An old story - The Jewish Standard

Our ancestors arrived here in America firmly believing that this was the Goldena Medina, a golden land, a land of milk and honey, free of oppression, offering us unlimited opportunity.

And do you know what? They were largely correct. We Jews have thrived here. Let me tell you some of the tales of my own grandparents, Kalman and Rifka Litwak and Isadore and Peshka Bauman.

When I drive down Aldine Street in Newark’s Weequahic section I think of Zayda, Kalman Litwak, a man who arrived in this country from Poland in the very early 20th century, around 1905. He had nothing material to his name and he knew he had to leave Europe. When he left he was already the father of three very young children; two more were in utero. One of those twins was my father, who was named Yisrael. In America he became known as Sam. Kalman departed for family in Passaic, leaving Rifka, for whom I am named, to manage a tiny grocery store, and her children, without him.

Five years after his arrival in New Jersey, Zayda was able to bring over his family, his wife and their five children; by then he was already on his way to fulfilling the American dream. He had become a builder and a real estate investor. Years later, when I accompanied my father to pick up Zayda’s tenants’ monthly rent, mostly along Newark’s Springfield Avenue, it never occurred to me that collecting rent was not something Zayda would have been doing in the shtetl near Bialystok. That rent money was earned from his ceaseless commitment to hard work and shrewd investing, all without benefit of the English language. Zayda did business strictly in Yiddish. I do not know how. I do know, however, that my own primitive Yiddish language skills are extant because it was the only way to communicate with my grandfather.

It was on Aldine Street that we grandkids learned more about Zayda’s ambition and business acumen. Five of us lived with our parents in one of the two houses that Zayda built, one at 83 and one at 48. Each was a four-family house and each was the most attractive house on the block. Each was built with great attention to detail, so carefully that they both stand proudly until this day. I often think of the creature comforts and attributes of those houses, both Tudor style, featuring intricate stained glass windows in the living rooms, marvelous walk-in pantries, so spacious and convenient that I wish I had one today, luxurious entrance foyers, and handsome brick stoops. The house that our family lived in, at 83, today is structurally sound and lovely to look at, spiffed up by its present owner with trendy flat-finish dark gray aluminum siding. I yearn to go in and visit our family’s apartment. I have yet to work up the courage to ask the present occupants for admittance.

My mother’s father and mother arrived in the U.S. a few years later. They were also penniless immigrants, parents of two sons. Mom was born in Brooklyn and was fluent in Yiddish, the lingua franca of most of the Jewish immigrants, as well as English, her native tongue. Ambition coursed through their veins, especially my grandmother Peshka’s. She had known creature comforts in Europe, being the daughter of a prosperous doctor, and she was driven to provide her children with decent lifestyles.

While Pop was content with a meager salary as a presser in the garment industry, Peshka worked toward financial security and the funds to send her middle child to dental school. Uncle Charlie became a graduate of the NYU Dental School and went on to become an orthodontist. Mom was able to go to Brooklyn College. Thus, in a period spanning a short few years, the family had arrived! Two children went to college and they became owners of a brownstone on Vernon Avenue in Bed-Stuy and a hotel in Parksville, New York.

Just the other day I had a conversation with one of our grandsons, a Yale graduate. I told him that his great-grandparents owned a Brooklyn brownstone. His eyes lit up! He’s a Brooklyn resident, born in New Jersey, living in a new luxury apartment in Crown Heights. Brooklyn, as we all now know, is a hot area for young affluent college grads, and I promise you that his apartment comes with more creature comforts than any brownstone, features like central air conditioning, heat and hot water that do not require kindling a stove, doormen, modern kitchens with actual cabinets, and refrigerators and dishwashers…..just to name a few. He still yearns for a brownstone, like his great-grandparents sold for a pittance long before he was born.

Yes, this Goldena Medina delivered on its promises. Most of our Jewish families are pretty successful. The ultimate question, of course, is will America continue to sustain us, to grant us peace, tranquility, and lives free of the kind of fear that many of us are now experiencing for the first time. There are signs and symptoms of a new wave, an antidemocratic wave, a wave where rights and law have become secondary to official power, and where dictatorship seems a genuine possibility. It’s not yet clear that we Jews can continue to prosper and grow in this new environment. As we have in the past, we are once again seriously facing uncertainty. Complacency has no place in our present lives as American Jews.

Rosanne Skopp of West Orange is a wife, mother of four, grandmother of 14, and great-grandmother of nine. 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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