Tag Archives: Parents

#4 Polly: Our Mother

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Mother’s role was MOTHER.  She always did what needed to be done.  For the most part she was living the life she expected to live. My mother was very much a loving, generous, caring person who was limited by her lack of education, but, strong in meeting human challenges.

My mother’s schooling stopped at the third grade.  She was deft with her hands, experienced in sewing, crocheting, and knitting, and loved gardening.  She was a husky, healthy woman who responded happily to Hungarian and Austrian music.  We had a victrola and player piano in our house, and she often couldn’t stop her feet from keeping time when the “Old Country” music was played.  She was also skilled in the art of making strudel.  She could stretch that fragile dough across our entire three leaf dining room table and create the flakiest strudel I have ever eaten.

Our “country place” was a magnet for the other relatives, of which there were many in the Detroit area, to arrive either late on Saturday night or early Sunday morning, to spend the weekend.  In the summer, the porch was used by relatives who would arrive with additional mattresses and sleeping gear on Saturday night, after they closed their shops, in order to spend Sunday in the country.

The Aunts would busy themselves cooking and baking for the Sunday Dinner, while the husbands played cards.  We children played ball, climbed trees, went for walks in the woods, picked berries, and, occasionally, raided the trunk in the basement to create costumes, and put on skits to entertain the grownups.

Mother looked forward to these social times because she had no social life other than these.  She never learned to drive.  We had very few neighbors out in the country.  My mother always felt inadequate, but she always kept herself busy with household and family chores, did a little reading, and a lot of canning of the produce from her big garden.

It was while I was in high school that Mother seemed to go into a deep depression: I would come home from school and she appeared to have done nothing all day.  The breakfast dishes would still be on the table.  I tried my best to clean the house and put things in order.  Some days I would find her weeping, but she would make no explanation.  Dad seemed as mystified as anyone.  Mother finally came out of it. (Menopause?)

In the 1950’s she bore the throes of two bouts of colon cancer, but, coupled with diabetes, it was too much and she died at the age of 75, in 1959.

#6 Fritzie: Growing up

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There is a darker yelllow where Frieda is sitting.

I can remember that everyday when we sisters came home from school there was a fresh round loaf of rye bread with jam for us to snack on.  I think my mother would get the rye bread fresh from the bakery every day.  One thing I remember very clearly, when I was 12, that on Saturdays we sisters spent the day cleaning at home while my mother and Aunt Gretchen went to matinees at the Bonstelle Playhouse or any other matinees playing in town.  They had a wonderful time together.  My mother loved to go and she dressed up like a Lady and really was a Lady going out. 

Between Josephine and I, we got all the work done with the other girls helping.  My sister Bertha never wanted to do house work.  I can remember Josephine, who was the oldest, would get real mad at her.   Gretchen was usually deep in dance lessons, when all this was going on.

I don’t remember much about when we were young.  In general, we went to school, and did things together. 

One thing I do remember, was when I learned to write long hand, a second time, very prettily. There were glass doors at our school and one day I put my hand on the glass and it went straight through! I had to have my wrist fixed up and when it all recovered, there was this lump on the inside of my wrist. So, for the rest of my life, people would ask me why I had that lump there. I had to learn to write all over again from the beginning. (You will note in a few places in this story, Frieda’s hand writing that was very very fine.)

The two families would get together for picnics on a regular basis.  Either in our back yard or theirs.  Gretchen didn’t take part in the eating on these occasions in order to keep her ballet figure.  She watched her weight very closely even at an early age, because of her dancing.

It was Gretchen who chose me to go out to dinner with them early on. We were close friends, Gretchen and I.  She shared her feelings and dreams with me and I with her.  But it was different than now-a-days.  We didn’t have a lot of time to converse and share our secrets when we were growing up.  Gretchen was more the out going one and I tagged along.  Since she was a year younger than I, we didn’t go to the same classes in school and I don’t remember going back and forth to school with her.   She had lots of home work to do after school; piano lessons from her mother and ballet practice.  I eventually had three younger sisters to take care of after school and other duties.  I went to watch her in ballet class some times, but I just wanted to watch.  So we were both very busy with our own things growing up.

Gretchen was very preoccupied with her dancing.  She took ballet lessons.  And she was very good at it.  She went to Olga Fricker’s Ballet School and eventually, by the time we were teenagers, became one of the principle dancers and a soloist in the Concert Group of Miss Fricker’s Dancing school which was connected to the Bonstelle Playhouse in Detroit.  When I was twenty I got a job making costumes for Miss Fricker’s ballet company.  That’s when I took lessons there, too, so that I could understand more about how to make the costumes.

Gretchen

Gretchen’s mother used to make costumes for her.  The one that I remember particularly, that I had a picture of, was a butterfly costume with wings – a white satin butterfly.  During World War I, Aunt Gretchen sold liberty Bonds and to do this she would set up entertainment programs for people to watch.  She would plan the whole thing and she would have Gretchen perform solo dances in her butterfly costume.

Eventually both families moved away from Gratiot Avenue.  The Haveman’s moved to the north side of town and we moved to Southfield Road in a house on 10 acres of land where wild strawberries grew in the woods.  I can remember on Sundays when maybe 25 of our relatives would come out to our house to pick wild strawberries in the woods and stay for dinner.  I can still see them now, maybe 20 aunts and cousins would sit in a row in the kitchen against the wall watching me washing the dishes singing “I’m forever blowing bubbles.  Pretty bubbles in the air……”  I was always washing the dishes.  My sister Josephine was always on a date.  My immediate younger sister Bertha was always studying and I was always washing the dishes or taking care of my three younger sisters.

I went to Northern High school.  At the time, we lived 5 1/2 miles from the nearest public bus stop.  So my father bought a car and gave each of us, who were old enough, a chance to learn to drive it.  Then he decided that I would be the regular driver.  So it was my job, every morning, to drive us to the bus stop and park the car there and catch the bus to school.

Frieda’s Highschool graduation picture
years later…………………

#9 Polly: Josephine’s wedding

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When I was seven, in 1926, my oldest sister, Josephine had a big wedding in a Temple in Detroit.  Josephine, I am told, had beautiful blonde hair and was very pretty and vivacious.  After high school she had attended a business school.  Before the wedding there was a large outdoor party and our front yard was strung with Japanese Lanterns and a chicken dinner was served. 

Mother’s parents had Immigrated by that time and were living with us.  Grandfather was in charge of making sure the chickens were killed and prepared according to the Kosher rules, since Father’s butcher shop was not Kosher.  My cousin, Lillian Greenhut and I were flower girls at the wedding.  Frieda, Bertha, Gretchen and the groom’s sister were Bridesmaids and each of them were paired off with a tuxedo garbed gentleman Usher.  Popular music was played.  Lillian and I danced the Charleston.  After the wedding, Josephine and her new husband, Sam Kazdan, left for California.


Fritzie is 3rd from the right in the rear. Polly is the little girl in the front (unless that is Lillian). I believe my Aunt Bertha is the one on the far left in the rear. Gretchen is 3rd from the left in the rear. Please anyone, let me know who any of the other people are.
Either Polly was wrong about Josephine’s hair being blond, or this is not really Josephine’s wedding picture, but it looks like my aunt Josephine.

#10 Polly: The Fire

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One October evening Dad came home and announced that we would be going to Temple after supper.  It was Succoth, a Jewish harvest festival, and there would be a special ceremony and treats for the children.  The synagogue was about 15 miles from our house, which resulted in our not going there very often.  But when Dad decided to go, we went.

On the way home, we noticed a bright light as we neared eight mile road.  By the time we reached our driveway, we already realized the glare was our house, engulfed in flames!  Dad dropped us off across the street and raced back to eight mile road where the Wayne county fire station was located.  He said that he plunked down a hundred dollar bill and asked them to come with their equipment and save our house.  He was told that he lived in Oakland County and would have to be serviced from Birmingham which was fifteen miles away.  They would make the call.  He returned, and we all watched the flames devour the inside of our brick house. 

After what seemed to be a long time, we heard the sirens approaching from the north.  As the fire truck made the approach to our driveway, it got stuck too far away from the house for the hoses to reach.  The firemen piled out of the truck and began breaking the windows and smashing the glass front door – helping the flames burn even hotter.  We soon saw that their efforts were worse than hopeless and watched the two upper floors collapse into the basement.  I think I was sent to a neighbor’s to phone Aunt Regina to ask them to come and get us and to bring some blankets because Dad said he would not leave the premises and Mother was determined to stay with him.  The firemen poked around the exterior for a while and then had to tend to the problem of their truck and left the smoldering remains.  Aunt Regina and her husband took we three children to their house.

Dad was concerned about the safe which, undoubtedly, had fallen into the basement along with the contents of the house.  Somehow, Mother and Dad hunkered down somewhere where they could keep warm and also keep watch.  Dad’s premonitions proved to be correct; some time during the night they heard noises.  Dad had armed himself and before long several of the “firemen” appeared, presumably to loot.  Dad threatened them with his weapon and they took off.

With nothing but the clothes on our backs, Dad found a house for us to rent near the butcher shop and Maxine, Viola, and I could walk to school while our house on Southfield rd. was being rebuilt.

The Rebuilt Southfield house

This story is rather interesting.
In the years before “the Depression of 1929” there was a great deal of Anti-immigration 
sentiment which had increased after World War I (1918) and continued to increase. Economic concerns combined with ethnic prejudice ended America’s “open door” immigration policy in the 1920s.
I wonder if the fire at my grandparent’s house was part of this Anti-immigration sentiment of that period, even though they had already been in this country for a decade.