Pursuing passion after three generations

Humanist, May-June, 2005 by Wendy Orent

My great-grandmother Yente came to the United States in 1901. She lived in a tenement apartment in East New York, where she cleaned and boiled chickens every day. She had people to feed: her husband; her son-in-law, a short, stout fur trader with a wicked temper and a Rabelasian appetite; her daughter and three grandchildren; and an orphaned cousin named Heschel, who was a cabinetmaker and the gentlest of souls. Kosher chickens in those days had to be kashered (salted for a half hour, soaked in clear water for an hour) and then they had to be krilled.

To krill a chicken, you pour boiling water over it and scrape the skin until the surface coating of grease is gone and the chicken skin is dry and smooth. And you pluck out the pinfeathers--the ones that stick up from under the skin like shafts of miniature broken arrows. Sometimes you have to dig under the skin with tweezers or a knife to get them. There are also the delicate feathers, as thin as hairs, that are the most difficult to see. And lastly, there are the pulkes, the legs, with a ring of yellow scales at their base. These must be scraped off. Krilling a moderately dirty chicken can take two hours. Yente cooked these chickens every day. For a family of this size she must have made two or even three. "That's all we ever had to eat, boiled chicken, chicken in soup" says my mother now. "She wasn't much of a cook." Together, now, we are savagely glad of it. I love to think of the men in my family eating those boiled chickens, day after day after day.

"She was always quiet, she never talked at all," my uncle, the physician, remembers. "Come to think of it, she must have been depressed."

No wonder. Today, on my mother's ninety-second birthday, she tells me something I never knew: my great-grandmother, after whom I am named, was a writer. "They wouldn't let her write," says my mother, and I'm astounded. "Who wouldn't let her?" I ask. "Her family," says my mother, who, after this span of time, is foggy on the details. "They wouldn't let her write. She had to cook and clean. She was a woman."

But my great-grandmother wasn't just any woman: in the old country, Yente Pachata Friedman was the only woman on the council of Jewish elders in her village of Yednitz, Bessarabia (which is now Moldova). She was recognized there as brilliant and wise. Her husband Sender was a wealthy man who opened a store for her so she would have some outlet for her energies. Then they fled Bessarabia to the United States (though why they fled is Sender's story and not Yente's).

They came to Manhattan with rubles sewn into their coats--rubles that had no value in the United States. Sender had to establish himself all over again, this time as a fur dealer, hawking furs from store to store. My great-grandmother took the train every day to study English. But the train she took stopped running and she had to abandon her studies. "She was wild with grief," my mother remembers. I knew that story from childhood, but I never knew about Yente's writing.

At the age of eleven my grandmother Ida was put to work, standing on a stool in front of a washboard and tub she was otherwise too small to reach. The family took in laundry, and Ida scrubbed and rinsed it all day long. The money from the laundry went to bring other family members over from Bessarabia. Yente couldn't do all the work alone, and she had only my grandmother to help her. As a child this image of my grandmother standing before the washboard haunted me, and I held it against Yente in my heart that she enslaved her daughter.

But the cycle of enslavement stopped there. My grandmother in her time chased my mother out of the kitchen. She wouldn't let her do any housework at all; only occasionally was my mother permitted to dust the living room, a task she loved. My mother, who was a quiet, studious, poised child, lived for the six books she could take out every week from the library. She came home every Friday carrying her books to a house even more immaculate than usual for Shabbat--to the smell of cookies baking in the oven. My grandmother would give her warm cookies, and she would while away the afternoon nibbling and reading. After my mother finished college my grandmother, who had only a third-grade education, informed her that she would now get a master's degree. And so she did--at Columbia University Teacher's College. My mother eventually taught for over sixty-five years, reluctantly retiring from her reading clinic at the age of eighty-nine after she broke a second hip.

As for me, my course in life was also set by my grandmother. When I was five and trailing after her as she went about her tasks, chattering to her as I loved to do, she told me that someday I would have a Ph.D. and be a college professor. I thought that was an odd choice of careers, because I thought a college was where they made college cheese. But I accepted it with nothing more than mild wonder. Later it never occurred to me, as I went through college and graduate school, that I could do something different with my life. As the eleven years it took me to complete graduate school in anthropology rolled on, I used to laugh with my mother over how I had to finish no matter how miserable I was or how long it took, because my fate was sealed by my grandmother when I was only five.