Family: Reba (1/16/1906–5/5/1999)
Los Angeles (Fairfax)
My grandmother Reba was diminutive and in perpetual motion. On the rare occasion she sat down, it was never for long. The exhaustion of her constant movement occasionally took hold — several times I saw her nod off for a moment at her kitchen table. Reba never walked but scurried in a rapid shuffle, dressed in her housecoat and slide-on slippers, pumping her arms vigorously to go faster. She scurried outside too, clomping rapidly and purposefully in her sensible shoes. Whether shuffling or clomping, Reba often wrung her hands and muttered in Yiddish. Less than five feet in her prime, Reba became shorter with age, bent over like an emerging fiddlehead fern, with a slight hunchback. In her later years, Reba’s hair remained auburn, carefully colored and piled cloud-like atop her head, adding height. She wore button-down sweaters over her dresses, with several Kleenex stored in the sleeves and sported a faux pearl chain for her eyeglasses. Reba rarely if ever wore pants. Her skin was extraordinarily soft and cream-colored, and she had beautiful high cheekbones and eyes she could open wide so that the whites were visible all around. Reba’s facial expression was usually one of worry or a baleful beseeching look, accompanied by Yiddish expressions like “oy”, “oy veyis mir”, or “oy va voy.” When she laughed, it was mirthful and brought tears to her eyes, which she dabbed with the stashed tissue.
Reba was always warding off some impending bad luck or the evil eye: “Wear it in good health,” “Keinehora,” “Sei gesund.” The world was full of tribulations and threats. There was rarely a moment of pure happiness. She prepared for all eventualities, saving every rubber band and piece of string. The three garages behind the house were filled with furniture, appliances, and knick-knacks that might one day come in handy. A glass kettle sat on the stovetop simmering water all day long should anyone need a cup of instant coffee or tea.
Reba’s Fairfax, Los Angeles home had extraordinarily thick stucco walls that kept the house cool. Inside, the curtains and shades were always drawn and the air was still and stale, the light a dark yellow. The ceilings were incredibly high and the kitchen cabinets were inordinately tall. In her kitchen, Reba seemed like a tiny Alice-in-Wonderland. A stepstool parked in one corner helped her reach the shelves, but many remained too high up for her to access. Plastic flowers were arranged in vases on most surfaces and sometimes Reba supplemented the strip of garden at the front of the building with additional plastic flowers.
Reba’s stature did not impede her. She piled several telephone books on the driver’s seat of her boat-like car and was just able to peer over the steering wheel. The driveway on either side of the building was so narrow it allowed no more than a few inches passage; at the back of the building there was almost no room to turn around. But Reba navigated the bulky vehicle expertly. The only time I borrowed the car I scraped it against the side of the building.
Reba was constantly cleaning and scouring. Every week she meticulously lined each of her aluminum garbage cans with layers of newspaper. After decades of washing all kitchenware by hand, Reba received a dishwasher from one of my uncles. She used it as an additional cabinet for crockery… and continued washing everything by hand.
Though constantly proffering food, Reba herself ate almost nothing. In the morning she would sip some tepid coffee and nibble at a piece of dry toast, finishing neither. Reba kept kosher, so milchiges (milk) and fleishiges (meat) were segregated. Accordingly, there were separate utensils, pots, pans, and dishes. I never got the hang of where things were stored and what could be used for which food. Reba would swoop in as if I had lit something on fire, wildly gesticulating and barking out orders to save the day.
Our family regularly received care packages from Reba; later she mailed care packages to me in college. Her handwriting was an unmistakable looping flowery cursive that would have made any penmanship teacher proud. Reba’s trademark cardboard box was tied with string and contained layers of Mandelbrot (almond bread, an eastern European Jewish twice baked cookie much like a biscotti). Each piece was wrapped in wax paper, each layer separated by more wax paper. She sent sappy Hallmark cards for every occasion, preferring those with flowers and glitter. Sometimes she enclosed a small check.
When I visited, we would sometimes bake “together.” Reba was an impatient instructor, rarely permitting me to execute any of the steps myself and routinely taking over in exasperation. She didn’t follow recipes, but proceeded from memory and went by feel. Her instructions were to add “a little” or “just enough” of one ingredient or another. Reba’s Mandelbrot remained largely traditional; her other cookies contained raisins and chocolate chips. As products proliferated, Reba took up new chocolate chip flavors (butterscotch for instance) and M&M’s with gusto, first adding one new item and then multiple items to her cookies, resulting in more chips, M&M’s, nuts, and raisins than cookie dough. She was delighted with the outcome. I was less enthused.
Everything in Reba’s life had a purpose and idle moments were few. The building was subdivided: the family lived downstairs, with the upstairs separated into a large apartment and a series of “bachelor” apartments (single rooms along a stretch of hallway with a shared bathroom, but no kitchen facilities). Reba managed the rentals, including cleaning, seeing to repairs, and finding tenants. Some of the bachelors stayed on for decades. The family also acquired a hotel in Los Angeles that Reba managed. She related one story about rebuffing an armed robbery attempt at the front desk of the hotel and I marveled at her fearlessness. I have a hand towel from the hotel, its name embroidered in red, likely by Reba.
I loved Reba, but I’m not sure I ever really knew her. She could be surprising. Late one night, already in her late seventies, she showed me how to do the Charleston, dancing with great agility on the kitchen linoleum. I wondered then, and still wonder now, what she was like as a child, a teenager, and a young woman.
European Origins
The record is spotty. Handwritten family history notes penned by my mother Fern offer few hints of Reba’s past. I can’t fully connect the various family trees and names, nor do I have a sense of the personalities or back-stories. Reba spoke rarely about her childhood or relations. When I visited, I was dimly aware of Reba having an occasional phone conversation with one of the female clan in Philadelphia, but I never met any of them or knew any names. Almost every relation seemed (save her parents and siblings), at least in Reba’s telling, to have stolen, lied, or deceived the family. No one was trustworthy. I’ll never know what accounted for this outlook, if it was based on real events, historic legacy, culture, upbringing, or personality. My grandfather’s approach was similar, exempting his parents, but excommunicating and excoriating all other relatives as duplicitous and dishonest. As a couple, Reba and Meyer seemed to me extraordinarily isolated; they almost never socialized unless it had to do with a nuclear family event.
My mother’s cryptic notes tell a story of Polish and Lithuanian village life that included repeated persecution, genocide, emigration, hardship, and reinvention. Many of the tidbits of family lore are fantastical and puzzling, fable-like and impossible to verify.
Reba’s mother, Rose Stein, was born Annarazel or Razel Baumstein (1884–1944) in Krynik near Bialystok, Poland. Krynik, according to inhabitants’ reminiscences of shtetl life in the early 1900’s (https://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/krynki/kry204.html) was known for its springs and rivers, was a center for tanning using tree bark, had Christian and Jewish inhabitants of varying religiosity, and was lorded over by a Count Varion. Rose’s father, Hersheloeb, was said to have died of pneumonia in his late twenties after giving his coat to a poor man. Following the early death of her husband, Rose’s mother, Fanny, ran a liquor store trafficking in bootlegged whisky and guarded by Polish peasants. If I am to believe my mother’s notes, Fanny served her children whiskey and white bread. One wonders… perhaps this was administered when they had a toothache but it surely was not their primary diet! Fanny emigrated to the US in 1901with four of her five daughters (one with asthma stayed behind), including Rose then aged 17. Unlike her sisters, all of whom lived to between 90 and 100, Rose died young at age 60 from complications of scurvy. In contrast to Rose, her sisters had many children and, interestingly, three of the sisters had daughters named Reba.
Reba’s father, Sam Baker, was born Shmuel Becker around 1875 in Krozh, one of the oldest shtetls in Lithuania (https://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/kraziai/krozh_a_shtetl_in_lithuania.htm). His parents, Masha and Meyer Becker, were wholesale bakers (“Beker” in Yiddish). Krozh, a rural village, had a river running through and sought after springs outside town. It was renowned in the region for its excellent Gymnasium (high school). In the late 1800’s violence erupted between the resident Jesuit Catholics (who had fled persecution in England in the 17th century) and the government, triggered by government seizure of the church on behalf of the Russian Orthodox inhabitants. The Krozh cemetery indicates a Jewish presence of many hundreds of years. In the early 1900’s eighty Jewish merchant families lived in Krozh. The weekly market day saw large crowds of villagers flocking to the shtetl. The wealthiest Jewish merchant owned a factory that processed pig bristles for sale to Germany where they were fashioned into brushes. Sam’s father, Meyer, studied (presumably religion), while his mother Masha worked in the bakery.
Early US Years
In the 1880’s Sam visited the US, then emigrated in 1891 at age 16. In 1914, just two weeks before the outbreak of WWI, Sam returned to Lithuania to visit his family, but his father advised him to leave. Sam returned aboard the ship the “Vaterland” or Fatherland. My mother’s notes say that Teddy Roosevelt was on board ship with Sam, but there are no records of Roosevelt having travelled from Europe to the US at that time. The Vaterland, built in Germany for Hamburg to New York runs across the Atlantic, took only seven voyages before the outbreak of WWI. It was then requisitioned by the US government, renamed the SS Leviathan, and used for transporting troops.
Both of Sam’s parents were killed at the outbreak of the war. I only recently identified a rather haunting set of photos of Sam’s parents; large oil portraits after the photos hung in Reba’s home for as long as I can remember. Sam’s three siblings survived both WWI and WWII. Sam’s older brother Abe emigrated to the US three years prior to Sam and figured importantly in the life of my mother’s family.
Sam was considerably older than most bachelors (in his late twenties) when he met his future wife, Rose. Their meeting occurred when he knocked on the door of a wrong address. Sam and Rose had two children: my grandmother Rebecca Baker (born in 1906 in Philadelphia), and her brother Louis Hershel Baker, seven years Reba’s junior. Louis’ life unspooled tragically as he grew from his teen years into young adulthood (more on that below). Rebecca was the apple of Sam’s eye. He called her “Reba” or “Rivka” and both names stuck. I never knew her name was Rebecca.
Reba’s childhood and young adulthood were spent ping ponging between different states. At age five she contracted and fortunately recovered from equine encephalitis; several other children the family knew died of the disease. When Reba was six, the family moved from Philadelphia to Minot, ND where Louis was born. From age 10 to 14 the family lived in Jamestown, ND. Her father Sam was in the real estate business but not having much success. According to my mother’s notes, Sam was not a very “forceful” man. The family returned to Philadelphia where Reba attended high school.
North Dakota Fur Trade
At age 18 Reba returned to Minot, received teacher training, and remained there for the next ten years.
Reba’s description of life in North Dakota was one of great hardship. Sam’s brother, Abe, started the family business: Minot Hide and Fur, luring Sam and his family to a hard scrabble life with promises of great wealth. Minot was close to the Canadian border, and trappers arrived, sometimes in single-engine biplanes, with beaver, fox, mink, rabbit, and skunk. My uncle Arny described Minot as a frontier town, like the Wild West, with multiple businesses competing in the fur trade. He told of trappers receiving partial payment for their catch, enough to get drunk in the town saloon. The next morning when, hungover and with little memory of the previous night they returned for the remainder of their payment, they were told it must have been at another proprietor.
The Bakers purchased from the trappers and then skinned, cleaned, stretched, and cured the animals with Native Americans they employed. The work was strenuous and unpleasant heavy physical labor; various steps in the process emitted an incredibly strong stench. The finished skins were sold to wholesale buyers in larger towns. Sam and Abe’s brother Moishe even sent furs from Lithuania to Minot for the Bakers to sell. Abe employed Louis as bookkeeper, and Sam in an unknown capacity. Later, Reba’s husband Meyer skinned animals for the company.
Winters were long and punishing. Reba told of mountains of snow that rose to the second floor of their home. She related one story of a trapper who arrived in an extreme snowstorm with scores of rabbits hanging from the wings of his biplane. The family and their employees worked through the night to process the furs. By morning he had disappeared with all the goods. Reba kept a stack of white rabbit fur pelts from all those years ago tucked away in a closet. I still have a few.
Minot had just 20 Jewish families. Other ND towns had small populations as well: Fargo had the most families (100), while Jamestown, Bismarck, and Devil’s Lake had a few. In the summertime Jewish families came from far and wide to share a lakeside picnic. There was a travelling Rabbi and a Friday “Schochet” who, using the family’s knife that my uncle Arny still has, performed the ritual kosher slaughter of chickens. Kosher beef arrived weekly in refrigerated train cars from St. Paul. Reba’s mother Rose drove with Louis and Reba every other year to visit her sister “Lake” in Wildwood (likely in Minnesota), while Sam stayed behind to tend the business. Around the time of WWII, my mother told me children threw stones at her when she walked to school because she was Jewish. Her Minot childhood seems to have been traumatic: she rarely spoke of it and never returned.
Family strife ran high. In 1924, Sam bought Minot Hide and Tanning to compete with Abe’s Minot Hide and Fur. At the time, Abe was in Europe and didn’t want to sell to Sam, so Sam approached the local postmaster (a Mr. Stewart), who didn’t know the circumstances and would not have sold to Sam had he known.
Reba was extremely clever and a fast learner. She ran Sam’s new company by herself while Sam and Louis continued working for Abe. Many times over I heard the family lore about Abe fleecing Reba’s family. This is curious considering Sam’s business machinations. My mother’s notes state that Abe promised Sam and Louis $5,000 (no reason given) but never delivered. Another particularly confusing note indicates that Reba’s grandmother Rose (Abe and Sam’s mother) left them a deed, perhaps to make up for the broken monetary promise. In a December 1934 letter from Abe to Reba, her uncle writes (I have retained his spelling and punctuation): “I am terible sorry that I made you feel so terible bad last night. I have had it in my sestim for a long time and I had to get it out of me…Remember I have never wronged your Father or any of your family of anything.” He goes on to state that only $180 in interest was ever received from his loans to the family over five years, and despite being owed $3,500 he has forgiven the balance due. “(S)o you can see I am not such a graber or sponger as some have called me. I don’t want any of your buisnes offerings. and don’t expect to get it. …you are the only niece that I only had love for as an uncle…” The letter, written on stationery from A. Baker & Company advertised “reliable goods, 24-hour service, right price” for sole leather, harness leather, and shoe findings. At the time, ten years after Sam’s acquisition of the competing business, Reba had been married for less than a year.
In the summer of 1934, at age 28 (an old maid for those times), Reba met Meyer in Atlantic City through her mother Rose’s girlfriend. Meyer subsequently visited Reba in Minot, and they married later that year in November in St. Paul. Reba’s parents did not attend the wedding, presumably because Louis was ill and needed caretaking; only Reba’s aunt Jenny (Abe’s wife) attended. The name “Jenny” was one of the only names of extended family I vaguely recall, uncharacteristically uttered with affection by Reba and my mother. Jenny and Abe never had children, but adopted a son, Hillel. Had Reba grown up at a different time and, given the choice, I don’t think she would have married my grandfather, or anyone for that matter.
Reba’s husband, my grandfather Meyer Abeshitz was a Polish emigrant. His family, the Abeshitzes, were said to have descended from a long line of esteemed rabbis, although the fuzzy photocopy of a painting of a rabbi with a similar last name contains no verifiable details. On the internet, that same painting pops up and provides further information regarding late 17th century Krakow born Jonathan Eybeshitz who, as a Talmudic scholar and rabbi, achieved notoriety and died young (https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/5945-eybeschutz-jonathan). The family connection is by no means definitive.
One of seven brothers and one sister, Meyer’s family emigrated to Palestine when life became unbearable for Jews in Poland; their highly successful family candy factory had been demolished and his father and brother were thrown off a moving train. Several years later, at age 16 Meyer emigrated from Palestine to the United States (he increased his age by several years on identity papers). Meyer was the only offspring chosen to follow a learned path, perhaps accounting for his sense of superiority and the resentment fostered between him and his siblings. He studied Torah and Judaism and ultimately became a religious schoolteacher. After some years in the US, the Abeshitz family changed their name to Porath.
Reba and Meyer zigzagged between North Dakota and Minnesota for a decade. In 1935, Reba gave birth to my mother, Fern, in Minot. The new family moved to St. Paul when my mother was 6 weeks old, and remained for 6 years during which time two sons (Arny & Herbie) were born. Then, in 1941 Sam persuaded Reba and Meyer to move back to Minot to help yet again with the family business; they lived in Minot four more years. Reba worked while her mother Rose took care of the children. In 1944 Rose died.
The following year, in 1945, the family drove to California so Meyer could become principal of the LA Jewish Academy in Boyle Heights. It was VJ day and the family camped in a field for several days because there were no hotel or motel vacancies (perhaps due to continued deployment of troops or a flood of servicemen and women being given celebratory leave).
Brother Louis
Louis, Reba’s only sibling, died at age 93 after a tragic life (coincidentally, Reba also lived to 93). He had mental health problems that became increasingly severe, enough so that Sam took him everywhere for help. According to my uncle Arny they went to “doctors, soothsayers, quacks, snake oil salesmen…” Sam was diagnosed at the time as schizophrenic. The Mayo Clinic had begun doing frontal lobotomies in 1930’s as a cure for schizophrenia. With no good options, Louis had a frontal lobotomy at age 23 and for 70 years was a shell of a man, moving from one institution to the next. He wrote short letters to Reba requesting the same things on a routine basis: candy, cigarettes, pencil and paper, stamped envelopes. Reba obligingly procured and delivered the items. Occasionally Louis stayed over for a few days at Passover, a difficult visit according to my uncle. The children were told never to mention Louis to anyone outside the family. Once Sam died in 1952, family visits to Louis became infrequent. At the time of Louis’s death, one of my uncles hadn’t seen Louis for more than 12 years.
As a child and young adult I accompanied Reba on several occasions when she visited Louis. She assembled the candy, cigarettes, pencils, and paper and we went to a depressing facility where an awkward child-like man anxiously inquired after his supplies. Reba was firm but on edge with him, distant yet familiar. She fussed over the items he still had from her previous visit (much of the same), asked him a few questions, and after a very short time we departed. Nothing was ever said about the visits.
Life with and after Meyer
When I knew Reba, she seemed to spend every waking moment waiting on and worrying, primarily over Meyer. He would imperiously call her name and ask her to bring him a “bissel” (little) snack, find some belonging, fetch his cardigan. As a rule, he was in one of three modes: complaining vociferously about an ache or pain and summoning Reba; holding forth in a soliloquy on various topics; or becoming angry and verbally excoriating whatever or whoever was the target of his wrath. Although the Meyer I knew was not a likable person, he was apparently held in high regard by his students. My mother’s relationship with her father was fraught, a combination of idolatry and hatred. She, like Reba with Sam, was the apple of Meyer’s eye, praised for her intelligence and scholarly success. But by the time Fern reached her teens, she and Meyer fought and he was verbally and physically abusive (using his belt to strap her). Fern moved in with her best friend’s family while still in high school. Whenever my visits to my grandparents coincided with Fern’s, it was never long before arguments and vitriol would burst forth.
Reba scurried and served Meyer, wrung her hands, tried to keep the peace, and managed the businesses. Until Meyer died in 1988 when Reba was 82.
Within a year, Reba’s second life began. She came into her own, more vibrant, more upbeat, and much more liberal. The nearly (to me) intolerable prejudices that were given routine airing, especially by my grandfather (racist, sexist, anti-gay, anti-divorce, suspicious of non-Jews) gave way to remarkable acceptance. Reba started taking classes at the senior center, regaling me with her activities and adorning her envelopes with impressive calligraphy. Besides calligraphy she took classes in Hebrew and Tai Chi. For the first time ever, she attended the ballet and musicals. Occasionally she was even willing, albeit still reluctantly, to go out for a meal. In 1993 at age 87, Reba had a stroke. She largely recuperated and resumed her many activities. A year after her stroke, in 1994, my uncle Arny brought Reba to my wedding for a weekend of celebration in the redwoods of Marin County. She was fragile, but gave a speech and even danced with me for a few minutes.
Then, a few months after her 90th birthday Reba had another stroke that left her with facial paralysis, an inability to communicate, and poor mobility. A caretaker moved in. It became impossible to have a phone conversation, but I still tried, describing what I was doing and pausing when Reba made some unintelligible noises in response. It was heartbreaking to visit. I no longer stayed over; her caretaker resided in the back bedroom. Reba’s facial expression was imploring, agonized, and unchanging. She was often parked in front of the television. Later, she would remain in her nightclothes in front of the TV.
Several months before I delivered my first child, Reba died. My cousin Sheri was due at that same time with her first child. It would have been lovely to introduce Reba to her great grandsons. Reba remains present in my kitchen when I use a variety of her implements or bake. I think of her whenever I exclaim “Oy.” Once in a great while I take out the rabbit pelts from Minot and daydream about their past.
