Clara's Stories: 1913-21 Early Memories of My Siblings*

           

In the early decades of the twentieth century, some professional photographers traveled the neighborhoods, bringing ponies to fancy up the pictures. Families paid extra to show off the kids on and around the pony. “What a photo to send back to the family in the old country,” my mother would say, adding “Won’t they be impressed!”

After our family got a Kodak camera in 1924, we took our own photos, at home, at Lake Michigan, anywhere and everywhere. But before then on a few rare occasions, we had formal photographs taken by a professional photographer. In one, I’m sitting happily on a pony with a tooth gapped-grin on my face, wearing a long-sleeved slightly oversized white dress with a peter pan collar.

In front of me and the pony, my older brother George stands, wearing a white shirt, dark colored knickers and athletic shoes. Next to George are my “twin” older sisters Mary and Rose. They weren’t twins, but that’s what I called them. They were one year and a few months apart in age and different in stature and looks, but like twins they lived in their own shared world, to the exclusion of everyone else, especially me. The photo isn’t dated but I would guess I was 3 1/2, George 5, Rose, 6 1/2 and Mary 8. The twins are both in white knee length dresses, with white stockings and they are holding hands.  Around the same time, the twins, at the insistence of our fully Americanized same-age cousins, learned how to stop speaking English in a Yiddish sing-song kind of way. And the cousins taught them how to dress properly for school, in bright white starched and ironed blouses, clean pressed skirts, with their shoes polished daily. 

In another professional photograph, taken before I was born, a very young Rose and Mary stand side by side. Rose has a serious look on her face; Mary’s is more quizzical. Rose is fair skinned favoring Father’s coloring and has a chubby baby face and fat arms. Mary who is a bit taller than Rose is swarthy, taking after Mother and if once she had baby fat, it’s gone. They are wearing not-quite-matching white dresses that hang almost to their ankles and large white bows in their hair. Most likely these dresses, and the ones we girls are wearing a few years later in the pony picture, were bought to last through growth spurts and were saved to wear only on special occasions. Mary and Rose have almost identical brown leather high-top shoes and are holding little porcelain dolls, also dressed in white. Just like the pony, these dolls must have belonged to the photographer. At home all we had were Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls that Mother made out of old flour sacks.

The twins got to hold the dolls. I got to sit on the pony. Lucky me! Or maybe lucky them because in 1921 Mary and Rose had a second professional photograph taken of the two of them, dressed like twins in matching outfits, looking self-assured and a bit smug, especially Rose with her head cocked to the side.

Neither George or I, nor three-year-old Perle had our pictures taken professionally in 1921.

The twins had each other and I had George, who allowed me to tag along as soon as I could toddle after him. And shortly after George went to full-day school at age six in 1918, I had baby Perle who was born a few months later. From then on until I went to full-time school in 1920, I had Perle to play with. When she was a baby, Mother let me feed her and dress her and rock her and when she got a bit older, Perle toddled around after me.  Perle was so much better than a borrowed porcelain doll or the home-made Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls.

So, in our family among the siblings, Mary and Rose made a twosome. And for a time there was me and George, then there was me and Perle.

Thinking back to this sibling configuration, I realize this is how we stayed into our adult lives. Mary and Rose together, the married women with husbands and children. George the only boy making his way on his own. And me and Perle, the two unmarried spinsters palling around, that is until 1965 when Perle tragically died too young at age 47 and 1967 when I finally married for the first and only time at the ripe-old-age of 53. 

*Note: This is another story from Clara’s Stories: An Imagined Memoir Inspired by the Life of  Claire LeBrint Metzger.  At this time Clara's memoir is an on-going work in progress by Claire's niece Betsy Fuchs. 

The Clara Stories are dedicated to

Claire LeBrint Metzger, of blessed memory 

b 1914 - d 2002

The Spaciousness of Books (in the time of Covid)

Twenty-first century clutter traps me

fills my time and in a daze my days disappear

What with Facebook and Messenger and FaceTime, Twitter Email YouTube Wikipedia Blogs Podcasts Texting Internet Research and now due to Covid Zoom Gatherings and Facebook Events 

Twentieth century paper clutter is still around still abounds 
mail delivered daily: donation pleas, advertising come-ons

-- tossed out

magazines mailed monthly: AARP, Consumer Reports and more

-- kept in baskets

handouts printouts notes from classes, events, workshops, all on Zoom!

-- kept in files and piles (like my emails, maybe to read or to need later)

Yet in my house there are books

  on shelves

    on tables

      on night-stands

many old 
a few new

some purchased

-- before my library re-opened

now thankfully some from my library

some from friends

 -- cautiously carefully borrowed

Books with their solid feel

and their sometimes temporary status

I read them now

(unlike my Kindle long gone, its electronic books unread)

Books in the twenty-first century are

unique      a treat      rare

and when I curl up in a chair
  and hold a book

    and feel the paper

      and turn its pages

when I read and reread and mark parts I love

  with sticky notes or paperclips or highlighting

      or when I underline

my life is spacious and slow

in the old-fashioned twentieth century way

This poem published November 2018 at https://www.poetsandpatrons.net/

Revised Summer 2020 to reflect changes brought on by the Covid Sequester

Clara's Stories: 1914 Webbed Fingers*

I was born with webbed fingers and my immigrant mother was sure she had been punished by the evil eye for having left her mother Rosa Menkes in the “old country” at age eighteen, to come to America. Mother believed this even though Rosa insisted that she leave because pogroms against the Jews were getting worse.

I was the fourth child born to my young immigrant mother in six years. Her eldest two daughters, Mary 4 ½ and Rose 3, were finally able to watch out for each other. But her only son George was not yet 2.

I was born at home, in our cold-water flat on Chicago’s Jewish West side. The midwife announced, “It’s a girl!” Mother must have been disappointed that I wasn’t a second son, but I was healthy – wasn’t I? After the compulsory cutting of the cord and the slap on my tiny behind to get me breathing, the midwife counted my fingers and toes and it became apparent that the evil eye was present.

My tiny hands might have been closed into fists and if so, the midwife would have gently opened them and seen a pinkie finger, a tiny mass of finger/bone/skin and a thumb. The index, middle, and ring fingers were conjoined; the same with my other hand. Conjoined! Even if the midwife was familiar with this condition, she most likely would not have said it out loud to my exhausted mother. Perhaps nothing was said and there was some surreptitious pointing, or the midwife quickly wrapped me up in a blanket and handed me to Mother and figured that the awful truth would come out later.

My fingers were joined each to the next by a thin layer of skin, like the webbing you see between the bones in a bat’s wing. Each of my webbed fingers had two joints, not the “normal” three.

As early as 1902 surgery was being done to separate conjoined/webbed fingers . Some years later, it became the practice to do the surgery on children between 6 months and 2 years old. I must have had the surgery as a young child because my earliest memories, from age four or five, are of having ten fingers. But on each hand there were three stubby fingers, a few with nails, others without.  

It was my reality and I never asked nor did the family ever talk about my fingers. I’m sure the kids in the neighborhood and at school made fun of me. I don’t remember, or more likely I repressed the memories. I’d rather imagine that friends and strangers instead looked away and no one asked due to fear, embarrassment, politeness, whatever.

With my ten fingers, I can do most everything anyone else can including writing a readable script and typing the manuscript for this book! And still to this day, no one asks or talks about my fingers, which I must admit look a bit odd.

My fingers were the first of many disappointments Mother had with me. For her entire life I remained a single working woman and a dreamer, and as Mother frequently reminded me I never did anything she could kvell about to her family and friends.

It was sad very sad for me and Mother and for our relationship. I’ll get into the details along the way, but for now I’ll end my finger saga with an assessment of the two of us that I wrote in my journal in 1982, “I inherited my mother’s uncertain nervous system. In fact, a teacher, in about my second grade told me to tell my mother I was a ‘nervous wreck.’ And I did.”

Those who have known me a long time would tell you that I often get “nervoused up” over little and big things. But please don’t worry. To quote from that wonderful lyricist Steven Sondheim:

Good times and bum times
I've seen them all and, my dear
I'm still here

Yes my dears, I’m still here!

I finally married at age 53, two years after Mother died. In Dixon, Illinois, where I live with my husband Rolland Metzger, I’m a minor celebrity: a published writer, a newspaper reporter, and a gad-about who tries (and sometimes succeeds) in helping my fellow Dixonians with their life-problems.

-------

*Note: This is another story from Clara’s Stories: An Imagined Memoir Inspired by the Life of  Claire LeBrint Metzger.  At this time Clara's memoir is an on-going work in progress by Claire's niece Betsy Fuchs. Claire, the narrator of these imagined stories, writes them at age 80 in 1994 .

The Clara Stories are dedicated to

Claire LeBrint Metzger, of blessed memory 

b 1914 - d 2002