Fall Flowers October 1, 2009
The flowers – red, and orange, gold and purple –
Seem to know that Fall is here.
Their wild brilliance
Suddenly erupts –
A grand finale to the season.
Fall flowers shout
The inner beauty of the plant –
Seductive, dazzling, often strange and wonderful –
Profligate parade.
In the lateness of my years,
I fantasize that I, too, may flower,
Happy in fulfillment of my gifts,
Full of passion, even as my seasons near their end.
Reflection: To Ellen:
Passion and energy were hallmarks of your life. You were powerfully present in everything you did, with everyone you knew. Your high school yearbook photo showed an intense, determined young woman. In high school, in Brooklyn, you came into your own. You had figured out how to excel, how to make your mark. During those years, and many to follow, your forceful energy propelled you to success, despite odds. You graduated Valedictorian of your class. You received many awards at graduation. You earned the overall excellence award, given to “the student with the most outstanding record in Scholarship, Character, and Service,” as well as the school’s medal for the “Highest Scholastic Average over the entire four years of high school.” You likewise received the highest awards for excellence in Athletics, Social Studies, English, Latin, and Biological and Physical Sciences, You had already become the “Renaissance Woman” that you remained all your life. You received a full four-year college scholarship. Your teachers’ glowing thoughts about you were expressed by one, in his autograph at the back of your high school yearbook: “I have had many fine students…but none more conscientious … or more intelligent.”
Even though you and I didn’t meet till late in our lives, passionate involvement and interest in many things was one of our wonderful uniting experiences. People who had known you all your life, like those who only met you in your last weeks on earth, all remember your intense interest in them, in what you were doing, in the world around you, and in the meaning of life.
Ellen’s High School Yearbook Description and Photo,
Samuel J. Tilden High School, Brooklyn NY January 1949
Growing Up Ellen
Ellen grew up in a section of Brooklyn called “Brownsville.” Today, in 2009, this is the center of crime in Brooklyn, a difficult place to visit. During the 1970s, huge swaths of houses and stores in Brownsville were torched and destroyed in widespread gang and racial warfare, to be replaced by massive “projects” – public housing complexes.
During the time Ellen was growing up, in the 1930s and 1940s, Brownsville was a densely populated, busy, mostly Jewish community. “Brownsville” is a section of Brooklyn located between the neighborhoods of East New York and Bushwick. It apparently was the only section of Brooklyn that never had its own high school. Ellen and her neighborhood friends attended Samuel J Tilden High School in Flatbush.
David Neal Miller, in the 1939 WPA Guide to New York City, added a few tidbits of information about the ethnic liveliness of Brownsville in the 1930s. He described the prevalence of Yiddish as the main language in the shops and at the open air pushcarts where goods were sold along the main street, Pitkin Avenue. The extent to which the neighborhood was dominated by Jewish immigrants at that point was highlighted in this passage:
Old World customs dominate Brownsville life. There are more than seventy orthodox synagogues; the first,… was organized in 1889. Numerous cheders, where young Jews receive instruction in orthodox traditions and customs, dot the neighborhood. On Friday night on Jewish holidays the streets of Brownsville are hushed. In all orthodox homes, after nightfall on the Sabbath eve, candles gleam, offering the only light in the room.
This was before Judaism had split into different movements. Everyone was more or less “Orthodox.” The women sat upstairs in Shul, separated from the men. You hated that! As a child of 7, you announced to your father that you did not want to attend services if you couldn’t sit in the main space with the men and boys. He did not insist that you attend.
Photo: Corner of Ralph Avenue, Brownsville, Brooklyn NY, 1930s (Source: Archive of New York Public Library)
To Ellen - Stories about Growing Up in Brownsville
You grew up in Brooklyn. People asked you where in Brooklyn, and you never really answered them. You smiled crookedly, or you said, the word ending with a question mark, “Flatbush??”
When I visited Jeannine and your childhood friend, Carol, in Florida, Carol talked several times about the teenaged activities you and she had shared in Brownsville, and told me about a book that described the Brownsville she remembered, by Elia Kazin, who also had grown up in this teeming community filled with immigrant Jewish families from Eastern Europe.
Confused, I asked “Did Ellen grow up in Brownsville?” “Yes, of course!,” replied Carol. Carol’s childhood home had been just a few blocks from your house. “She never mentioned it,” I said. Carol gave me a long hard look, shook her head, and opined, “Ellen must not have identified as Jewish!” In fact, you never said outright that you were Jewish. You always said, carefully, “I grew up in a Jewish family.”
I was intensely curious to learn why you would not have been willing to say where you were actually from, and started researching Brownsville and Brooklyn in the early parts of the 20th century.
You had told me that your family was large and close-knit, relatives always in and out, and that there were many loud, celebratory parties with singing and dancing. You remembered that boisterous intimacy with pleasure. It was your yardstick, always, of “having fun.” You also told about relatives living with each other, or joining up to share a single apartment when times got tough. Census data from 1910 and 1920 depicted the families of your maternal and paternal grandparents living in the same neighborhood, each in apartments with children, adults, grandparents, unmarried siblings, and a “cousin” or two, whose professions were listed as related to the garment trade – buttonholer, or seamstress. In 1930, your parents’ household, likewise, in addition to themselves and your brother and sister, included a couple of cousins. Your father’s trade was listed as “laundry worker.” In fact, from what you told me, he owned several dry cleaning stores, and was quite prosperous, before losing everything in the mid 1930s, plunging your family into destitution.
You remembered happily the large automobile that had been your father’s proudest possession in your early childhood, and the pleasure of taking Sunday drives and visiting Coney Island and other nearby areas beyond the city streets. During that prosperous time, your mother and siblings were able to spend summer weeks in a rented beach house at Coney Island, with your father joining the family on weekends.
You told me about shopping in stores around the corner from your house –with men sitting and chatting around the cracker and pickle barrels, as you, a small child, went up to the counter to tell the grocer your mother’s order for the day.
Once your father had lost his chain of dry cleaning stores, your family’s fortunes changed dramatically. You talked about moving often because of difficulties paying rent. Sometimes two related families would pair up in the same small apartment so that everyone would have a place to live, despite job difficulties and lack of income. Your older brother, Harvey, had a paper route and then other jobs, to contribute income to the family. On one occasion, his income bought your shoes. By the time you started school in 1938, your mother was the one working in your family, besides your brother. She was one of the “lunch ladies” at the neighborhood school cafeteria. Ashamed, you went home every day for lunch, rather than have your classmates see that your mother was serving food to them. Your father, unemployed, took care of the house, and fed you lunch.
But by working at the school, even in so menial a position, your mother was able to keep track of what was happening to you at school. In first grade, you had been put into the lowest aptitude reading group. Incensed, your mother went to see the teacher, then the principle. You already knew how to read. She informed them sternly, on your behalf, “Just because she’s disabled doesn’t mean she’s stupid! Put her in the top group! “ They complied.
Your early memories of school focused on keeping up. You already knew reading and writing at that level. Your biggest problem was getting winter outer clothing off and on in the same time frame as your schoolmates, so you wouldn’t be left behind, on arriving in school, going in and out for recess twice a day, and going home for lunch and at the end of the school day. In a cold climate, in the day of two piece snow suits and snow boots, and before the blessing of Velcro, getting dressed and undressed was a big preoccupation!
Your mother determinedly insisted that despite being one-handed, you must learn to pull your weight in the household, folding clothes, dusting around tiny, fragile tchotchkes, and learning to prepare Sabbath meals – items like chopped liver and gefiltefish. You felt her stubborn insistence on this as anger and disdain, and perceived that she hated you. However, because she made sure you learned how to do everything, even if it was difficult, you were able to move successfully through a two-handed world, despite being one-handed. You also became determined to show that you COULD do everything.
You told me proudly of the time when you were about 4 and had figured out a way to tie your shoes using just one hand. You were afraid that your mother wouldn’t appreciate what you had done, or wouldn’t believe you had done it, so you told your older brother Harvey and showed him. You asked him to tell your mother of your achievement.
This was a test you often administered to people you knew, asking them to tie their shoelaces one-handed. You wanted your friends to understand what it was like to be one-handed, and often asked people to live for a day with one hand in their pockets, using only the other, non-dominant hand. Few did, although many, like me, often tested ourselves with specific tasks, seeing what it would be like to do it with one hand. I still find myself practicing doing different tasks one-handed, because you had done them that way. The only other person besides yourself who was able to tie a shoelace one-handed was my daughter, Liessa, after we had moved to North Carolina. You were astonished when she showed you!
You worked hard throughout childhood not only to do daily tasks with one hand, but to excel at extraordinary tasks, one-handed.
Two of your childhood friends, Beverly and Carol, described you during high school:
“When I met Ellen she was a kid – we were in our teens… Sunday morning was meeting day for the kids. We played ball – gang at Prospect Park. Betsyhead Park. Set-up teams…Ellen was pretty powerful. She could knock a ball off the back walls… Ellen played pitcher, but when it was her turn to bat, everybody backed up.
She did all things to overcome her disability. She did things with one hand – she made balsa wood planes… Ellen knew more than everybody, but it didn’t make her an intellectual… She was interested in literature and had an in-depth knowledge of music, and she had a huge record collection. … Ellen was a serious person.”
You always loved classical music. Your uncles and aunts had given you many records. You also discovered the classical music stations on FM radio, and listened to them often. When your family had purchased its first television set, you were intrigued to find the FM band, unmarked, between channels 6 and 7, and enjoyed listening to that as well.
You reveled in the magnificent cultural treasures to be found across the river in Manhattan. Taking advantage of Brooklyn’s easy subway and elevated access to Manhattan, you spent every available moment immersed in the exhibits of the great New York museums. You often talked about spending whole days as a teen pretending you lived in a Japanese house that had been erected, completely furnished, among the exhibits of the Natural History museum. You felt calm and sheltered in the spare, minimalist décor of that museum house.
Although you grew up in a Brooklyn family and neighborhood, and attended Brooklyn schools through college, you were a true, cosmopolitan New Yorker.
