Maybe it was the years of having hidden her Black friends from her mother, or the friends my mom was ordered to unfriend because they were known to have committed some crime in Rose’s estimation, of having dared to be different, maybe it was an unspoken fear of her mother’s wrath should she ever find out what her life had been like in California… This wasn’t the first time this had happened but it was the first time it broke my mom. “Shvartze,” comes out of her clenched teeth, a Yiddish word for someone who is Black, in this case used in a derogatory way. Rose’s jaw is wired shut, but this doesn’t prevent her insulting non-Jews. Phil comes out of the accident without injury.Ī few days later, in a post-hospital state of recuperation, my mom and Rose are sitting at the vinyl-covered kitchen table in her childhood home, talking. My mom and Rose end up in the hospital with minor injuries, my mom with stiches over her left eye and broken ring finger and Rose with a broken jaw. Suddenly, the car swerves into a tree and turns over. Her father, Phil, is driving and her mother is sleeping in the front seat. She is in the backseat of her parents’ car, no seat belt, on the way home to the Jewish enclave of Pelham Parkway, in the Bronx. In this story, my mom is in her early twenties (in 1967) and has just returned from her year in California, temporarily living with her parents. Rose was the doting grandmother (to my older cousins) and she was also a person who never stopped holding a grudge, who had a certain idea of how things should be and G-d help you if you didn’t fit into her vision.Īll my mom heard, growing up, was about Jews being the best, the chosen people, about protecting Israel, raising money for Israel, and my adolescent mother would think, “What about everyone else in the world? Why are we any better than anyone else?” Though I never met my grandmother Rose, I “remember” her through stories. But there is one story my mom told more than once about her mother, Rose. When I was little, we almost never talked about race.
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