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Sunday, 11 May 2008

Happy Birthday, Mother. Where Are You?

By Tamar Orvell of Only Connect

Dear eema, mommy, ma, mother,

Today is your birthday. And no matter which name I call you (toggling through the monikers I have assigned you over the decades), you appear not to make sense of my voice nor understand my words.

While you once spoke five languages fluently (German, English, Hebrew, Yiddish, French) and earned a master's degree in foreign languages that gave you license to teach French and German in New York City high schools (you "couldn't stand the endless ringing of the bells," and soon quit), you stare blankly at me now, occasionally yawning.

I attach this photo, marked Rosh Hashanah on the back of the original print copy. Judging by my shirt (I remember all our clothes), glasses (still trying to look like Gloria Steinem), waist (visible), hairstyle, and phony sophisticate look (I never took to sipping wine), I am guessing that the photo captured us 20 years ago. You, always pretty and dressed tastefully, are wearing your mother’s springtime necklace, the one I am wearing today.

It is a common regret that we do not ask enough questions while our parents are still around to answer them. Was I too incurious when I was younger or too busy with other things (really, myself) to ask more about your fascinating life and sometimes peculiar biases or ways? Until even a year ago when I spoke with you, I could hope for a clue, a key, a name in answer to my questions.

Now, I can only rely on the few people still alive and alert who knew you before I did and could help fill in the blanks that I know will never be filled. Not as only you might have filled them.

A full life lived in many lands
Over the past dozen years, despite your steadily decreasing faculties and increasing silence (you, the nonstop chatterbox who would sometimes drive me crazy with your talking), I consider how, throughout your long, full life, you were brilliantly successful in negotiating most of your many careers, challenges and activities.

For example, almost as soon as you arrived into this world to Russian-born parents living in Poland, your father, helping to secure a safe home for the Jewish people in their homeland, was soon relocated to Germany where your sister was born.

Next, the Leah Dinnen and Dr. Simon Bernstein family moved to Denmark (where you became a lifelong non-swimmer when they dumped you into a net and then tossed it in the ocean - a local swim training “method”) and then to England (where you picked up traces of the royal accent that your spoken English hinted at all your life).

When you were a sweet 16, Lady Liberty, the "mighty woman with a torch...mother of exiles," greeted your family on New York City's Ellis Island where agents in the great registry hall - opened as a USA immigration station in 1892, processed 12 million immigrants in the next 68 years it was in operation.

Even today, when I land in the Big Apple by airplane, I think about your maiden journey here - what it might have been like on that boat carrying war-, world-, and sea-weary, freedom-craving, hope-filled immigrants. And I wonder about your first moments and early years on these strange shores.

Finally, a home base
I do know why home became New York City: your father worked here as an official of the Zionist Organization of America (and, especially after retirement, edited and annotated Hebrew medieval liturgical poetry, accessing its great library resources). You immediately entered Evander Childs High School in the Bronx and then earned BA and MA degrees at Hunter College in Manhattan. No small feats for an immigrant, especially a woman, in the third decade of the last century. Yet you were not just any woman.

Heiress to ancient Jewish law and modern traditions
You adored your parents (so did I and all who knew them). Really, you were your daddy's girl, inheriting his values, passions and talents: lifelong study and learning writing, reveling with a wide circle of friends, an appetite for delicious food, a strong constitution and charm, warmth, and even a temper.

And you were a player. You married three times and became a widow the same number, birthed two daughters in one hemisphere and raised them in another. You traveled widely in the USA and in Europe, joined a tourist group when the former Soviet Union first admitted Americans and journeyed often to Israel where you lived a decade during your first marriage until your beloved, my young father, died suddenly.

Wherever you were, you had endless appealing friends with whom you shared any of your wide-ranging interests: literature, theater, opera, museums and galleries, travel, folk dancing, playing piano (especially Chopin sonatas), studying sacred Jewish texts and modern Hebrew literature (Moshe Shamir, among others), film, ballet, and frequenting elegant shops, beautiful parks, and splendid gardens.

A long line of over-readers
While I reflect on my career choices (teaching, community organizing, writing), work my way through the 26 books I borrowed this month from my public library, read online the print subscriptions you kept even after they ceased to sustain your attention (The New York Times, daily, and The New Yorker, weekly), and polish my Hebrew with coursework and in conversation, I look in the mirror. And I see my smile, my lips, my hair, my build. Do I see you in me? Or is it me in you?

Years ago, while you were fully present in spirit, you told me that you felt like an ancient tortoise. And that you had done enough, lived enough. Yet you are still here. And I sigh and don't know what to wish for you. So, happy birthday, dearest one. I won't wish you the traditional "[m]any more."

But wait. A gift to touch your soul as it has all these years. In the video clip below, Jerusalem scenes featuring anemones, kalaniot, with Shoshana Damari singing her trademark song, kalaniot.

Your loving daughter,
Tami

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