January first is, of course, New Year's Day in the Western world. Most people really focus on the night before and are hung over and/or lazy on New Year's Day itself.
For me, January 1st is my grandmother's birthday. Were she still alive, she would be 104 years old. In reality she died ten years ago in 1997 at the very respectable age of 94.
My family tends to live a long time. Many live into their 80's and 90's and several have lived into their 100's.
My grandmother, was born Celia Luban in 1903 in the small town of Rezekne, Latvia. For more on Rezekne itself, please see a previous diary I wrote about my attempts to find my roots and to preserve one small part of those roots. Her parents were an ill-matched couple whose squabbles spanned generations. Dora (Dweira) Luban was born in the city of Dvinsk to a rabbinical family who had hit hard times. How hard? When Dora's brother, David, turned 13 he was sent off to South America to find his fortune because their parents couldn't afford to support him. Dora and her sister, Ida, were sent off to live with relatives who had an inn "outside of town." I am not sure which town that was. Perhaps it was the town of Rezekne this referred to because later it was in Rezekne that Dora married. That inn was ruined by pogroms, though our family was warned by the Latvians in time to hide so that we wouldn't be killed because we were Jews they happened to like.
For a fascinating description of the city of Dvinsk during the years around when Dora would have been born, please see the writings of Sarah Foner. They show what a squabbling bunch the Jews of that city were at the end of the 19th century.
Ultimately, Dora's parents died probably of starvation or malnutrition during an economic depression that hit Jews, who couldn't own property, particularly hard.
Dora married, in her mind, beneath her. Being from a poverty-stricken home and older than is normally "marriageable," she had to settle for marrying a "mere craftsman." Her husband was Solomon (Sawel) Luban, born to a family of craftsmen in Rezekne. He, himself, made furniture. His father was Jankel Luban, after whom my son is named Jacob. He was a bit stuffy, from what I have heard, but kind, while Dora's family sound like they might have been a bit more progressive. I imagine them caught up in the Haskelah, a modernizing, forward looking movement within Ashkenazi Judaism at the time. But I am only speculating. Dora and Solomon never got along and the split between them dominated their children's lives.
Solomon and his brother moved to the United States, followed a short time later by their families, ultimately settling in Milwaukee, WI. Solomon's brother's family still live in Milwaukee, something I discovered only a few years ago. One of his descendents is Henry Rollins, the punk rocker.
My grandmother never cared about Latvia. She was American. In fact, we had all forgotten she had been born in Latvia and remembered her as being the first of our family to be born in the United States after we had settled in Milwaukee. She couldn't even remember the name of the town we had come from and simply referred to the area as "Russia." Technically this was correct at the time we left since it all was part of the Tsarist Russian Empire. But...we were Latvian Jews, with some ties at least to Germany, more than we were Russian Jews. But to my grandmother, and to most of my family, we were Americans. We don't even remember Dora's maiden name. She was Dora Luban when she arrived in the US and before that who knows? Some remember her maiden name as Misroch, some as Diamondstein. We will never know.
Dora reconnected with her brother, David, who had worked his way up from South America, married in Philadelphia, then settled in Los Angeles California. When my family visited his family, the Dannings, in California, Dora refused to return to Milwaukee permanently. She and Solomon divorced and Dora took the kids to California. Their son, Simon, had always sided with his father while their daughters, my grandmother Celia and her sisters Sarah and Norma, sided with their mother. Another brother, Jack, who everyone loved died young of tuberculosis. This family split remained well into my life. My side of the family seldom spoke to Simon's family and my side had forgotten altogether that Solomon had a brother and there was a whole other branch of the Luban family.
Growing up, my grandmother was a major part of my life. She lived with her sisters by the time I was born. Sarah was an independent thinker who never really got over her hatred of her father and never married. Perhaps in a different time she would have been lesbian. Who knows. I remember her as being sterner than my grandmother, but still loving. In Milwaukee she had been a good friend of Golda Mabovitz, the later Golda Meir, the fourth Prime Minister of Israel, and, in one of life's little coincidences, both Golda and Sarah died of the same very rare kind of Leukemia.
Norma I remember better. She had been sick her whole life. Scarlett fever almost killed her. She had been on an iron lung after tuberculosis hit her. She was in a tubercular hospital until antibiotics came along, freeing many invalids. She lived most of her life with only half a lung surviving. She was an amazing woman and one of the nicest people I have ever met. She never worked, never married, and mostly was taken care of by my grandmother.
Celia married a stud of a man named Joseph Jacobson. I mean this man was handsome and muscle bound in the photos I have seen. They were very much in love. His family lived in New York. In fact, in a supreme irony, the one branch of my family I can find no trace of is the Jacobson family, some of whom lived right in Brooklyn where I now live. Not only are there a huge number of Jewish Jacobsons in NYC, but add to that all the Scandanavian Jacobsons and you have an impossible task. Celia and Joe had one child, my mother. Celia and Joe tried living in New York City, but illness hit and Celia hated NYC. They moved back to Los Angeles but soon after, due to heart complications from the illness they had in NYC, Joe died quite young. My grandmother almost gave up then, even contemplating suicide the one and only time in her life. But she persevered and raised my mother as a single parent.
Celia was extraordinary in a very quiet way. During the great depression she held down three jobs at a time most people could find none. She subsisted on the coffee and donuts she could get free at work, sometimes drinking so much coffee, she claimed, that her skin started to turn the color of coffee. But she still managed once a week to find the money to buy my mother the exact sandwich she loved at a particular Los Angeles restaurant. In fact, my grandmother managed to spoil my mother despite being a single mother in the Great Depression!
She was also something of a quiet feminist. She refused to learn how to sew and she resented that her brother was given a full education but she and her sister weren't. She vowed my mother would get a full education and she worked to get both my mother and, later, my father through their Ph.D.'s.
My grandmother was always a part of my life until 1995. I spent almost every weekend of my childhood and adolescence there. Only once I hit college did I see less of her. She was always healthy until her 90's. Only then did she have to take so much as an aspirin. In her 80's she was asked if she was over 65 and was told by one doctor she had the heart of a 20 year old. She never did anything to stay healthy except live a simple, quiet life. She didn't smoke or drink though she loved coffee. She, quite unlike me, hated food, though her cooking was perfection of a kind of simple, comfort food.
In 1995 I got my Ph.D. and moved to Kyoto, Japan for a year. During that time, my grandmother, whose health had slowly been deteriorating, suddenly collapsed. She suffered a series of strokes that left her a shattered person. The first time I saw her after her strokes, there were pieces of her personality still in there, but not connected, not rational and, I hope, not really solidly aware of what was going on. Over the next year her body wasted away so much her leg broke without anyone noticing for days. Her brain had also wasted away...what was left did suffer. It was not a good end to her life, but she hopefully was never aware of the state she was in, a state she always feared. After getting back from Japan I watched what was left of her brain slowly shut down. By the time she died, there wasn't much left of the person I had loved so much. I wish she had died quicker. My mother needed that extra year to get used to losing her mother.
Once I had a family of my own, my ancestry became more important to me. Much of what I have learned about my ancestry came only well after my grandmother died. Too bad. It would have been great to pick her brains for information and stories. I am lucky, though. The dishes that my grandmother used for all celebrations--birthdays in particular--came to me, though years after her death. Only once I had a more-or-less permanent place to live did I take responsibility for them. Now I have them and I use them for entertaining. She would like that.
My wife and I, with a young son, don't do much on New Year's Eve. Big deal...another year gone and another one just begun.
But New Year's Day I always have a small, simple memorial to my grandmother. I always cook the meal she made that everyone loved. Roast chicken, simply prepared (though I elaborate it somewhat), a simple, Challah-based stuffing, and fresh string beans.
The stuffing was her specialty...everyone loved it and no one could do it quite as well as she could. I have no recipe for it but I make it anyway. You HAVE to use good challah. You have to toast the challah and crumble it up. Mix it with walnuts, salt, pepper, poultry seasoning and a touch of nutmeg. Mix in lots of real, unsalted butter as you mix in the still warm, toasted bread. Add just enough water (or stock!) to moisten the whole thing. And that's all. Obviously it could be modified to make it more complex. And I have been tempted! But not on New Year's because on her birthday I want it the way she made it. Supremely simple. The one thing I never, never would use is celery or onions. Her look of disgust at the mere mention of either vegetable was a sight to behold. She despised both. I love both, but would never use them in a meal that included her stuffing.
I share with you Celia Jacobson's stuffing "recipe." She'd be happy if you enjoyed it.
