His Yiddishe momma: The tale of Moisie Rubinsky’s formative years
Once upon a time, in a faraway land known as Dorem Afrika, a little boy was born into a family of refugees from Plotnik in Eastern Poland. Actually ‘Moisie’ was only one of seven names he carried with him. Another was Malcolm, (to fool the inhabitants of the host country into thinking that he was one of them. A third was Moshe, to be intoned on sacred occasions like a Barmitzvah, marriage or burial. A fourth was his surname Rubinsky, later changed, Marrano fashion, to its goyishe equivalent, Robinson (number five) mainly for the purposes of job satisfaction.
That’s only five, you say? I forgot to mention his middle name, Pinchas, translated into goyspeak as Percival (nebbech). So that brings the count up to seven. And for good measure, his bobba called him Kukka Rennela, for reasons known only to herself. That’s nine altogether, and that’s not including the nickname he was given at school, ‘Mousy’. But who’s counting? As the famous Willem Wikkelspies once said, “A raisin by any other name would taste as sweet.”
Anyway, Moisie’s mother, Soreh Leah, had a morbid fear of disease, starvation and infant mortality, so Moisie had a rather sheltered upbringing. In fact, he saw no other children for the first six years of his life. After all, who knew what one might catch from them? Soreh Leah frequently recounted, with horror and a scarcely concealed sense of relish, the time when the milk that she had boiled to render it germ-free was immediately descended upon by a swarm of flies attempting mass hara kiri. For years to come, Moisie’s gorge would rise at the mere mention of boiled milk.
Eventually, when Moisie reach the age of six, he started to attend school, being compelled to do so by law. He saw his schoolmates as aliens from outer space who had to be placated, so he offered them his carefully prepared sandwiches and the bottles of orange juice which his mother had lovingly squeezed and strained (to get rid of the pips, on which, God forbid, one might choke).
He was glad to have bought their fealty, but when Soreh Leah found this out, she almost collapsed with aggravation. This meant nothing to Moisie, who was inured to the possibility, because Soreh Leah would quite frequently almost collapse with aggravation. (‘Tsu challesen avekk fun fardroos’ in the vernacular.)
A school photo taken at the time shows Moisie as a curly haired, bewildered, solemn little boy staring myopically at the camera. It had occurred to no one, not even the family’s faithful GP, Dr Israel (MD Leipzig, 1925)that he might need glasses, even though the only tests he failed were those chalked up on the blackboard, which of course was beyond his focal point.
However, Moisie was a survivor. Early in his primary school career, he clocked a friendly little boy in his class called Brian Prout Jones (only three names! Meh!) who seemed to know his way from the classroom to the playground and back again, so everywhere that Brian went, Moisie went too.
Alas, the school layout remained a mystery to him for most of his attendance. (Dr Israel’s diagnosis: ‘spatial agnosia’). Associated with this, was an unfortunate difficulty he had in recognising faces (‘prosopagnosia’, muttered the learned doctor from Leipzig, shaking his head gravely).
Moisie’s early years (0 to 6) were therefore a complete blur. To compensate for this, he developed a prodigious memory for names (‘nominal hypermnesia’ pronounced Dr Israel, who had once studied neurology under the eminent professor Kugelman). This talent which served him well into adulthood, except when he happened to misremember the name of a girl he was dating and addressed her passionately by the name of another. Oy vay!
Having been overfed, frequently to the point of nausea, Moisie grew into a chubby toddler, eliciting exclamations of ‘kaynenhora’. But something changed when he reached the magical age of six. Mysteriously, he began to elongate, as though an invisible hand was drawing him upwards, and the body fat dropped off him like the morning dew, shaping him into a tall, wispy youngster with a prominent rib-cage, which gave him the appearance of someone recently liberated from Belsen.
His big-bosomed aunt Dvorah and her sisters and daughters moaned, whenever they saw him, “Oy, vi mogger er iez!” (“O woe, how thin he is!”) Or words to that effect. Naturally they pressured Soreh Leah, already laden with guilt and anxiety, to step up the feeding ritual.
Moisie’s emaciated appearance caused him to avoid swimming pools, with the result that he never mastered the art of swimming, except with a rubber tube round his midriff and then only in the shallow end. However, he did become proficient in the dog-paddle.
It should surprise nobody that Moisie went on to forge a successful career as a librarian. At the age of forty he married a lady called Christina, a therapist who specialised in eating disorders and had written a thesis on maternal overprotection. Readers might also be interested to know that the couple enjoyed a happy marriage and became parents to a bonny little girl whom they named Rowena. This young lady enjoyed sky-diving, became an airline pilot and married her instructress, Hildegard. But that, kinderlach, is a story for another time.
