“And now we are only seven,” thought Freida Sima, as granddaughter Judy helped her cut her blouse and sat with her for the hour while she cried over her brother.
* * * * *
The years passed and Freida Sima made friends among the neighbors, some of them older Europeans like her, others younger English speakers. To keep her from being lonely, Shirley founded an English-speaking seniors club nearby. Her brothers in Israel thought it amazing that she took so well to unfamiliar Israeli food. When Leibush walked in one day and saw her enjoying a plate of local extra-sharp techina, he admitted that in his twenty-five years of living in Israel, he had never once been tempted to try it.
She even learned to cook a few local dishes, although her specialties remained the American-Jewish foods at which she excelled. On Friday after school Judy and her girlfriends would stand in the kitchen eating Freida Sima’s schnitzel straight from the pan.
“Leave some for Shabbos, kinderlach,” she would laugh, but in truth she was pleased. She hadn’t lost her touch. “Just one more piece, Baba,” the girls would always insist.
Leaving the apartment one day, she slipped and broke her foot, necessitating six weeks in a cast. She recovered fully, but it was a reminder of her growing fragility, which was never far from her mind.
A year later, she slipped a second time and broke her hip. In those days, Israeli doctors rarely operated on octogenarians who had suffered such accidents. Instead, she was placed in a full leg cast for three months and sent to a rehab facility where the doctors informed Shirley that there was almost no chance her mother would walk again.
Freida Sima responded in her usual no-nonsense way, telling her daughter: “No one is going to tell me I’m not going to walk again.” And she did, surprising her doctors, her daughter, her convalescent home roommates – everyone but herself. True, it was with a walker, and for only short distances. But she was not about to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair, unable to run her kitchen.
Alas, Freida Sima’s physical limitations made it more difficult to run the kitchen than she had imagined, and Shirley did most of the work while she gave instructions from a chair in the dining area. If that wasn’t depressing enough, Srul and Leibush had abruptly stopped visiting. True, they called her daily on the phone, but even those calls were strange. And where had her niece, Abie’s daughter who lived nearby, disappeared to?
Only after a month did the pieces fall into place. One day in mid-August, Judy walked into her bedroom to tell her that Srul and Leibush had come to visit. Starting with “Baba, your brothers are here,” Judy continued with the same fateful words she had used when she prepared her grandmother for Tuleh’s death: “Before you come out, please change your blouse; that one is too nice.”
The news was about her brother Avrum in New York – her Abie, whom she had brought to America such a long time ago. He had been run over early one morning on his way home from shul. He had lingered for ten days in a coma but died of his injuries. Srul and Leibush knew, and had sat shiva, but once again the family wanted to spare her an entire week of shiva, particularly in view of her physical limitations. Had her brothers come over with their mourning beards, they couldn’t have hid the tragedy; hence they only came over to be with her now that the shloshim was over, while she sat her hour.
Tuleh was gone, and now Abie as well. While Freida Sima refused to succumb to depression, she often felt overwhelmed and sat for hours on the kitchen terrace, looking out of the window, just thinking. Shirley noticed, and for the first time she asked her mother if she wouldn’t be happier in America. Giving a deep sigh, Freida Sima patted her daughter’s hand and remained silent.
How could she tell her only daughter that her heart was torn between two irreconcilable desires: to be with her family in Israel and to be with her family in America. One day, when Shirley asked her again, Freida Sima finally gave her an answer. “I want to be buried next to your father in Wellwood,” she said.
For Shirley, that was enough. She left for the U.S. where she secured a place for her mother in the Daughters of Jacob Home for the Aged in the Bronx. In March 1981, Judy brought Freida Sima to America. Shirley met them at the airport with an ambulette to accommodate her mother’s travel wheelchair.
Years later, Shirley recalled the moment she knew she had done the right thing for her mother. A few hours earlier, President Ronald Reagan had been shot and wounded, and the ambulette’s radio was tuned to a news station. En route to the Bronx, when Shirley tried to speak with her mother, whom she hadn’t seen in months, Freida Sima put her fingers to her lips. “Sha! I’m listening to the news. They shot the president!”
It was the first time in years that Freida Sima, homebound for so long and feeling more and more cut off from the world, could listen to the radio and understand every word.
* * * * *
Freida Sima spent the next three years at the Daughters of Jacob Home, running the social committee on her floor and enjoying daily phone calls and weekly visits from her family in America. Shirley flew in at least four times a year to see her mother. Early on, Freida Sima’s Aunt Sadie was still alive, living in another home, and the two women talked daily, reminiscing about the days when they were young girls in New York.
In April 1984, three days after Judy gave birth to her first daughter in Israel, Freida Sima had a stroke and was moved temporarily to Montefiore Hospital for treatment. Speaking to Shirley by phone, she learned that her new great-granddaughter was named Rivka for Max’s sister Becky and Freida Sima’s Tante Rivka, wife of Uncle Joe who had brought her to America.
