Grandma's yahrzeit - my dad responds

(Dad's comments are in bold)
>Grandpa was born in 1898 and came to the states in 1917 - these dates may both be wrong - correct me family!

1898 is correct. He came with his brother in 1913, just in time to avoid becoming a German soldier in World War 1. (The war started in 1914.)

>Grandma was born in 1902 and came to the states as a baby.
I thought it was 1901, and the family came to Chicago in 1904.

>The way I see it, the negative side, Grandma's life and values were influenced by the shame that comes from not fitting in, having parents who don't speak the language etc. She told me about how her mother didn't know you brought cupcakes to school on your birthday - Grandma's birthday was in September, so she would have been one of the first birthdays in her class.
This was especially true in xenophobic Chicago.

>Grandma left school at 12 ....
More likely 14, which would have been the school-leaving age in Massachusetts. She worked first delivering groceries for her father. I've always suspected that Mendel Pezrow became a grocer because the more ambitious immigrants got in to "break-bulk", buying wholesale quantities and selling them retail to their neighbors. One of Julius's earliest memories (from Hamburg) was (with his brother) picking through a load of potatoes his mother bought to separate the good from the rotten.
(Aunt Ruth wrote me that Grandma did leave school at 12 to take care of Uncle Ken because her mother was working in the store!)

>Grandpa, like many of his generation, tried to organize workers in his print shop. As a result, he and a friend were blackballed and could not get work.
It was more than organizing. They led a successful strike. When management found out who organized it, they fired them, and the others refused a second strike. This was legal until the Wagner Act in 1938. What Julius was blackballed from was going to Monotype school; he could and did get work. But the experience was something that impelled him to go to law school.

>Neither of my grandparents had much Jewish learning, but they both strongly valued Jewish peoplehood. My grandfather was a true apikorus - a non-believer. My grandmother hadn't much secular education - she also never learned to swim - and she grew up in a time when girls did not receive Jewish education. (OTOH, neither did her brothers, from what I know, get much Jewish education.)
I don't think that's true. Both Jack and Kenneth would have had bar mitzvahs, and they grew up in a kosher home. Neither followed their father's strict Orthodoxy. (Mendel was reputedly the most frum of the four Pesorowsky/Pessarevsky brothers.) Jack married out and was cut off. Kenneth always belonged to a Reform synagogue in Manhattan (Rodeph Shalom?).

(Gail's comment here - Uriel told me that the oldest brother was the most frum (religious) and that's why he stayed in Ukraine. But more on that in another post.)

>The world of my grandparents - and their century - is gone. But they are with me every day, and I believe with their other grandchildren too. May their memory be for a blessing.
Halevi!