Freida Sima’s marriage strengthened the bonds within the Eisenberg family as well. Now that she had gotten married, it was possible for her younger siblings, who had waited for years, to finally marry. In February 1929, her brother Abie in New York would marry their first cousin Minnie Scharf, whom he’d been courting for years; her sister Marium in the Bukovina began to “step out” with Feivel Rosenberg, whom she would marry in June 1929; and her brother Benny would go back to Europe to find a bride, fall in love with Bertha (Betty) Lobel at first sight, and a year later return to Europe to marry her and bring her to America. But this was all in the future.
Meanwhile, the family’s needs were changing. Abie, together with uncles Joe and Moshe-Leib, decided to found a landsmanschaft, a Scharf-Eisenberg family circle and benevolent society. Abie was already secretary-treasurer of the First Mihowa Berhometh Bukoviner Society, founded in 1910 to provide sickness and death benefits for members and function as a burial society. Seeing the family get older and realizing that after Freida Sima’s marriage there would be a rush of weddings among the siblings, they founded their own “circle” as both a social group and eventual burial society. Thus, they laid the groundwork for the family to be together in both life and death.
And indeed there was a new life to look forward to. Thrilled to be expecting just weeks after her marriage, Freida Sima informed her husband, whose income as a house painter well supported the family, that they must move to a bigger apartment and one that was not a fifth-floor walk-up whose stairs were torture for her growing girth. She also stated that contrary to common practice, and although his boys had been born at home, those stairs were the reason his next child was going to be born in a hospital.
“It’s a woman’s decision,” his mother told him. He reluctantly agreed and began looking for a new apartment for his family.
* * * * *
On January 14, 1929, Freida Sima gave birth to her firstborn at Prospect Hospital, a private Bronx facility boasting a new maternity ward. The ward may have been state of the art at the time but the communications were less so. As few people had telephones at home, the hospital would call the candy store nearest to a patient’s house, asking to deliver a message to the family. That morning Max woke up to a delivery boy handing him a note stating that his wife had just given birth to a baby boy.
“Another boy,” he said, thinking of the bris that would take place the following week. “What a mistake,” recalled my grandmother. “And what mazel that he got to the hospital before I really had the baby. Otherwise, after four boys, when he saw I had a girl he would have always believed the hospital had switched babies on him!”
Max had tears in his eyes as he held his first and only daughter, whom they decided to name Shirley Rosalyn. As her husband would never step foot in a shul other than to hear chazzanus, Freida Sima asked her Uncle Joe to make the mishebeirach for the kimpeturn (new mother) the following Shabbos and give her daughter the Hebrew name Sarah Raizel. Wishing to commemorate Max’s late wife, she assumed Sarah to be Sadie’s Hebrew name. (Raizel was chosen in memory of a great-aunt.) Informing Max only after the deed, the surprise was on Freida Sima.
“Actually, her name was Sima, just like yours,” Max told her. She now understood why he had never asked to name the baby for his late wife, as Jews do not give a child their own first name.
