TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 99

[Tobie Shapiro]

December 24, 200000000006


Dear Pipple,

	I hear Meyshe laughing hysterically from 
his room.  He has an unusual laugh.  "Heh heh 
hooooya.  Heh heh heh.  Yee eee heh heh heh."  I 
used to wonder if laughs were inherited.  I can't 
remember if I laugh like my mother.  This is sad, 
folks.  I haven't laughed in so long that I don't 
remember my natural laugh.  I guess this divorce 
has taken more out of me than I care to think.  I 
used to laugh all the time.  But now, I can 
listen to a good joke, find it funny, yet not 
laugh.  I just sit there watching a comedy, my 
face blank.  Maybe I laugh inside but it doesn't 
surface, or change my expression.  This has got 
to stop!  And something else has got to begin, 
and it better be happier.




                   ÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆ
 
¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨
                     hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh


Channamas

	While I was growing up, Channukah was a 
big holiday.  We lit the candles every night, but 
no one knew the prayer in Hebrew, so we just lit 
the candles.  And no presents were exchanged.  We 
saved that for Christmas day.  On Christmas day, 
the whole family would get together and bring the 
carload of presents we'd gotten for everyone. 
We'd go to my Uncle Harold's and Aunt Ruth's 
house on Aptos Avenue across the street from the 
junior high school where my cousins, Marcie, 
Donnie and Alan used to go to use their 
basketball hoops.  Harold and Ruth were a tough 
couple.  It's hard to explain the relationship 
between my mother and her older brother.  When 
they were kids, he was jealous of her, and 
treated her very badly.  He teased her and hit 
her and made her scream, and scared her with 
awful stories about dead cats in the alley.  When 
my grandparents told him to help teach Mickey how 
to ride a bicycle, he put her on the bike, held 
on to it, then let go, said, "Ride," and walked 
away.  Naturally, she fell over and scraped 
herself up.  The bicycle never did come back to 
my mother.

	When they grew up into adults and had 
children of their own, the relationship didn't 
mellow much.  Harold criticized my mother's 
housekeeping and criticized her mothering.  When 
my mother picked us up or rocked the cradle when 
we cried, he scolded her, saying that she was 
spoiling us.  She should let us cry.  He was of 
that school.

	And Ruth, Harold's chosen life partner 
was no better.  In fact she was worse, because 
she planned her meanness. She crafted social 
tortures for my mother and carried them out. 
When a crowd of people were invited over to play 
bridge, everyone was assigned a table for four, 
except my mother.  Ruth told her, "I knew you 
didn't like playing bridge," and left her on the 
couch with no one as company, while everyone else 
sat at their tables and played.   I have never 
figured out, nor has my mother, why Ruth despised 
her so.  We wondered if maybe Ruth was angry at 
my mother for having three bright, normal 
children, when Ruth and Harold's third child, 
Alan was retarded.  But that couldn't explain the 
whole barrage of attacks against my mother, and 
besides, Ruth was like that before Alan came 
along.  I imagine what it must be like to be that 
way, jealous and bitter, vengeful, having a list 
a mile long of people I'm not talking to because 
of some minor infraction of what I deemed to be 
etiquette, looking down on so many other people 
that the eyes must wear a permanent dip in the 
middle of the lower lid.  My mother was always on 
guard when we went to Ruth's and Harold's house 
for any of the holidays.

	Up until the time I was about nineteen, 
Christmas was always held at their house.  They 
had a tree.  It would be an aluminum tree, shiny 
pink with pink bulbs.  It would stand in front of 
their piano which they had stained white, and 
they set up a little spot light with a rotating 
colour wheel in front of it, so the tree would 
get a bath of red, blue, yellow, or green light 
on it.  I always regarded Christmas trees as 
something Jews shouldn't have.  I never had a 
desire for one, and would have been happy 
celebrating Channukah with the extended family, 
and forgetting the big to do at Christmas.  But 
for my Grampa, who owned Western Slope Sales 
Service, a stationery, novelty and toy wholesale 
company, for my cousins once removed, Doris and 
Norman, who owned King Norman's Wonderland of 
Toys, and my great Uncle Al and Great Aunt Gussie 
who owned the Bell Bazaar, Christmas was truly 
the first break they got in a busy hectic season. 
So Christmas day made some sort of sense.

	All in all, we were an assimilated 
family, more than reform Jews, even lapsed.  It 
seemed my great grandparents undertook the life 
and death risk of fleeing Lithuania, the pogroms, 
the fierce injustices and rabid anti-semitism, 
then suffered the poverty of immigrants in the 
United States, all for the freedom to be Jewish 
without persecution, so that a hundred years 
later, their descendents could forget it all. 
That thought rolled around in my head as I 
watched the monochromatic Christmas tree and the 
piles of presents wrapped in Santas and sleighs 
at my Harold's and Ruth's place.

	We would all assemble on available chairs 
and couches in their basement recreation room, 
and my Grandfather Benny would wade into the 
enormous mountain of gifts and hand them out to 
the nice Jewish family.  After all the presents 
had been opened and the heap of ribbons and 
wrapping paper had grown to unmanageable 
proportions, the kids would take their presents 
out for a trial run.  One year, Donnie, Marcie 
and Alan got a bumper pool set, and while they 
were outside trying out their new bicycles and 
pogo sticks, my sister and I played bumper pool. 
Unfortunately, I beat her, because her fury in 
defeat nearly broke the cue stick over my body 
and scraped a good rift in the green felt surface 
of the pool table.  Balls were everywhere.  There 
was always some nasty scene on Christmas.  It 
usually involved my father , my sister and my 
uncle Harold, who used to love to tease Dana 
until she threw a loud fit.  My father would get 
into political debates with the conservative side 
of the family, and he would lose his temper quite 
dramatically.  These were festive occasions.  I 
usually ducked my head down to avoid being 
eliminated in the cross fire.

	Then, my mother made the mistake of 
allowing Marcie to stay with us when Uncle Harold 
and Aunt Ruth kicked her out of their house for 
dating a black man.  From that moment, Ruth and 
Harold refused to speak to my mother.  Harold 
would step back from my mother at family 
gatherings when she tried to say hello.  They 
wouldn't set foot in our house.  This one sided 
feud went on for over thirty years and tore the 
family to shreds.  From then on, Christmas for us 
was held at Grama's and Grampa's house without 
Ruth's and Harold's family.  Behind the scenes, 
secret negotiations took place every once in a 
while, but the hostility from Harold only 
subsided after Ruth died, a vicious and cold 
woman who had nurtured the warfare as fondly as 
my mother spoiled her children.

	After Ruth's death, Harold spoke to my 
mother again.  And by the time he passed away, he 
was calling her sweetheart.  These internal 
battles wind up as a paragraph in a page: thirty 
years of antagonism and ferocity, for a few cheap 
sentences during a look back in a witness's 
retelling.

	After my grandparents and my aunt Belle 
died, our celebration finally gave up on 
Christmas.  We choose a weekend day during 
Channukah and hold our annual potlatch then. 
This works for everybody, because it eliminates 
the problem of mixed marriage families where they 
used to have to juggle which family to visit on 
Christmas.  This way, they can do both.  But now, 
on Christmas day, there is nothing much to do but 
go out to the movies or a Chinese restaurant for 
dinner.  I heard that once, in a theater in New 
York City, on Christmas day, a rabbi, 
contemplating the predominance of Jews in the 
theater that day, broke out into singing a well 
known Jewish song, and bit by bit the audience 
joined him until the whole theater was singing.



                   ÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆ
 
¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨
                     hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net