A love story - The Jewish Standard

I thought they were getting divorced.

I was 10 years old, and they were both in the kitchen at our home on Aldine Street in Newark. The kitchen was big and old fashioned and had been the setting for numerous arguments that I called fights. Point being that all of those battles were between my sister and me — we found endless topics to disagree about. Was she wearing my socks? Did I use the last of the Heinz ketchup? Was she hogging the one and only phone in our household? Trivial all the way, and not worthy of remembering. So, why do I remember?

This fight was decidedly different. It was between my parents. They were arguing with each other. It wasn’t loud or violent. I suppose the word I’d use today is sad. They both sounded sad. But not as sad as I was. I pictured Dad moving out and our family life disintegrating. I was very frightened.

I had never heard them argue before that moment. I assumed that parents had nothing ever to disagree about since mine were always unified in everything. It never occurred to me that grown-ups might do battle with one another. This was something I had never before witnessed.

Today I have no recollection about the subject of their dispute. It was quickly over and forgotten, except by me. It was the only time in my entire life, from my birth until Mom died in Herzliya at age 85, that I ever heard a critical word pass between them, unless you count the endless times she urged him to stop smoking cigars. He would say she was nagging and he would just ignore it and continue smoking. But those were never noisy spats. They were really signs of love and tolerance, expected daily reminders that they were in love and cared about each other.

I suppose those concluding years in Israel were among their best. With Dad retired, they had endless hours together every day. They shopped together and walked to shul together and made meals together and filled their days reading and playing gin rummy, for money. The winner, usually Dad, had quite an impressive tab, which was never paid but whose bookkeeping was always impeccable. Dad had come from a family of card players, so Mom learned to follow his ways. Back in Newark she had had her regular Monday night women’s poker game with her closest friends, all die-hard Hadassah ladies (Henrietta Szold chapter).

In Israel, they also focused on the Friday night dinner menu. It was a given that every Friday night they would prepare a lavish spread for the entire family, my sister Janet, and her husband, Zeev, and their kids, Tali and Ilan, plus their dog of the decade, Yogi being the last. We were often part of the crowd with whichever of our brood was staying with us at our Rehov Chana Senesh apartment, a short walk away. Mom would prepare her old favorites with Dad as a willing, and even eager, sous chef. We would sit down to a beautifully set table and an elaborate meal, starting always with the brachot and proceeding to an appetizer that Mom, a serious student of French who always struggled with Hebrew, called an entree. That was often some iteration of liver but at other times it would be more exotic, something delicious like lung and miltz (spleen), no longer available in the U.S. but incredibly delicious, or sweetbreads with mushrooms. At that point the menu for the following Shabbat would enter the discussion and someone would always entertain the thought that maybe we should focus on the meal in front of us rather than worrying about next week’s. Mom mastered all of these delicacies as a young woman and had an elaborate collection of favorites that she always proclaimed were “so easy” to make.

Mom and Dad met via the Bauman House route. It had to be a match made on someone’s as yet nonexistent computer, since it was hopelessly impossible that these two would get together. Nonetheless they did, luckily for all of us. Dad, from Passaic, at the time was living in California, a journey he had made by himself during the years of the Great Depression. He had neither car nor money, so he described the generosity of the Salvation Army (saving his Jewish body if not claiming his Jewish soul) in providing him with overnight lodging. He hitchhiked. He found odd jobs and was in Los Angeles for a long segue when his elder sister Edna wrote that she had met his bashert. Edna was working at the small hotel and admired the owners’ daughter, a slender and beautiful young woman called Ida.

Ida and Sam had little in common. She was an intellectual, a student of humanities at Brooklyn College, an admirer of Victorian poetry, great fiction, opera, and art. He was less formally educated, a graduate of the school of life and self-sufficiency, a man who could change a flat tire in five minutes and read only non-fiction, which he did constantly. She was verbose and outgoing. He was quiet and private. She was the youngest of an immigrant family with two older doting brothers. He was the fourth child of six, sharing his birth with a twin sister whose general exuberance accentuated his own taciturn personality.

They started by writing letters. For three years their letters traveled across the United States, without pause. Finally they met and put the stamp of approval on that love that they had embraced in their mail. They were married, a marriage that lasted 65 years in simple peace and abiding adoration.

No, my friends, the 10-year-old me was entirely wrong. The marriage made in Parksville might have been made in heaven. It was only death that separated Ida from Sam, and they lie peacefully together in a corner of the Herzliya Cemetery. May they rest in peace.

Rosanne Skopp of West Orange is a wife, mother of four, grandmother of 14, and great-grandmother of 12. She is a graduate of Rutgers University and a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. She is a lifelong blogger, writing blogs before anyone knew what a blog was! She welcomes email at rosanne.skopp@gmail.com

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