Mom’s life on the farm was hard. With eight children and the struggle to make ends meet, she worked from sunup to sundown, and sometimes late into the evening. She had a lot of stress and was often not a happy person. She may have had miscarriage(s). And two of her children died – one as a teen, the other as a young adult. More on that later.
I had some run-ins with my mom about not helping enough with chores. She got mad at me because I stubbornly refused to help with canning late at night. I remember sitting on the bottom stairs, refusing to go up to bed or to help in the kitchen. Mom was so tired and angry, she hit me. But that was unusual. My mom was a gentle giant. With five older siblings to pick up the slack with farm chores, mom often just let me be. Though if someone was going to bake a pie, I always volunteered to pick berries up on the hill, where I could visit my retreat. Until the day I came across a snake coiled under a berry bush. I dropped my berry containers and ran. It was a long time before I braved berry-picking again.
My mother’s happy moments were when her sister Becky (Cohen) came to visit. They had a great time together. Working while chatting and laughing until all hours. Becky had four children – a set of twins, Beadie and Rosie, another daughter Ethel, and a stepson, Murray.
My mother had another sister, Ida, who committed suicide when her husband died. Ida left three sons who were essentially raised by Becky. Becky’s brood grew to 7.
The farm was a summer resort for all the cousins to come visit. Later, two of Becky’s daughters – Ethel and Beadie – married two of the brothers (sons of Becky’s sister). A case of first cousins marrying.
My mother’s grandparents, Boris and Esther Kletnisky, were born mid-1800s in Bialystok, which at that time was part of Russia. Their daughter Ethel married Joseph Shevach. These were my grandparents who we think lived in the vicinity of Minsk. When Ethel died in childbirth, Joseph remarried. The kids were not part of Joseph’s plan for a new life. He took off for Palestine with his new wife. The kids, including my mother Dora, were farmed out to relatives. Dora ended up in the States with her cousins, the Ephron’s.
My mother met my father at a summer resort in Moosup, Connecticut. They were married in 1911 or 1912. I wish I could say “happily ever after”, but life on the farm was physically demanding and there was no rest until many, many years later when my parents left the farm and moved to California.
