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My Mum’s nourishment

Apr 06, 2017

I do not recall ever seeing Mum eating anything, despite the fact that she provided breakfast, lunch and dinner for my Dad, my sister and me daily right through my childhood.

Nor do I remember ever seeing her joining us at the table while we ate.

She cooked for and waited on us tirelessly.

As if she was so busy in looking after us that she could not afford the time to sit down, lest her service for us would suffer.

Like a loyal servant, she was at our beck and call all the time.

I wonder if she lost her appetite cooking so much and by the time the meal was ready she was already full on the smell and taste of the food. Or maybe she was just fed up with the food and perhaps with us too, by the time she was serving up the dinner.
She never complained about feeling sick of cooking; soldiering on relentlessly.

I only saw her rebel once, and I found it impressive.

One evening all four of us were sitting in my Dad’s surgery room, and we might have made a complaint about something that she has done.

So, she went to the middle of the room, turned her back on us, crouched down, pulled her undies down and pointed her fingers to her bare bottom and said:

“If you don’t like what I do for you, you can always kiss my bum!”

She even offered us a lewder alternative, but it better not be printed.

No one took up her offers, but we all had a big laugh at her defiantly irreverent, rebellious stunt.

So, the three of us lived on her meals, but who nourished her?

Dad was busy with his hospital work and private practice.

He spent much of his spare time playing his fiddle or with going up to the second floor to his engineer friend to enjoy clandestine political discussions.

I tried to listen in on both of my Dad’s wonderful musical recitals and on his political dialogues with his friend, but Mum was never involved with either of these.

The chance was that she was busy in the kitchen while we were having fun.

Then my sister, when she was not studying was off first with her girlfriends and later with her boyfriends.

As to Mum’s nourishment, I saw her with her New Testament and with the Old Testament in Hebrew…. But wait a minute! I just remembered! The title of her Hebrew book was Miriam. But who is Miriam? What does she have to do with the Old Testament? So, I look it up! And low and behold, for the first time, I am starting to get a clue to my mother’s Jewishness. Something she never talked to me about and nor did my Dad. But Dad became an atheist by the time I was born, so he could be excused for not vexing lyrical about his Jewish past. But my mother, despite our conversion to Christianity and her professed love for Jesus, also kept reading her Miriam book in Hebrew.

So, I phoned my sister Erzsi, two years my senior.

“Erzsi, remember Mum used to read the New Testament as well as a Jewish text. Do you recall the title of the text?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Try to!”

“Oh, yes, it was called Miriam.”

“That’s right! That’s exactly what I remember too! Until now I thought it was the Old Testament in Hebrew.”

“No, it was not. It was a Jewish prayer book for women, written both in Hebrew and in Hungarian.”

“Sometimes Mum used the Hungarian text to pray with me,” said my sister.

So, who was this Miriam and what does she suggest to me about my mother?

This is where the story became fascinating for me: at last, I can guess why of all the Jewish texts she was reading Miriam’s prayers. Because she was a strong and brilliant woman, the older sister of Moses without whose standing up to her father to have more children, Moses would probably not had been born. She saved Moses’ life and correctly prophesied that her brother would lead the Jews out of Egyptian captivity. She co-led her people, together with Aeron, her other brother and Moses, from Egypt and across the Red Sea, and so on.

Her character seems to have rubbed off on my mother:

She had the amazing courage go give birth to her first child in 1944 near the height of the murderous persecution of Jews and all the other horrors of the Second World War. And then she was able to get pregnant with me right after the war, after her horrendous family losses and sexual violence against her and her subsequent attempted suicide. And she stood by me and the rest of our family with utmost dedication.

Only now, after reaching seventy, that I could discover, that she had a great Jewish role model in Miriam. She stuck with her even after her conversion. Thank God, that I now remembered the name Miriam on her Hebrew book cover. It is better late than never. Now I know it was her women’s prayer book and that she sought guidance from it. For the first time now I have a clue of what she retained from Judaism and female role model.

My mother, like Miriam, had a quiet, feminine strength, born out of bitterness; a faith sewed amidst despair.