Cousin Rose at Passover

Each year at Passover, I think about Rose, my grandmother’s cousin, who was born in a shtetl, but kept creating new memories during the holiday in the late 1990s. 

Rose Pinsky Halpern, the embodiment of a lively, short Jewish woman from the old country, was born in 1910. But we really didn’t get to know each other until the 1990s, when we started corresponding, me writing from Northern California, and she answering from the South Bronx. She was one of the last of the relatives who fled Ukraine for America in the 1920s. She was still active, traveling and fighting for the rights of seniors. 

In 1997 my girlfriend’s family lived in New York, and she invited me there at Passover. Before the first seder, I took the subway to visit Rose, 87, in her high-rise apartment. 

I hadn’t been there long, admiring the view of Yankee Stadium, when the phone rang. 

Rose’s hearing wasn’t very good. She asked me to answer the plastic wall phone. 

“I’m calling for Rose Halpern,” said a male voice on the phone. “It’s the New York Communist Party. We’d like to invite her to our Passover seder on Saturday night.” 

I repeated the message to Rose. 

“Tell them I’ll think about it,” Rose instructed me.

I can’t remember the last time I’d answered the phone for anyone. And I’d never had the New York Communist Party on the other end. Who knew they even had a seder?  

I can’t remember the last time I’d answered the phone for anyone. And I’d never had the New York Communist Party on the other end. Who knew they even had a seder?

More importantly, I now had an answer to the question I’d been wondering for years — was Rose a Communist? My mom in California adored Rose. She mentioned Rose’s alleged Communist past, but had told me not to ask her about it. I didn’t always listen to my mother, and now I didn’t need to. 

The call ended, and we returned to our visit.  I tried to act like this was normal. As if every day I answered the phone for my elderly cousin and the Communist Party was on the other end. 

We continued to look at old family photos. Rose gave me a treasured black and white photo, showing the immigrants from her shtetl at a reunion dinner in 1929. 

That night I called my parents, hoping to discuss my return to California for the next night’s seder. But no one picked up.

I found out why the next day. My mom was in intensive care. She had ended chemotherapy a few months earlier. Instead of a second seder, I saw my mom at St. Jude’s Hospital in Fullerton in Orange County, enveloped in tubes.

It was hard to talk to my mom at such a dire time. But my visit to Rose gave us something to discuss that was off topic from the bigger issues. I told my mom about my trip to the South Bronx, and that indeed Rose was a Communist. We looked over the 20-inch photo that Rose had given me, and figured out where our relatives were.  

My mom, Rita, died of ovarian cancer two months later. But Rose carried on, and I visited during her final years. I got to ask her why she’d become a Communist. Her answer was that she believed in racial equality in the 1930s, and the Communists did, too. I didn’t probe too deeply, although later I would make a Freedom of Information Act request and learn that the FBI investigated Rose from the 1940s to the 1960s. They never found anything incriminating. 

The next year, in 1998, my girlfriend Alison and I returned to New York for Passover. This time, we invited Rose to a large family seder in Queens. Rose was the oldest person there, and the best dressed. She’d had her nails and hair done, and I remember feeling proud as she read during the seder. I don’t know if the Communist Party of New York ever counted Rose among its seder attendees, but she was an honored guest that night.

And that picture of the shtetl’s reunion? It’s now framed and hanging in the house I share with my then-girlfriend. Alison and I have been married for 23 years, with enough time to have created plenty of Passover memories. They almost always include the ones about Rose.

Larry Sokoloff grew up in Orange County, which in his childhood was renowned as an anti-Communist stronghold. He is a professor emeritus at San Jose State University, an attorney and a freelance writer.