“YOU AND YOUR GODDAMNED SHABBOS CANDLES”

Next door to us, Rose lived with her daughter, son-in-law and grandsons. Rose was the quintessentially grandmotherly-looking hausfrau of the Old World style: rotund and buxom, always swathed in an apron, hair pinned up, sitting quietly, folding the laundry, mending the grandkids’ clothes, her low humming punctuated by an occasional “oy vey.” Atypically for a Jewish grandmother, though, she did not cook or bake, for reasons that at age ten I had yet to surmise.

I saw Grandma Rose almost whenever I played with her grandsons. My mom did not think that they set a good example for me, so she frequently encouraged other friendships. But they lived next door, and we played ball at the same speed, so the issue was moot. Grandma Rose liked me. She would call me over, pinch my cheek, offer me a cookie and then retreat to her corner.

Back in the 50’s, most of the families on Seeley Avenue evolved into three generations under one roof as one grandparent died and the other moved in because of financial constraints, or more usually, because that was simply the way things were. No denying that even in the most loving household would strain trying to accommodate a multigenerational family in two bedrooms, one bath, and maybe an enclosed back porch. And you need not be a sociologist to imagine the complexities of “Old World versus New World” and the stigma of “grandparent as interloper” in such cramped quarters. I shared a bedroom with my grandmother until I went off to college, no doubt creating a casebook full of neuroses.

So, none of us, including the Wilson’s, were in an enviable situation. Grandma Rose, though, awoke each morning to a fresh world of cruelty beyond that which other grandparents knew, which she accepted with neither martyrdom, nor pathos, nor anger, but silent resignation. Her fate destined her to live out her days in the home of mean, boorish, foul-mouthed children and bratty, disrespectful grandchildren.

To this day, I do not believe that she was simply getting what she paid for by raising a rotten daughter and reaping all the pain that ensued. As a simpleminded, poor, Yiddish-speaking immigrant in a strange land, who worked as a mediocre seamstress to put food on the table, Rose did the best that she could.

It was not so much that she herself was a frequent object of their anger. I would hear the daughter, son-in-law, and even the boys, snap at her, “Shut up!” which was cruel enough, as she would shrink to her corner and resume her sewing and humming.

The more pervasive, day-in, day-out, cruelty that surrounded Rose was an inescapable cloud that I could only imagine sucked more life out of her with every breath. The shouting in that household was incessant. The cursing. The threats. The screaming. The slamming doors. The explosions over whether to watch Championship Bowling or Ben Casey. Mother or father chasing one or the other of the kids down the hallway, then beating him with “the strap,” a WWII brass-tipped army belt. And Rose, fully cognizant of all that was transpiring, humming and sewing and an occasional “oy vey.”

Rose, I learned, was quite a good cook. But, she dared not dabble in the kitchen because she was kosher, and the family liked its bacon, pork chops and ham. Rose, meanwhile, would eat her slice of challah, a piece of cheese, perhaps a salad or a can of tuna.

One bit of Rose’s Jewish sentiment, though, went unchallenged. She lit her Sabbath candles every Friday afternoon, in a modest candelabrum, perhaps pewter, that she brought from the Old Country. The sentiment went unchallenged until one winter Friday afternoon. I was over playing with the boys as shrieking erupted from the kitchen. Rose had lit the candles a little too close to a dry cleaning bag. The bag caught fire instantly, ignited a towel and scorched some of the wallpaper. By the time we had run down the hallway, the fire was out. In her hysteria, though, the daughter insisted on calling the fire department to “make sure there wasn’t any fire in the walls.” The hook-and-ladder, of course, made for a terrific show, during which the daughter repeatedly humiliated Rose by telling and retelling the story of her stupid, burdensome mother, with increasing relish.

Back inside now, mother cornered Rose and berated her in front of me and the grandsons: “You and your goddamned Shabbos candles! You and your goddamned kosher! You and your goddamned challah! You and your goddamned Yiddish! I wish all of you would go to hell!”

Grandma Rose retreated to her corner . . . but this time she did not hum.

Do not ask me what happened next. Sometimes, like Eliot said, the world ends not with a bang but a whimper. Oy vey.