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    Oy Vey, I'm Going to Church: A Memoir
    Oy Vey, I'm Going to Church: A Memoir
    Oy Vey, I'm Going to Church: A Memoir
    Ebook153 pages1 hour

    Oy Vey, I'm Going to Church: A Memoir

    By Krissel

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    About this ebook

    What happens when a young Jewish girl grows up in an upper middleclass household in New York City and attends the best Jewish schools and camps, only to be catapulted into WASP---White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant---territory as soon as she reaches her teens. From attending elite, primarily gentile, private schools and exclusive clubs to sleepover weekends at the homes of her high school WASPy friends, she is left not just a bit bewildered but also amused. Nevertheless, in this rarified environment, she meets and marries "Superwasp" -- a direct descendant of the Mayflower! With incisive wit and a generous spirit, the author entertains us with stories of her Jewish family and their social crowd, as well as of her gentile friends and their activities. Oy Vey, I'm Going to Church is at once provocative and funny…and completely unputdownable.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateMay 20, 2019
    ISBN9781543973310
    Oy Vey, I'm Going to Church: A Memoir

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      Book preview

      Oy Vey, I'm Going to Church - Krissel

      B

      PREFACE

      About eight years ago, inspired by old home movies that I had come across, I decided I would jot down some things about my family—many of whom had already passed away—and my childhood, and try to capture not only the times but also the emotions I had in my youth. After writing a few pages, I could see that the transformative moment in my life had been the change from a childhood spent in a primarily Jewish school and Jewish camps to teenage years and beyond in what were then considered Waspy girls high schools and colleges, and in my marriage to Superwasp.

      I could also see that my mother, Kitty, was indeed the dominant person in my childhood. I began to realize that she was fairly typical of her generation of Jewish wives and mothers who were fortunate to have been raised with a great amount of economic comfort. And as I continued to write, it occurred to me that the way she and her family and friends—whom I would come to know as The Gang—had lived was unique to the times; it was a rarified environment—and one that I was happy to share.

      But, in truth, since Mom was still alive and might not have appreciated the stories I sought to tell, I put the pages in a drawer and forgot about them until I met a publisher and author, Richard Mason, at a cocktail party. After a few drinks, I told him about my tentative steps to writing a book, and to my surprise and dismay, he insisted on seeing the few brief chapters I had written in their raw, unedited form. Wonder of wonders, he liked what he saw and encouraged me to continue working on this book. (Thank you, Richard, for your support!)

      As I reached the penultimate chapter, Missing Kitty (about my mother), I started to cry. Memories don’t just exist in the brain; they live in the body. And memories of all the people from my childhood, who no longer are alive, flooded my heart, making me even more aware of what our lives mean and how very short they are.

      For the children who are now elderly, who grew up as part of this generation of Jewish families, I hope the book will bring back memories of their own childhoods. For people who had no exposure to this generation of upper middle class Jewish families, I hope that they will welcome learning about the culture.

      I have tried to make this book a humorous one. Making fun of things has always gotten me through the hard and hurtful times, and this book is no exception.

      ROLL CAMERA

      Home movies, found in the attic of one of my cousins, presently claim my attention for hours on end. I can’t understand what happened to this family. The films, which are mostly shot at my grandfather Morris’s huge weekend place in Mount Kisco, New York, show everyone in a state of great happiness: swimming in the pool, ice skating on the frozen pond, playing tennis on the property’s court, and golfing on its four-hole golf course. Even my formidable grandfather appears easygoing; he is laughing as he pushes us grandchildren on sleds down the snowy hill and takes us hunting through the woods, instructing us how to point our fake guns at imagined enemies—most probably Nazis.

      In my memory, however, Morris had been a domineering figure, always ordering everyone around. As I grew older, he insisted on my brother, John, and me being formally presented to him and our grandmother, Esther, every Sunday afternoon before the serving of tea and cookies—as if Morris was trying to imitate an English aristocratic lifestyle found in some book or movie.

      As the film reel advances, I see my cousin, Peter, and me on the swing, in the hammock, and dangerously racing down a hill on our bicycles. We are holding hands and constantly kissing each other. In fact, those movies show it was a total kiss fest with this family—everyone smacking everyone else on the cheeks or the lips. I am shocked to see my Aunt Mimi and Peter repeatedly kissing on the lips. Was that normal or healthy? Mother and son? And there I am in the pool with my darling father, Irving, and sitting on the lap of Uncle Roger (Mimi’s husband and Peter’s father), who paid a lot of attention to me since I was the only girl in the family of my generation.

      Wonderful birthday parties took place in Mount Kisco, and now I appear on-screen in an exquisite dress from Martha’s exclusive Park Avenue boutique, cutting my cake and seemingly ecstatic with the whole show. My beloved governess is flitting around making sure all my wants are fulfilled. Aunt Mimi is batting her eyelashes and looking beautiful. Kitty is cute and flirtatious and smiling—which seems at odds with the mother I remember. The Gang is sitting around the pool eating a gorgeous lunch and hamming it up for the camera…

      I search these movies to try to find clues—any clues at all that might reveal what lay in store for this deliriously happy family.

      IN THE BEGINNING

      They came to America fleeing vicious anti-Semitism, pogroms, government restrictions, and poverty. They came from Russia, and from Central and Eastern Europe—between 1880 and 1924, the latter in numbers of over two million. They were very poor merchants, shopkeepers and craftsmen. They were seeking freedom to practice their religion and opportunities to educate their children and start their own businesses.

      It was in that large wave of Eastern European immigrants that my grandfather, Morris, came to the US and set up home on New York City’s Lower East Side. That’s about all I know of his early years. He was typical of so many Jewish immigrants who put their personal histories behind them as soon as they reached America’s shores, rarely discussing their childhoods in far-off lands. He said very little about his relatives. What he did talk about were his first jobs: selling newspapers as a kid in New York and being a messenger boy for a company that made brown grocery bags.

      He later became a super-salesman for that same company and was then hired by Hudson Pulp and Paper, which was owned by three prominent Jewish families. Apparently one of the owners fought with the other two and left the company, taking the Equitable Paper Bag Division and Morris with him. Morris was quickly made Sales Manager of Equitable, and eventually an equal partner. In the end, Morris got rid of his partner and became the sole proprietor of Equitable.

      By 1941, the year I came into the world, Morris’s Equitable Paper Bag Company had become a prosperous business, which provided a comfortable upper middle class lifestyle for him and his family—his wife and daughters, Kitty and Mimi; and two sons-in-law, Irving and Roger.

      Like other upwardly social and economic mobile Jewish immigrant families who expected the sons to join the family businesses (that were as varied as light socket manufacturers, department and grocery stores, insurance companies, law and real estate firms), Morris—having no sons—demanded that his sons-in-law join his paper bag company. And that is precisely what Irving and Roger did in order to assure him that they could take care of his daughters.

      To understand my family you have to understand my grandfather. Everyone who knew him—friends, family members, and even business competitors—agreed that Morris was a genius. He was always working—even when he wasn’t in the office. I can still see his note pads and red pencils lying all over the place: by the side of his bed in his Manhattan apartment, on his desk in the library of his country home in Mount Kisco [Westchester County], and later, in his winter residence, nicknamed the Winter White House, in Palm Beach, Florida—where he would make at least a dozen calls a day to the Equitable offices.

      He married my grandmother when she was sixteen years old. From the few pictures I have of Esther as a young woman, she was lovely, always elegantly dressed, wearing pearls and white gloves. But, even in these pictures, standing side-by-side with a short-but-handsome Morris, she seems to be totally dominated by him.

      My grandparents’ relationship was an open book. Morris would scream Esther and she would come running from another room to fetch his slippers (literally) or perform some other subservient task. My entire family, except for me, seemed to think that this was okay and the way things should be—the patriarchs of these Jewish families ruling the roost and ordering everyone around; that was both expected and accepted. The rumor in our family was that Esther had once tried to run away; but sadly without an education—having never finished high school—and no money to speak of, she was stuck.

      A tyrannical figure, Morris continued to wield his authority through his control of the money. I found him rather intimidating and used to be very nervous before going to his apartment to see him since I was never sure what kind of mood he was in, or whether or not he was being nice to Esther. But what helped me to overcome my trepidation was the possibility of getting a peek at his money closet, which never ceased to amaze me. My grandfather would be in his office, and after I paid my respects, he would sometimes go over and open the closet with a key and take out stacks of crisp, fresh bills to give to me. I was convinced he was making that money with a machine hidden in the closet—even though no store manager

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