Generation Bubelah: Jewish in the Midwest during WWII

This entry is a continuation of an oral history I did with my grandmother on her parents' immigration to America from Russia, growing up Jewish in a German neighborhood and simply being a Jewish girl in the Midwest. For the first entry, Midwest Judaism in the 1920s, click here. 

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So sixteen was a great year for me, starting with my first kiss. Then Harold taught me how to drive. My brother Ruby started driving when he was thirteen because there was no legal age, (nor was there such a thing as a license). I didn't have my own car so I would use my father's. Papa had an old brown and beige Studebaker station wagon with the panels on the sides. When it would rain, we would have to go and nail them down.

Although things between the Germans and the Jews in the neighborhood were tense, they intensified at the start of the war. Women that had always been friendly to my mother on the street began to ignore her. The ill comments and cruelty did not affect my parents; they never once doubted their faith. As the war continued the neighborhood began to clear out. First the family on the right corner, then their neighbors, soon the entire neighborhood was barren. Each day we would talk about what family had left their home and my mother and father would shake their head in disgust, as the Germans in the neighborhood fled to Germany to help fight the war.

By the time I was in high school, the neighborhood started filling with Jews, and more butcher shops moved into our area. There were four butcher shops near my house. I would go there with my mother and watch them cut the meat. They would hang the animals, slit their throats, and then drain the blood immediately so that they wouldn't suffer and wouldn't be contaminated.

Mama made it clear to us from the very beginning that we were Jewish. From living inside of her for nine months, I must have digested enough Judaism to come out healthy. My mother was the one who gave my brothers and me a strong sense of who we were as Jews. We went to synagogue at Agudath Achim as a family, but the women would sit upstairs and the men would be downstairs. We sat in the front row because my mother always sat in the front row. My mother never wore a Shitzel but many of my mother's friends did. They wore it to cover their hair so no other man besides their husbands would think they were beautiful. Most of the time the wigs were prettier than their own hair. Mama wore a cloth that covered her head. I would only wear it if I had a pretty one.

When services were over my friends and I would stand outside and throw sticky balls at each other. They would stick to my clothes. Mama would be eyeing me while kibitzing with her friends to make sure I didn't tear my dress. On our way home, we would stop at the pharmacy on the corner and get hot fudge sundaes.

Mama always wore her good clothes to synagogue and was never seen without a fur coat and hat.

When Mama lived in Europe she worked for a furrier. So buying new clothes was not an option but new fabric was a must. Mama would go downtown and buy material. Then cut patterns from the newspaper and out of nowhere came a magnificent dress, jacket, hat - you name it, Mama could make it. Mama always said that if you wore the right clothes, you would never go ugly. Synagogue was not only a place to pray, it was a place to be seen. I never lost sight of my mother because of her fur coat and hat, or maybe she never lost sight of me.
 
Every Friday night we would have Shabbat dinner at our house. The house would be spotless and twenty minutes before the sun would go down we would light our Shabbat candles, say Kiddush, and finally sit down for dinner. After dinner, we would go to synagogue and then on Saturday morning, we would walk to the synagogue.

Compared to the other Jews in the community, we weren't that religious. My parents didn't work on Shabbat, but we always turned on the lights, drove downtown to the theater, and had lunch in the cafeteria. My mother would order a roll and coffee, and my brothers and I would get ice cream and jello. Mama always made Shabbat dinner. The house would fill with people; the dining room would light up with familiar and not so familiar faces, and my father always had some new speaker from the synagogue with him when he came home. Papa had his seat at the head of the table and nobody ever tried to take my father's seat. The rest of us sat where we felt like sitting.

On the weekends for entertainment we would go to different parks and take our meals with us, but every Saturday afternoon my brothers and I would sit down with Papa and he would read to us from the Forward. The Forward was in Yiddish so my father would translate it into English to help himself and to entertain us. He would sit in our big brown chair. The arms of the chair stretched out for miles. They were big enough to hold two of us on each side. I got to sit on my Papa’s lap because I was the only girl and I got whatever it was that I wanted. The solid brown made me feel like I was sinking into milk chocolate.

We would smell the cigars on Papa's breath while he read. He would read to us from the Dorothy Dix section. All those people asking her questions and hoping she would have their answers. I sometimes tried to imagine what I would ask Dorothy Dix, but I couldn't understand why she would know the answer. She didn't even know who I was. People would write in saying that they had lost contact with their relatives when they came over to America and wanted to know how they could find them. Others asked about employment and where they could find money to support themselves and the most frequently asked question was - where were all the Jews? 
 
At night, we played outside and nobody bothered us. We would be out at all hours of the night and never worried. There were so few cars that we would ride our roller skates and play street games. We played Go Sheep Go. Where we would make a circle on someone's back and then that person had to guess who did it. Then they would hide and you had to find them. My favorite was jump rope; I was the best jumper in our neighborhood. I also won all the bubble gum popping contests. Saturday nights we would go to the movies for ten cents and on Sunday we would go downtown for lunch and see the vaudevilles - Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor and all the big names.

When my brothers and I were older and my father had become a little more Americanized, he would take us up to the cottage at Buckeye Lake. My father would bring home food and my mother would cook it. All the relatives would come and visit us and we would go to the park and dance, swim, and play bingo. We rode all the rides we could, and that was plenty. At night, I would lay in bed with a flashlight so my mother wouldn't know, and I would read the Bobsy Twins or Heidi.