My mother, your great-grandmother, Lillian Green, was born in New York City, probably in Harlem, on June 9, 1905.
Her parents, Sonia Chafetz and Joseph Usilewski, were part of the great migration to America of Eastern European Yiddish speakers. According to my mother, they were both engaged to other people when they eloped, he deserting from the Russian army. They arrived at Ellis Island mid-August of 1904 without a kopeck in their pockets and only one pair of shoes between them. I used to think that my mother had been conceived aboard the ship from Rotterdam, but the dates don't bear it out. Moreover, passengers in steerage were segregated by sex and kept apart.
My mother was born Lilly Usilewski but when she entered public school, where she acquired English, she was enrolled as Lily Solawisky. When her younger brother was enrolled as Daniel Oslofsky, my grandfather Joseph realized that it was time to Americanize his name. The judge before whom he appeared was named Green, so Green he became. Lilly became Lillian when she married, my father insisting that "Lilly's not a name." He and everyone else except her mother called her "Lil" but she was always "Lilly" to Sonia.
Lil's upbringing, I fear, was impoverished and harsh. I was told that her father raised her and her brothers Dan and Ellis (Bub) "with the belt." Her mother Sonia was frequently ill from goiter and the consequences of her five home-made abortions, so against her wishes Lil was taken out of school six weeks into high school to run the house and take care of the boys, a sacrifice for which she received no appreciation either from them or from her father. For her, it was a disaster. Her life from age thirteen to age twenty-six, when she married my father, Emanuel, is almost entirely blank to me. I know that she had a job in the printing industry. She was not at all athletic or artistic but she was musical -- she played the piano and sang. At some point in early adulthood she started to take vacations at one of those camps for young adults in the Catskills. She sang in camp musicals and it was there that she met my father, a law clerk studying for the bar. My grandfather Joseph Green disapproved of her independence and refused to speak to her for two years -- a wound from which she was still suffering when I came to know her. Lil and Manny were married on June 19, 1930 and had four children: Eugene (1935- 2006), Susan (1937-1938), Elihu (1939 - ), and Jonathan (1942 - ).
Her hard early life and the death of her daughter at the age of nine months, along with a chronic, agonizing stomach ulcer left her a troubled woman. She was what used to be called "difficult" -- acerbic, rude, insensitive, thoughtless. She once said to me, "I was a good mother until you boys were six years old; after that, I couldn't cope." I think it was insightful of her to say so. Yet my very earliest memories are pleasurable. She kept us warm and fed and loved; otherwise I don't know how my brothers and I would have been able to have lived satisfying lives. But I also know that I have no memories of touching or being touched by her, although sometimes she would demand a quick peck on the cheek. She was not "supportive" -- "assaultive" would be a better term. Such achievements as I might have had made no impression on her. There was no praise, only incomprehension or disdain.
I can't remember any particular words that she said to me, but here's a sample of her language. I remember that when my two or three month old firstborn suffered noisily from colic, she said to my wife, "Maybe your milk is poisoning him," -- which was not a sentence to endear herself to a new mother. It took me into adulthood to recognize that her peculiarities were not villainy but the product of her emotionally impoverished early years and of her almost constant pain.
After her children were grown, she resumed her piano playing and turned herself into a stalwart of the League of Women Voters. In 1960, during JFK's presidential campaign, she gathered fifty or sixty women and welcomed Eleanor Roosevelt herself to our house on East 9 Street. A most memorable and important contribution.
She did not mellow with age. Yet I would have to say, that all things considered, she did well.
Lil died at age 74 from the consequences of her then-incurable ulcer. In the hospital, dying, "intubated" and incapable of speech, she scribbled on a scrap of paper, "I love you all," and I know that she meant sincerely what had always been so difficult for her to express. I retain that piece of paper as a relic.
Here's a picture of Lil at her best. Me and my mom, c. 1940.