I lay awake most nights in that small bedroom where my father had dismantled the crib, too frightened to close my eyes. There were monsters in the closet, that was for sure. The searchlight whose source my father explained so precisely was really, I knew, no matter my father’s logic, a trail for witches. I could hear them cackle and call. Monsters, witches, and bombs likely to fall on the roof of our house. La la la la I tried to sing to myself in a you-can’t-get-me pretend bravado. Or I told myself stories: I was the Lone Ranger’s girlfriend; I played Sparky’s magic piano as in the new record my mother had recently bought me. Conjure the sound of the Lone Ranger’s boots on gravel,I didn’t tell myself but must have somehow enjoined. Conjure Sparky’s red hair, hair like Cliffy’s, our carrot-topped neighbor. Imagine yourself into a whole other world and maybe you will be safe.
Fear lived in my legs, my feet, in the big brown shoes I wore that covered even my ankles. Fear in the trouble my feet had simply resting on ground. Fear lived in the device the doctor gave my mother to correct my turned-in hips. I placed my feet in this contraption at night, then lay on my back unable to move. I was a good girl—everyone said so—reasonable, so the panicked scream ready to burst buried itself instead in my throat.
My own favorite made-up story had me lost in a forest. I was cold, so cold. I threw off my actual blanket—thin, white cotton, flowers in quilted squares, bordered with brown scallops—to make nearly real the arctic I summoned. I imagined a bleak, stormy wind. I’d been lost for days. No food. Probably rain. When I was so cold I couldn’t get any colder, I heard a sound in the stillness. Footsteps on leaves. A stranger appeared. He wrapped me in blankets and walked with my body held in his arms. I shivered, but he kept on in the dark. I imagined each moment of our walk for as long as I could, drawing it out. I felt so safe against this big body. Eventually we wound up inside a hut that was warmed by a fire. Somewhere I’d never been before. The stranger called the place home.
I told myself stories and taught myself to read stories in books, like the Golden Book I was allowed to buy each week at the supermarket as my parents shopped for groceries: Pantaloon, Nurse Nancy, Doctor Dan the Bandage Man. My mother read me longer stories in installments—B is for Betsy, The Wizard of Oz, K’tonton.
My father told stories from the floor where he lay prone between Debbie’s bed and my own. Daddy Bob had three on-going series. Hal Stories featured a young, studious boy, a good boy, as my father was himself told always to be. Zillie was a pluckier hero, a courageous girl who, with a pinch of salt, became invisible and, with the tiniest taste of sugar, could fly.
The series I loved most was the one my father called Bob and Emma Stories. These were about my father’s childhood first in Cripple Creek, Colorado, and then in Santa Ana, California. Emma, his older sister, got marquee billing, but most of the stories were about Bob, or Robert as he was called as a child.
For example: Five year old Robert begged and begged his mother for a donkey. Grandma Nettie resisted; Robert persisted. Finally his mother borrowed a neighbor’s donkey for an afternoon and Robert was joyous. But no sooner had the boy been lifted onto the animal’s back than the donkey bucked. My father tumbled, hit his head on a rock. Grandma Nettie wrung her hands, I knew it. I knew this would happen, I knew it.
Or: Mr. Dewar owned the general store in Cripple Creek, and he taught young Robert to sing “Just a Wee Doch an Dorus” as the Scotsman Harry Lauder sung the song. Mr. Dewar offered Robert a deal. Sing the song for customers and earn a handful of cookies.
Sometimes my father paused in his telling. The pause lengthened, grew into silence, and finally we heard a slight snore. Debbie and I rolled to our sides, looked down from our beds, and found our father asleep on the floor. Other times the telephone rang in the kitchen, and my mother came to our bedroom door to announce a colleague or student from UCLA on the line. My father most often took the call, and Debbie and I were left with a half-told story, having to find our own way toward sleep.
Aunty Riva also told stories. When she was a young girl in Russia, she came down with bronchitis every winter. Her father saved money and the year she turned sixteen, he planned to send her to the Riviera through the cold season. The doctor shook his head. This girl won’t live another winter, why bother with her? Aunty Riva laughed when she told that story, for here she was, in her late sixties, a survivor of dozens of winters. A survivor of worse.
Judith (age seven) with sister Debbie
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Aunty Riva told stories of escaping Russia just after the revolution; of tutoring the niece and nephew of the grand duke of Finland; of years in the ex-pat community in Berlin; of putting an ad in the Jewish Daily Forward trying to locate my grandmother in America; of making it to this country at the last possible minute, barely escaping Hitler. In Los Angeles, Aunty Riva, delicate and speaking perfect French, transformed herself from Riva Velinsky into Vera Villard. Madame Villard taught French to Beverly Hills matrons; Madame Villard was governess to Judy McHugh, Eddie Cantor’s granddaughter.
When she visited from Detroit, Aunty Emma also told stories. She was the only one of my grandparents’ children born in Russia, and she arrived on the boat with my bubbe in 1907. That boat landed in Boston on the fourth of July. When my grandmother saw the firecrackers exploding, she cried out—my Aunty Emma reported—“They have pogroms in America, too?”
My world was my mother’s family, and the Lazaroffs didn’t need to tell every story out loud to convey what they wanted to teach me. For there I was, kneeling on the kitchen chair, rolling dough into plump cylinders along with Bubbe as we baked coffee cake in her kitchen. There I was, staring at the photo in my grandparents’ bedroom of Aunty Emma in her UNRA uniform on her way to the Displaced Persons camps after World War II to sing “Ani Mamin” to the survivors.
On Purim, Bubbe assembled baskets of fruit and baked goods and handed them to me. Shalach Manos, Bubbe said, and not much else. She never used the word “poor,” or explained the requirement to help those in need. Bubbe just took my hand as we delivered one basket to the old woman on the second floor in the back of the apartment house two doors down and another to the recently widowed mother around the corner on Packard. I don’t remember her words, but somehow Bubbe let me know being poor was not a fault, and that the Purim gift was ours—hers and mine. I was shy and afraid, knocking on the doors of people I didn’t know, but I also felt something like pleasure or pride, as though my bubbehad chosen me to help right the scales of justice.
If some barking dog chased me as I walked up Ridgley Drive on my way home from school, if some neighborhood boys teased me about a bomb about to fall only on my side of the street, there was my grandparents’ front door—five houses closer than my own—on which I could knock. I knew that front door would open and whoever stood there would welcome me in. Bubbe would say something in Yiddish to Zadie, and though he would sigh, he’d put on his jacket, take my hand, and walk me the rest of the way home.
My father’s family—the Tannenbaums and Porgeses—lived nowhere near Ridgley Drive. Daddy Bob’s parents, Henry and Nettie, died before I was born; my great-aunts lived in Denver. When a young woman, Aunt Irene taught in small Rocky Mountain towns. She boarded with a student’s family, she told us, and rode to school side-saddle. Though Jewish, too, there was no Judeleh out of her mouth, no shaine maidel. Aunt Irene addressed each one of us as “dearie.”
My father’s sister Emma—I called her Ahmee—lived with her family in Glendale. The Elconins seemed exotic, Glendale not Jewish at all. Brock-mont Drive, a winding road that climbed along a steep hillside, looked nothing like my neighborhood of square streets: Hauser, Curson, Spaulding. No sidewalks in Glendale. No Pico, the big boulevard at the end of my block, crowded with shops. Where were the delis like Joe and Ann’s, the kosher butchers, banks, and beauty shops?