Editor’s note: Avram Patt has lived in Central Vermont for 42 years ago and in Worcester since 1989. He wrote this letter in 2002 after the death of his mother and it is edited for publication here. It has become a family tradition to honor her memory by reminding people to vote.
Rather than sending thank you notes to friends and colleagues who sent condolences for the loss of my mother, Brucha Patt, I thought it would be much more in keeping with who she was to tell you something about her. At her funeral, my niece Anita, before speaking about her bobbeh (grandma), warned the assembled that the story was going to have a message, and this is a similar warning.
On the day she died, I had to stop at the Co-op office to take care of some things before heading to New York. Someone asked me where donations could be sent to. I wanted to think of a local organization that Vermonters would have some connection to, rather than one of the organizations my mother supported in New York. It only took a few seconds and I knew: Central Vermont Adult Basic Education. So that’s the starting point for this story, which is about literacy (by which I mean being able to read, but also more than that), and about citizenship. She was a good citizen, a great one actually.
She was born Sheva Brucha Salcman in Warsaw in 1915. Her name in Hebrew means “seventh blessing” and she was the youngest of seven children in a poor, working-class Jewish family. They lived in a small attic apartment, which in addition to housing a large family, always had room for guests. Her parents were religious, observant Jews, whose seven children all became involved in one way or another with the Jewish labor and political movements, and the Yiddish literary scene, which were powerful secular forces among the Jews of Eastern Europe and Russia at that time. Somehow, the old traditions and the new revolutionary forces accommodated each other in this family.
Although reading and being well-informed were valued highly in that culture, Brucha never did finish high school. But along with many others of her generation, she did get involved in an organization known as “SKIF,” which was the youth organization of the Jewish Labor Bund, a major democratic socialist political party in Poland, which also provided many educational and social services to the poor. (The Bund was also a major force in Russia, but it was illegal and underground there, and as a proponent of democracy, its leaders were persecuted, arrested and sometimes murdered by the Communists.) My mother was a counselor in SKIF’s programs for young children, and was caught up in a movement full of idealism, that believed that a just and peaceful world was possible and that people of different cultures and languages could live together in a pluralistic society.
My father, Emanuel Pat, was a leader of “SKIF,” and was the son of Jacob Pat, one of the major national figures in the Jewish Labor Bund. (The extra “t” in our family name was added later in this country.) The Pat family was part of the movement’s more elite intelligentsia. Unlike my mother, Emanuel was formally educated, a young doctor, and he cared for poor children with tuberculosis in the Medem Sanatorium which was established by the movement. It was in this environment that my mother, a girl from the proletariat with flaming red hair, and my father, a doctor, writer and political leader, met and fell in love.
In the 1930s, Hitler came to power, the Nazis took over Germany, and the world began to change. By 1939, the German invasion of Poland was imminent. Although ghettos, concentration camps, gas chambers and ovens were not yet something anyone in Poland could imagine, it was clear that very bad times were coming. My grandfather, Jacob Pat, was in New York at that time, fund-raising for the Bund and its social programs, and was able to make arrangements. My parents left Warsaw literally as the Germans were invading Poland, and went to Vilna, which was still a free city, on their way to America. They left much behind, including family. My mother never her saw her parents again.
With Europe at war, it was impossible to travel west from Poland. Together with some other friends, they entered Russia, my father having grown a beard because if the Communists knew that a well-known Bundist from Poland was within their borders, he might have been detained. They took the Trans-Siberian Railroad across the continent to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast. From there, they went to Japan. My mother, a Polish-Jewish refugee who had now made it to pre-war Japan, and who was pregnant with my sister Rebecca at the time, intended to hike up Mount Fuji. Her husband the doctor would not allow it, but she took a friend and did the hike anyway.
They traveled across the Pacific on a Japanese freighter with passenger service, the Heian Maru. My mother was uncomfortable with the first class service and the unfamiliar dishes they were served, and would go to the bathroom to rinse the strange sauces off her food. The United States and Japan were not at war at this time, but the Heian Maru was later sunk in battle. Brucha and Emanuel landed in Seattle, and were met by friends of my grandfather and put on a train.
They arrived in New York City on Election Day, 1940, a fact that Brucha would remind her children and grandchildren about for the rest of her life.
They got a small apartment in the Bronx, and their home was later to become a first stop, the first place to stay, for many people who survived the war and the Holocaust and made it to this country. But as it became clear what the Nazis had in mind for the Jews of Europe, my father was not able to just start to build a life in this country. Instead, he decided to join the Army and help defeat the Nazis. It is another story to tell about the strings that had to be pulled to get this recent immigrant into the Army, and how once that happened, how he then had to lobby hard, right up to General Eisenhower’s office, to get his assignment changed from the Pacific, which was not what he had in mind, to Europe. A most un-military man if there ever was one, he became a captain in the Medical Corps, and was with the first American troops that liberated the concentration camps.
Brucha would always tell the story of how she learned English. She went to classes for immigrants learning a second language. Although this was years before I was born, I have always imagined her as a very serious student there, with strong intentions to learn the language of her new home. She learned the basics in class, but she got her feel for the sounds and expressions from the radio and from Readers Digest. I think her intent always was not just to learn English so she could communicate and survive, but so she could participate.
Although both my parents became fluent in English, we spoke Yiddish at home. That is the first language my sister and I learned, and it was very intentional on my parents’ part. They understood that we would learn English soon enough. Since no one would say that either Rebecca or I are ever at a loss for words, I guess they were right. For my mother, language was a beautiful thing, so knowing, and being able to think in two languages was better than just knowing one. (On the other hand, although my mother also grew up speaking and reading Polish, that was a language she retained the use of when necessary, but in later years avoided. She no longer wanted it as her language.) For a time after she retired, she tutored Spanish-speaking children in the elementary school I had attended, because she felt strongly that immigrants needed to learn English as she had, even if they wanted to hold on to their mame loshn (mother tongue) as she also had.
My mother loved the English language, and all her life she continued to listen and to pick up new expressions and phrases. She loved how the same or similar sounding words could have different meanings. She was always amazed at the weird and illogical spelling of many English words, and for fun would pronounce them the way they were spelled. She loved word games and wordplay, and for this reason she was always attracted to, and in her later years sang, nursery rhymes.
At her funeral, my niece Donna read a poem she had written, in Yiddish, in which she imagines a connection, over time and space, with a young idealistic woman like her grandmother in pre-war Poland. Although Donna heard a lot of Yiddish growing up, it was not something she was at all fluent in until recently, when she began studying it, and writing. Her poem was published in a journal, along with her translation back into her first language, English. It would have made her bobbeh very proud. Or as we say, she would have gotten a lot of nakhes from it, a very Yiddish word that means, specifically, the pride and pleasure that parents or grandparents derive from the accomplishments of their children and grandchildren.
Brucha was an opinionated woman, about things great and small. She was cheerful, enthusiastic and very funny, but was also very capable of giving someone, anyone, a piece of her mind. She needed English to do this, and made a concerted effort from the moment she stepped foot in this country, to work on her language skills, and she only stopped in the very last years of her life, when she was no longer able.
My parents both became active in organizations in this country that were also connected to the Jewish labor movement and Yiddish culture. While my father continued to be seen as a leader in these organizations, and a writer who published books and articles in newspapers and magazines, my mother was a behind-the scenes worker, the ultimate volunteer. My father was the founding president of a community center in our neighborhood, the Amalgamated co-op houses in the north Bronx. My mother helped put out mailings, picked up donations for the annual bazaar, made sure the front steps had glow-in-the-dark markings so the old people wouldn’t fall, and did the grunt-work for the annual Holocaust remembrance evening. If things needed to be done, she was tireless, and was known to get impatient if people spent too much time in meetings rather than getting to work.
After my father died in 1971, my mother worked in a nursing home for a number of years, as an activities aide. She arranged events, ran poetry writing workshops and put out a little magazine, and made sure that all the different residents had access to holiday and religious celebrations of their own. She knew everyone and everyone knew her.
Brucha was a patriot and she loved the flag. She also understood that her patriotism did not restrict her from seeing things that were not right in this country or the world. During the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, my parents understood that racism was the great flaw of their adopted country that they loved so much. My mother supported organizations that fought for civil rights, against poverty, for women’s rights, and for other causes.
While she was always an idealist, she could also get angry and disappointed by people whose actions departed from their rhetoric. She would sputter about some of her old Bundist friends in the Bronx who were upset that black people were moving into the neighborhood. And it also pained her when some civil rights leaders departed from the principles and idealism that she felt so deeply. A few years ago, she was reminiscing about her activist youth, and we asked her what “socialism” means. Brucha was not an economics theorist or a political scientist. She thought for a while and said she wasn’t sure anymore, but the one word that came to mind was “democracy.” I don’t think she was strictly referring to elections and government. I think the idealism she grew up with was a simple belief that the world should be a place where the people have a say in how that world is run, and for whom.
She read all the time, books, newspapers and magazines, in Yiddish and English. And she always maintained a connection and loyalty to the Readers’ Digest, in later years the large print version that stemmed from the days she was absorbing her new American language.
She developed macular degeneration, a condition which caused her to lose her eyesight over the years and eventually to become completely blind. No longer being able to read was very painful for her, and she fought fiercely to keep reading. We got her a magnifying glass, and she would go through the New York Times every day, the Yiddish papers, and magazines. There came a time when I began to realize that her eyesight, and perhaps her decreasing ability to concentrate and remember, had gotten to the point that I wasn’t sure how much of what she was looking at was actually being absorbed. But she kept reading until she could really no longer see.
My favorite photo of my mother in old age is one that Amy took. My mother always read in the same chair, a pretty plain one in the corner of her living room by the window and a big lamp. As her eyesight deteriorated, the direction and angle that light came from became critical, and she had things set up so she could read, even though she could barely see by that time. In this photo, she is holding her magnifying glass close against the pages of a pretty obscure Yiddish literary and commentary journal. I do not think that she was able to actually read or comprehend too much of what was on those pages anymore at that point, but she is making a go of it anyway.
Brucha was aware that she was getting less and less able, both physically and mentally, to be the involved, inquisitive, funny, active person she had been. That upset her. But the day she lost her eyesight completely was a terrible day for her. She loved art, trees, birds, TV, bright colors and the printed page.
My mother was a voter. The fact that she arrived in New York on Election Day is wonderfully symbolic, but she would have been a voter anyway. It was her duty and obligation. It was her fundamental understanding of America and democracy. It was her most patriotic act. The right to vote was a gift, and it was her sacred obligation to fulfill. She could not for the life of her understand how anyone could not vote. It made her angry. When she could no longer see well, she was not embarrassed to ask for help flipping the voting machine levers. It should be no surprise that my parents’ children both grew up to be civic-minded people who organize, write letters to the editor or call elected officials, get elected to things themselves, and vote.
What I did not know until my niece Anita told this at the funeral, was that between bobbeh and granddaughter, Election Day was a major holiday on which it was traditional that they would talk to each other on the phone. “Bobbeh, did you vote yet?” Reply: “Of course!” And once Anita was of age, also: “Did you?” Passover, Chanukah, the Fourth of July. And Election Day.
Once, back when I was Chair of the Plainfield Select Board (an elected position my mother got more nakhes from than any real job I ever had), the townspeople were considering the merger of the village and town, and at a big public hearing, an old cantankerous native Vermonter stood up and accused me and all the flatlanders like me of showing up and trying to change things that had been working perfectly fine all these years before people like us showed up, thank you. Of course the merger was not my idea and had been around for at least a generation, but anyway, I began answering patiently. Then while I was talking, my mother, Brucha, came to mind, and I finished off with a pretty impassioned speech about immigrants, and maybe it’s the immigrants who understand, love and appreciate the place that they have chosen as their home and community better than some people who were just born here but could care less! She had said that herself more than once.
There is a photograph of my mother’s parents Chavah Leah and Avrom Yitzkhak (Isaac), after whom I am named. It is a farewell photo. My grandparents are old and haggard looking and in shabby surroundings. They are both looking into the camera and it is very evident what they are thinking and what they know. It is a photo of parents who will never see their children again, taken by children who know the same thing. My mother was never able to determine exactly where or when in the course of the Holocaust they perished, but they did. When I look at this picture, they are looking right at me, looking right at their future grandchildren that they knew then that they would never meet, who would be living in an America that they also could not imagine or know.
The other day as I was driving to work early in the morning through the back roads of Worcester, Calais and East Montpelier, with the beautiful view of the Knox Mountain range behind Plainfield in the distance, this picture of my grandparents suddenly came to me. It was the day after Town Meeting, and I had been involved in making some noise at Worcester’s meeting about reapportionment and the right of voters in small communities to be represented. Could these grandparents of mine, who lived in a country where their kind was hated and despised, and where their rights were never a sure thing, imagine their grandson living in a place as special as Vermont, getting elected to things, managing a co-op, or speaking out at a Town Meeting without fear of getting beat up or having his house burned down? In the photo, they are looking at their descendants, but they cannot see or know them.
Their connection to this time and place is their youngest daughter Sheva Brucha, their seventh blessing. She showed up in New York on Election Day, got to work learning and using the language, and left a deep legacy about what is valuable and what is important. She was a patriot and a good citizen, and she made sure that her children, grandchildren and anyone else within the sound of her voice were aware of and valued what we have here. Her patriotism was not one of simple or blind loyalty, but was the vocal and questioning kind.
Brucha Patt brought with her and carried with her all her life the idealism, appreciation, enthusiasm and dedication of that young immigrant. She also knew the worst that humanity is capable of. Every single one of us is an immigrant, to this country, or to this state or to the communities we live in. Whether we are the first generation to arrive, or whether our families go back generations in the same place, someone came from somewhere else, and picked this place. Although I have now lived in Central Vermont my entire adult life, I would also like to remain the constant immigrant-citizen that my mother was, learning, appreciating and picking up new words and phrases, being amazed at, laughing at or getting angry at the community that I have chosen, and never forgetting the reasons why I have chosen it.
In wrapping this up, I thank you for taking the time to learn something about who my mother Brucha Patt was. Most of the people reading this never met her, or perhaps only briefly on one of the few visits she made to Vermont. If nothing else, she would be very pleased if, on all the Election Days in your future, should someone ask “Did you vote yet?” you would remember this about her, and be able to answer: “Of course! Did you?”
