In My Mother's House, livre ebook

July 1974

She calls me on the telephone three times the day before I am due to arrive in Los Angeles. The first time she says, “Tell me, you still like cottage cheese?” “Sure,” I say, “I love it. Cottage cheese, yogurt, ricotta . . .” “Good,” she says, “we’ll have plenty.”

The second conversation is much like the first. “What about chicken? You remember how I used to bake it?”

The third time she calls, the issue is schav — Russian sorrel soup served cold with sour cream, chopped egg, and onion with large chunks of dry, black bread. “Mama,” I say. “Don’t worry. It’s you I’m coming to visit. It doesn’t matter what we eat.”

She worries. She is afraid she has not been a good mother. An ac¬tivist when I was growing up, Communist Party organizer, she would put up our dinner in a huge iron pot before she left for work each morning, in this way making sure she neglected no essential duty of a mother and wife. For this, however, she had to get up early. I would watch her chopping onions and tomatoes, cutting a chicken up small, and dicing meat while I ate breakfast, sitting on a small step ladder at our chopping board.

Now, thirty years later, she’s afraid she won’t be able to give what¬ever it is I come looking for when I come for a visit. I’m laughing and telling my daughter about her three calls, and I am weeping.

Foreword
Acknowledgments
Part One: Wasn’t I Once Also a Daughter?
The Proposal
The First Story My Mother Tells
Childhood in Russia (1903–1914)
Oy, My Enlightenment
The Second Story My Mother Tells
Do This for Me, Rose
The Third Story My Mother Tells
A Larger World (1920–1928)
Three Sisters
The Fourth Story My Mother Tells
I Fight for My Mother (1928–1932)
Wasn’t I Once Also a Daughter?
Part Two: The Almond Giver
She Comes to Visit
The Fifth Story My Mother Tells
Motherland (1932–1934)
A Walk in the Woods
The Sixth Story My Mother Tells
The Organizer (1934–1938)
The Rose Garden
The Seventh Story My Mother Tells
Letters (1938–1940)
The Almond Giver
The Eighth Story My Mother Tells
A Birth and a Death (1940–1946)
Part Three: The Survivor
414 East 204th Street
The Crossroads
The First Story I Tell
Hard Times (1947–1952)
Take a Giant Step
The Second Story I Tell
A Communist Childhood (1952–1957)
A Knock at the Door
The Third Story I Tell
Motherland Revisited (1957–1967)
What Remains
Epilogue