Jenny and Celia

Gramma Celia at the beach looked like a Bedouin wrapped in robes and blankets covering every inch of her lily white body. On her nose, over the protective white stuff that she also wore smeared across her cheeks and any other parts of her that were likely to escape her burqa and be exposed to the dreaded sun, she added a plastic nose cap for extra protection. Jenny and Celia were at war from the minute their children married each other. They both came from approximately the same neighborhood. Jenny from a farming area near Odessa and Celia from a shtetl near Minsk. Jenny was a “peasant” and Celia was the daughter of a Rav—a rabbi. Jenny was a communist, a secular Jew who observed the holidays and life cycles. She spoke Russian and Yiddish and heavily accented English and was literate in all three. Celia, who came from a traditional family, spoke only Yiddish (a little Polish and less Russian) and English. She could read the Forverts (The Jewish Daily Forward in Yiddish) but I don’t think she could write very well in any language and her reading of anything other than Yiddish or really simple English was halting. Jenny was a worldly woman who continued to support her family and have boyfriends after divorcing her p hilandering husband when he impregnated the “polishaka” seamstress in her sweat shop (that replicated couturier fashions). Celia ran a tiny luncheonette, candy store in Detroit where husband Harry worked for Ford motor having been recruited straight off the boat. After Harry died in his early sixties—Celia moved near us and worked for Lofts making candy for a while and then came to live with us and ate white food, farina and fish potato soup that had long ago stopped containing fish and occasionally noodles and cottage cheese. Jenny stuck it out with the communist party marching against a variety of causes advocating for support of the Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil war until her son, my uncle Dave ran away to join up. And later joined Mother’s March for Peace and the progressive party during her California years. She officially resigned from the party after the Prague Spring. But was still hunted down by McCarthy in the fifties and only just avoided deportation by the fact that her then husband (Jack Stark) had a life threatening heart condition. She was a lifetime follower of Adele Davis and made us meatloaf with “veet joims,” wheat germs I found this article while checking on the exact title for the Yiddish newspaper. “100 Years Ago in the Forward” “Forsyth Street resident Feige Gabeh, 20, disappeared this week and is rumored to be in hiding with Joe Shuster, a former border in her parents’ home who also disappeared from his wife and two children. Shuster and Gabeh, who knew each other from the Old Country, were having an affair under the noses of Gabeh’s parents, who took Shuster in because he was a landsman. When Shuster’s wife and children came over from Russia, he moved out of the Gabeh’s apartment and into a room on Allen Street. Gabeh continued to visit him and became close friends with his wife, too. But neighbors began to talk, saying that Gabeh and Shuster were too close and that it would end badly, which it apparently has.” Jersey City, 2020; Provincetown, 2024