I remember Mom

Evanston RoundTable, March 6, 2024

The other night my grandmother came to me in a dream to talk about Helen, her middle daughter – my mother. The timing was propitious, as I had just then been thinking about this column. My grandma, whom we called Gummy (her real name was Sonia), was evidently trying to help out.

But in the manner of dreams, I couldn’t make out what she was saying. I woke up before the sounds formed into words. Alas, no help from Gummy/Sonia.

She might have told me Helen was the favorite of her four children. They had a mutual adoration society. Letters from Gummy to Helen are filled with a deep and yearning love.

“My dearest darling Helen,” she wrote May 7, 1952, from her apartment at 7102 S. Jeffery Ave. By then we were 800 miles away, having moved in 1950 to New Rochelle, N.Y., my father’s hometown, so he could assume an executive position in Manhattan’s Garment District.

“Your sweet letter was a tonic to me,” Gummy wrote. “Oh for the gift of your expressions, to put on paper everything I feel, and want to say. Your letter made me cry, and then laugh…”

In another, undated letter she wrote, “The love of a mother has no earthbound ties, and when I wander in that unknowable land, my love, even then, you shall feel my hand.”

Gummy visited us at least once in New Rochelle. I was maybe 5 or 6, and remember sitting on a couch between my father’s mother, Nanny, and Gummy, sandwiched between them like a little dumpling. I rubbed Gummy’s arm and thought: Gosh, this is the softest thing I’ve ever felt.

Travels and travails

But her life was anything but smooth. My grandparents Sonia and Max Light (originally Lichtovich) left Latvia, then part of the Russian empire, in the early years of the 20th century and emigrated with their four children thousands of miles to Bethlehem, South Africa. My mother was born there in 1910. My older cousin told me the family moved to avoid the risk of their only son (her father, my Uncle Leonard) being conscripted to a 25-year term in the Czar’s army, as well as to escape the antisemitism then rife in Russia.

Bethlehem was a welcoming town with a large, supportive Jewish community. My grandfather, Max, did well working in a local bank, and my grandmother had help raising Leonard and his three sisters.

Notwithstanding their comfortable life there, they left for America because, I was told, marriage prospects for the kids were deemed more favorable in the New World. On April 15, 1915, they sailed from Liverpool on the S.S. New York, which meant another trip of thousands of miles to England before even beginning the trans-Atlantic crossing. As residents of South Africa, they were listed as British subjects.

They had a sponsor in Chicago, listed in some notes I made decades ago as “staying with Light Bros., 1814 W. Division, Chicago.” This would’ve necessitated another trip, this time from New York to the Midwest.

For a time they owned and ran a “dry goods” store on North Southport Avenue, just a few doors north of the Music Box Theater. I have a photo of the family posing along the counter. My mother looks to be 7 or or 8, which might’ve made it 1918.

Ten years later she was a high school grad and young wife. I have a page from the Chicago Herald and Examiner of May 20, 1928, with a black-and-white photo of my mother, heavily made up and looking almost coquettish, wearing a white scalloped headpiece and attached veil and a string of pearls around her neck. In another five years she was divorced, highly unusual for a young woman of that era, especially with a young child, Mark. But the divorce papers (which I inherited after she died) report a shocking level of violence and abuse, both physical and mental.

Helen met my father in 1938 and they were married on Feb. 3, 1939, during a howling blizzard, according to family lore. She adored my father and from a letter he wrote her five days after they were married, it’s clear the love was mutual. My brother Bill was born 18 months later and I followed in 1945.

Early memories

My earliest memories of my mother are from 1950. In my birthday party photo from that year I’m smiling gap-toothed at the camera, while my mother beams at me. Billy and Dad sport fanciful ties and my adored oldest brother Mark smiles down at me. Everyone seems to be in the bloom of good health and cheer. Needless to say, it’s a cherished keepsake.

As difficult as it must’ve been to leave the bosom of her beloved mother and sisters in Chicago (her father had died in 1928), Helen blossomed in New Rochelle. She was president of the local school PTA as well as head of our synagogue sisterhood and a member of Hadassah and other civic and Jewish organizations. (I still have her sisterhood gavel.)

It was easy to understand why. She was “a people person,” genuinely interested in others and a good manager and communicator. She had a wonderful sense of humor. When I asked my father what a word meant, he’d invariably tell me to “look it up.” Once he informed me in his sometimes-sanctimonious way that as a youngster he always took the dictionary with him to the bathroom. Without a moment’s hesitation, my mother piped up: “That’s because they didn’t have toilet paper in those days.”

She was warm, caring and protective. I always felt wrapped like a blanket in her adoration, which needless to say is foundationally crucial for any child.

I’ve written before about the huge influence my father had, like the sun’s gravity. Mom was the core, the vital center of my life.

Nevertheless, she could get incredibly angry when I disappointed her. Once during a routine physical the doctor reported with some concern that my blood sugar was at astronomical, diabetic levels. I took the blood test again the next day and it was normal. The difference, I confessed, was that I had consumed a dozen doughnuts the day before the first test. She burst into tears. “How could you do this to me?” she wailed, which had the lash of a thousand spankings.

My laziness in school was a source of angst too. She’d be angry and embarrassed when I did poorly, which was frequently the case, except when an exceptional teacher excited my interest. At least once she had to endure a humiliating visit (while PTA president) to the assistant principal’s office to hear him complain I was an “underachiever.”

Almost caught

Like mothers everywhere, she had a psychic’s ability to discern my moods. One summer afternoon a friend and I decided it would be fun to drop water balloons on open convertibles passing under the nearest viaduct. A state policeman pulled up and gave chase, and would’ve caught us too except he dropped his revolver and had to retrieve it.

I raced into the house and ran up to my bedroom. Before I even had time to catch my breath I could hear Mom calling from downstairs, “Oh Butchie, there’s a policeman here who wants to see you!”

I traipsed down expecting to be led off in handcuffs, except of course there was no policeman. She’d figured out something was wrong and made up the story to 1) scare the pants off me, 2) have some fun at my expense and 3) teach me a lesson. Lesson learned.

She loved Broadway musicals and soppy movies. We would watch some of her favorite 1950s TV shows together: Kukla, Fran and Ollie, The Loretta Young Show and I Remember Mama. As I grew older she would treat me more as a confidante than her youngest son (it was well known that after two boys she wanted a daughter), and would share highly inappropriate but hilarious pieces of scandal about Hollywood stars.

In 1963 we moved back to Chicago so my dad could take a job here. Mom rejoined her sisters (Uncle Leonard and her parents having predeceased them) and began working at my Aunt Mabel’s ritzy antique store on Walton Street, near Michigan Avenue.

It should’ve been a wonderful time for her, but she missed New Rochelle, where she was active, independent and hugely popular.

At Mom’s 65th birthday celebration at the old Chez Paul restaurant on Rush Street, friends and family lined up to tell stories. I still have a transcript from the evening.

My Aunt Mabel reported that Helen was “the ideal older sister.” As a child, Mabel said, she was a “tag-a-long” who tried to be helpful with errands, especially when threatened with excommunication by my mother. “One day it dawned on me, she had to be my big sister regardless, and that’s the day she got her comeuppance!”

Switched babies

Helen was remembered as a tomboy and “daredevil” in her youth, the one who defended her sisters from neighborhood and school bullies. Her older sister Rosalie reported, “Once you saved me from a beating from some kid who thought we were too ‘superior’ with our English accents and English clothes.”

She had “tons of boyfriends,” including Mel Gold, who taught her how to drive by “pretending to be a car and running ahead of her as she drove.”

Another tale someone related was of “the day Helen and her best friend skipped school and went downtown to the movies, only to find themselves seated next to Sonia on the train on their way home.”

There was the famous story about being presented with her first born in the hospital, the old Lying-In Hospital in Englewood, where only a year before there’d been an infamous baby mix-up. Rosalie was there and when the infant was brought in, as was recalled at the party, “Rosalie immediately went into paroxysms of joy about how gorgeous he was, until Helen whispered it wasn’t her baby. The nurse insisted otherwise, but when Helen started to become hysterical, the nurse undressed the baby, only to discover it was a girl! The nurse flew out of the room with the naked infant and returned a minute later with Mark. Whereupon Rosalie immediately resumed raving about how gorgeous the baby was!”

Yet another story: Billy had a newspaper route in New Rochelle but was unavailable one Saturday due to a planned outing. Mom volunteered to deliver his papers for him. At one stop, “a haughty old grande dame came to the door and inquired, ‘Where is that handsome, mannerly young man who usually delivers the paper?’ To which my mom replied, “He is at the theater. I am his handsome, mannerly young mother!”

My brother Mark recounted their challenging early years. “My mother was 21 when I was born in the Depression year of 1931. She was divorced several years later and we had to move in with my grandmother and great-grandfather. We were poor but I did not know it. I was never cold or hungry. I was always loved, even adored.”

Once a week, Mark reported, “a man would climb three flights of stairs to our apartment on the third floor of a three-flat. My mother would give him 50 cents. He recorded the payment in a pocket notebook. When I was 22 and the first college graduate in my family, my mother gave me $500 to buy my first automobile, which was the proceeds of the savings policy she scrimped for all those years.

“Mom was also instrumental in my making the wisest decision of my life. She all but dialed the phone in 1959 when I called Marilyn to propose marriage.

“Her humor, her warmth, her unconditional support will be with me always.”

At the party I told my mom, “While Dad breathed the righteousness of his wrath when we were bad, you gently scolded us and then enfolded us in the all-embracing love of your forgiveness.”

When my dad died in 1982, Mom said the life went out of her. Her last few years were a misery, in a nursing home she hated. I think she died from disinterest. I was there, in the hospital, when she passed, and ushered her out with the terrible words no child should ever have to say: “It’s OK, Mom. It’s OK to go.”

But as Gummy wrote her, “when I wander in that unknowable land, my love, even then, you shall feel my hand.”

I still feel my mother’s hand.