A Visit with Grandma Pearl: Personal Reflections

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Chapter 9: Personal Reflections

I don't know if I have changed much. I think, essentially, I'm the same person. But you have to change a little bit, and some people can’t.  Life is always changing.

 

Regrets

I have one regret, but I don't dwell on it: I didn't get an education because I was deprived of parental care. There was nobody to encourage me and nobody to pay for it.  When I was six years old, my mother said, “You’re going to go to college Pearlie.” I remember her saying that. She had been American born, had gone to school, and knew about college; some of them never heard about college. Of course, now, if you don’t go to college, you don’t get a job. It wasn’t like that then. You could get a job somewhere and if you had what it took, you could even get rich. But not many of them did.

I would have loved to have had a full education and I missed that. And to this day, I feel the loss. I would have loved to have been able to continue because I was always an excellent kid in school, with excellent grades. I was a sensible kid and I had good observation and reasoning power.  I didn't go far enough. Like I said, I regret that today.

I always had that independence about myself, so I decided I had to go to work as a very young girl. I got prepared for that and went to work early. And I happened to meet the man that couldn't live without me, and then I realized that I couldn’t live without him.

 

On Friends and Enemies

I made some very close friends in my life. I made them in school as a child and then growing up, as an adolescent and young woman. In my travels, I made friends on the ships and in the planes -- wherever I was. You make the friends and you don't question why.  Wherever I lived I made friends easily. You know, I'm a very flexible person, and I get along with people. I'm a good people person.

I had relatives who were very close to me, and they were truly friends. That's something you feel. And I guess everybody in life makes friends and makes inadvertent enemies.

They are enemies because they want to be you. They are envious to the point that they’d like to see you dead.  I had relatives in my family and Eddie’s family like that. I guess every living person knows this kind of thing.  It was a matter of being jealous. They wished they were me and I couldn't accommodate them. So, you see, these are the kind of people you collect in your life, but you keep a distance from them because you know their motivation is evil.

I never deified anybody. I was just a good friend and I knew the people that loved me and I knew the people that wanted to be me if they had to kill me to be it. You know? But if you're smart, you win by paying no attention to that. And a lot of silence is good. You keep your distance from those kind of people because they are only bad.

Thank God I had more friends than enemies. I never made enemies because I never hurt anybody. If I found somebody was mean-spirited or something, I kept my distance from them, even if they were cousins or aunts. But there weren't too many of them, so it was all right.

 

On Being Jewish

You're born into it, so you don't think about it, but I always felt Jewish. I'm still interested in the culture and I get publications, and I read what is going on now.  I read the Jewish newspaper that used to be printed in Hebrew, "The Forward.”  I think I get it twice a week.

When they first started to put it in print in English, my son Melvin sent a check in so I that could get it.  You get a lot of nice information from them that you wouldn't get in the regular press. I'm also a lifetime member of Hadassah, and they have a wonderful little magazine that

comes -- beautiful, lovely things that you can't get in your regular press. I'm absorbed with it. I want to know, so I know pretty well what is going on.

I knew I wouldn't marry anybody that wasn't Jewish and I would be very upset if my children didn’t stay within the Jewish faith. I would prefer it, but it depends on the people. As a matter of fact, I have two granddaughters who live in the suburbs here who both married outside of the faith. I gave them a little hard time with it, but I didn't make it a whole big tragedy. And now they are raising their children with all the Jewish education that they can hold.

They had seders where my grandson-in-law wears a white yarmulke and puts it on his Bar Mitzvahed son, and they can conduct the seder. And he was not born a Jew. And her sister is also married to a Gentile, but now their daughter is going to be Bat Mitzvahed. And she is going to have a Bat Mitzvah. It is going to be like the biggest event of the century. So they toe the mark.

I didn't give my children much special training because they were getting educated in the United States. I didn't think they needed anything special. And in those days, don't forget, women didn't have any place in the synagogue. We sat upstairs with the rest of the ladies. We accepted it; that was the way it was.

The boys went to Hebrew School, mostly among the Orthodox. But the girls -- nothing.  In Europe, girls learned the prayers but they didn't really learn Torah. But now, women are rabbis. They wouldn't have believed it, to see a woman walk up to a Torah. My God! You see, it's a whole different world.

You know what else is changing too? The Christian religion is beginning to ease up. They are beginning to recognize that anti-Semitism was ridiculous. The Christian church and the Catholic Church have already accepted the fact that they were in error during the Holocaust -- that they had made a terrible mistake. And the Catholics have removed from their textbooks a lot of the lies that they spread around all these years. They have come to a reasoning of this, that there was no sense to this.

When the Holocaust happened, we didn't still have family in Europe, because in my generation, family came here to avoid the pogroms and get religious freedom and some opportunities for education. There was no Hitler then.

The pulpits weren't silent during the Hitler period. It was the main subject in the pulpit and the temple.  It was incredible, you understand. It wasn't only that you couldn't understood it, but there was nothing you could do. They did what they could, but he was a madman that appeared on the scene. You wonder how he could get away with it.

Back then, if a priest had taken aside a group of children and looked at a picture of the last supper, he would have told them that Jews were all Christ killers; they had that blood libel thing going on – that lie. He should have said that that was a Passover seder on account of Jesus was a Jew, and made it clear, you see.  They were responsible for a lot of the hatred, and responsible for Hitler.

But they have come to terms with that now and realize that they had been mistaken. So it's getting better. And half of the marriages that take place are outside of the faith marriages. I'm very encouraged about the attitude now of Christians towards Jews. They are looking at things differently, realizing how ridiculous the whole thing was.

I'm gratified by that because I feel that this makes these people more logical. I think that the Orthodox Jews are behind the times; they're not responding well enough to what Christianity is now trying to correct. I must say that I give Pope John a lot of credit, and the other Pope before him, because they were the first ones to object to all of that and remove those references from the books that they were teaching children with. And the Pope controls the minds of half the world. You know, when he died, every synagogue in America had services for him.

 

On Being Remembered

I would like them to remember me, but each child and grandchild, a close member of your family, will handle it in a different way, you see. They won't line them all up and do a dance. Each one has a different way. I don't give it too much thought.

I'd like them to remember me. But what I feel lucky about is that they know me now. I have a connection with them. And even the little kids, the tiny tots, they say, "Grandma Pearl." They hear it, they know it, they keep that alive. You know, I have maybe sixty members [in my family] and I don't know any of them that are inattentive or don't know me. And they don’t all live in the same city either.

Time goes by and each person has a life to live. When my own children got ready to fly from the nest, I gave them full freedom. I didn't interfere with their lives. I let them go, just like the birds.  My children got married and I kept on good grounds with the sons-in-law and daughters-in-law.  I don't advise them about how they live their lives.  I don't get poetic about that. See, when I reminisce with my children, I'm not a fountain of advice, a fountain of how they should behave or who they should love, who they should hate, or who they should divorce.

I don't know that I ever sat down and pondered what the meaning of life is. What's important? I think love is a very major thing. It's a major thing in a marriage and it's a major thing in relationships.  People who have never known love don't know what it is. When you have known it, you know how important it is.

 

On the Hereafter

I don't expect to know the answer to where do we go from here. There are a lot of questions that nobody can answer, that nobody knows. We talk about God and like to feel that there is some Supreme Being. But no matter how much education you get, how many degrees you pack away, and how long you live and experience the world, you still do not have the answers of what happens in the afterlife. Sometimes that is where humor comes in -- you can get a little humorous about it.

Reincarnation? Well, I don't dismiss anything. I like, sometimes, to console myself, to feel that maybe there is another plateau of some kind. Or maybe there is such a thing as a soul. We talk about a soul, but we don't know what a soul is. And we don't know if it exists. We can't.

Sometimes I take comfort in hoping Eddie is out there somewhere. I think the two people that I wonder if they are somewhere on the planet are my mother and my husband. Those two.  Maybe they are looking out after me. There's no really pat answer for that, but deep down I like to feel that we could be reunited somewhere. Now that I am getting towards the end of my days, it's a comfort when I think about it.

But, see, I don't cling to those thoughts because I've always been so forward thinking about tomorrow and life. You go on. I was always an up person. My husband had his occasional bouts with depression.  He wouldn't be happy, but then he'd snap out of it.  He was a different man with the swings.  I've never had the swings.  I was always rather even.

 

Joie De Vivre

I've had a good life.  I happen to be very lucky.  I have had bouts with surgery a couple of times, and I've had children, but I've been lucky. I grew up being pretty safe. I didn't grow up with traumatic fears or anything.  Emotionally, I am very strong.  The early blow – losing my mother – that’s about as bad as it can get for a child. But I handled my mother's death okay for a ten-year-old child.

I didn't have a mother or a father watching me, but I'd always have some cousin or uncle that took an interest in me and watched over me. I knew these people were my friends; I knew the ones that were good and the ones that weren't. I could recognize that even when I was a little girl. I could take the measure of a person. I'm very good at reading people, and having an opinion.

I've never had a trauma of any kind. I didn't come from Europe, I didn't live under Hitler, and I didn't have those terrible traumas that people lived the rest of their lives with.

Now, I'm waiting for a pacemaker. I'm okay. I'm on this medication now, and I can't be too active. But I'm blessed with my reasoning power and I am as mentally alert as I ever was.

Some people shorten their lives by their lifestyle or by the way they live and think.  I've seen them around me and I can't figure out how their mind works. Nobody knows how the other fellow works. No two people are alike.

I guess it's hard to explain what type of person I am. I do know one thing: I see the bright side of everything, I see the positive -- the better situation. I’ve always liked the French saying the best, “joie de vivre”; it tells everything. I have a very keen sense of humor. I love laughter and I love comedy. I love life. I was a woman with a lot of joie de vivre.

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