Although she didn’t become a mother until she was thirty-three, she became “Baba,” meaning grandmother, when she was less than a year old. As her granddaughter I called her “Baba,” but she had first been called by that name more than sixty years before my birth. That was how her older cousins referred to her, treating it as a nickname and calling her “Babaleh.” On her immigration papers from 1911 she is listed as Babe, the immigration official’s phonetic equivalent of what he heard when he asked her name and she automatically replied with what everyone had called her for the previous fifteen years, “Babeh.”
The story of how she received that nickname was a central tale in our family lore. When her parents married, her mother, Devorah, had long fiery red braids that almost reached the ground. Enamored with Devorah’s hair, her husband, Nachman, forbade her to cut it after marriage as was the custom. Instead, she pinned up her flowing locks under her marriage wig to the dismay of her relatives who had come to shave her head.
Refusing to heed their warnings about where such immodesty could lead, she and her tall, strapping Nachman lived happily together, soon delighting in the news that she was going to bear their first child.
Shortly thereafter, my grandmother entered the world and was named Freida Sima – Sima after a neighbor who had recently died childless and Freida, the Yiddish equivalent of simcha (“happiness”) in honor of Simchat Torah, one of Judaism’s most joyous festivals, which had just been celebrated the previous day.
But that happiness was soon threatened. Several months later little Freida Sima fell ill with diphtheria. Seeing her baby convulsed with fever, a terrified seventeen-year-old Devorah ran to a neighbor for assistance. This was the moment the local women had waited for. Admonishing Devorah that it was God’s punishment for her misdeeds, they coerced her into shaving her head in the hope of appeasing the Almighty.
When Nachman returned home and saw his wife’s denuded scalp, he ran out of their cottage bellowing with rage. But it was too late. The deed had been done, and Devorah never grew her beautiful hair again.
At the same time, in order to “cheat the devil” it was customary to change a sick child’s name to that of an elderly person so that the child would be spared the evil eye. Boys would often receive the name Alter (“old one”) and girls would be called “old lady” or grandmother.
Thus, little Freida Sima was re-named Baba or Babaleh –”little grandmother,” a name that stuck for close to ninety years, almost wiping out the memory of what she had been called at birth.
All her future names would be based on the sound of this one. Her aunts in America gave her the English name Bertha, which was the closest one they could find to Babaleh. After joining her in America her younger siblings called her Boitee, which was easier for them to pronounce. A decade later, Max, her Russian-born husband, would call her Bert or Bertie, glossing over the “th” sound which was so difficult for immigrants to say.
Only when old age began creeping up on her did she begin to refer to her birth name, reminding us of its existence. At her eightieth birthday party, after everyone had toasted her with good health and long life, she turned to my mother and said, “Just remember one thing. My name is Freida Sima. That’s what I want you to put on my tombstone. Remember. Freida Sima.”
One of my grandmother’s favorite expressions was “I was Jewish before you were born,” and indeed her visceral reactions to various situations were deeply rooted in Jewish traditions, customs, beliefs, even superstitions.
Happiness is transient, an illusion. Every moment of joy has its flip side lurking in the shadows. Traditionally, Jews dilute even the greatest happiness with a brief mention of sorrow. Ashes are placed on a bridegroom’s forehead; a glass is broken in memory of the destruction of the Temple. Here too there could be no absolute celebration or undiluted joy. Even when drinking a birthday l’chaim and celebrating life, in a corner of your mind you should always think of the grave.
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According to a midrash, every person has a number of names: the one God gives, the one parents bestow, the one friends use, and the one a person earns by his or her unique talents and abilities. Each name expresses a different attribute and contributes an essential component to one’s essence. My grandmother was indeed a woman of many talents, and almost as many names; obviously her essence was just as complex.
Unlike many of my friends who had lost all their grandparents in the Holocaust, I was lucky enough to have one set of grandparents who lived with us throughout much of my childhood. From as early as I could remember, my grandmother would tell me stories about her life in Europe and her experiences as a young girl in America.
She was a walking history book. From her I learned about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of March 1911 that occurred seven weeks after she arrived in New York, the largest industrial disaster in the history of the city in which 146 garment workers, mostly young immigrants, died. The fire was the impetus for the creation of the American Society of Safety Engineers, the oldest and largest professional safety organization in the United States.
Then there was the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, and the funeral – one of the largest in New York City history, drawing my grandmother and 100,000 others – of the famous Jewish author Sholem Aleichem in 1916. She spoke to me nostalgically about the days when Harlem, her first home after getting off the boat from Europe, had been a Jewish neighborhood.
The stories she told me have been the basis for this series of articles, augmented by information from my wonderful cousins, members of the revived Scharf-Eisenberg Family Circle, which functions until today. Having at one point dwindled to barely a burial society, it is now, thanks to its president, Norman Eisenberg, a thriving group of relatives, some closely and some more distantly related, who maintain contact through Family Circle parties, online groups, and social media.
