Sepia Memories

As many of you know, my Mum died just over a month ago. I’d like to post up a tribute to her but it's all still too painful so I thought I’d post up a tribute that I wrote several years ago to a great aunt who I loved dearly.

My Great Auntie Lena came to London from Latvia early in the 20^th century at a time when pogroms were driving whole communities of Jewish families out of Russia and the surrounding area. She was fairly representative of a generation of immigrants but in my childish naivety I thought that her life reflected the lives of all elderly people. Didn’t everybody’s Great Aunt speak Yiddish? I didn’t yet understand that there are as many different cultures as there are Great Aunts... well almost anyway.

I love these old sepia photographs. There are two more at the bottom of this post.

To a truly great aunt

[The Yiddish is translated below.]

My Great Auntie Lena Cohen

Born in Riga, Latvia, date unknown

Died in Leicester, England, February 1971

A refugee, she escaped to the East End of London

Unpacking her culture along with her feathered Russian bed,

Was she comforted by the Yiddishkeit that surrounded her?

Or did she feel the sting of black-shirted anti-Semitism?

I'll never know because she never said.

An evacuee she escaped to Leicester,

To an English world as far from the East End as it was from Riga.

Was her heart still in bombed-out London?

Or had it never left Latvia?

Did she fear these Midlanders with their strange accents?

Or did she appreciate the peace of a provincial town?

I'll never know because she never said.

In my memory she was always smiling,

Always cooking,

And I was always at her side,

Watching as she made blintzes with cheese from the hanging muslin,

Kreplach filled with meat from the metal mincer screwed to the table edge, 

Kneidlach rolled into balls so swiftly I could hardly see her moving hands,

And my treat; 

Gribenes glistening in the tin after the shmaltz had been rendered.

Was her life richer for having seen so many ways?

Or poorer for being a stranger in every place?

I'll never know. I never asked and she never said.

I only know that I was her little girl, her shayna Maideleh,

And my life is richer for having been touched by hers.

Yiddishkeit – Jewish way of life
Kreplach – Meat-filled dumplings
Kneidlach – Dumplings for soup
Gribenes – Fried onion and crunchy chicken skin left after making schmaltz
Schmaltz – Chicken fat used instead of butter with meat
Shayna Maideleh – Pretty little girl

Lena on her wedding day with husband, Simon Cohen

At the seaside. 

Auntie Lena is top right and my Mum is bottom right.

I love the way they're dressed in formal clothes on the beach.