Grandma's yahrzeit

Today is, incredibly, the 15th Yahrzeit of my grandmother Zena Pezrow Burstyn, or as she preferred to be called, Mrs. Julius Burstyn. Today we had a memorial day of study at the Conservative Yeshiva donated by my parents in memory of my grandmother and grandfather. I had a few minutes to speak before Kaddish at the afternoon service, and these are some of the things I said:

I started out by saying that we can't really imagine the lives my grandparents led. They were both immigrants - Grandpa was born in 1898 and came to the states in 1917 - these dates may both be wrong - correct me family! Grandma was born in 1902 and came to the states as a baby. 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. Grandma's mother made her clothes and the seams were never quite right. From those experiences came Grandma's tremendous aspirations.

Grandma and Grandpa married late - putting off their marriage for years because he was supporting his family. I told my students how shocked Grandma was when the 60s came and people thought premarital sex was ok - imagine how that must have sounded to her after all the years they waited to marry.

Grandma was a homemaker at a time when home economics meant what it says. She saw it as her job to be sure her family had enough - stretching every penny there was and wasn't and making it count. She told me all the time how if you keep things nice they last for a long time. She had an immaculate home, the furniture was always polished, and there was always a sweet for a child visiting. I forgot to mention how she fresh squeezed orange juice for Grandpa every morning.

Grandma left school at 12, took a business class, and went to work. She didn't have a chance for higher education and she didn't learn critical thinking. Instead, she had conventional wisdom, and deeply held beliefs about what was right and what was wrong. This wisdom was greatly challenged in the upheavals of the 60s and 70s - if she was here today I would tell her how I've come to value the things she stood for.

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. Later, much later, he became a republican, and at the end of his life had to deal with the betrayal that was Watergate.

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.) But they both cared about the Jewish people and about Israel and I think they would be proud to know that a day of learning was dedicated in their memory today in Jerusalem. What I didn't say but meant to was that for them, I think, everything, including religion, took a back seat to the enormous struggle to make it in America.

My grandmother lived most of the 20th century. She saw the incredible changes - cars, tvs, women's suffrage, 2 world wars, the Shoah, the civil rights and women's movements. Toward the end of her life, if her ideas seemed outdated to me, I understood that she had lived through so many changes, more perhaps than a person can be expected to absorb.

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.