The Jewish Mothers' Hall of Fame by Fred A. Bernstein

Author:Fred A. Bernstein [Bernstein, Fred A.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-08T16:00:00+00:00

Born in New York City. Parents owned mom and pop candy store (with soda fountain) in which I worked after school from the age of eleven until I graduated Theodore Roosevelt High School in the Bronx at sixteen.…

Fred Bernstein: Was it fun, hanging out in the store?

Sylvia Wallace: Fun? I had to put down my books every day and go behind the counter. I remember my mother saying, “Your sister’s putting in more hours than you are.” I recall making a chart to show her that wasn’t true. I was eleven or twelve. I also cannot remember that the four of us ever sat down and had a meal together. Because the store was open every single day of the year, except Yom Kippur, when you didn’t eat anyway.

FB: Did you love your mother?

SW: It’s instinctive to love your mother. But when that love gets mixed up with maternal criticism and rejection, there is conflict. My mother was a highly intelligent, disappointed, frustrated, also highly neurotic woman.

FB: What was wrong with her life?

SW: A lot of things. Her own mother committed suicide when she was thirteen. She came home from school one day and found a crowd outside the house. My mother loved me as well as she could love anyone, but because of her own tragedy as a child, she didn’t have the capacity to give love freely.

FB: Not even to your father?

SW: It was not a love match. She often told me that she married my father because she wanted someone who would be good to her. It was very sad. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut and he had come over from what was then Austria. In arguments, she would mimic his accent. It was painful for all of us.

FB: So did you dream of getting out of the Bronx?

SW: It wasn’t a dream—it was a need.

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