The Lilith Blog

July 22, 2016 by Sara Nuss-Galles

Sunday in Humboldt Park

Flickr.com

It was a mid-September Sunday in 1950s pre-air conditioning Chicago. Most days, my siblings and I zigzagged between school, our third-floor apartment, and our parents’ convenience store a block south on Western Avenue. Seven days a week my parents toiled in the “Milk Depot,” selling glass gallons of milk so rich there was a layer of cream on top. In addition to the walk-in cooler’s array of dairy products, the shelves sagged with canned goods, loose cookies at 29 cents a pound, fresh bread and rolls, and $2.19 cartons of cigarettes. The loss leader milk and cigarettes often drew customers for a regular priced item or two, but the trade mostly came after the nearby A&P Supermarket closed.

I attended Casimir Pulaski School, several blocks away, and walked there in rain, shine, snow, and ice, annually garnering perfect attendance awards. In warm weather, the classrooms and halls teemed with the eau de toilette of kids—kids, like me, who ran and played every minute of recess and lunch hour. Back in class, sweated up and raring for freedom, I daydreamed about being transported to the park.

The Lilith Blog

May 7, 2016 by Sara Nuss-Galles

Mother’s Day Was Complicated for the Daughter of a Survivor

The author and her mother in Bergen Belsen Displaced Person’s Camp.

Mother’s Day was a complicated time in my childhood. My mother had survived World War II in Europe, and she had difficulty taking joy in life. For me, Mother’s Day was an opportunity to heal my mother’s pain and make her happy.

Making-do was a credo in our house and I learned young that frivolous spending relegated one to share a circle in hell with sinners who left food on their plates. So I strove to make my presentation special.

In Chicago, Mother’s Day coincides with the bloom of spring. We lived in an apartment, so I often appropriated gifts from other people’s property.

One year, I settled on lush purple lilacs hanging over a chain link fence and returned on Sunday morning to “shop.” A curler-crowned, housecoat-clad woman came out dragging trash and spotted me in flagrante delicto. She chased me down the block, yelling and waving the lid.

“I call principal. What school you go?” she scolded in the Polish-accented English of our immigrant neighborhood.

“St. Pat’s,” I chirped. The St. Pat’s kids treated us public school kids like gutter snipes and I felt proud to imagine a snooty St. Pat’s girl suffering for me.

At home I presented my mother with a pickle jar full of lilacs. My mother inhaled their perfume and rewarded me with a smile. Two days later, as the blossoms dropped onto the kitchen table, I heard her mumbling as she cleaned up.

Another bitter-sweet spring I admired my classmate’s pin. No sooner did I finish than she offered it to me for fifty cents so that she could buy her mother a gift. The pin was a flamboyant purple enameled flower, studded with rhinestones, only a couple of them missing. A tiny spring made the stamen “boing” when touched. It was irresistible, and I wanted it for my mother.