In a clean blouse and skirt with a pink kerchief covering her hair, she would turn toward the candles placed in two tall silver candlesticks her atheist husband had bought for her out of love before they married. Slowly circling her face with her palms three times, she covered her eyes and benched lecht, praying for her husband’s health and livelihood, for her stepsons, for her daughter Shirley, for her parents on the farm in Mihowa where she was born in far-away Bukovina, and finally for herself, thanking God for having seen her through another week and asking for strength in the week to come.
Turning to her husband, she would wish him a good Sabbath. “A gut Shabbos, mein Mordche,” she would say, to which he would always reply respectfully, “A gut Shabbos, mein Bertie.” Despite their daily political and religious arguments on the theoretical level, he never mocked her candle lighting, her shul going, or her insistence on a strictly kosher home.
* * * * *
The years of the Great Depression continued with Mordche working less than six months out of every year and Freida Sima expanding her boarding house. She even agreed to take on a boarder with kitchen privileges, a Mr. Rosenthal whom everyone called Rosie. A widower and traditional Jew who soon became a member of the family, Rosie’s weekly payments enabled them to breathe financially, to become “the less poor among the poor,” as Freida Sima once said.
The tall, kind widower lived in the Kraus home until his death twenty years later, and was mourned by all as if he were indeed a relative. Leaving his tallis and tefillin to his landlady as his own freethinker son had no use for them, they sat in her drawer for another three decades until there finally was a religious man in the family tall enough to wear Rosie’s oversized prayer shawl.
Freida Sima’s family continued to expand on both sides of the Atlantic. Three weeks after the stock market collapse, Abie and Minnie had a girl, naming her Muriel in memory of their mutual grandmother, Baba Malka. Several months later, in Mihowa, her sister Marium gave birth to a daughter, Tzili. A year later, her sister-in-law Betty, wife of her younger brother Benny in America, had a daughter, Bernice, and two and a half years after that Muriel was joined by a baby sister, Sheila.
Much of the extended Scharf-Eisenberg-Kraus family lived within walking distance of each other, as many families did in those days, and they would constantly go back and forth between each other’s homes, giving the younger cousins the feeling of belonging to a clan that stretched throughout the Longwood section of the South Bronx.
The all davened at the storefront shul on Intervale Avenue, across from the Minsker shul, “which was only for the Russians,” Muriel recalled. She also recalled how her older cousin Shirley developed a sense of adventure that matched her red hair.
“One erev Yom Kippur when we were quite small she found a baby kitten that she decided to take into Kol Nidre. Hidden in her sweater, the kitten was quiet until it decided to start meowing right in the middle of davening. Her mother and my grandmother looked straight at me as Shirley with her big green eyes put on this innocent look so that no one would suspect her. But I just shook my head and shrugged my shoulders.”
* * * * *
“Dor Holech Vedor Ba” – one generation goes and another comes. In early 1932 Max’s father Abraham became ill, passing away in May at the age of 83.
