<p>I don’t know if this book club is going to take off but I did want to tell you that it was springboard for a great conversation with my mom this past weekend. Yabeyabe’s post made me wonder about my family’s immigration experience. My mother was visiting this weekend so I asked her about it. There were some interesting correlations with the book.</p>
<p>Mom told me that her mother’s family was poor. When they left Turkey for the US in the early 1900’s they had been told that the streets in America had gold and money. So they did not arrive to the conditions they were expecting. I don’t know what the Jewish experience was in Turkey, I just know that family on all sides left and eventually ended up in the US. Grandma who was living with her married sister was told that she had to get married because sister couldn’t afford to keep her anymore. So the prevailing sentiment in the book that women didn’t live alone was true for her as well. Grandma was working at the time. Apparently there was another man Grandma was interested in but that relationship wasn’t progressing quickly enough and one way or another she ended up with Grandpa. </p>
<p>Mom said that her mother’s sister was the favorite with my great grandmother and that when my grandma got married, her family didn’t have anything to give her, “not even a quilt”. In Bread Givers Sara’s mother brought her a feather bed. It seemed like at the time there might have been some significance to this as a gift. Of all the items my mother might have mentioned the quilt was the only article she did. I guess it could also be a coincidence.
The sense of duty to take care of parents was also present in my family. My mother told me that grandma’s sister had died so great grandma lived with mom’s family inspite of the strained relations between great grandma and grandma. As Mom’s story went whenever Grandma and Grandpa argued Great Grandmother sided with grandpa. I expect there was some dysfunction in this family as well.</p>
<p>I didn’t know that mom’s family initially lived in a lower east side tenemant. I learned that they moved to the Bronx after an incident in which my uncle jumped on the back of a pickup and grandma decided that he would be killed if they didn’t leave the area. I expect there are a few holes in the story but still interesting.</p>
<p>She also gave me the impression that the American Dream was alive and well in her family. Grandpa initially worked in a factory when she was small, I don’t know if any fingers were actually lost but Grandpa decided this work was too dangerous and that his fingers might get cut off. He quit is job and became a street vendor selling fruit. He eventually opened a small store that sustained the family without any memories of hunger throughout the depression.</p>
<p>It was lovely conversation that I know would not have happened if not for this thread!</p>
<p>Spectrum, what aninteresting story! I have often wished that I had videotaped for posterity my grandparents and parents recollections of their childhoods (my wife and I have not videotaped ours, either, although they are less interesting).</p>
<p>FYI, if you have not been there recently, a lot of the NYC Lower East Side is now very trendy and filled with clubs, restaurants, boutiques, etc</p>
<p>Finished the book last night. As literature, it wasn’t great – the three “parts” in the book were so distinct they might as well not have been part of the same work. I found it unrealistic at the end that the father would wind up selling chewing gum on the street. He never worked for anything in his life; he wouldn’t have started at the end of his life. Lots of holes in the story itself, I guess, but I still enjoyed reading it. </p>
<p>The protagonist is to be commended for working as hard as she did and making it. This really was a story about a feminist. It also was a droll commentary on the religious father as stereotype of someone who thinks about the next life but does nothing to survive in this life. I really wanted to bash him for his narcissistic, thinking-he-deserved-respect view of himself.</p>
<p>spectrum, how interesting and I think that it is great that this book triggered a conversation with your family!
When you mentioned the street vendor, I was reminded of a family story: my mother’s uncle had three pushcarts from which he sold fruit. One daughter sold fruit at one end of Hester Street; another sold fruit at the other end, and both priced the fruit higher than the uncle, who sold fruit in the middle of the street. The customers did not know that they were all under the same ownership, but they thought that they were getting a bargain from my great uncle, who would then resupply his pushcart from the other two pushcarts! My mother gives his daughters credit for thinking of this idea. Yiddishe cup as my grandfather used to say!</p>
<p>It’s actually “Yiddisher kop” and it literally means “Jewish head.” So it suggests that your great-uncle was very smart for figuring out this little trick!!</p>
<p>March 25 marks an important date in American and American Jewish history specifically, the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in NYC, where 146 workers, mostly poor Jewish women, died. Triangle: The Fire that Changed America, is a good book. It is a good reminder of how recent the stereotype of affluent American Jews is.</p>
<p>Yes, I was just transliterating from my grandfather’s pronunciation - we will get different English spellings depending on the accent in Yiddish. In my family, the word for “head” was pronounced “cup” or “cupela” if one were talking to a child, as in “Watch your cupela”. I think that my grandfather was actually incapable of the short “o” sound, and an “r” after a vowel did not exist in words - I remember him telling me that the train went through “Yunkes” (Yonkers!)</p>
<p>I remember when a national spelling bee contestant lost on the word “hechsher”, and I wondered how there could be a correct English spelling of a transliterated word.</p>
<p>I think that yabeyabe’s suggestion is good - and then after that book we can move on from the Lower East Side.</p>
<p>Levirm: The culopla was a word I also heard growing up but the pronunciation I heard was “kepela”, and it was affectionacted called “kepie”. I had up until now thought it was a derivative of Ladeno but I also distinctly remember the word “cavesa” being used. I believe that would be the Ladino word, really close to Spanish “cabesa”. Perhaps my family learned it pushing those push carts :). Now I’ve got to ask my mom where her dad’s Lower East Side pushcart area was!</p>
<p>What do I do when I can’t fall asleep? I sign on to cc!</p>
<p>I want to let you all know that on Sunday Mornings, from 9am-10:30am there is a program on CBS called (what else) CBS Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood. It used to be with Charles Kuralt before he passed away. It’s a show about culture, theatre, books, current headlines, etc. Anyway, it’s technically already Monday, so yesterday there was a segment on all about the Triangle Fire tragedy.</p>
<p>Ok - I’ve ordered my copy - it sounds very engrossing and certainly an appropriate time to revisit this tragedy as we are at the 100 year anniversary. Thank Yabeyabe.</p>
<p>Thanks, yabeyabe. I requested it from the library and it looks available for delivery to my branch. I would suggest that all who are going to do it this way do it soon before all of this news coverage causes a long wait for the book.</p>
<p>Those who get HBO should be on the alert for a show this week on the Triangle Fire. Anyone living or visiting near NYC should know that the the original building is still standing–there will be a memorial there Tuesday. It is right next to NYU.</p>
And that’s about all the Yiddish I know!!</p>