Mother’s Day
Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.
As I tell my family story, I realize how much of it is about mothers and daughters – strong women protecting their children from adversity as much as possible, trying to give them a better life, as mothers everywhere have been doing since time immemorial. Several of these women married men who, although charming and intelligent, did not have a practical bone in their bodies, leaving day-to-day affairs to their wives.
Rosa and Helene (and perhaps Helene’s father Adolph?) planned to move from Bohemia to Vienna in the early 1900s. Unfortunately, Rosa’s eldest daughter Ida died in 1902, leaving 4 children under the age of 7. I believe Adolph died at this time as well. Helene moved to Vienna on her own. In 1903, Rosa’s daughter Mathilde married her sister’s widower Julius Zerzawy. She died in 1910 and Rosa again took care of her motherless grandchildren until the end of World War I. It must have been heartbreaking for Rosa to be called upon to bury her daughters and care for her grandchildren, and then to lose three of those five grandchildren to war and illness before 1920. Yet, she soldiered on trying to hold the family together.
We learned a bit about Helene’s grandmother Babette and mother Rosa in the post from February 16.
I think often of my own mother’s strength. At a time when most American teenagers were going to high school dances, Eva and her brother had left their parents behind in Vienna, imagining that they would see each other again in a few months. She finished high school and began earning money to send to her parents, hoping that what little she could provide would ease their lives and perhaps help them make the journey to America. After the U.S. entered World War II in 1941, Eva and Harry stopped receiving letters from their parents and had no idea what was happening to them. Eva completed nursing school and began working. Her brother joined the army as soon as he was able. By 1943, Eva was in San Francisco with neither her parents nor her brother. She must have been terrified that she might never hear from her parents again and that Harry would be killed in the war, particularly given how often he talked in his letters about longing to see combat. In 1945, Eva must have been thrilled to know that her mother was safe, but she also had to find the resources to help her mother come to the U.S. and help support her when she arrived. My mother was always an ultra-responsible person, but I can’t imagine how difficult it was to shoulder the responsibility of supporting her parents (and probably trying to act maternally to her younger brother who wouldn’t have been interested), all before she was 25 years old.
I am touched that one of the few cards my grandmother kept was a Mother’s Day card I gave her at some point in the 1960s.
I am so grateful to all of my foremothers. Happy Mother’s Day!