My height was attributed to Opa Isador who was tall for his generation (my mother and father were short; she always said that the milkman was tall). Oma Carrie was 5’ if that tall. She once said to me (in German), “Peter, help me stand on this chair so I can smack you!” She did have a good sense of humor, I suppose; living with my aunt and uncle required it. They didn’t have a television set and we did. I was pretty sure they didn’t because Oma wanted one. So, every night she would visit us (the apartment directly over theirs) to watch TV. She particularly enjoyed wrestling but denied it. My father would always offer to change the channel. “No,” she would say, “If that’s what you want to see, that’s fine.”
When they came to this country, they had left an amazing home, a mansion that had later been converted to four individual apartments! Opa Isador couldn’t understand that his lifestyle had to change. He was accustomed to a daily shave from the barber in their town. Soon after arriving he took a walk one morning to the barbershop in our neighborhood, but his son-in-law chased after him telling him that would no longer be possible as they couldn’t afford it. He also couldn’t understand why in a country whose streets were paved with gold, all he found was a penny or two and dog waste.
His becoming a citizen was a story my parents loved to relate. He completed his exam with some difficulty. The judge asked him, “Mr. Weil, was it hard for you?” Without missing a beat my grandfather replied, “Not for me, Judge, but for you!” And to celebrate the occasion the family went to the Waldorf Astoria for afternoon coffee and cake, an old European tradition. When he dunked his cake into the coffee they said, “You can’t do that in the Waldorf Astoria!” His reply? “I’m a citizen now. I can do what I want.”
Opa Isador died when I was three years old, but Oma Carrie lived to be 90. On one of her birthdays celebrated in a nursing home, my cousin and I came up from Baltimore and Wilmington. We brought her a large box of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts, her absolute favorite. We made sure to arrive early, before the 11:00 hour (on the nose!) when our mothers would begin their daily visit. When the women saw what we had given her one of them said, “Oma can’t eat that! One of us said, “If she died after eating just one of those chocolates she’d die with the broadest biggest smile!”
One more thing which I realized about my grandmother when I was already an adult…she was the one who taught me Hebrew reading before I began religious school. For a woman to have had that education in Europe way back when was, to say the least, most unusual, but neither my cousin (a rabbi in Baltimore) nor our parents knew how she came to be able to read the language.
Ok, one more thing: you can tell from what I wrote about her relationship with my aunt and my mother that there was a huge difference. Why she lived with her older daughter, I don’t know because it was like fire and water. The same could be said about my cousin’s relationship with Oma Carrie. So, when she died our discussion with our rabbi who was to deliver the eulogy was most fascinating. It was as if two different women had to be eulogized. Well, as I always say, better him than me.