American Born by Rachel M. Brownstein;

Author:Rachel M. Brownstein; [Brownstein, Rachel M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO000000 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / General, BIO037000 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Jewish, BIO022000 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women, BIO026000 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2023-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

The conjunction of the commonplace and the magical, the banal and the mystical, the literal and the metaphorical: this is one thick thread that runs through all my mother’s stories about her grandmother and Mielec—and Sholem Aleichem’s stories about Tevye, as well. The Bubba Brucha, the story goes, was called in the night to visit the bed of a child choking with diphtheria, and when she laid her fingers softly on either side of the child’s throat the child began to breathe. The Bubbe taught my mother never ever to sew a piece of clothing while a person was wearing it: if you did that, you sewed up the person’s powers of thinking, the saichel. Aphorism, metaphor, abets superstition: as the Greeks also knew, women’s cutting and spinning and weaving and knotting is a minefield of metaphors. They said that when a boy brought a girl home to his mother, in Mielec, the mother would toss her a skein of tangled string or wool to tease apart, to test the limits of her potential wifely patience. It sounds like something in a fairy tale, but it is in fact also a good test of the ability to deal with and organize the ties that bind. My mother was good at untangling complicated knots—she did it effortlessly, it seemed to me. Like her sturdiness and strength and capacity for physical labor, it was one of her innate qualifications for womanly excellence.

For fun she enjoyed working with string in the opposite direction, using a crochet hook to knot string into doilies and baby blankets and hats, or clicking knitting needles to turn brilliantly colored cheap acrylic yarn into booties for men and women and boys and girls, and in the end for babies someone would surely someday have. “Bed socks,” a dignified high-WASP friend of mine called them once, in a thank-you note he wrote to her. Because he was a tall man, handsome and distinguished, she tried to use that term instead of “booties” to lend her handiwork dignity, but soon gave it up as too fancy. In her eighties and nineties, she made pairs and pairs of booties in electric colors, gifts for relatives, friends, and acquaintances. My brother and his wife call them “feet.” I have bags of them in more than one closet—also needlepoint covers for pillows and pictures in frames, and, in drawers, tablecloths and matching napkins embroidered with cross-stitching. Women’s work is never done.

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