Jackie Mahler
My grandmother taught me how to cha-cha when I was six years old. She thought it was an important life skill, which made sense at the time. It was the 1960s when everyone was swept up by the bossa nova, mambo, rhumba, samba, and anything else you could play on the hi-fi that got your body moving and your hips shaking. My tiny Jewish grandmother was part of the Latin dance craze.
Nan (AKA Nanny AKA Nanny Bessie) lived with my family from time to time. She was under 5-foot tall and sewed all her clothes. I wish we still had her sewing machine. Forged at the turn of the century, the workhorse Singer was a permanent fixture in her life. I’m sure that after she died, her daughter Betty disposed of the well used machine. My mom wasn’t sentimental about things from the past.
“Children in India Are Starving… So Eat!!”
Playing Against Type
Unlike the template Jewish grandmother, Nan did not dote on children. And unlike the stereotype, she was not much of a cook. She had two stand-out dishes. The first was rugelach. She made the dough from scratch then patiently rolled it out until it covered the dining room table. When it was just right, she spread jam on it, added a layer of crushed walnuts and dried fruit, then finished it off with a heavy dusting of sugar and cinnamon. The other standout was coleslaw, which seems to have a genetic marker because everyone in my family knows how to make killer coleslaw, including the men.
Border Crossings
“What country are you from?”
I thought it was a simple question, but Nan had no easy answer.
“Pfffffttt! One day it was Poland. The next day, it was Russia.”
Theology was a simpler matter. She stopped believing in God the day her family was killed. I now know that day was in August 1942. Twenty years later, she traveled around the world to visit her son Morris who was working in India. En route, she stopped in Israel where she had arranged to meet someone from her hometown. He bore witness and revealed the awful truth.
Later she told me, “They didn’t even wait for the Nazis to get there. The townspeople and police were more than happy to kill Jews.” That was all she said about her parents and 12 younger siblings.
Ephemera
Nan crocheted lacy shawls with scalloped edges and metallic threads. She knit slippers, read Yiddish newspapers, and sang in the kitchen. Sometimes we sang together. Tum Balalaika and Tsena Tsena were two favorites.
I have a flowerpot that was Nan’s. It’s bright yellow with a dark green base. The sides are fluted to make it look like a tulip. I first saw it in her apartment on Hastings Avenue in Rutherford. She filled the pot with soil and coaxed a large snake plant to grow inside. I remember the pot, and the plant, and the way the light filtered in through the curtains in her living room.
Twisting Fate
The most remarkable part of Baszie Bessie Gurtovoy Gordon Budin’s story is that she had the guts, spunk, and sense of self to leave Rozyszcze, Poland and come to the U.S. by herself at age 16. Her father Avram was a harness maker. Her mother Pesia Wajner raised hens, sold eggs, and did whatever else she could to make sure 13 children didn’t go hungry. As the oldest child, Bessie saw the heavy toll this took on her mother. She decided she was not going to have the same life.
When matchmakers found a perfect husband for her (a prosperous 30-year-old tailor), Bessie told her parents she had other plans.
“He’s too old. I don’t love him, and I’m going to America.”
Nan arrived in NY around 1913. Her first home was a boarding house run by her aunt Sara and Sara’s husband Yoelik Sheinbein (from Osova). She became Bessie Gordon and soon found work as a seamstress in a sweatshop. She was so homesick in New York she wrote her parents to tell them she was saving money to buy a passage back home.
As fate would have it, Bessie went to a Bund-sponsored dance, met tall dark and handsome Jake Budin, and the rest is (family) history.
“You can catch more flies with honey than with winegar (sic).”
Bessie had three husbands: Jacob who died at 57 soon after they bought a chicken farm in Toms River, Chaim Siegel (perhaps 5 years together in the 1970s in Passaic), and a man she met in the early 1980s when she lived in Miami Beach. She outlived them all.
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