college graduates or well on their way, except Daniel. What to do with Daniel, still a boy? My parents offered to adopt him, move to Cleveland and live there with him. Aunt Sarah recoiled in revulsion at the very thought. No, she would become Daniel’s legal guardian, his surrogate mother. No need to marry. She could play the martyr and at the same time blame Mother for abandoning her responsibilities. It was an effective club to drive Mother from her family. The sisters were oil and water; their relationship poisonous. Sarah—petite, red-haired, impeccable, tightly controlled, the very model of the old-maid school teacher, virginal to her ninety-sixth year—dripped disapproval of Mother. Mother—larger, wide-boned, gray-haired, open and generous, her emotions gushing to the surface—spent a lifetime trying to win Sarah’s respect for reasons known only to the sisters.
Sarah had her good points. She was an A student in math, but decided to go into teaching when her Prof told her, “I’ll recommend you to Graduate School, but I’ll have to be honest and tell them you are a Jew!” By all accounts she was a terrific teacher, but strict as a straitjacket. On the other hand she spoke out against racism in the schools, even wrote a pledge that Cleveland teachers took to treat each child equally. And she was a one-woman crusade against child-abuse. She stayed with us a week in NY once on the rare occasion that the sisters called a truce. Abe recalls walking with his aunt, this tiny, precisely spoken woman with the flaming mop of red hair. They came upon a father at a street corner spanking his small son briskly in the behind for an unknown infraction.
“If that child were six-feet two-inches tall you’d find another way to communicate with him!” Sarah says to him firmly. The man is shocked at this little woman speaking to him that way. Then he recoils in shame.
Aunt Sarah followed the rules. She was sensible.
Dan in his teenage years pitched for the local American Legion baseball team. Tall, wiry, nay skinny, he had a surprising fastball and a curveball that kept hitters off balance. He once threw three scoreless innings against the legendary Birmingham Black Barons—the great barnstorming team filled with players kept out of the Major Leagues because of their color; indeed some were posthumously elected to the Hall of Fame.
“I was lucky; they were rapping me all over the park,” Dan said to me with characteristic modesty. But he was eighty years old and he had not forgotten.
“What was it like facing them?” I asked. Dan made a gesture; no words could describe it.
Major League scouts took notice and he was offered a Minor League contract: Class D or something lowly like that. This is the late 1930s. Baseball is the only American sport. To play pro ball is every American boy’s dream, his fantasy. But Dan needed Sarah’s signature.
Sarah’s response? “Town to town with a bunch of bums in the back of a bus, drinking beer! Smoking cigarettes! No Daniel, you are not playing baseball! You are going to summer school. You are taking calculus. You are going to be an engineer!” And an engineer he became after seeing combat in North Africa and France.
Mother followed a trajectory that differed from Sarah’s. No money for medical school, she worked in a home for orphaned Jewish teenage girls and was reprimanded for unprofessional conduct: being too soft, too comforting, identifying too closely. She visited the girls at night after lights were out, listened to their sad tales, brought them treats. She scandalized the head rabbi when she warned him that a male member of the staff had trouble controlling his “member” or “staff.” That is, he was “taking advantage” of the girls. “I won’t hear this filth!” the rabbi said, and fired her.
Somehow, someway, Mother kept Father Abraham’s rectitude, but rejected the authoritarian root. She came to despise arbitrary power, no matter how well intended, whether it be exercised by a father, a rabbi, or a government. It was all the same to her. And she came to identify with the victims of this world, be it a brother beaten with a strap, a poor man who picked potatoes to survive, or an unloved orphan girl. She gravitated toward the anarchists.
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