L'Shana Tovah

which means Happy New Year. Today is the first day of Rosh Hashonah, the two day celebration of the Jewish New Year.

Which I do not observe, but it did put me in a mind to tell you about my great-grandmother, who most certainly did observe. I don't think I've written about her before, but she was like a legend in my family. There was never a time I did not know about her, although she died six or seven years before I was born. I grew up knowing her as "Bubbe Pesha", but it wasn't until I was maybe twelve that I realized that Bubbe is the Yiddish word for grandma, and that her personal name was Pesha. What her last name was is part of the story.

So. Pesha Lapidus was born about 1850 into an Orthodox Jewish family that lived, we presume, in the area of Vilnius, in Lithuania, and in what we can also assume was poverty. Poverty is relative, though, and I think her fortunes went down over the course of her life there. She married at a typical age, but was soon divorced. I had always heard that the groom's family felt that she wasn't frumeh enough -- religious -- but it may be the other way around, that the groom was not observant enough for her. There were no children. She married again, to a man whose last name was Rabinovich, and with whom she was very, very happy and with whom she had six children. We are told that he was a good man and a wonderful husband. Sometime in perhaps the late 1880's, he became ill and died, as did her five youngest children. She was left a widow near 40, and with a child to support, her only remaining child, Yosef. So she did the logical thing: she married again. This time she picked, let's be frank, a loser named Avram Kapelovich. He had no interest whatsoever in supporting Pesha or Yosef; his only interest was in fathering a son, because it would be necessary to have a son to say the prayer for the dead (the Kaddush) when he died someday. So, making sure that Pesha was pregnant, he took off.

It was 1892, Pesha was pregnant and had an eight year old, and had nothing whatsoever, not even, when the time came, a place to give birth. According to Uncle Joe, who told me this story many years later, she was noticed by some women who lived in a nearby brothel, and they took her in so that she could have her baby indoors.

Avram got wind of the baby being born and showed up in time for the bris, the circumcision ceremony that takes place on a boy's eighth day of life. He named the baby Shimon Gudel; we don't know who the baby was named for. And then Avram took off again.

Pesha managed to keep her boys together and alive by selling dried fruits and nuts at a table in the marketplace. This gave her the money she needed to rent a corner of a basement room in an apartment house. Four families shared the basement, each in its own corner. There was some sort of furnace in the center of the room. Clothes for the boys were probably donations. The boys were able to go to cheder, the school where boys were sent to learn to read Hebrew and say their prayers, because it was the obligation of any Jewish community to pay the cheder fees for families too poor to pay their own.

Yosef, when he was old enough, was apprenticed in the leather-working trade (mostly shoes), which was very big in Vilnius. Shimon, when he was eight, was torn sobbing from his mother's arms by his father, who decided to take an interest in the boy's religious upbringing, and brought him along on his own meanderings around the countryside, saying prayers in exchange for a place to sleep and a bite to eat. When the food was short, or the barn was full, Shimon went to sleep hungry on a bench in the synagogue, with rats scurrying around the floor under him.

I've told this part of the story before, but it's Shimon's and not Pesha's. Suffice it to say that five years later she was all alone, her younger having gone off with his father and her elder having gone to make his way in America. One day at her stall in the marketplace, she noticed a small boy staring at her, and she tried to shoo him away, afraid that he was planning to steal from her. At last, through tears, he choked out "Mama, ich bin Shimon." (Mama, I'm Shimon.) She hadn't recognized him. He had written to his older brother in America and was told to go back to mama and wait for him to send a ship's ticket. Shimon lived with his mother again for several months; they were very happy to be back together. Neither of them ever saw Avram again.

Shimon Kapelovich left Vilnius and arrived at Ellis Island with a new name, written out for him by his brother and sent along with the ticket: Sam Robin. Yosef Rabinovich had already become Joe Robin. Sam, who realized that his brother had already done more for him than his own father ever had, was happy to take his brother's last name to replace his father's.

Tiny at 13, Sam promised Joe that he would be his slave for life, would do anything Joe asked of him, and would never ask Joe for another thing as long as they both lived. And then, as Uncle Joe told me, little Sam spent a year crying, longing for mama. He and Joe together worked until they brought their mother to live with them in America. Her name in English became Bessie Robin, but that name appears nowhere at all, except on her gravestone. She was Pesha Robin, as long as she lived.

This is picture of Sam and Pesha taken about 1910. He was 17, so she would have been around 60. And not a hint of gray, eh?



Just kidding. Pesha was an extremely observant Orthodox Jewish women, which means she wore a shetl, or wig, to cover her own hair, starting the day she was married. (Presumably, the first time she was married.) Orthodox women still observe this custom, although the wigs are better, or they cover their hair with a scarf. No man except their husbands may see their own hair, which is often cut short.

Over the years, Pesha lived either with Joe and his family or Sam and his family, which included my mother. Pesha had three grandchildren, all of whom were incredibly devoted to her. The interesting is that although Pesha and Sam were observant Orthodox Jews all of their lives, nobody else was. Uncle Joe knew all his prayers, but I never saw him say one; I think he was too cynical to be religious. Neither of Pesha's daughters-in-law were observant, nor were any of the grandchildren raised to be. My grandfather was quite devout, and observed the daily prayer rituals every day (which include morning and evening prayers for at least 30 minutes, wearing the tallis [prayer shawl] and tefillin [wooden boxes containing the scriptures which are strapped to the head and arm, like this) and all the prayers before and after eating and every other thing he did. He compromised when he needed to, and worked on Saturday during the Depression when it was the only job he could get.

Pesha, who did not speak English, btw, did not compromise. One of the stories about her is that she got up early one Saturday morning before anyone else was awake to go to services, but got lost. Within a few hours, the family had called the police, so New York's Finest was out looking for her, too. Hours later, a policeman found her in a neighborhood miles from home, and held open the door of his squadcar to give her a ride. But she shook her head, and did the "no-no-no" gesture with her finger, and said only "Shabbos," meaning the Sabbath. And the policeman walked her all the way home.

She was tiny, and she shrunk with age, so that she had maybe been four feet eight at her tallest. She was very impressed with her tall, strapping sons, who were maybe five foot three each.

In the years that she lived with either Sam's or Joe's family, she would keep house so that their wives could work. Uncle Joe had a successful store for years where Aunt Sarah helped out, and Grampa Sam had a series of unsuccessful stores where Grandma Ida pitched in; ultimately, they would both go back to the leather glovemaking industry in which they had trained and worked, until that finally petered out in the late 1950s. Anyway, Bubbe Pesha did not really know a life without work until she was quite old.

In her eighties, she became blind, no doubt from cataracts, which Uncle Joe developed, too. In her late eighties, it was decided that she would be more comfortable in a home for elderly Jewish women, where she was visited quite often by family. This is my mother and her father visiting Bubbe Pesha there.



I believe she was still wearing some kind of wig, although clearly not one for fashion, or maybe just a scarf. In the home, she would go from bed to bed each night, making sure that each of the women was covered. When she was 95, her first great-grandchild was born, my Colorado cousin. Bubbe Pesha died a year later at 96. When they saw the hair for the first time, my mother told me, most of it was still black.

Bubbe Pesha lived her life with one goal: to live the way God wanted her to. She did this by observing every ritual, every prayer, and by doing good deeds, what we call mitzvahs. When she had nothing, she would not pass a beggar in the street without giving something of the little she had. Grampa Sam was the same way. (And btw, when he got word sometime after 1920 that his father Avram had died in Europe, he dutifully said the Kaddush every day for a year, as a son is supposed to do.)

So, there.


WATCHING FRIENDS :: ENTRY #1867
READING: Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! by Fannie Flagg