 “La sociededad de mujeres intelectuales y brillantes,” she told me in Spanish. I translated quickly in my head—"The society of intellectual and brilliant women.” Aha. I smiled as I looked at the picture she put in front of us on the table. It was 1974, I was 24 years old, and my grandmother was visiting me for a week. She had come from across the ocean to my home in Maryland. I was embarking on my adult life having just gotten married, bought a home, started my teaching career, and begun my (first) master’s degree. Spanish was the language we communicated in, but it was her fifth language. As a young girl in Lomza, Poland, she spoke Polish, German, and Russian. She told me, “We never knew which language we might need. First one army invaded, then another. We learned to listen and speak what they were speaking. It kept us safer.” “French, too. Yes. I learned the language of fashion and hats when I was young. Oh, that was a musical language.” After she emigrated to Uruguay, in 1930 she quickly learned the native language, Spanish. “You know,” she said, “my name in Polish is Malka, but when I started my women’s hat-making shop in Montevideo, I changed my name to Margot. So much lovelier a sound. I love the sound of words,” and she sighed happily as she sipped her Earl Gray out of my new Wedgewood teacup—the Volendam pattern with a singing bird on a branch by its nest poised to take flight. She had brought some essentials for our visit: good sewing needles of various sizes, a collection of very old buttons, and some photographs. Today she showed me this picture, from 1916, of a gathering of young women. “You see, women were not thought to have very much in the way of brains for higher thought. Ha! How small minded those men were. We didn’t have access to libraries or lectures. But some of us were determined to hear the big ideas of the world. Our town was so small (on the far north eastern border of Russian), but our minds—they were big and they were hungry. We girls got together to talk. Our fathers thought we were discussing food or sewing, but some of our mothers knew the truth. Do you see her?” she said pointing to the girl in the far left chair, “her father was a doctor. When her mother cleaned his library book shelves she would take out books—one a time so as not to create suspicion—and leave them on the floor near the door. Annika –who was prohibited from setting foot in that room—would walk by, put the book under her skirt and bring it to our meetings. One time Greta—the girl with the tie standing up—paid a young peasant boy to go into the library and steal a book (a Martin Buber book!) because we were so desperate to read those ideas.” She paused to nibble on the chocolate chip cookies I had baked that morning. I knew that her father wouldn’t let her go to the university, and that she made money modeling hats in fine stores which she used to pay her way so she could secretly earn a degree as a pharmacist. (“No one knew I was a Jew. They would not have allowed me in. Hard enough I was a woman!”). But I had never heard of her life before that. “You know, Abuela,” I said to her as the sun shone through the big picture window of my living room, “even now in 1974 they tell me that women should not worry about getting higher degrees—being doctors or lawyers or philosophers or college professors. When I graduated from high school the best universities didn’t allow women to enter. Even now it’s such a small number.” I slumped lower into the couch beside her. “Look at this picture,” she said almost violently pointing. Look. You see these girls? We got together. We found a way. We began. See Elza there?” she said pointing to the girl with her chin resting on her hand, “she learned Morse code and helped get Jews out of our town in 1935 by tapping on walls and floors. She lives in Israel today and works as a translator. And Ada, sitting with her hand on her temple, she dressed as a German soldier in 1939 and led 25 children to safety. Then she became an artist.” She smiled and looked at the picture again. “And that’s me,” she said pointing to the slim girl on the far right leaning on the cabinet. “I’m going to be the first one of this group with a granddaughter who will get a doctorate degree.” I laughed and said, “Abuela, I’m only just beginning a master’s degree. I don’t know if I can go that far.” She put down her cup, grabbed me by the shoulder and looked me squarely in the eye, “Yes you will. Women have their own, personal, individual stars inside of them and we find a way—we find a way—to shine brilliantly.” Thirteen years later, eleven years after she died, I framed my newly earned degree in gold.  “She died of a long illness,” they told me when I asked about my great-grandmother Anna. My mother remembered her from when as a child she lived in Poland. “Oh, she was wonderful. I had typhus when I was six, your age, and she brought me back to health. My fever was so high she had to put me in an ice bath to lower it. They thought I was going to die.” I could not imagine such a misery. It was 1957 and we were sitting around the big dining room table in Montevideo, Uruguay with some of my family’s Polish friends. Even as a young child, I loved their stories and the word-pictures they would paint of that old world they had left. In 1930 my grandmother had managed to escape the horrors of Poland with her two small children in tow, but not before having to say a painful farewell to her beloved mother-in-law. My mother remembered (in Polish) her grandmother’s parting words, “Sara, you be a good girl and listen to your mother. She will help you to a better life. It is not safe for us here. Be very brave.” She knew she’d never see her grandchildren again. The 1940s brought horrors to the extended family in Poland with many killed in concentration and labor camps and many others simply murdered in their homes. All communication had stopped. It was not until many years later, the early 1950s, that several of the remaining relatives and friends were able to emigrate and some came to Uruguay and now, here they were, sitting around the big wooden table talking and laughing. “Remember that time Solomon was so full of beer that he couldn’t get up the stairs and Herman tried to help him but they both ended up rolling down? Achhh, what silliness that was, they chuckled. And then, “We didn’t know how bad it was going to get later. No one really knew,” as they grew suddenly solemn and quiet. I took that lull as an opportunity to ask about my great grandmother and was told of her death. And then they continued, “But it was an amazing thing when she died. Back then, in 1939, it was instructed that Jews were not allowed formal burials. They were just dumped into graves. But not your great-grandmother.” “Why not?” I asked. They continued, “Because all of her life she helped the poor. If she had one piece of bread left she would give half of it to the poor and half to her family and she herself would eat nothing. If she had two pieces of cloth she would sew a dress for a desperate child.” “So, she helped the Jewish community,” I mused. “No,” I was told, “Not just that community. She helped everyone who needed her help. The poor people of the village of all religions loved her so much that when she died, they found a way to buy a coffin for her and then they carried it in a long procession to the cemetery. There must have been more than a hundred people walking together. Even the soldiers on watch did not disturb the ceremony. No one had ever seen anything like that before. A Jewish woman carried with so much dignity! We knew, all of us, we knew that this was the last moment we could all honor goodness in the world.” And then these old Polish people, survivors of unimaginable suffering and grief, cast their heads down with long, heavy sighs. Even as a child I felt their sighs in my bones. I feel them still.  |
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