A Jeweled Relationship
Eulogy for My Grandmother
By Erika S. Fine
My grandmother Yetta was a powerful presence, nowhere unnoticed. Handsome and regal, she had olive skin and black hair, worn in a low chignon. She was mistaken for Greek inAthens, Italian inRome, and Brazilian in Sao Paolo, but she was Eastern European Jewish, born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Her parents were immigrants fromGalicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now part ofPolandand theUkraine. A child in theirNew Yorkneighborhood had burned to death in a tenement fire, so my grandmother’s father moved the family to then-bucolicBayonne,New Jersey, where Yetta enrolled in kindergarten.
My grandmother still lived inBayonnewhen I was growing up. I loved our family visits to her home there. Her bedroom, to my inquisitive eyes, was a treasure trove of female bounty. My mother—her daughter—was a modern minimalist who eschewed beauty creams, fragrances, and other accoutrements of traditional womanhood. My grandmother, in contrast, kept silky hand lotions and French perfumes on her bedside table, complex girdles and curious garters in her closet, and elbow-length gloves and ornamental hatpins in her dresser drawers. Other mysterious grown-up-lady-things were stashed all over her bedroom, lures awaiting my discovery.
The kitchen was far less dreamy, but it held evidence of Yetta’s nahkes, or pride in her family. The wall by the kitchen table displayed my gold spray-painted macaroni collage of a dreidle next to a painting of a woman in a flowing white dress that my artistic mother had painted at sixteen. (Years later, I was surprised to see my mother’s painting reproduced in a textbook. Only then did I realize that my mother’s work was a perfectly rendered art-class copy of Sir Thomas Lawrence’s Pinkie.) Other grandmothers venerated the kitchen, but mine wasn’t particularly interested in cooking. She told me she didn’t know how to boil water until after she was married. Nonetheless, she was in charge of mealtimes in her home. I can still see a whole cow’s tongue perched on her kitchen counter, carving knife at the ready. I used to shriek at the sight of the tongue and scurry out of the kitchen to the den. Why, I wondered, did people eat tongue? Did anyone besides Jews eat it? Why was something so repulsive considered kosher when delicious normal foods like shrimp were not?
The den beyond the kitchen was almost as magical as the bedroom: it housed the first color television I had ever seen. My grandmother, in fact, was an “early adopter” of both television and color TV. She was always a combination of the thoroughly modern and staunchly old-fashioned. She worked out in a gym (she called it a “spa”) in the mid 1970s, well before it was commonplace. She wouldn’t wear pants until the late 1970s, when she moved toFloridaand adopted the modern American culture of ease, comfort, and informality. Loose, casual outfits replaced girdles. She chopped off her hair, trading the graceful bun for a short do with shaggy bangs. I missed the pre-pantsuit grandma who could look elegant in almost anything, the grandma who, for several winters back inNew Jersey, had sported a stylish leopard-print hat that drew compliments every time she wore it. Where did she get it? She made it herself out of a cheap, fuzzy toilet-seat cover, but that was our little secret.
Even though her new look was casual, she could still work her “elegance magic” when she wanted to. For example, for one festive occasion, she hired a seamstress to create a neck hole and side seams in a hand-crocheted lace tablecloth that she had found at a yard sale for a few dollars. She wore it belted over a plain ecru silk shift. Her beaming smile, tanned skin, and stately demeanor transformed the tablecloth outfit into a couture creation.
It wasn’t the recycled lace or homemade hats that most engaged me, however. It was, without question, her jewelry collection. Nothing was more magnificent than the top left drawer of her dresser, her main jewelry stash. For me it held endless allure, with its cardboard and plastic boxes, opened and closed, overflowing with beads, bracelets, and brooches, both precious and costume, along with other exotic lady-things, such as glittery shoe clips, black-lace Spanish fans, hand-embroidered handkerchiefs, summer-weight gloves, and pearl-headed hairpins.
When I was six years old, I bought what I thought was a beautiful necklace for her. I paid for it with money I had saved in my ceramic piggy bank, and I felt so grown up. The gift wasn’t for her birthday or Chanukah or another special occasion; I bought it simply because she was my grandmother and I thought she would look good in it.
The necklace featured big plastic pearls alternating with small oblong beads. It was very long, but it could be doubled or even tripled. My grandmother kept it in the glorious top left drawer, with all her other jewelry. I used to “visit” the necklace in the top drawer when I stayed with my grandmother. I was proud when I saw her wear it.
Every year or so, my grandmother would say, “Erika, I still have that beautiful necklace you gave me,” and there it was, still in its box in that drawer. As a teenager, however, I was embarrassed by the necklace, mortified that I had picked out something so tacky. But later, when I was in my early twenties and my grandmother would still say, “I have that beautiful necklace you gave me,” I was touched, because I understood that she had kept it simply because I had given it to her. And she wore it, too, for the same reason. I don’t know what happened to the necklace, but I do have a slightly more elegant set of her costume-jewelry beads in a dresser drawer, as sort of a memory proxy.
When my grandmother was a teenager, in early-1920sNew Jersey, she was part of a tight circle of six female friends, all born inAmericato immigrant Jewish parents. The six girls decided to form a secret society, naming it the Hexagon Club. They visited a jeweler and asked him to set a six-sided garnet in 14-karat gold, and then write “HX,” the code for the Hexagon Club, in gold leaf on the garnet. The jeweler made six identical pins. My grandmother gave me hers when I was in my late twenties, when she told me about the Hexagon Club. It’s actually an octagon, but the gold-leaf HX is strong and clear, with no signs of fading, just as my memories of her will never fade.* [see note at end]
My teenaged grandmother could afford a garnet and gold pin because she worked after school and on weekends for $2.50 a week at the Five and Dime. About two decades later, during World War II, she worked in a different capacity, and jewelry again entered the picture.
To contribute to the war effort, Yetta found a job at Elco Boat Works, or more formally, the Elco Naval Division of the Electric Boat Company, inBayonne. Elco produced large PT boats (patrol torpedo boats), about four hundred of them over the course of the war, in a twenty-one-building plant. My grandmother was a “Rosie the Riveter,” but not literally—she was a drill press operator, with her own assigned press. She worked at Elco throughout the war years, on a 4 p.m.-to-midnight shift, preparing dinner for the family before she left for the plant. My mother, the older daughter, served the meal while my grandmother was out building boats, including PT 59, whose first commanding officer was Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, after he heroically survived the sinking of PT 109.
A popular diversion in the wartime plants was fashioning small items of jewelry from scrap metal, including rings in the shape of belt buckles. My grandmother had one of those belt-buckle rings, and she gave it to me when she first told me about her wartime work experiences. I still wear it now and then.
Today, my top dresser drawer looks very much like my grandmother’s—with cardboard and plastic boxes, open and closed, overflowing with beads, bracelets, and other jewelry, including a 1920s hexagon garnet pin and a 1940s base-metal belt-buckle ring. It’s not, however, the things inside the drawer that have value. It’s the memories of childhood and love that they evoke, the memories of looking at the strange world of grown-ups as embodied by one loving, idiosyncratic, hard-working, and glamorous grandmother.♦
* Note: After my eulogy, my grandmother’s ninety-year-old sister, eighteen months younger and very competitive with her, approached me and exclaimed, “So THAT’S what the HX pin was all about! I finally know. Your grandmother would NEVER tell me!”
