Jan. 12--Near the delivery room where my 11th grandchild was born there's a plaque reading: "Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see."
I trust the little guy will find the right words to tell the story. But holding him in my arms, I've quietly dictated the opening sentence: "Four days after Micah Gideon Wachter was born, Aunt Goldie, the 98-year-old matriarch of our family, died." Since getting a phone call with the news, I've been haunted by that thought displayed on a wall at Prentice Women's Hospital. Maybe it's because I'm overwhelmed by a responsibility that's come to me.
Goldie Nudelman's death makes me the senior member of our family, and ex officio the keeper of memory. It falls to me to pass on the tales she told and retold of generations past -- indeed, for so long it's tough to accept that her voice has been stilled. And it was a distinctive one, pitched maybe a octave below the hysterical range, like Lucille Ball, the wide-eyed star of the "I Love Lucy" television series.
Which reminds me that Goldie and her husband had the first television set in the courtyard apartment building where they, my parents, my brother and I, plus assorted relatives -- or so I then thought they were -- lived in the 1940s. Decades later interviewing Milton Berle, I told him how dozens of us would squeeze into Goldie's matchbox living room to watch his Tuesday evening show. He smiled broadly and nodded, indicating he'd heard that from others; it was nothing special.
Yet even ordinary peoples' stories deserve to be told, perhaps even more so than those of the rich and famous chronicled in society columns. For the rest of us, family history is an oral tradition. One break in the chain of storytellers, and it's lost. So some day, I'll sit down with Micah Gideon, show him old photographs, and explain who the people were. On the eve of his bar mitzvah, I'll tell him about mine.
It was catered by Goldie and her sister, Aunt Esther, who must have slipped out of the storefront synagogue while I was chanting biblical verses. I was too nervous to notice, but on returning home I saw that they'd commandeered card tables from around the building and set them up in our apartment. Guests were greeted with platters of smoked fish and lox, onions, tomatoes and cream cheese, brought from a neighborhood deli.
I've been to many a fancier bar and bat mitzvah in hotel ballrooms and discos. Paid for several of those, myself. Yet they're but a blurred memory. My own, I can see as if it was yesterday. Maybe because it was reduced to the bare necessities: bagels, lox and love. Like Mies van der Rohe said: "Less is more." To my elders, that wasn't an aesthetic principle but a lesson life taught them.
The apartment building where we lived, though nothing fancy, was a big step up from tenements where my parents grew up. My maternal grandparents shared a bathroom with the next-door neighbors. Having come of age in the Great Depression, my elders lived under a psychological caution sign: Take care. The good times may not last.
They'd come together for mutual support as newlyweds in the dark days of the 1930s, and eventually moved into that apartment building at Sacramento and Montrose avenues. They mostly weren't blood relatives. The "aunts and "uncles" were members of another family, one of whom married into ours. But the human heart isn't limited by dictionary definitions. The man and woman who lived across the back porch will always be Aunt Goldie and Uncle Bill. The upstairs neighbors were Aunt Esther and Uncle Lou. Aunt Leah and Uncle Mush -- named for his mustache -- lived a block over.
Meals were often communal, not just on holidays but whenever a neighbor cooked a favorite dish. Does it make any sense to put in all that work for just your husband and kids, when you could feed half the building? "Come on up! Aunt Esther's made a pot of chili!" someone would call to kids playing the courtyard. Aunt Goldie made cheesecake in quantities that could stock a bakery.
The women of the building had a weekly mahjong game. When the men washed their cars in the alley, children manned a bucket brigade running back to a basement laundry room. Nobody would pay a gas station to wash their cars.
Now, I hold no brief for the ennobling quality of poverty, nor any animus against materialism. When It finally became apparent that the Depression wasn't coming back, my aunts and uncles moved on to homes of their own in nicer neighborhoods or the suburbs. Goldie relocated to San Diego, on the advice of a doctor who said a warm climate might give Uncle Bill, often in poor health, a few more years.
But that diaspora only increased Aunt Goldie's role as the family's center of gravity. As her generation died off, mine felt a sharpened need to keep in touch. Nay, she insisted on being updated on school grades, job opportunities and marriage prospects. For her 90th birthday, we all chipped in for a present of her choice: an ocean cruise.
Of course, I hardly expect Micah Gideon to remember all of that. Besides, he'll have lots of his own tales to pass on to the next generation. Still, when putting the old photos back in the shoebox where my mother kept them, I will ask him for a small favor: "If they ask about your family, could you say a few words about Aunt Goldie?"
rgrossman@tribune.com
