I published this reminiscence some years ago:
My daughter continues to urge me to write something autobiographical. To which I reply, it’s all autobiographical. But since she wants hard news, not indirect revelation, I offer this account of my grandmother, born Sonia Chafetz, later, by marriage, Sonia Usilewski and finally, after a legal name change, Sonia Green. She was born in 1884 somewhere in darkest White Russia (now called Belarus). I have no idea exactly where, but I know that she was a distinctly rural girl -- she loved to fish, to pick berries, to grow plants. Of her life in the old country, I know almost nothing -– only that she was raised in a cottage with a dirt floor and that the family brought the cow inside in the winter to keep the place warm. I know that she didn’t have a proper bed, and that at least for part of her childhood she slept on the mantle over the fireplace, which sounds mighty precarious to me. She couldn’t have had much in the way of formal education, but she did read and write Yiddish and still understood Russian in her old age. I know this because in the late 1940s or early 50s I would occasionally sit with her and listen to the broadcast of debates at the United Nations (in those days there were subsequent rather than simultaneous translations) and she would render the Russian to me, as best she could in her halting English. She never did become fluent in the only language I knew so our conversations were stilted and confined to utilitarian topics. When she was young--I’ve seen the pictures—she was dark, attractive, and voluptuous. By the time I came to know her, when she was close to sixty, her looks were long gone and she was disfigured by goiter and other diseases and no doubt by the consequences of her many self-induced abortions. The family story was that both she and Joseph were engaged to other people when they eloped to America (my grandfather deserting from the Russian army, where he had been drafted for the usual twenty-year term, and where his salary was a ruble every other month). They arrived in New York in August of 1904 from Rotterdam. How they found their way from Minsk to Rotterdam I was never told, but the Ellis Island records report that they came through London. My mother was born in June of the following year, or just about ten months after her parents arrived in this country. My mother’s story was that at first her parents had only one pair of shoes between them, so that Sonia had to stay at home until Joseph returned from work. The family settled in Harlem; my grandfather, who was urban and more sophisticated than Sonia, had been trained as a pharmacist, but never found work in his field in the new world. I don’t know what they did for a living (was he some sort of salesman?) except that for a short time my grandparents owned a delicatessen at the corner of 4th and 10th streets in Greenwich Village. I’ve gone to that corner many times and tried imagine such a restaurant, but of course not a clue remains. As far as I can guess, their marriage was uneasy. My grandfather was frequently absent (my father once darkly hinted, “I don’t know whether it was other women, or what”) and my grandmother frequently ill. My father also told me that when he and mom married, he laid down a prohibition—it was in the days when men made prohibitions-- that she wasn’t to act as intermediary between Sonia and Joseph any longer. I know that my mother had to leave school six weeks into the ninth grade to care for her mother and two younger brothers. But that’s about all I was told and there are no documents. I have a few memories: Sonia trying to teach me to play fan-tan and five hundred rummy -– I was as bad then as I am now at card games; Sonia planting in wooden Philadelphia cream-cheese boxes every orange or grapefruit seed that came into her house, so that her tiny apartment had the pleasant aroma of a hot-house; Sonia growing avocados in the winter but setting them in my father’s garden (just around the corner from her third-floor walk up) in the summer. And I also remember her attempt to cure my father’s sterile apple tree with an old-country remedy—rubbing the cut half of an apple on the trunk in midwinter. I remember also stuffed cabbage, the world's finest blintzes, and jars of apricot jam sealed with paraffin. In her last years, Sonia lived with my parents; she had her own kitchen, a room that had been remodeled from my former bedroom. She was weary of life and I suspect that she died at least in part of malnutrition. I remember also that she owned a pressed-glass ruby bowl that was always filled with hard candies. I was allowed one candy per visit. When Sonia died in 1971, she had no money and precious few possessions, but I inherited the bowl. It was pretty, and I’m sorry to say that after a few years I accidentally broke it. But it was easily replaced (it was in a popular pattern and every second-hand store had the item for sale) and I bought one for about $25.00. Some years afterward I broke the second one and bought another, but by that time the price had gone up to $50.00. So, although my inheritance in cold cash was a negative $75, I was left with grateful appreciation and many warm memories.
Now I want to complete the story of the sterile apple tree.
My father had three fruit trees in his backyard garden on East 9 Street. A pear tree, which produced abundant fruit but not every year (it was a Seckel, if I remember correctly, very sweet); a peach tree, which was only occasionally fruitful, probably because it was just a bit north of its proper range; and an apple (variety unknown) which was large and healthy, disease-free, but which for some unknown reason never produced even a single blossom, let alone an actual apple. My grandmother Sonia Green explained to my father that when they had a sterile apple in the old country, they would take a ripe apple, cut it in half, and rub it on the trunk of the tree in mid-winter. It always worked, claimed grandma. My father would have none of it. "None of your superstition here," proclaimed. But one January he caught grandma apple in hand applying the folk remedy. He didn't say anything, but the next summer, he bought some apples and tied them to the branches of the tree and took grandma to view them. She was an intelligent old lady who immediately saw through the plot --but we all had a good laugh and a good story to tell.