Memories of My Mother on This Mother's Day

My mother died almost 60 years ago, when I was sixteen and my brothers were twelve and ten.

She was born a century ago in Frankfurt-am-Main Germany to a mercantile family of secular Jews who identified as much German as Jew.  Her father and brothers owned a handbag factory.  They had a chauffeur.  Her father had been a front kampfer (front-line soldier) in World War I.  We have the medal and certificate he received from Chancellor Hindenburg, and the family assumed he would be immune from the Nazis.  Nevertheless, he was arrested on Kristallnacht.  Years later, she wrote about the events he witnessed in a story I retold at my son's Bar Mitzvah in 1987. (You can click to read it)

After leaving Germany in June, 1939, with her family, my mother worked as a hotel maid and attended London College where she studied chemistry.  She met my father (whose remembrances I will recall on Father's Day next month) at a synagogue dance.  They were married in 1943.  She came to America on a Brides Ship.

I recall my mother being a typical nuclear-family mother of that time and a full-time housekeeper. She always respected others, even though she had a feeling that her family was better than others.

I'm guilty of "presentism" when I recall her paradoxical treatment of "negroes."  My first-grade class had two Black children, Stanley and Wilma.  The teacher sent notes home to the parents instructing everyone to bring in a quarter to pay for an "El" ticket so we could visit the airport.  My mother gave me extra quarters because somehow she had heard that Stanley and Wilma didn't have the money.  On the other hand, like many others in our 1952 neighborhood of three-bedroom, 1200-square-feet houses in Northeast Philly, she had help from a "girl" (a Black woman), who came to the house once or twice a week for eight dollars a day plus carfare.

She made sure her boys learned to read before kindergarten, and I still recall her coming home from parents' night one time and saying that Ms. X would never give me another B in math after she had been browbeaten.

My mother died from cancer in 1965, which spread to her brain.  She collapsed at the dinner table in front of all of us.  I still remember calling the fire department by dialing 0 (911 didn't exist then) and telling them to come.  They asked me what was wrong, and I could not bring myself to say she had cancer.

Whenever I feel unlucky, I remember my mother's life, the good and bad and how things can change.