Essential Yiddish: Part II

 

                                                    "Yiddish" in Yiddish 

I've been meaning to write a follow up to my post, Essential Yiddish: Part I, for quite some time. Not that I'm some kind of Yiddish expert. It's just that, having grown up with Yiddish swirling around my suburban Skokie house, listening to my mother give colorful commentary on everyone who walked in and out of our lives, I can't imagine life without it. Yiddish, to use a Yiddish word, is poonkt - a Yiddish word for getting something just right, perfectly, even if we're talking about my house, which is never actually just right or perfect.

                                                   The Yiddish Hoarder

The other day I was watching "Hoarders: Buried Alive." When the show was over I suddenly noticed that I hadn't seen my master bathtub in quite a while because of all the chazerai [haz-er-eye] (junk) I had piled in it. This was because I had taken that chazerai out of my closet and needed somewhere to put it. It's a constantly shifting pile of drek (see Post #1) around here, basically.

Since I was watching Hoarders with Daughter, a true nudnik [nood-nick] (precocious child), she noticed the resemblance between the house on the TV set and my bathroom. She said, "Mom, you're a hoarder!"

I took a deep breath. Instead of shraying [shrie-ing] (yelling) about it, moaning about it, wailing about it, I looked around and I thought, I need all that chazerai like a loch in kopp (hole in my head). But I wasn't sure I'd have the coyach [koy-ach] (energy) to do all the cleaning myself. So I asked the kleina [klayna] (little one) nudnik to help and Bar Mitzvahzilla, who, with all his football training, has become quite the shtarker (heavy lifter, tough guy).

And soon, though I was farmisht (exhausted); though I thought I might plotz (collapse) - the tub? Gornisht [gor-neesh-ed] (nothing). Empty.

Do you have things laying around that you need like a hole in your head? Do you find yourself using one of your kids for heavy lifting and that they have to help you now instead of vice versa? Do you have a secondary language that adds some color to your speech?

Eight Greedy Nights

Well the eight days of Chanukah are over at sundown today.  It's been exhausting.

Because I had such a ludicrous Jewish upbringing, I've always tried to make my kids' Jewish holidays incredible, including Chanukah.

My Chanukah as a kid:  all the motley crew of cousins come over - there are the foolish cousins and the egghead cousins, the bucktoothed cousins and the Bryl creamed cousins.  Some of them are actually being raised Jewish and expect that there will be a lit menorah.  My mom is under pressure now.  She has to pretend she's raising us Jewish.  She has to find our menorah and candles. 

She snakes her arm into the cabinet above our stove and finds what passes for a menorah in our house:  a miserable, metal, tilting thing that Goodwill would throw out.  Then she snakes her arm up there again and finds a box of candles.  Since it's stored above the stove, the candles are melted together into one blob.  It's a candle brick now, and she has to snap off the candles that she needs, one by one. Broken candle shards.

My mother, being Old Country, is mystified by the idea of Hanukkah presents. When pressed, she enlists the aid of my grandfather.  He gets a great idea, laboriously rises on his diabetic legs and fishes around in a pocket so big it's like Mary Poppins' purse - I'm thinking he'll probably pull out a floor lamp. He comes up Eisenhower dollars all around. Chanukah gelt.

I go off to school very excited by this whole gigantic silver dollar thing, this whole Zayda as Mary Poppins thing, this whole mystery of the blessing over the candles thing. I'm confronted, however, by the children of non-immigrant families all showing up with presents identical to each others, like they had coordinated it or something.  They all have lovely Jewish stars on necklaces.

Flash forward to parenthood.  Flash forward to eight greedy nights.  The kids and I set up an elaborate eight-day calendar every year, Bar Mitzvahzilla on one line and Daughter on the other, the days of the week on the top. Then we assign themes. Not all are gift nights, one is tzedakah night, where we give to others, and another is menorah night, where we light just about every menorah in the house and start a veritable conflagration. Last night, the lighter not working, Husband helpfully lit a blow torch to help me light the menorahs.

Flash forward to a lifetime of lists now that are like a time capsule of my kids' lives:  Lego Day, Spiderman Day, Hello Kitty Day, High School Musical Day, and now, much to my chagrin, Xbox Day and Moshi Monster Day.
 
And flash forward to the thing I love the best:  my light up menorahs sitting on my front window sills lighting up our windows just a little, telling the world about the miracle of Chanukah.

An Immigrant Thanksgiving

Because we were a family of immigrants, we never got Thanksgiving quite right when I was a kid in Skokie.  It's not that we didn't want to give thanks - trust me, being a family of Holocaust Survivors welcomed to the United States post-war, there was no shortage of thanks.  The problem was the food. We just didn't understand the food.

We understood turkey. We preferred chicken, but, fine.  Turkey could be dealt with.  It was a kosher animal, after all.  No problem with the turkey.  The problem with my family were always the other dishes, like the desserts, which we grouped in our minds as not quite Jewish. 

Pumpkin pie? No. Dessert to us was only coffee cake and it was never actually sliced.  It was served the exact same way it is now:  put in the center of a table of hungry, dieting women all holding forks and, voila, ten minutes later it's gone.  Pecan pie? We were firm about this.  Absolutely the only nuts in our family were humans - all the strange inbred Jews who emigrated as one block, hairnets on their heads, frowns on their faces, purses stiffly carried from room to room, no English. I spent years not knowing whom one woman was who came to every party on my mother's side.  Finally I asked.  She was one of my aunts. 

My mother's now been in the U.S. for sixty years; we should know how to do this by now.  But today, at our Thanksgiving dinner, besides all the other stuff, here's what I saw:  Turkey, Matzah Ball soup, Challah. Is this some kind of immigrant Thanksgiving?  Or maybe we're half pilgrim and half Jewish, half American and half Lithuanian, even after all this time.  Happy Thanksgiving.

Apple of My Eye

My daughter is very thin. People look at from Husband to me and back again and then declare without any qualms that she gets her thinness from Husband.  Apparently, my body is teeming at its restraints, just waiting for me to overeat one day at which point it will suddenly bulge out and I'll be wearing a wardrobe of circus tents.  When I was fat I used to go to Weight Watchers - twelve years in a row without ever achieving Lifetime Member status - and the leader would say, "You didn't gain it in a month, you're not going to lose it in a month!"  But she didn't know me.  I did gain my weight in a month, each time.

But not my kids.  Daughter's weight, for example, hasn't changed in a couple years, and it's a weird weight, 59 pounds.  Every time she gets on the scale, exactly 59 pounds. And her hunger is odd.  She's not just hungry before meals, that would be too normal.  Instead, she stands up after meals full but then immediately announces that she's hungry again.  I say, "What? You just told me you were full!"  And she says, "I'm full of what I just ate, but now I'm hungry for something else."  The strange, twisted labyrinth of the ten-year-old mind - both full and hungry at the same time.

In the immigrant household in which I grew up, there were none of these nuances.  We sat and ate with our only desire being how quickly we could escape from our mother's constant food pushing.  She stood by the table, waiting for a plate to empty - like a vulture perched overhead - and then swooped in to fill it immediately.  This is how a few of my sisters ended up chubby; the skinny sisters ran from the table as her spoon was descending. And it didn't help that dinner was the standard Eastern European Jewish diet:  anything made out of rendered fat, or out of animal parts that we weren't sure were actually edible.

There was no eating after dinner was done. Mom shut down the kitchen, like it was a store. And anyway, being an immigrant, she didn't understand the concept of desserts.  In her small town in Eastern Europe there were no such fancy concepts as "desserts."  You ate or you starved, nothing in between.  If she was feeling extravagant, fine, we could have an apple.  Wildly extravagant?  Fine, she'd bake some apples.

So Daughter finishes another meal tonight, announces that she's full.  Stands up.  Walks over to me a second later and tells me she's hungry.  What can she eat?  I don't even try to offer her more of our dinner.  I say, "Baked apples?"

Give Me All Your Pop

I go to a party at my sister's house.  My mother is planted like a tree in a chair at the head of the table.  She is not going to move an inch all night. 

It is true that at our family parties, a chair is hard to come by.  Once you get one, you need to stake it out, make it your own.  You leave it at your peril.  Sometimes, annoyingly, the two skinniest sisters will show up and insist on sharing the chair with you. 

So, since my mother is ensconced on her throne, she needs to be waited on hand and foot.  Someone who doesn't have a chair to maintain and occupy needs to get my mom's food.  Later, another chairless person needs to get my mom's dessert.  Suddenly, she eyes me up.

"Linda, give me some of your pop!"  She pushes a coffee cup across the table at me.

Of course she's using a coffee cup because, to my mother, anything is a drinking vessel.  In Skokie we never had a matched glass in our house.  We had drinking glasses that were one of two things:  either they were yahrzeit candles - memorial candles - after the wax had been burned off, morbidly being used by the living, or they were from the S&H green stamp catalogue and we had broken most of the set.

I dutifully pour her some pop.  Suddenly, she screeches, "Stop!  That's too much!" after I pour an inch.

Then a minute later.  "Linda!  More pop!"  She thrusts the coffee cup at me.  I give her a baleful glare.  I only have the one can of pop and I also can't leave my chair.  I'm guarding it.  But, she's my mom so I pour.  Again she shrieks for me to stop.

And then a minute later she does it again.  "Linda!  More p-"

My head whips around.  This is worse than taking care of a two-year-old.  I take my can and put it in front of her.  Finally!  She got the whole thing away from me.  She happily empties it into the coffee cup.

Crowned

Since I'm slowly turning into my mother, it was only a matter of time until I acted just like her when shopping.

Since I'm a compulsive shopper, I somehow always think of something to go shopping for after my morning exercise class. This is my favorite way to waste the rest of my morning and put off chores and writing. And anyway, I have a coupon. Of course, I have many coupons from being every store's favorite customer. So I get to the store and shop. I have a goal: I have to hit $75 in order to validate the coupon. I end up buying some longish, fleece shorts for Skinny Stick Daughter in a size seven even though she's ten-years-old. Even though they're a size seven, I'm still not sure they're going to fit her, but if I go any smaller than a seven I'll end up in the toddler department.

I bring them home and she puts the first pair on. I look at her admiringly. They look fantastic! I'm aglow. Not only that, but after the coupon and the sale price and the incentives and the other markdowns, the store practically paid me to take them away! They cost $3.52 each! I'm kvelling at my genius and how gorgeous she looks in them!

Daughter, however, gives me a deadpan look. She touches the rhinestone accents gingerly, wrinkles up her nose, and says, "A Princess crown, Mom?" Like that's all she needs to say. I mean really. Don't I know that all that Princess stuff ended for her a long time ago? If it ever even started. She's more of a Tom boy/girl. She can't show her face at school with a crown on her clothes.

I'm crestfallen. "But they only cost $3.52 after the coupon! The purple pair cost $2.65!" But she's unmoved. She shakes her head. "No, Mom."

Of course, it's inevitable that I've turned into my own mother, the 1960s Jewish shopaholic. My mom's idea of a really good time was to load all seven of her daughters into her 1965 Chevy Nova and take us down to Turn Style, Skokie's version of Walmart.

The first thing she'd do once we walked in Turn Style was to steal all the Brach's Candies from the display. My mother didn't understand the idea that all this Brach's Candy was sitting there on a kiosk, unsecured, yet not free for the taking. To her if it wasn't behind a counter, that meant it was free. When she was done with that, we'd all fan out, the seven of us going off to different departments until we all reconvened at customer service hours later. One of us would have to skulk up to the counter and ask the customer service person to page mom since, invariably, we'd have lost her somewhere in the store.

If I found clothes I liked, I had to lope through all the aisles of the store searching for her in the vain hope that she would actually spend money on something that wasn't food or shelter. With five older sisters and one younger, and a mother who sewed, let's just say that new clothes wasn't exactly what we showed up at the Turn Styles register to buy. We showed up with fabric. And empty Brach's wrappers.

So, of course, my daughter doesn't know it, but she has it good. And, she doesn't know how appropriate that crown probably is.

My Hurricane

I used to have a really organized house.

When Bar Mitzvahzilla was little, we had him firmly under control. We had a bunch of plastic buckets of various sizes and each one was designated for a certain type of toy. There were buckets for cars, for blocks, for Legos, and one for action figures. There were a lot of buckets.

He had an amazing memory for the minute. If I picked up the tiniest Lego connector piece and said, "Where does this belong?" I could watch as his brain would go click click click and, like a computer, he'd figure it out. He'd say, "That goes with my Star Wars Death Star Lego set." And if I asked him where that was, he'd go to his room, pick up a Darth Vader helmet, 5 light sabers, 3 swords and 5 Bionicals, and find it.

Then the hurricane came into our lives. Our daughter was born.

She looked like a normal baby. 6 pounds, 9 ounces. Not a preemie like her brother. She slept a lot the first year. Little did I know that she was just storing up energy to bring the house down around our ears.

She was the nicest baby. A sweet, charming baby. Chubby with big red cheeks. Everyone who saw her - or at least anyone who was Jewish who happened to see her - said, "Oy, such a Yiddishe Punim!" Which meant that she had a beautiful little Jewish face - yes, chubby with big, red cheeks.

And then she turned one.

We were at a restaurant one day with her in a high chair and everything was pretty normal. She was putting all the olives on her fingers like fake fingernails, but nothing too odd. Suddenly, she stood up in the high chair. Apparently she had decided to leave. Alone. While walking into mid-air. That was the end of our halcyon days. I'm not sure she's ever sat down or stopped screaming yet.

My mother doesn't understand my leniency. She tells me, "Don't let her play! Tell her to stay in her room! Did you ever have toys all over the house in Skokie?"

Well, no Mom, as a matter of fact, I didn't. My mother ran a tight ship in Skokie. Despite having seven girls, there was never any evidence of us around. We were only allowed to play on the hard linoleum tile of our laundry room, but even there - in a room with a furnace, a laundry chute, and sponge-painted walls - everything had to be put away at bedtime. She wasn't raising kids, she was raising a house.

My house shows the effect of the hurricane to whom I gave birth nearly ten years ago. All spots at the table are neat and tidy except hers, which has a pile of crumbs on the floor beneath it. Nine forks have been thrown out with paper plates. Not one of her toys has ever made it into that neurotic toy bin system we once had. Her bed nearly rises from the ground with all she has hidden beneath it. Sometimes she surprises me by showing up out of her room dressed in a lab coat with a feather boa, a stethoscope, and a Magnadoodle briefcase, then setting up an office in our dining room. An office I don't disturb.

At night I go in to check on her and kiss her, if I can find her beneath the pile of stuffed animals. She lays there, her Yiddishe punim cheeks glowing, the hurricane gathering strength during the night to wreak havoc again in the morning.