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Health & Fitness

Cousins, Butter And Kichel During The Wartime

My father was one of five children. I have written previously about Aunt Sarah and Aunt Jenny who I told all my friends that they were my two grandmothers because I had no grandmothers alive during any parts of my life. I wrote about his bad brother Lou who cheated him of money he owed Dad. I never wrote about Aunt Annie though we called her Aunt Kornblatt, Kornblatt being her last name. Why we did, I will never know. My brother Herbert and I always referred to her that way and her husband as Uncle Jake, never Uncle Kornblatt. Silly, that somehow along the way, the last name became her first name to us.

She was an old lady when my brother and I were young because Dad was the fourth child and he must have been born later in life and Aunt K and Aunt Jenny and Aunt Sarah were so much older than him and Lou. She had three children and another odd thing was that one was named Joseph like my dad, her brother and the other one named Sarah like her sister Sarah mentioned above. That was kind of different having a brother and sister and your children having the same first names. We usually name our children after departed friends or family that we have lost and remember them in love by naming our children in their honor.

Her third child was named Rose and she was a school teacher who was loved by her students. They were like her children because she had none and she bought them little trinkets and books because these were under privileged kids in the school and she wanted to make them happy. She was what I would call a teacher’s teacher being the kind of educator, we would all wish our children would experience in their school days. She was a few years older than my mom; so my mom had a niece-in-law older than her.

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She had a brother Joseph mentioned above and he was the same kind of teacher like Rose. Joseph was a very big man, he loved to eat and he loved to sail a boat. In fact, he was some sort of a captain in some boating organization. He was very handsome and we knew he had a girlfriend outside of his religion and he never married her because he did not want to upset his mom and dad. In those days, very few of us wandered from marrying out of our faith and those that did, often upset their parents as was the norm for those days. She was a very nice lady and he was just about to finally marry her because I think Aunt K and Uncle Jake knew that would make him happy and before he could, he died sitting in his classroom right before school started for the day. He leaned his head down and he was gone and the kids at the high school cried and were very sad for the rest of the school year. He was loved and adored by them and he taught math and the kids loved math because of his teaching skills.

The two of them Rose and Joe were delightful teachers and I as a young child enjoyed talking to them, who were actually my first cousins. I was about ten and they were about thirty years older than me. They would converse with Herb and me and we enjoyed our visits to their old and modest home. When Aunt K knew we were coming to visit, she would go about baking what we loved best from her baking skills. It was called kichel and it was a flat cookie sprinkled with cinnamon. Normally she made them thicker and when she knew we were coming that Sunday, she made them special thin, flat and even sweeter. I remember this with fondness. The third cousin Sarah and she too was a teacher but her teaching days were cut short as she developed Multiple Sclerosis when she was about twenty-five and newly married to a dear guy and guess what, his name was Lou. I have already written about the two other Louis’ in my life. He was a good guy and adored her and cared for her when she was sick. The illness lasted twenty-five years. She wrote an article in a small pocket sized national magazine stating that if you see someone walking shakily, it did not always mean they had a few drinks. In her case, it meant MS. It was published and she became somewhat famous from that article. The magazine I believe was called Pageant and resembled the Readers’ Digest in size in those days.

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So the three siblings were all the perfect teaching family; imparting to their students their knowledge and joy in being educators. We were impressed with these three older cousins because normally, your first cousins are in your almost age bracket, maybe sometimes one or two are ten years older than you, but not much more than that.

I use to go upstairs to Rose’s room and  I was enamored of all the ‘junk’ that was stored on her shelves from all the trips she took to Mexico and other countries. She brought back souvenirs and took them to school to show the elementary kids in her classes ornaments and books from foreign countries that they had only read about and never saw examples of since there was no television or internet in those days.

These were unusual cousins to my brother and me and we valued the information we gleaned from them on our visits. I remember one night we came from our visit there and after eating dinner and kichel for dessert, we got off of the streetcar and we had to walk several blocks. We passed by a store that was still open and it featured all dairy products like real butter which was rationed during the war going on then and sour cream and cottage cheese. The owner saw Dad and his little family, us, walking past and he said standing at the doorway “Mr. Sohmer, I have a treat for you. I can give you a pound of butter and I will need no ration stamps.” Well, we sure felt rich, having an extra pound of real butter; we ate no margarine in those days. We got into the house and we looked at this huge chunk of butter weighing at least two pounds and not one pound and our mouths quivered thinking of the bread we could butter it with.

My father had a cousin who owned a small grocery store and he and his wife and daughter lived above it.We went to visit him one time and he told us to come upstairs to have a snack and he pulled me into his kitchen and said “look what I got for you.” It was a box of 100 pieces of pink bubble gum which in those wartime days you could not ever find. He gave them to me as a present. I was rich beyond words and even though then I was a very giving child; I hoarded this gum for myself though I gave Herb a few pieces now and then. One hundred pieces of bubble gum in those days, wartime, was like the butter-it was pure gold to a child and to her family.

Now days, simple things like two pounds of delicious butter and a box of bubble gum would not make a family or a child feel delight. There are IPods, cellphones, CD discs, movie discs and everything else to fulfill a child’s dream.

Those were simple, purer, sweeter times when a bit of happiness was a piece of bread with real butter put on it and a mouth chewing some ordinary gum or a homemade cookie called kichel.

We were content with what we had because everyone was in the same ‘boat.’ It is important now for us to be grateful for new inventions, new moments of attaining happiness and fulfillment. This story is just to remind us all that sometimes innocent and unsophisticated things that were in our past can still be moments of happiness, we can still remember.

     

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