Nobody’s Child – My Mother’s Southern Jewish Upbringing

My Mom went to jail when she was ten years old.

Her father wasn’t happy.

The road to Mom’s trip to prison began in Russia.

My grandfather was about seventeen years old when he had just been drafted into the Czar’s Army for the Russo-Japanese War of 1905.

My grandfather, Max Ravdin (Ravdin means “rabbi of the court,” from Hebrew), was not eager to join. The term of service was twenty-five years.

The 1903 Kishinev pogrom was particularly horrific. “Homicidal gangs stalked the streets, chasing down Jews and beating them with crowbars,” states a 2023 Washington Post article on the anniversary of the pogrom.

“Jewish women were subject to gang rapes. Not even children were spared…their mutilated bodies serving as the most damning testament to the rioter’s depravity…” Jews “were hunted “like animals… The streets were littered with Jewish corpses,” the Post article recounted.

It would make sense that Max had the Kishinev pogrom on his mind when he was drafted.

The family legend, told by my aunt Lilly, which can never be proven, is that Max, who had no money, walked three hundred miles out of Russia and into Poland. There, somehow, he managed to find enough cash to get on a boat to America.

The story doesn’t even have to be true to feel true. It illustrated the tragedy of the persecutions the Russian Jews faced.

My grandfather came to New York and didn’t like it. He moved to Richmond, Virginia and got work as a tailor. Working conditions were poor.

Max tried to organize a union.

So, here is my grandfather, a little Jew with a foreign accent, trying to get the other tailors together to fight for better wages and working conditions, in the Deep South in the early 1900s.

He was lucky the authorities didn’t kill him.

What they did do is run him out of town.

Max moved to South Carolina. He opened a dry goods store in Columbia, then another one. All the Jew Stores were consigned to side streets in the city.

My grandfather sold work clothes, like overalls, among other things. He purchased some homes around town and rented them out. He married a much younger Jewish woman, Jenny Baker, also Jewish.

Mom was proud that her father allowed the black men in town to buy products on credit when the Christian stores on the main street wouldn’t.

He and Jenny had five children — Lilly, Ruby, Fred, Joe and my mother, the baby – Helen. All American names, with Lilly and Ruby seeming Southern.

Mom was born two days after the stock market crash of 1929, on Halloween. She remembers men, both black and white, coming to my grandparent’s door asking for food, sometimes offering to do yard work in exchange.

My mother didn’t speak about her childhood often. She did tell us the birthday cake story. Mom said her mother organized a birthday party in the kitchen, for one of the five children. Mom didn’t remember whose.

The children were fighting over the cake. Jenny, the mother, hadn’t yet cut the cake. The kids argued very loudly.

Max got upset. He picked up the cake plate, opened up the door by the back of the kitchen, and threw the whole thing into the yard. The cake was smashed into the grass. The local ants must have thought there was a God after all.

One of the only gifts of my mother getting older is that she started talking about the past.

She told me, “I was nobody’s child.” Her sisters and brothers were older and often out of the house. Her mother was never around. Jenny often spent her days cleaning her husband’s stores or rental home properties. Helen’s father barely spoke to her.

Mom took up with the other children on the avenue, many of whom were Baptist. She went to Sunday church every week with the families of her friends. Nobody in the house told her not to. They may not have even known.

Mom’s best friend was a boy who lived next door. The boy’s father was a guard in the Columbia City Jail.

When Helen was about ten years old, the boy’s father was promoted to warden of the jail. The family was going to move. The jail had an apartment for the family, so the father could be onsite in case of emergency.

Helen’s best friend had left the neighborhood. She was desolate.

Mom decided to walk to the jail to see her friend. Mom said she walked through the black section of town to get there.

Mom didn’t tell us what it was like to walk through town, then onto the grounds of the facility, a grey, cold, brutalist tower of granite and brick and dread, with hundreds of prisoners locked in tight and crowded in on one another, the desperation, sweat, and anger seething in the walls.

She didn’t remember much about her visit with the boy when I asked — if she was happy to see her friend or scared of being in the proximity of hundreds of possibly violent men.

What stayed with her seventy years later is that her father actually spoke to her when she got back home. He told her she couldn’t go see her friend again. He didn’t want her walking through that part of town.

Two years later, her mother died, in a particularly horrible way. Jenny had gotten pregnant. She was in her forties. The labor went on for three days.

Apparently, in those days, in Columbia, South Carolina in 1941, they hadn’t heard of a C-section.

It couldn’t go on.

It didn’t.

Jenny died on a hospital table, when my mother was just twelve years old. The baby died too. My grandfather didn’t leave his bedroom for two weeks.

The last story Mom told us was about her father wanting to retire, in the late 1940s.

Mom was a freshman at the University of South Carolina. Max wanted to move to a bungalow in Miami, and take with him my Uncle Fred, a World War II veteran who suffered from schizophrenia. A possible reason he had a breakdown was that Fred had been frequently mocked by other soldiers. He had a thick Southern accent. Nobody could understand how a Jew could be from the South.

Helen’s father wanted her to go with them to Miami. Max asked that she keep house – tidy up, go grocery shopping, make dinner. He said she could go to the University of Miami. Mom went down there and visited the campus Hillel chapter. She’d have to take two buses to go to college. Also, the school didn’t have a lot of Jewish students back then.

Her father had slotted her in as a replacement for his dead wife.

Instead of knuckling under to her Dad, Helen ran off to New York. She moved in with her sister Ruby and her husband, who just had a baby and were living in Queens.

Mom randomly picked Adelphi, on Long Island, to go to college.

My mother earned her degree and, in effect, liberated herself from her father’s heritage. When she did that, she became a modern American. But still Jewish.