special braid of false hair that she wore on Shabbat and other occasions.  Edwin thought she was saying “Bring me my braid,” so he brought the braid of false hair to her in the dining room.  She was so angry that she forbade him to go to the farm for Easter.  No one, not even Joseph, could contradict her; Charlotte said if Edwin couldn’t go they would all stay home, and they did.

Many years later, when Flora and Morris were first married, they lived in this same house with Flora’s parents, Joseph and Charlotte.  Morris enjoyed it, as he’d lost his mother when young and had never had any real family life.  Someone once remarked to him that Flora might get fat as her mother had, and Morris replied that if Flora turned out like her mother in every way, including getting fat, that would be fine with him.  Charlotte always had “second sight;” one day, as the result of a premonition, she organized everything at home and then went to visit an old friend she hadn’t seen in a long while.  Walking home afterwards, she had a sudden stroke and died.  Someone ran to get them, and Morris did not wait for the ambulance to come; he just picked up the very heavy body of his (quite fat) mother-in-law and carried her in his arms for an amazing number of blocks, Flora said, not putting her down until she was inside the house where they’d all lived together.

Copyright © Leora Freedman 2014
First published in the Southern Humanities Review

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Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2014 Leora Freedman

In the late nineteenth century, many Jews stopped keeping the Torah’s commandments, and Joseph was one of these.  As he was growing up in Nasofke, a shtetl in Ukraine, he became “enlightened,” or secular.  One Shabbat, a neighbour saw him smoking a cigarette.  She wanted to tell his mother, as we are commanded not to light fire on Shabbat, but she did not want to break the commandment regarding gossip.  So she simply told Joseph’s mother that while walking behind him on Shabbat, she’d noticed “smoke was curling up over his head.”  Then Joseph’s stepfather caught him reading Tolstoy hidden inside his prayer book.  His stepfather remarked, “To read this book, Joseph, you don’t need to be wearing tefillin.”

Joseph was one of few Jews allowed to attend gymnasium in Kiev, where he tutored gentile students in the Russian language.  He wanted to go on to university, but Jews weren’t allowed, so he immigrated to the US.  There, he worked in a button factory, sold stationery, and eventually completed law school in New York.  Joseph remained concerned about other immigrants—he was a founder of HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) and volunteered his services at Castle Garden.  He and his wife Charlotte also kept a kosher home, not because they were religious, but so that any immigrant Joseph brought home—and there were many—could eat there.  Charlotte never knew how many people she was cooking for on a Friday night.

Once, in the 1930’s, Joseph was sent to meet a young German-Jewish boy at Ellis Island.  This boy refugee arrived beautifully clothed, with matching leather luggage.  He was very religious and announced that since it was Friday night, he would not ride home with Joseph.  “On this day, I do not ride,” he said.  So together they carried the boy’s suitcases through the streets and over the Brooklyn Bridge.  The family found the boy, whose name was Jon, unbearable.  On Saturday morning they tried to give Jon a key to the house so they could go out themselves, but he announced:  “On this day, I do not carry a key.” Eventually, Jon was so unbearable that they brought him to live with a different family.  There, he was introduced to the daughter of the house, who, like Jon, was about thirteen years old.  “I want it understood that I will not marry this girl,” Jon said.

Jon never knew that Joseph’s family found him unbearable; he remained their “friend” until eventually, while at university, he stopped being religious and was thus more understandable.  He became a professor of anthropology, an expert on the Hutterites, a Christian group in the Midwest who lived a self-contained farming life based on their own biblical interpretations.  Jon would go out there to study their ways, and he wrote books and articles on them.  Once in a while he also visited Jerusalem, where he had a brother living in Mea Shearim, the “ultra-Orthodox” neighbourhood, observing the Torah’s commandments.  Jon found his religious brother in Jerusalem unbearable…

Copyright © Leora Freedman 2014
First published in the Southern Humanities Review

***If you have something to say, or a story to share, our comments page is the place to leave it!

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2014 Leora Freedman