Food for Thought II

Yes! I am still amongst the living, and while I have lots of thoughts about what I should write, the desire is not quite there. So I am giving you another story from a resident where I work.

And this makes me wish all the more that I had asked, no - insisted - my grandmothers write everything down.



Becoming Jeanette

by Dee G.

In Poland, where she was born, they called her Josepha, but it could have been Josephine, for she was named after her dead uncle Joseph. According to Jewish law you didn’t name a child after someone who was living. A tradition, started by Ashkenazi Jews, to honor the deceased. To carry on the name.

But the “Jeanette” thing didn’t happen right after she got off the boat in America. Actually, no one remembers exactly how this teenage girl, my mother, got this glamorous name. Everyone has a different story about it.

Maybe the immigration people saw a word scrawled on the back of her visa that said “Jospa” which was no doubt a misspelling or shortcut for Josepha. But the authorities decided she would be admitted officially as “Joseph” of all things!

So, at the immigration desk, the skinny, black-haired, wide-eyed girl, now called “Joseph,” stood close to her mother, brother, and sister. All of them in wooly, drab clothes. Hungry, too, because they were too scared to eat most of the obviously unkosher food on the boat.

Funny, but many moons later, this woman-child would be a person whose origins and dreams I never cared that much to know about. Maybe an entertaining story at the kitchen table on a rainy night. But as I grew older, I became hungry for her total story. And I am just beginning.

She rarely went farther from her Polish village of Pietkowo to the town of Lapi, about five miles north, and never to the larger Bialystok. The first and last time she was in Warsaw was for the visa that would allow the difficult journey to begin. Up to the Baltic, on to England, and then to a 520-foot Scottish vessel that would take them across an ocean.

Later, in America, she would never let go of the belief that Europe meant lush green hills, forest, wooden sidewalks, and muddy roads. American, by contrast, meant tall buildings, traffic, noise, and pollution. Yes, it was the land of milk and honey. It just wasn’t the “country” environment like Europe, she always said.

I think that it was a teacher, in the night school where she diligently tried to master English, who convinced her that Josphine just wasn’t who my mom really was! That’s my take on it.

I heard that from about that time, she suddenly became “Jeanette.” And it wouldn’t be long before the bushy black eyebrows became pencil-thin, the skirts shortened, and hair was shaped into the latest style.

She wanted to be an American girl.

But I remember how, for most of her life, she couldn’t stop comparing Europe’s environment to here.

Back then, as a young immigrant, she didn’t yet know about the fear and revulsion many Americans felt toward Jews. She didn’t suspect that even before she’d left Poland and the beautiful Narew Valley behind, American had already started to pass laws limiting immigration.

She wasn't scared anymore; she just wanted a life.

But the odds of her getting here at all had been dangerously slim. And I now know that the odds of my being born here, or anywhere, had been just as slim.

If I have great-grandchildren someday, I really hope that one of the girls will be hamed Jeanette. To carry on the name.


*I did take liberty and correct a couple of grammatical errors.

Unknown immigrant family from a lot of old photos I bought several years ago at an antique shop.