Donald Paneth, who contributed a portrait of an old-clothes peddler to our June 1950 issue, here offers a sketch of a Jewish housewife in the Bronx, drawn from the life—the by-no-means humdrum events of a not untypical woman’s career, along with her opinions and personal faith.
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In the declining afternoon, Mrs. Gertrude Litofsky, a Bronx housewife, likes to sit at her bedroom window and watch the young children playing in the apartment house courtyard below. She has cleaned, washed, shopped, ironed, and cooked; now she rests. She observes the children’s small difficulties with amusement—a tot attempts to retrieve a ball from the courtyard’s fountain, an eight-year-old falls from his bike and bruises his knee, the superintendent, a short, husky, sullen man, shouts at the children and chases them from the yard, threatening them with his hose. Then Mrs. Litofsky looks beyond the courtyard into the street, where the mothers of the children sit and stand, knitting and talking. She watches the street with detachment.
She remains at the window a half hour, an hour. Then she walks restlessly through her tidy three-room apartment, critically adjusting a rug, a lamp shade, a chair. In the kitchen, where the table is set for supper, she takes a glass container from a cupboard and returns to the bedroom. She opens a window, and from the container carefully sprinkles white rice upon the ledge. The rice is for the sparrows who nest in the courtyard; Mrs. Litofsky feeds them in the morning, afternoon, and evening. “You wouldn’t believe it,” she says. “The birds call me. They want to be my friends.”
Mrs. Litofsky resembles her apartment. It is small, neat, and comfortable. She is short, slim, and unpretentious. Her hair is white, her face is full, with bright hazel eyes and a small straight nose, and her skin is fair. She dresses simply, in inexpensive dresses or tailored suits. She is fifty-three, has been married twenty-nine years, and is the mother of two daughters, Phyllis and Rachel; her husband, Isaac, is a kind, quiet, philosophical man, thirteen years older than herself. She is a matriarchal, thrifty, scrupulous housewife. She allocates Isaac’s pay check; she shops frugally; she dusts her furniture, carpet-sweeps her rugs, and scrubs her kitchen and bathroom floors every day; she is unfamiliar with the city, since she rarely travels from her neighborhood. “I feel more comfortable uptown,” she says. “No crowds. No rushing. No upset.”
Housekeeping stimulates Mrs. Litofsky. She is diligent about dusting, and she likes the fresh smell of wash hung to dry in the sun, and she anticipates the sweet flavor of young corn at the vegetable market. Though housework itself is routine and fatiguing, she accepts it. “Work is good,” she says. “The muscles don’t get flabby.” Mrs. Litofsky rises early, makes breakfast for Isaac, who is a presser in a Seventh Avenue garment shop, and when he leaves she dusts and cleans and straightens and washes until noon, and then shops and irons and cooks. She delights in her home—“My home is my palace,” she says—but she dislikes apartment living. She resents inquisitive neighbors and noisy neighbors. “I don’t like to blabble with neighbors,” she says. “They only want to know your business; I say good morning and how are you and that’s all. And if you ask the people upstairs to stop the radio after eleven, they say about you, ‘Who the hell does she think she is? I pay my rent!’”
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Mrs. Litofsky dislikes walking three flights to her apartment, and she would prefer a garden to her tiny kitchen plants. “A house is the best thing,” she says. “It’s private. You have a porch to sit. And you could have a flower garden. I like my plants—I think everyone loves plants; you give them a little water and they grow—but flowers are so beautiful.”
She is absorbed in the health of her husband, the activities of her daughters, and the welfare of her six sisters, whom she calls and visits occasionally in Philadelphia, where she once lived. She enjoys evenings at home with Isaac and her daughters and their husbands. Phyllis and Max, who have been unable to find an apartment, live with her; they sleep on a sofa-bed in the living room. “This is no good,” she says. “Young people should be by themselves. No matter how we try, there are arguments.” The issues are minor, but their existence produces tension: Phyllis and Max like to sleep late on Saturday and Sunday, but Mrs. Litofsky is accustomed to cleaning early. This conflict caused frequent disagreements until Mrs. Litofsky reluctantly agreed to postpone her dusting on weekends until eleven or so in the morning. Rachel and Harry are more fortunate; they have a two-room flat on Washington Heights. When they visit once or twice weekly, the family sits about and talks and nibbles nuts, dates, and prunes from plates on the coffee table in front of the sofa. They discuss the apartment shortage, the possibility of war, the most recent Broadway plays, the season’s fashions. Sometimes Max, who studies engineering nights at City College, reads physics or ponders a problem in a corner; Phyllis, who sews her own clothes, cuts a pattern on the floor; Isaac speaks to Harry about a Dostoevsky novel or a Pushkin poem; and Mrs. Litofsky talks quietly with Rachel. “How is everything?” “Fine.” “I had a terrible headache today.” “It’s probably from the weather—the dampness.” “I guess so.” Later, they have coffee and cake in the kitchen.
Mrs. Litofsky, who didn’t reach the fourth grade, has a prodigious natural curiosity, and when her family gathers about the kitchen table she listens alertly to her children’s conversation. She hears them mention a film, a current event, a magazine article, a personality, and she interrupts: “What’s that?” she says. “What’s that?” At other times, she will amuse them with family tales—how her father regularly brought ragged vagabonds home to supper, how she helped organize the women in Philadelphia’s hat industry, how Phyllis spurned her dolls to play Johnny-on-the-Pony with the boys on the block—and mimicry, in which she caricatures relatives and neighbors. But, though she is lively, Mrs. Litofsky isn’t breezy or easygoing; she is serious, tense, proud, and excitable; and when she gets angry she accompanies her outbursts with vehement expletives. Small incidents disturb her and she worries unnecessarily, but in an emergency she is tough and resourceful. She is skeptical about human beings. “Birds are better than people,” she says. “You feed them and they’re your friends. People you feed and they give you a kick in the back.”
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Mrs. Litofsky lives in a five-story, seventy-five family apartment house, three blocks east of the Grand Concourse, in the middle Bronx. She has lived in the same apartment for eighteen years; a prolonged depression, a war, and an apartment shortage have prevented her from moving. At the beginning, her rent was $45 a month; in 1934, it dropped to $38, and eight years later it rose to $42, where it was frozen. In eighteen years, the neighborhood, the house in which she lives, and the tenants have changed more decidedly. The neighborhood was once less urban. Apartment houses were fewer; old, rambling one-family homes predominated; streets were lined with tall trees; the children played in wide, open, grassy lots, almost fields. Then the apartment house itself was attractive. It was new; the courtyard fountain, where goldfish swam, sprayed prettily; the superintendent obliged tenants with service and material; the tenants were quiet and friendly. Now the children play on asphalt; gray apartment houses, monotonously similar to each other, crowd a few stubborn, small homes; the adolescents who cluster at the corner candy store are swaggering and noisy. The apartment house has deteriorated. Its shrubbery, once full, is thin and ragged; the fountain no longer plays; and the weather has obscured a sign: “Loitering or Playing in This Courtyard Strictly Prohibited.” So the children run and squeal—“Let’s play cowboy!”—their mothers gossip on the front stoop, and in the evening their older brothers and sisters dance to a portable radio, which is loud and penetrating.
When she is depressed or annoyed, Mrs. Litofsky complains that apartment house days resemble one another—as they do. “God damn it,” she says. “Every day it’s the same thing.” But the house is her job and her duty, and she urges her daughters to emulate her. “You got married,” she says. “Keep your things nice.” “But Ma overdoes it,” Rachel say. “She cleans clean things.” Weekdays, Mrs. Litofsky rises wearily at six-thirty—she does not sleep well—to prepare Isaac’s breakfast and pack his lunch; he leaves home at seven to avoid the morning rush hour. An hour later, after Phyllis and Max have left for work, she begins to clean. She works swiftly, washing breakfast dishes, opening windows in each room, placing blankets and pillows near a window to air, wiping the furniture. She starts dusting in the living room, proceeds to the foyer and bathroom, and then to the bedroom, finishing in the kitchen. She carpet-sweeps, or wipes uncovered floors with a rag. “I have no mop,” she says. “I never had a mop. I don’t like a mop. They collect dust.” She is adamant about cleaning. “A house must be managed like a factory,” she says. “Work can’t accumulate. If you want it clean, you dust every day.” While cleaning, she soaks her daily wash; although there is a washing machine in the basement, she doesn’t use it. “There are too many tenants,” she says. “It would make me nervous to wait for my next.” A light wash takes her ten or fifteen minutes, a heavy wash (with sheets and pillow cases) thirty minutes. She finishes her housework by eleven-thirty in the morning, and bathes, dresses, and eats lunch. She likes to eat. “There’s not a thing I dislike,” she says, “except the jackets of baked potatoes. I love nuts, pickles, borscht, and lox. But gefilte fish is my favorite.”
After lunch Mrs. Litofsky goes shopping. She shops mostly on Mondays and Thursdays, when she buys canned goods, meat, chicken, and staples, but every day she buys fresh milk, bread, cheese, and butter. Although she buys in several kosher shops, she does not keep a kosher house. “I don’t believe in it,” she says. “I don’t see why it’s necessary.” Nor is she formally religious. “I have my own religion,” she says. “Not to hurt people. Live and let live. That’s my religion. I don’t see why some people go to church or synagogue. They come out and curse others for no reason—I have heard it myself. Do you call that religion? Or the way Hitler made hate in the world. Anti-semiten. Why should they hate?” Though she herself doesn’t go to synagogue, she is acutely aware that she is a Jew. “I wouldn’t change my religion for nothing,” she says. “It’s so hard to be a Jew. We went through so much, we should appreciate we are Jews. We have to fight for everything we get. They wouldn’t give us the rights in Europe, so I feel wonderful about Israel. At least they shouldn’t say we’re a wandering Jew. My people have their own land; I hope they should only keep it. I know a rabbi’s daughter who came back from Israel last year. She says it’s remarkable; the way they build, the way they plant the land. She says if they only have a chance, it’ll be a beautiful place to live. But I wouldn’t give up America; I wouldn’t go to Israel to live. I’m too old. I have here what I remember since eight years old. I raised my children here, and gave them a fine education that didn’t cost anything. I like it here.”
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To shop, Mrs. Litofsky leaves her neighborhood and walks ten blocks, past factories, garages, a powerhouse, and empty lots, across a New York Central railway bridge, to Bathgate Avenue, where food is less expensive. Bathgate is a near-slum below 174th Street; the avenue is dirty, narrow, crowded, and clamorous. The streets are filled with crates and garbage; impatient drivers honk their horns at the women crossing slowly with their children; shops block the streets with sidewalk stands; store signs declare: “The Old Reliable Izzy Berkowitz Is Back Here Again,” “Chickens—Fresh Killed Every Hour,” “The Bank Don’t Sell Meat. We Don’t Cash Checks.” Old, tired women with shabby shopping bags or baby carriages, filled with packages, buy from bawling dealers and pushcart peddlers. Vegetable and fish men shout, “Hey, Mama, whaddya want?” “C’mon, girls. Oranges. Three for a dime! Three for a dime! Three for a dime!” “The carp wiggle for a quarter a pound today. Who’s next? Who’s next?” At the corner fruit store, a dealer admonishes a woman: “You wanna buy? Get in line!” A stocky, sweating, bald man calls to a delivery truck driver: “Let’s go, kid! Let’s go! God damn it, let’s go!” An egg seller speaks to a woman: “Take your time, lady. What’s the rush? It’s later than you think. I’ll be with you.” And a woman sells a bath towel from a sidewalk stall: “Pay the boss inside,” she says. “He takes the money. I’m not allowed.”
Mrs. Litofsky has shopped on Bathgate since the depression. “I have to be economical,” she says. “The dollar means nothing today; a dollar’s like a quarter. Some people say, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t go to Bathgate.’ But they shouldn’t be ashamed to save a few pennies. They’re not taking anything that belongs to anybody. If you’re wealthy, it’s different. You’re lucky. You don’t have to carry heavy packages. Otherwise, you must save. It would be worse if I had to come and stretch out my hand to someone.” She has known her meat, chicken, vegetable, and fish men for eighteen years. Her fish man is tall, heavy, and dark. “Good morning,” he says. “How do you feel?” He will not sell her fish that isn’t fresh and promising. “No,” he says. “It’s not for you. Try mackerel. Delicious today.” At the fish store, women agitate Mrs. Litofsky; they pick up the fish, smell them, and toss them back. Once she shouted at a customer, “Hey lady! Is that nice? Why do you smell and feel the fish? Suppose you had a cold or something?” She is more pleased with the bakery, where new glass showcases have been installed; customers can no longer squeeze the rolls to determine whether they are fresh. At the kosher chicken store, Mrs. Litofsky has encounters with aggressive women who crowd about the cleaner and push and slip him a quarter—the normal tip is ten cents—so he will handle their chickens more quickly. “They pay and get ahead of me,” Mrs. Litofsky says. “When I see it, I get fresh. I don’t take anyone’s place, and no one can take mine.” On her heavy shopping days, she finishes by half past two (on other days, an hour earlier) and returns home to empty her packages. Then, if the weather is fair, she goes walking on the Concourse.
She window-shops. “I look at the pretty things,” she says. “I don’t buy.” And occasionally she sees a movie, foreign or Hollywood-made, that she has heard her children discuss and approve. “Ma won’t go to a picture unless she can cry over it,” Phyllis says. “She says musicals and comedies are silly nonsense.” Usually, she is home at four to prepare supper for Isaac and herself; she doesn’t cook for Phyllis and Max. She isn’t an extraordinary cook; her suppers are simple but various. She cooks fish (fried, baked, or boiled), chicken (fried, roasted, or boiled), lamb chops, soup meat, beef liver, meat loaf, and soups. “I make very good soups,” she says. “Pea, vegetable, chicken. No cans.” She bakes a little, too—apple strudel and honey cake. When Isaac arrives home at five-thirty Mrs. Litofsky is waiting. “I always wear a nice dress and apron,” she says. “I don’t believe in a house dress—they’re sloppy. A woman should look her best for her husband.”
Evenings are quiet and short. Isaac and she sit in the living room or bedroom, reading the Yiddish papers and talking, she calls and speaks to Rachel, and sometimes, when Max is at night school, she takes a walk with Phyllis. Other nights, Isaac is tired and sleeps after supper, and Phyllis and Max go out; then Mrs. Litofsky is lonely, and she wanders slowly about her apartment, needlessly straightening a chair, a lamp, or a picture. Ordinarily Isaac goes to bed at nine and Mrs. Litofsky joins him an hour later. She has difficulty sleeping. “I don’t sleep well,” she says. “I guess it’s my nerves. Some nights are so long. I lay there, and I say, ‘Oh God, I wish I could sleep.’ And I can’t wait for the morning.”
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Though housewife days are repetitious and uneventful, Mrs. Litofsky is familiar with contention. “Life is a war,” she says. “A long quarrel.” Mrs. Litofsky was born in 1897 near Smolensk. When she was five, her father, Samuel Kaufman, a handsome, blithe man, departed impetuously for the United States without informing his wife. He went to work one day—he was a hat maker—and didn’t return; a month later, his wife received a letter from Philadelphia. He wrote that he would send for her and the children soon and that they would all have a fine life in America. With her four children—Harry, eight, Gertrude, five, Sol, three, and Dora, one—Sara Kaufman returned angrily to her father’s house. Two years later she refused to bring the children to Northumberland, Pennsylvania, where her husband had a job sewing sweatbands into men’s hats; Gertrude’s grandfather, a tall, strong, bearded man, who was ninety-six years old, distrusted his son-in-law’s impulsiveness and persuaded her to delay. Six months later, Sol died of measles and Sara sorrowfully wrote her husband for passage money.
Gertrude’s father met his family at Ellis Island; he greeted them with gifts, which included a baseball bat and glove for Harry. In Philadelphia, he bought new shoes and clothes for his wife and children. “We were dressed to kill,” Mrs. Litofsky says. “My father wanted us to look American.” For two years, the Kaufmans lived happily in Northumberland. They occupied an eight-room house; Gertrude went to grade school; her sisters, Nellie and Mary, were born. “I liked America,” she says. “A cherry tree grew outside my windows, and I picked wild strawberries and blackberries in the country. I had two pairs of shoes, and I went to school free—in Russia, you had to pay to learn to count 1, 2, 3. That’s why I’m mad when people cry, ‘The fatherland, ah, the fatherland.’” In 1907, her father went on strike for more wages and a union shop; he was out a year, and his union lost the strike. When his old boss wouldn’t rehire him, and he couldn’t find a job elsewhere, he moved his family to Philadelphia, where he became ill and was unable to work. Their savings had been exhausted during the strike, and now they sold furniture to pay hospital bills. They rented a small house for $12 a month, cooked pots of water on the stove so neighbors wouldn’t suspect there was no food in the house, and used a large packing case, wrapped with linens to conceal the cardboard, as a dining table. Mrs. Kaufman cooked at weddings for food, and then since Harry, who was fourteen, had no shoes and couldn’t look for work, Gertrude found a job. She was eleven years old.
She was hired to make ostrich plumes for ladies’ hats. “I was disgusted at being poor,” Mrs. Litofsky says. “I knew a girl who made out well at plumes. I wanted to make out too.” She came to work the first day without lunch. “Everyone had lunch,” she recalls. “I was ashamed I didn’t have a package, too, so while the girls ate, I wentand sat in the washroom. One of the girls came and knocked on the door. ‘My mother packs too much lunch for me,’ she said. ‘Would you like a sandwich and a pickle?’ I said, ‘O.K.’ That night, we went home together, and we became dear friends. Her name was Jennie, a tall girl with black hair. She was quiet and sincere; you don’t find such a friend nowadays.” On the job Gertrude worked from seven in the morning to six at night, and at home from eight to ten. She was paid $4 a week.
When her father recovered, he worked again, sewing sweatbands. From 1909 to 1911, her mother gave birth to three more daughters, Julia, Rose, and Sadie. “My mother was very beautiful,” Mrs. Litofsky says. “She had dark, wavy hair, and light brown eyes, and the prettiest nose I ever saw. She was different from my father. She had dignity, and she always wanted to look nice. My father wanted to enjoy as much as he could everything he had, he would dance on the table, but she liked quiet fun. My father would rather give $2 to a friend than to his family—he wanted to be a big fellow. My mother worked hard, and she was a little bitter. I loved her very much.”
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Gertrude went to work in her father’s factory, sewing as he did, after four years of making ostrich plumes, and a year later she went to her boss to ask for a raise. “I’ve been here a year,” she said, “and I only get $5 a week.” “This is nice pay,” he said. “I want a raise,” she insisted. “Do you do good work?” “Sure.” “Well,” he said, “we’ll see.” The next week, her pay was increased to $5.50. “I felt so bad,” she says. “I went to see my boss. I was furious. ‘I asked you for a raise,’ I said, ‘not for an insult! You had to think fifty cents over? God in heaven!’” Her pay was increased to $6. When the shop’s fifteen other girls learned of her financial success, they also asked for raises; several were fired instead, and those who remained woke Gertrude early one morning. “We’re not going to work,” they told her. “We’re going to be organized.” Gertrude joined the group, which appeared nervously at union headquarters; in 1913, only men were organized in Philadelphia’s hat industry. The girls huddled timidly as a puzzled union official inquired, “What is it, girls? What do you want?” Finally, Gertrude spoke reluctantly. “We came down here to be helped,” she said. “We want to be organized.” Two days later, the union held a meeting of male members at which the girls appeared; the girl who had been selected to speak could not—she was sobbing with stage fright—and Gertrude spoke again. “I never spoke to a crowd,” she said. “I’m a working girl. But all you men should be ashamed. You hear how our boss yells at us like animals. Is it good for a girl to work in such a place? Is it pleasant? And we don’t make out. We don’t want to make a million dollars a day. We want to make a living. But I can’t even afford to buy a dress and a slip at the same time. We want to be organized.” They were.
In 1915, Gertrude married Norman Abelson, twenty years old, a lingerie salesman; they had been neighbors. “He never wanted me to see another shop,” she says. A year later, a son, Herbert, was born, and they were happy. Then in 1917, during the great influenza epidemic of World War I, she was stricken, and since nurses were unavailable, her husband cared for her, caught the flu himself, and died in ten days. Three months later, her baby caught pneumonia and died. For half a year she was inconsolable and ill. “I lived through a world of sadness,” she says. At twenty-one, a desolate, bowed-down woman, she returned to her old job, which she kept for two years.
Slowly she revived. “I was young,” she says. “I wanted to live. I saw girls dancing, and I wanted to dance. I said to myself, this is the way people are: If I kill myself, they’ll say, ‘That damn fool. She was crazy.’ And if I put on a new dress, they’ll say, ‘Look, look. She’s forgotten already.’ I put on a new dress.” In February 1921 she came to New York City to visit a friend, at whose home she met Isaac Litofsky, a man of thirty-seven, short, broad, dark-haired. Her friend spoke to her: “I don’t mean to offend you, but he’s a nice young man. We know him five years; he makes a nice living. You’ve been a widow three years. He’s interested in you.” Gertrude, who at first had thought he was a neighbor with three children, was unconvinced, but she went to dinner and the opera with him one evening. Isaac was quiet and considerate. He had come to the United States in 1905, leaving Russia hastily in a hay wagon: while engaged in revolutionary activity, he had killed a czarist agent and was being hunted. He was a thoughtful man, who read the Russians widely, knew the Old Testament thoroughly, and attended the opera avidly. He admired Destinn, Ruffo, Plançon, Homer, Caruso, Melba, and talked of them endlessly. He said to Gertrude, “I know how you have been hurt. Your heart has been broken. But I would make you a good home.” “His words made me like him,” Mrs. Litofsky says. “I thought I might have a happy life with him.” They were married three months later, in May.
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They rented a three-room apartment in the middle Bronx. “We lived in a new house,” Mrs. Litofsky says. “But all the apartment buildings looked like ugly factories to me: in Philadelphia, only factories had fire escapes.” Her first year of marriage bustled with home-furnishing, cooking, visiting relatives, and a baby. While furnishing the apartment, Mrs. Litofsky one day bought a pair of shiny spittoons, which were fashionable then for entrance halls or living rooms. She was quite pleased with them, and set them splendidly in the hall, awaiting Isaac’s approval. When he came home, he exclaimed, “What are those?” She explained the aesthetics of spittoons to him, but he objected: “People will spit in them. You can’t clean them.” He then peremptorily carried them to a garbage can in the cellar. “It was a shame,” she says. “They had solid mahogany bases.”
From the start, Mrs. Litofsky kept house well, but she had difficulties with vegetables, which she wasn’t accustomed to cooking; to her, they had been a luxury. Soon after their marriage, Isaac suggested string beans for supper one night. “I didn’t know how to cook them,” she says. But she bought a pound at the vegetable market, returned home, and examined them. To prepare them, she removed the tiny seeds from each string bean, dropped them in a kettle, and disposed of the remainder. “A pound wasn’t enough,” she says. “I bought three pounds more, and I fried them in butter. It came out a spoonful. I sat down and cried. Why couldn’t he like something else?” That night, Isaac said, “They’re very good, Gertrude. But it’s so expensive to do it that way. . . .”
Through the summer, relatives visited the newlyweds. Once a wealthy cousin of Isaac’s came with his wife from Passaic in a long, chauffeured limousine. Mrs. Litofsky prepared supper for them, and when they were about to eat, she thought of the chauffeur sitting downstairs, hungry and lonesome. She called him up and set a place for him beside his astonished employer. “The chauffeur thought I was a lovely lady,” she says. “My relatives, Isaac says, weren’t sure.” Another time, Mrs. Litofsky’s sister Dora came with her seven-month-old daughter. Dora and Gertrude were affectionate sisters. Dora was a short, corpulent, gay woman, who in winter had often carried her lighter sister six blocks on her shoulders to the movies because Gertrude was afraid to walk on ice. Once, Dora had borrowed Gertrude’s only extra dress though it was four sizes too small, and dauntlessly wrapped a sash about the places where buttons and snaps wouldn’t close. Dora and her baby visited for a month, sleeping in the living room; it wasn’t a pleasant visit. “My sister told me she stayed a month so her husband could save a little money,” Mrs. Litofsky says. “That hurt me. You can’t come to my house to save money. My husband’s a workingman, too.”
Mrs. Litofsky’s daughter Phyllis was born ten months after her marriage, and Rachel four years later, on her twenty-ninth birthday. Mrs. Litofsky was happy raising her children. “It was wonderful,” she says. “A child is born empty. A child doesn’t grow up on air. You’ve got to take care of them. Like a little plant, you must water them. Feed them, bathe them, and bring up a healthy mind. So they won’t be gangsters. Once a woman said to me, ‘It doesn’t pay to have children.’ I said, Why?’ ‘You cry over them,’ she said. ‘Believe me,’ I said, ‘it’s best to have children. You mix up the tears with laughter. You make them even. You cry at some things, even if you don’t have any children.’
“Naturally, you have to sacrifice a lot—if you want freedom, you can’t have children. But without children you die and are forgotten. With children, from generation to generation, you’re always mentioned somehow. The only bad thing is when children go to war, and we lose them that way. We’re born to die, but in war, that isn’t dying. That’s being killed.”
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Phyllis was noisy, restless, and mischievous; she preferred an erector set to her dolls. Rachel was quiet and well-behaved; she cherished her dolls. Phyllis was extraordinarily curious. Once Isaac brought her a miniature piano with keys that produced musical tones. Phyllis wanted to know, “Why does it make music?” and her father attempted to explain the principles of the piano to her. Dissatisfied, she took it apart with a hammer and a screw driver. “She knocked it all to pieces,” Mrs. Litofsky says. “Isaac got disgusted and said, ‘No more toys.’” Conversely, when Rachel was three, she accidentally broke a doll that she liked particularly. She was heartbroken, and her mother scoured neighborhood candy stores until she found a duplicate. “This is a sick baby,” Rachel said, and she cared for it affectionately and scrupulously.
Like most mothers, Mrs. Litofsky raised her children intuitively. When they were young, she rose at six to dust and wash; three hours later, she was ready to take them to the park. “Children need fresh air and sunshine,” she says. “Like a plant.” At noon she brought them home for lunch. “Some mothers give their kids lunch at the delicatessen,” she says. “A hot dog and cherry soda. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I don’t believe in it.” When they fell and cried, she didn’t strike or scold them; she said, “Where does it hurt?” and kissed the bruise. Once she sent Phyllis to buy bread at the grocery, and when she hadn’t returned in half an hour, went to look for her. She found Phyllis waiting anxiously downstairs with several of her friends; she had stopped to play, had lost the money, and had been afraid to come upstairs. Mrs. Litofsky gave her more change, and when she returned home, said to her, “You mustn’t be afraid I would hit you. It was an accident; it could happen to anyone. Just next time be more careful. Buy the bread first and then play.” When her daughters were six, they received an allowance. “They should know how to spend,” Mrs. Litofsky says. “They should be independent.” In the kitchen, she kept a pitcher into which she tossed pennies, nickels, and dimes up to fifty cents a week. “This is your allowance,” she told the children. “When you want something, go and take. I trust you. But remember, it’s for a whole week.” Each spring, though times were bad, she bought new clothes for her daughters, and as they grew older, suits and coats were made for them in their father’s shop. Isaac was an indulgent father. He regularly oiled their roller skates so they could move as swiftly as other youngsters on the block; each Sunday, while his wife prepared dinner, he took them on excursions to the Bronx Zoo, the Botanical Garden, Central Park, and the museums; and before they started the elementary grades, he found out where a particularly fine public school was located and moved into the neighborhood.
Raising the children was complicated by financial difficulties, illnesses, and accidents. When Phyllis was born in 1922, Isaac was unemployed two months, during a garment industry lock-out; and in 1926 he was out six months while the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, of which he is a charter member, struck for work guarantees. “The workingman must fight to make life better,” Mrs. Litofsky says. “If it takes a strike, what else can he do?” From 1930 to 1939, Isaac only worked spasmodically; Mrs. Litofsky cut deeply into her savings, and when they were drained, borrowed on his life insurance and from loan companies. “A workingman saves five years,” Mrs. Litofsky says, “and it goes in six months. In the depression, I didn’t have a new dress for six years. If we needed two pounds of meat, I got a pound, and we shared it smaller. Each month I cried when I paid the rent. I would just make it.”
Illnesses and accidents were costly and disruptive. In 1928 Isaac slipped in the apartment house hall and broke his foot; he was in bed three months, and then, since money was needed, he returned to work in a cast. Eight years later, he awoke one morning unable to move; doctors said an operation on his sciatic nerve was required. That time, he wore a body cast to work for seven months. “Everything is upside down when somebody is sick,” Mrs. Litofsky says. “You should only be well.” In 1932, when Rachel had a severe case of scarlet fever, Mrs. Litofsky didn’t take her dress off for six weeks; Isaac hunted specialists instead of working; and Phyllis, who came home only for meals and to sleep, walked the streets and went to the movies. Mrs. Litofsky herself was ill for nine years with an overactive thyroid, which might eventually have been fatal. She first took sick
in 1929, when her brother Harry died suddenly, and until 1937, when a physician finally diagnosed her illness accurately, she was treated for high blood pressure, liver deficiencies, and stomach troubles. She received radium treatments for a year, and her metabolism rate fell from sixty-seven, almost as high as it goes, to ten, normal.
The education of the daughters went more smoothly. Rachel and Phyllis were good students. They learned easily, received good grades, skipped once or twice, and acted in school plays; there were only minor scholastic difficulties. “Mom wouldn’t let a teacher get away with a thing,” Rachel says. “If we complained a teacher was being unfair, she grabbed us by the hand and went to school. She always stuck up for us.” Phyllis and Rachel both went to college, although Mrs. Litofsky wasn’t enthusiastic about it. She believed her daughters might work profitably in a bank or office, and that since they would marry, a college degree had little significance. But Isaac felt differently. So Phyllis went to Hunter, where she majored in economics, and Rachel to City College, where she studied art.
When her daughters started dating, Mrs. Litofsky listened sympathetically to accounts of their crushes and early love affairs, mostly unhappy. The girls were pretty, slim, and vital. “I talk to you like one woman to another,” Mrs. Litofsky would say. “With boys you can go so far and no further. It’s your honor. If you won’t eat garlic, you won’t smell from it.” On several occasions Mrs. Litofsky’s friends or neighbors approached her with a proposal. “Tour daughter is very nice,” they would say. “Maybe she would like to meet my nephew.” Mrs. Litofsky always recoiled at these suggestions, though she was hoping for early marriages, the tradition to which she was accustomed. “My daughters aren’t horses,” she would reply. “They’ll find their own husbands.” When Phyllis, a statistician, was twenty-six, she married Max Cohen, an electronic technician, and a month later Rachel, a commercial artist, married Harry Rosenberg, an accountant. “I was happy,” Mrs. Litofsky says. “My daughters married good Jewish boys.”
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Isaac Litofsky is happy with his wife, and though Mrs. Litofsky was not in love with him when they married, she is now devoted to him. They live quietly. They conscientiously watch each other’s health, weight, and diet. At night, they talk together in Yiddish, discussing the possibility of Isaac’s retirement and the problems of their children. Weekends, they walk on the Grand Concourse, visit a friend, or sit in a nearby park. When they first married, they lived less tranquilly. Gertrude was sensitive, shrewd, and petulant; Isaac was stubborn, analytic, and quiet. “He was much older than me,” Mrs. Litofsky says, “and after work he’d be tired. I’d want to go, but he would sleep.” Eventually, Gertrude and Isaac successfully reconciled their personalities. “We understand each other,” Mrs. Litofsky says. “Without understanding, there’d be no marriage.”
“Mama is like this,” Isaac says. “She was raised in a very poor family. She had nothing natural to life. When I met her, she was all broken up. I see she needs a home, I see I need a home. So we married. She had a little temper. It came from the circumstances of life: a happy person is quiet and simple in the heart; a person who has misery has temper. Her temper didn’t last long. We live together in the happiness of life. In harmony. We have a clean, moral family life with respect and love and consideration. Gertrude keeps a nice home. She manages on anything I give her. All the time, she’s good to me. And she’s a wonderful mother—she gave the children everything she didn’t have.”
She is now moderately serene. Her family is close to her, her daughters are intelligent, self-sufficient, charming young women, she hopes to play with grandchildren soon. She has nearly persuaded Isaac, who recovered from a heart attack four years ago, to retire. “He’s sixty-six,” she says. “He worked hard. I want him to rest.” Isaac will draw from savings, federal old-age insurance, and a union pension, and Mrs. Litofsky says they can manage on $40 a week. “We’ll walk together,” she says, “and sit—it’ll be very nice. As long as we have all the necessities, it’ll be luxury.”
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