Imaginary Conversations with My Eastside Grandmother

We called her “Eastside Grandmother,” which is a rather strange way to refer to one’s great-grandmother. I assume this was easier for my brother and me than saying “Great-grandmother Savetnick.” After all, she lived in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles, while we lived across town, on the west side, in Beverlywood.

I wish I had been older. I wish I had been able to talk to her. She was a mystery.

We visited her often during the ’50s until she died—was killed, really—in December 1959, a month before my eleventh birthday and my brother’s bar mitzvah. I wish I had been older. I wish I had been able to talk to her. She was a mystery. My father’s family in Eastern Europe was a mystery. Eastside Grandmother Annie held all the answers, but I was too young to know I should be asking questions. Too young to make an effort to get to know her story. I think she would have liked to have been called “Grandma Annie.”

“Grandma Annie,” I wish I had been old enough to say, “tell me about your village. Tell me why you couldn’t leave Warkowicze in 1904 and sail to America.” 

“Hershel was sick,” she would have answered. “We couldn’t leave because of him.” I knew from family lore that Annie, her husband, my great-grandfather Earl Bernard, and their five children were ready to leave but Annie knew they’d be turned back at Ellis Island if they arrived with a sick child.

“I understand,” I would console her. “You did the right thing by cancelling, but sending your eldest, Harry, who became my grandfather, all by himself at age 13 on a ship across the ocean to … to where?” 

“You can’t understand. There were pogroms. We were in constant danger. I had to believe that Harry would succeed, that he would find the family in Omaha that was waiting for him.” 

Annie was strong and determined and right. I know that Harry settled in Omaha, Nebraska with Earl Bernard’s relatives. I know what happened in America. “But Annie,” I wish I could have asked, “What happened to your sick child? How did your husband, my great-grandfather, die?”

Annie was in her mid-eighties living alone on Chicago Street in a two-story building with cement stairs that were parallel to the building and went up to a landing with a wide entrance and down the other side. My brother Jay, two years my senior, and I loved to run up one side and down the other on our visits. There wasn’t much else to do anyway. Annie would wait for us and immediately push some coins in our hands. “Go. Go buy rugelach.” We’d skip off down the street by ourselves to the bakery where we pointed at more than the rugelach and returned with chocolate cookies and sweet pastries. Annie knew we’d never complain about the Sunday visits this way.

Every visit, while my brother and I were walking to and from the bakery alone, an unimaginable scenario in the Boyle Heights of later years, or while sitting quietly eating our pastries, my father “conversed” with his grandmother—in Yiddish, a language he did not know at all. 

She stood tall, had straight short white hair with a large wisp across her forehead. She was short but what I liked was her resemblance to my father. Their skin tones were more olive than my mother’s pale tones. Every visit, while my brother and I were walking to and from the bakery alone, an unimaginable scenario in the Boyle Heights of later years, or while sitting quietly eating our pastries, my father “conversed” with his grandmother—in Yiddish, a language he did not know at all. Annie talked and my father nodded his head in agreement. I suppose she threw in some English, but I do not remember any personal conversations with her. Exchanges, yes, to thank her for the money for the bakery and to get instructions on what to buy, but no intimate conversations. But the exchange should have gone this way:

“Grandma Annie,” I say, “I know Harry succeeded and nine years later your son, Sam, joined him when he was 16 or 17, before World War One, as did their sisters. But you remained in Warkowicze. Why?”

“Hershel was sickly. He could never have made the trip. Then my husband died.” Annie sighs. “And the Great War started and no one could leave. But my children were safe.” She smiles before sipping her tea or taking a bite of the rugalach. “At least I finally got here in 1923.”

Annie was alone when she arrived, but she remarried three years later in Omaha to a landsman from her childhood home in Schimsk. They moved to Los Angeles. Real pioneers. Surely they spoke only Yiddish. But she was widowed again only seven years later. She remained in Los Angeles, alone. No family members moved to Los Angeles until the mid-forties. 

“Why, Grandma Annie, did you stay so far away from your children and grandchildren?”

I wonder if she had to shut off her emotions for her children as, one by one, she pushed them out to what she hoped would be a better life. Did she get used to being without them?

I wonder if she had to shut off her emotions for her children as, one by one, she pushed them out to what she hoped would be a better life. Did she get used to being without them? In Warkowicze, she was surrounded by extended family. In Los Angeles, there was no one. Grandma Annie was more alone than she had been in Warkowicze.

“Now, Grandma Annie, forgive me for asking, but the family that stayed in Warkowicze, the ones you lived next to for over thirty years, your husband’s brothers and their families—the Mergiels. Didn’t you worry about them as Europe moved toward World War Two? 

“I sent the Mergiels packages of clothes for many years,” she’ll tell me. 

“But that’s before the World War Two. Did you exchange letters? These people were my grandfather’s aunts, uncles and cousins. Did they beg for help? Tell me, please, that someone in the family tried to save them!”  

“I heard nothing. I could only assume. Millions were slaughtered. What chance did they have in our little town? I’ve always wondered, but not really wanting detail,” she says, her face stern without tears, I’m sure. 

“Grandma Annie, do you realize that no one even mentioned them? I didn’t know that branches of the family remained in Warkowicze. I had no idea they existed. No idea where we were from until several years ago when I reconnected with my father’s cousins. Sam’s children. I didn’t know that our name was Mergiel and not Miller. Tell me if you found out their fate? If so, how did you find out? And even if not, how could a whole branch of my family be destroyed and forgotten?”

Annie just looks and listens. Should I tell her what I know? I know how they died. I pause. 

“Grandma Annie, the entire Mergiel family was in the Warkowicze ghetto and marched out one morning after the Sukkot holiday of 1942, was shot and dumped into pits. About ten years ago, Grandma Annie, I met a survivor of the massacre a few years before he died in Tel Aviv. He was born the year you left, but he remembers the Mergiel family getting the packages you sent. After the War, Mordechai drew a huge map of the village. He put in every house, every building. With names. There was Mergiel written on one house and on another across the street. Another a few houses away. Your brothers-in-law and their children and grandchildren. And one was surely yours! Or had been.” 

“Yes, if I could see the map, I would show you where I lived with your great grandfather, where your grandfather, Harry, was born. I could show you the river where we used to play with the children.” 

“Grandma Annie, I have to ask this. Did you light candles for them? For Gadalia (your brother-in-law, I saw from your immigration records), Israel and his wife Malka, Leib and his wife Batya, Pesia, Yankel, Yitzhak, Gittel, Mottel, Moshe, Frieda, Sonia, Shimon and Avrum?”

Annie doesn’t answer me now. She is silent now as she sinks into memories and, perhaps, some longing and guilt.

“Annie, did you have letters, papers, pictures? What happened to everything?”

“What happened? What did I have that anybody would want? I saved what I needed. Everything else I got rid of. Too depressing.”

When Annie was 90, hoodlums broke into her apartment demanding all her money and jewels. They tore up the floorboards but found nothing. So, they beat her up. 

When Annie was 90, hoodlums broke into her apartment demanding all her money and jewels. They tore up the floorboards but found nothing. So, they beat her up. They beat up a 90-year-old woman because she didn’t have a treasure stashed away. This I remember clearly. She was hospitalized, treated, recovered, as much as one her age can recover, and she returned to her apartment. My parents tried to get her to move into a care facility. She refused. Although she was released from the hospital, she was still suffering from the effects of her injuries. Soon after, she fell and died from a head injury. It was December 13, 1959, five weeks before my eleventh birthday. Children didn’t go to funerals in those days. Had I been older, had I asked questions, I could have given a eulogy of facts and dates. 

My great-grandmother was a heroine of her times. She had the courage to send off her eldest so at least he could have a safer, happier life and hopefully send for them. She was born in the Russian/Polish town of Schimsk in 1871, give or take a few years as the records vary. She was a devoted mother and wife, caring for her sick child and later her husband, but losing both. She survived czars, pogroms, war in Europe, tragedies. But not hooligans in East Los Angeles. But what did I know of her feelings, her loves, her losses, her husbands, her family, her hobbies? Nothing. 

I’m not even sure where Grandma Annie is buried or how many people accompanied her to her final resting place. On a visit to Los Angeles several years ago, my husband and I went to Hillside Memorial Park, got a map and the secretary marked the graves of my aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents. One by one, my husband recited Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. How did I forget to ask if Annie Ferer Mergiel Savetnick was there, too?  

I have five grandchildren. Maybe one day, though hopefully not too soon, I will also be a great-grandmother. What haunts me the most about my great-grandmother was her verbal and physical detachment from us, from her many children and grandchildren. Language? Maybe. One answer I’ll never get. When my grandchildren were very young and ran into my arms with kisses and “I love you, Grama!” I was filled with their warmth and love that could cure anything. No running today, but the “Hi Grama” as eyes temporarily leave the iPhone screens are just as powerful. I tell them stories about my life and they listen! They may not remember everything, but they’ll have firsthand funny—and sad—stories, recipes, memories of trips, holiday celebrations, hugs and kisses. My grandchildren and those yet to be conceived great-grandchildren won’t need to search on Ancestry.com for information about my life. They will be connected to me naturally and inextricably.  And they will be with me when my time comes. That is comforting.

Galia Miller Sprung is a freelance writer and editor and retired teacher who has been living in Israel since 1970.