Assorted
memories.
Her
picture sits on my desk in my classroom.
If not for her, I would never have become a teacher. Or, I would have racked up so much debt in
grad school, it wouldn’t be worth it.
Either way, I keep her in plain sight at all times when I’m on the job.
She
was known for her keep fashion sense. To
an outsider, she may have looked like a typical balabusta walking down the
streets of Borough Park. But to those who
knew her, she was so much more.
First,
there was her hat collection. Oh, her
hats. The more colorful, the
better. It’s an old stereotype of
Hungarians, they like things that are colorful.
But even by Hungarian standards, her fashion sense was ostentatious. My mother tells me it embarrassed the dickens
out of her late husband, my Zeide. He
was a quiet, simple man. He typically
wore the same white shirt, black pants, red suspenders, big black yarmulke, and
white tzitzit every day. There was not a
lot of variety in the way he dressed.
Every year, his yeshiva had a weekend getaway for alumni. Zeide would go. He would beg Savta to please wear a tichel, like
most of his cohorts’ wives. She would
never sully her head with such an ugly hair wrap. But he would beg and beg and beg. Savta would give in (or pretend to). She would then go to the store, buy herself a
new hat, and make sure it was as flashy as she could muster. Sequins.
Rhinestones. Feathers. Oh yeah, she would get creative. And poor Zeide always looked so embarrassed.
She
never acted her age. When I was a child,
if I ever asked Savta how old she was, she would say “100.” She nearly lived to 100. But she did not look or act 100. And she didn’t want anyone to think that she
was almost 100. She would not take a cane
or a walker. She had one of those
foldable shopping carts; that was her walker. To an outsider, she would look like she was
just going shopping. She would not get a home help aide. Whenever the social workers at the hospital
asked how she can live alone at her age, she would get very sassy with
them. No matter how much they told her
that she should not be doing all her housework by herself, she still didn’t care. She hated the way home help aides did
housework. As far as she was concerned,
all they were good for was passing her a towel when she was in the shower. And with a wave of her hand, she harshly said
“I can get my own towel, thank you very much.”
Nobody
could drive you crazy the way Savta did.
Oh yeah, she was one of those people who could give Sophia from the
Golden Girls a run for her money. One
time, she got in fight with her sister Yudit because Yudit suggested that Savta
had cancer. Of course, Savta gave her an
unequivocal “leave me alone, I don’t have cancer!” Yudit then had one of her sons print out some
literature from the internet about how to fight cancer. She slipped it under Savta’s door. Savta was livid. Then later, she found out that Yudit’s son,
who is the sexton at a synagogue in Queens, recited a prayer for the sick for
Savta. That was all she could take. For the next few years, Yudit was dead to
her. It was funny, but it wasn’t funny;
that was Savta for you.
One
of my favorite stories was when three of Savta’s sisters decided to visit their
father’s grave in Lakewood, NJ—and they didn’t invite Savta. Before Yom Kippur, it is customary to get a
blessing from your father; and if your father is not alive, you are supposed to
visit his grave. My father always drove
to Staten Island to visit his father’s grave before Yom Kippur; I usually went
with him. So Savta’s sisters went to
their father’s grave, and they didn’t invite Savta. So Savta got pissed off at all three of
them. But here’s the funny part: even if
they did invite her, she would have said NO!
She thinks this custom of visiting your father’s grave is stupid. Knowing her, she was more upset that she wasn’t
given the opportunity to chide her sisters.
They probably heard it from Savta so many times, that they decided just
to go without telling her. But Savta wanted
them to hear her complain about how they shouldn’t visit his grave...
Savta
had many quirks. And they made her the
kind of person who was not always easy to get along with. But I still took the time to visit her. I wasn’t sure how much time she had. So I learned how to not let her drive me too
crazy. And I’m glad that during those
last years, I got to know her. There was
so much I wanted to ask her. There was
so much she wouldn’t tell me. She told
me a lot about her childhood in Hungary.
But her father was a topic she would never discuss. She loved talking about her travels. But her own experience in the Holocaust was mostly
off limits.
She had an encyclopedic knowledge of the Holocaust. And she loved to argue about it. One time, she randomly called me to ask how
many people survived Bergen-Belsen. She
always heard that there were no survivors.
All her books (she had plenty) said the camp was completely
liquidated. I went on Google and looked
it up. Yes, the camp was completely
liquidated. But before that, there were
prison transfers. So there were a
handful of survivors; but they were lucky enough to have been sent to other
camps before Bergen-Belsen was completely liquidated.
At her age, she had an
amazing memory. But sometimes, it was
spotty to a fault. One time, she called
me about Sheldon Silver. She wanted to know
where Sheldon Silver was born. I looked
it up. He was born on the Lower East
Side of Manhattan. “But I thought he was
a Holocaust survivor!” I scoured Google
trying to find anything about Sheldon Silver and the Holocaust. He would have been a little child when the
Holocaust occurred—living on the Lower East Side. Nope, Savta still insisted he was a Holocaust
survivor. I threw the question out the
Facebook. Everyone who replied agreed
that Silver was a LES native. Some
friends said she was maybe confusing him with someone else. What amazed me was
how impossible it was to get her to back down.
Perhaps the funniest
Savta story of all happened at a Passover seder when I was younger. Her sister Edith survived Auschwitz. We were taking a little break from the seder before
the meal. Savta asked Edith what stops the
train made on the way to Auschwitz.
Edith had no idea. Savta wouldn’t
let it go and continued to badger her.
Edith yelled at her “WHAT STOPS DO YOU THINK THE TRAIN MADE? DO YOU THINK WE TOOK THE A-TRAIN TO AUSCHWITZ,
THE B-TRAIN TO BUCHENWALD, AND THE D-TRAIN TO DACHAU?” To be fair, Savta had a bit of survivor
guilt: she and her father were able to escape Hungary. But the rest of the family was stuck in
Europe after Pearl Harbor, when America closed its borders. I’m still not clear on why that
happened. But Savta, who missed out on
the travesty, was forever curious about what it was like. So the funny thing about the story is that it
takes someone like Savta to ask such a question; and it takes someone like
Edith to answer the question like that (another post).
I could fill pages and
pages with stories about Savta. The most
important lesson I’ve learned from her is to never take anyone’s word for anything. Always question everything. She took it to the extreme. But in her world, nothing was ever de facto
true.
She will be missed.
May her memories
forever bring a smile to all who knew her.