Celia

In the first months of my life, my parents and I lived in DC with Pop’s parents. Mama quickly came to loathe her mother-in-law, a native of Riga, Latvia, who made spaghetti by emptying a bottle of ketchup into a big bowl of what at the time were called noodles, stirring, and serving. At the dinner table of my dad’s early years, anyone who wanted a second helping of something just reached in with the fork he or she had been putting food into his own mouth with. Mama found this disgusting, and during her and Pop’s marriage, she would shrike loudly enough to be heard back in her native Minneapolis when Pop reverted to the ways of his own childhood home and helped himself to more of something with his own fork. I would be forbidden to have any more of whatever it was.

Where Mama’s hypergentility came from was anyone’s guess, in her own childhood, her family had been so poor that they’d had to sneak out of rented premises they couldn’t afford to pay for under cover of darkness, and Mama couldn’t bathe as biology might have preferred. One of the defining moments of her childhood was of being sent home from school for smelling. In adulthood, she would become fascistically fastidious.

Her mother, whom I knew as Gram and the world knew as Celia Kaufman, had grown up in Odessa, Ukraine, which her family had fled for fear of being raped or incinerated in a pogrom. For reasons that I’d love to know, and will never find out, she and her young husband, a fellow refugee from Ukraine, relocated to Minneapolis, where Hubby took to being carried home drunk and bloodied. They had four children — my mother, her sister Doris, her brother Marty, and a little boy whose death at a few months old was another defining moment of Mama’s early years. Gramps — John Ned Kaufman — was apparently an inattentive or even abusive dad, and the three siblings grew up as damaged emotionally as they were gorgeous. My grandparents came out to Los Angeles briefly when the air still smelled of oranges, and opened a cafe in Boyle Heights. It went bust, and they returned to the upper Midwest, where John Ned resumed being carried home half-dead until a year or two after the repeal of Prohibition, when he got rich as a liquor wholesaler. A year or two later, he died at 42 a year or two before my own arrival. Gram returned to Los Angeles, and Mama, having had enough of Riga-born Grandma Rose’s coarseness and ketchup spaghetti, informed Pop they’d be following her.

Her three surviving children remained very, unhealthily, close to Gram all their lives, Doris because she was incapacitated by a disease whose name I never knew, a disease that killed her before she was 35, and Marty because the world terrified him. I saw a great deal of Gram. I would go over to her home either with Mama alone or with both my parents. While Gram listened in silence and I, precocious little sod that I was, read the latest issue of Readers Digest, to which Gram subscribed, Mama would rail at the world and everyone in it, especially those to whom we were related, by blood or marriage, without taking a breath.

Under the influence of powerful, primitive antidepressants, Marty had an automobile accident which left him slightly less gorgeous, and too self-conscious ever to venture into public in daylight again. He persuaded Gram to relocate to Quartz Hill, in the Antelope Valley, where no one was likely to be horrified by his (imagined) ugliness.

For around 36 hours after my almost-unattended bar mitzvah, I aspired to become a rabbi. Everyone was delighted, none more than Gram, who I don’t think was ever glimpsed in a synagogue, but who remembered the pogroms well enough not to be very comfortable around gentiles. Then I resumed planning to play second bass for the Los Angeles Dodgers even though I was an awful baseball (and everything else) player.

Marty and I got close as I entered adolescence. He murdered me at chess and let me marvel at the textbook from the abnormal psychology class at Loyola College he’d been on his way to the afternoon of his accident. He idolized Thomas Wolfe, and, when he learned I’d won the creative writing award at my junior high school, appointed himself my mentor, intending to agonise over every syllable, as he’d read that Wolfe’s mentor had done. I wasn’t having it. He tried to kill himself (in part, I can’t

t help but think, because of my disinclination to be mentored), and failed, and tried again, and succeeded. Having lost two children in three years, Gram and her little dog moved back to West Los Angeles.

She was delighted when, as a university freshman, i took to coming over to her apartment on Sepulveda Blvd. to study. I’ve never completely trusted anyone delighted by my presence. I got older and less dweebish, with a red Porsche and a trophy girlfriend. People perceived me as rockstar-like in both dress and affect. I was too cool to spend much time with Gram, and when I did visit, I would make no secret of my exasperation at, for instance, her having conflated Jane Fonda with Vanessa Redgrave, who’d famously said something or other vaguely antisemitic. Utter asshole though I was, Gram never failed to give me a bagful of spectacularly delicious homemade blintzes and knishes before I left. I will never cease to be ashamed of rarely embracing or kissing her on parting. I was too cool for such behaviour.

She got dementia, and Mama put her in a “convalescent hospital” in Santa Monica where she died at around 84 without my being able to say goodbye, or to thank her for her implacable. kindness and generosity, or to ask her about her childhood in Odessa, and her marriage, and a thousand other thing. But the wonderful news for her is that she’s on my prayer list, one of the half-dozen to whom I apologise every night before drifting away.