First thing I remember
I was lying in my bed
I couldn’t have been no more than one or two
And I remember there was a radio
Coming from the room next door
And my mother laughed
The way some ladies do
When it’s late in the evening
And the music’s seeping through
“Late in the Evening” ~ Paul Simon
At one time the Boyle Heights neighborhood in East Los Angeles had one of the highest concentration of Jewish people in the region. Many — like my grandparents, (later their parents), aunt and uncle — immigrants from Eastern Europe. Russia in our case. Boyle Heights was equally home to arriving Japanese immigrants during this same period of the1920s and 1930s. African-Americans attended Mt. Carmel Baptist Church, long neighborhood residents since the beginning of the 20th century. It is one of the city’s most notable and historic Chicano/Mexican-American communities, with roots back to the Spanish and Mexican periods. Boyle Heights was known then as Paredon Blanco (White Bluff). My father mentioned that over (26) different languages were spoken at Roosevelt High his freshman year. Interracial marriage was not uncommon but a couple would need to get a license across the border, in Tijuana or Mexicali.
What drew such a multi-ethnic, diverse of folks here, besides the Mediterranean weather, hope for a new life? No housing covenants. In the early 1910’s, Boyle Heights was one of the only communities in L.A. or elsewhere where you could buy a home whoever you were. It would take several years before my grandparents could buy their first home. I hear my father’s boy’s delight every time he tells me about the day they moved into the big Victorian, leaving quarters above their drugstore, “I couldn’t believe I got my own room and how big it was!”.
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Sofia is my grandmother. Oh, how I can tell you stories about this remarkable woman, this unsung warrior. Not the way my sister the doctoral level genealogist can. I am connected to her in ways I can’t say, times spent asking my incessant kid questions, looking at the many photo books and framed pictures of far away places and times; stories of seeing Rasputin rouse a crowd in a Moscow square; of making the decision to leave everything for safety and a future after her husband was almost killed in cold blood by Bolshevik soldiers, rousted from their home in Kyiv. Of course, all that came later, when I was a young teen. When I would understand she spoke over five languages; learn to make her barley beef soup, blinis, latkes; discover she’d been a practicing dentist, a Jewish woman in Czarist Russia.
My grandmother became a widow before I was born. I once asked her why she never remarried when I was 11. Sofia gave me a sweet, amused look; sighed; dabbed her eye with the lace hanky she always carries, “Thank you dear for that. We had been through so much I couldn’t imagine wanting or needing to start again.”
When I was around one, we moved to a duplex in Leimert Park that my grandmother bought. Jews were no longer included in the racial covenants; and, red lining by banks for Boyle Heights homes made further home buying there, much less wealth appreciation, difficult at best. I told my Dad about this recently. He said, “I don’t know about all that. My Mom just wanted to help us out, be close to help and best of all, only charged us $25 a month”.
Before I knew who my grandmother was as a person, before I understood what a grandmother is, I knew Sofia by her voice: her accent melded Russian and Yiddish, the occasional mixup of word order in English. And little old lady appearance to the side, her voice had a force behind it.
To this day, I see myself laying in my crib, a blanket over me, falling asleep in the dark room when the door slowly swings open, light floods through. I hear a voice murmur. Then the unmistakable sound of my Grandma Sofia’s voice saying, “where is the baby?” Twice before my mother whispered to be quiet, “I just put him down”. The door closed; I heard something about “…tomorrow”.
To this day I remember the joy in her voice, a certain pride, protectiveness. I remember her, “Nu my darling, how are you? Come, let me kiss you”.
Resource Links
https://www.latimes.com/local/la-xpm-2011-dec-09-la-me-tobar-20111209-story.html
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-feb-22-la-me-boyle-heights22-2010feb22-story.html
http://www.brooklynboyle.com/2019/07/african-americans-in-boyle-heights.html
