Throughout my childhood, I adored Lena as my traditional (if strangely dark-haired) grandmother.

She sewed me and my Toni doll clothes on her thudding treadle Singer, cooked on a scarily vast stove with a fire inside, and decorated her handkerchiefs with lace and monograms in Cyrillic.

She had a full set of teeth that grinned at me from a tumbler of water in the night-time,  pared corns from her feet, lived on Alka-Seltzer and submitted quietly to scoldings from my mom.

But in retrospect, I understand she had to have been an exceptionally strong-willed woman.  At 17, all by herself, she left her tiny shtetl and came to America.¹

She married Peishe Blistein a scant 15 months after that.  And then, almost immediately, she moved herself and Peishe to the mysterious wilds of Pawtucket, away from absolutely every single person they knew.

The Levins and Helfords and Blisteins all lived in Providence, on Smith Hill, and they weren’t alone in this. The Smith Hill Historic District documentation  (added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1993) makes this explicit:  “In the mid-1880s there (had been only)  20 Jewish families in Smith Hill. The number of Jewish families had grown to 208 by 1910. The majority of these immigrants moved into an older, poorer section of Smith Hill at the eastern end of Chalkstone Avenue near the railroad tracks and Moshassuck River industry.”

 

This map shows how that description fit Inez Court to a tee.

The tenement that first housed the Helfonds and Levins was hard up against the railroad mainline leading to the Charles Street roundhouse; and was hemmed in on other sides by a casket factory (Clark Mfg),  a police station and a Providence Gas Company tank 30’ high.  (Franklin Manufacturing, across Charles Street, was the oldest of the city’s large iron foundaries.  It had cast cannons for the War of 1812 using the Moshassuck River to run the bellows for its blast furnace.)   Ambrose Street where Morris Blistein first landed, and Shawmut Street, where both Philip and David Blistein resided, were quite literally right across the tracks.  The Old Country neighbors who witnessed (and sometimes lied on) their naturalization papers also lived on Ambrose and Shawmut.  Harlan and Michael – not entirely jokingly – refer to these few blocks as Little Slutsk.

Pawtucket did have what has been described as a ‘”small but vigorous Jewish community”,  though in a 1878 History of Pawtucket, the presence  of Jews wasn’t mentioned at all.  But by 1882, Jacob Shartenberg had arrived  from Germany and opened his first small New Idea store at 96 Main Street. The emporium grew and thrived.

In the 1950s, a major treat was to be taken by my grandmother to the by-then vast and eponymous Shartenberg’s, for a coffee cabinet (coffee milkshake for you non-Rhode Island heathens).

But  tellingly, Pawtucket did not get its first Jewish doctor until 5 years after Lena and Peish moved there.  And both before and after that date, Jews mostly lived around Pawtucket’s northern border with Central Falls.  Lena  opted for Fairlawn, at the westernmost edge of the city, where her immediate neighbors were the French-Canadian Patenaudes and the Scottish Browns.  (Interestingly, given that Peish was always considered the underachiever of the family, as early as 1910 he had his own Dry Goods store.)

 

At the  time of her  wedding, Lena undoubtedly had had her fill of the Helfands (who were potentially her cousins and definitely the in-laws of Peish’s brother Morris), their Inez Court apartment packed to bursting with seven of its twelve children still under one roof, Joseph’s second or third wife Rose juggling children ranging from the 4-year old Aaron to the possibly “slow” Daniel. who was 21 but would never marry or live anywhere but with his parents or sister.

Even Lena’s cousin Annie was crammed in with her father, stepmother and four other kids in an apartment around the corner.  I am pretty sure  Lena couldn’t wait to get away.

The eldest girl in her family, she would normally have been expected to help raise her younger siblings.  Instead, when Isaak was merely  4 and Beryl 6, she beat it out of Dodge.   I suspect given her druthers, she herself would have stopped with her two first-born daughters.  And while there may well have been pressure to produce a male heir to keep the Blistein name going, Lena doesn’t seem to have been overly swayed by things like that.   (Outside of Peish’s sister Elkie who fortunately married her first-cousin Archic Blistein, the Blisteins had a propensity for churning out girls.)

In any case,  nine months and one week after marrying Peish, Lena produced Lillian, referred to thereafter as Lil or Lily.  Judging by the considerable number of photographs that even I possessed (and the Cutlers have many more of them), Lil was the classic well-loved first child.  

 

 

Twenty-six months later came Dorothy who despite the stilted photos of the time manages to convey a radiant impishness.  I was startled when I first saw them.  My younger son could have been her twin.  The two girls seem to have had a happy and surprisingly well-chronicled childhood.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And then, Dorothy died.

Why, and even when, for a long time was yet another family mystery.  In the Sugarman Yarzheit book, Peish  penciled in carefully the word Daraty and the dates 1918/1919.

We had no birth certificate or death certificate.  We didn’t know how long Dorothy had spent on this planet.  All we knew for certain was that – per the recollections of a young Lil – it had taken her sister a long time to die.  That seemed to rule out the flu. The Influenza Pandemic peaked in Rhode Island in October, 1918, but children who contracted it generally died within a day.

Also Elmer often insisted that Lena was pregnant with him when she suffered the trauma of losing her  baby.  It was implied his high-strung temperment was caused by that fact.  But Elmer was born in September, 1920 which would have meant Dorothy couldn’t have died any earlier than January, 1920.  Alas, there seemed no way to be sure.

And then, last November, I went back to Rhode Island.  As had become traditional, David and Jon arranged to synchronize their visits with mine.  Along with family business like arranging new aides for my 94-year old Dad who still lived in the house we’d been raised in but was rapidly moving beyond his ability to stay there solo, I had a private item on my agenda: I wanted to find Dorothy’s grave.

I knew Lena and presumably Peish were buried at Lincoln Park Cemetery in Warwick.  I had last been there in 1968.  And my grief over Lena’s death had almost entirely obscured any memory of the place.  All I recalled was the cars screeching down the nearby freeway during the graveside service… though I was still months from learning “freeway”, the  California term.

On WarwickHistory.com, I was told that Lincoln Park Cemetery is “a  26 acre Hebrew burial ground started in 1908.  There are 54 sections each one belonging to a temple, society, or fraternal organization, who keep the records with various degrees of success.  Some are defunct.”  Well, Dorothy had definitely been buried at least a decade after its founding, so Lincoln Park was where I had a decent chance of finding her… though the “some are defunct” did give me pause.  On a suitably gloomy fall afternoon, I headed out there accompanied by both my brothers. I had impressed on them my firm belief that Lena had no interest in having more than three children; and that none of us would be here if our younger aunt hadn’t died.

I  had scheduled our visit specifically for a time when the office would be open.  In it, we found the unnervingly cheerful Beth S. Veltri, Executive Director, who checked her records and gave us the good news and the bad.  The good:  Dorothy Blistein was definitely buried there.   The bad: no one had any idea where.

While Beth  could provide us with a  sketch indicating the location of all 54 sections belonging to “temples, societies or fraternal organizations” ranging from Anshe Kovno to the Workman’s Circle (not to be confused with the Old Workmen’s Circle)

And while she could even highlight in yellow where Lena and Peish’s shared tombstone was, the child had preceded her parents into the ground by almost half a century.  And in those early days apparently the little ones had just been tossed wherever there was space for them.  Beth apologized for the fact that the 20,000 graves she oversaw had only been irregularly charted.  (Findagrave.com lists a measely 6,000 names); and indicated some sections where she thought we were most likely to find Dorothy.  It was mid- November.  The sun would be setting in just a few hours.  My brothers and I hurried into the already-darkening grounds.

In the suggested areas, we did discover several expanses of child graves; but many of the stones had fallen over and were half — or entirely — buried in sod.  We dug out those we could but most of them were just too heavy.  Others were barely legible or only recorded a first name.  With some exceptions, it was a very old and badly maintained boneyard and we walked and walked and walked and found nothing.  Finally Jon wandered off to find a restroom and David wandered back to examine our grandparents’ tombstones and the whole expedition seemed doomed to fail.

At this low point, I recalled a novel I had finished only weeks earlier.  It featured a private eye named Mallard Lowenstein.  He  was, of course, a duck.  In it, he and his human partner are hired to find a man’s missing sister.  Among the places they look is the vast Evergreen Cemetery in East Los Angeles.  I have to emphasize two things here:  one, that I had no idea I would be looking for Dorothy’s grave when I started on the chapter more than a year earlier.  And two, that I had little control over Mal’s words or deeds.

And he spoke thus:

“… there we were, surrounded by 300,000 tombs in no special order. Any other creature would be dismayed. But I am an anas. We migrate thousand of miles guided only by the wavelength of sunlight and tiny magnets in our cranium. Plus I knew where to find a map. But first, I just stood there, waiting for my girl to find me. That happens. The lost want to be found. And they come to you and tap you on the shoulder and say, “Thank you…”

I thought about this.  I considered what Mal would have done. He didn’t look for the dead; he let them come to him.  So I stood there in the looming dusk, just waiting.  And then I looked down.  At my feet, a stone was half-hidden by several plants and I had to push the leaves aside to read it: “In Memory of Our Daughter Dorothy Blistein, Born Aug 20, 1912 Died Nov 20, 1919.”

 

This is true.

With a specific date, I thought it would be an easy matter to obtain a death certificate and therefore a Cause of Death.  Dorothy had died almost a hundred years earlier.   Anything over fifty is considered to be of public record.   So I wrote the RI Department of Health and enclosed a $20 check for their trouble.  It was returned weeks later with the explanation that such a death certificate could not be provided unless I included the signature of the deceased’s parent or spouse.  Um…

I stewed for a while and then emailed the RI State Archives explaining my dilemma.  Seven-year old Dorothy had never married so a Spouse was out of the question;   and her parents had been gone, lo, these 45 to 50 years.  Obtaining a signature from either of them was going to be tricky.

Fortunately my missive was received by the estimable Keneth Carlson, Reference Archivist.  Within a day, he had supplied me with the information I had so long sought.  He wrote:  In reply to your inquiry a search identified Dorothy Blistein, daughter of Philip & Lena dying at Memorial Hospital (usual residence 18 Whitford, Pawtucket), Nov. 21, 1919, age 7 years, 3 months of subacute appendicitis; had had operation two weeks prior which developed parititis on right side – incised & drained.  Burial at Lincoln Park Cemetery, Cranston.

That was truly sad.  Infection after an appendectomy had to be excruciating.  And Lil was right.  Dorothy had presumably been sick prior to the surgery and then slowly died for two weeks after it.  It must have seemed like a lifetime to them all.

The reference to  “parititis”, however, was bewildering.  Both David and Jon are the MDs, but even I – the black sheep in the family – recognized the similarly-spelled parotitis as mumps… and that seemed crazy.   So all three of us decided parititis was a misspelling of peritonitis, the most logical fatal outcome of an appendectomy pre-antibiotics.  We couldn’t help blaming the Memorial Hospital as well.

Then I found this in Medico-Chirurgical Transactions,1905 (Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society of London):

“The association of parotitis with peritonitis in abdominal cases is so close that one would have no hesitation in saying that peritonitis is the commonest immediate cause of parotitis. Although it is convenient to classify the cases according to the primary condition present, such as perforated gastric ulcer, appendicitis, and so on, it must be remembered that the majority of cases are to be referred to peritoneal infection in the first instance. In many of my cases the development of parotitis coincided in point of time, not with the operation, but with the onset of peritonitis.

So it seems that poor Dorothy suffered peritonitis and parotitis both.

A more recent passage on Medscape provided an even clearer explanation:

“Mumps (which is viral) and bacterial parotitis were differentiated by 1800, but neither was effectively treated. The mortality rate for bacterial parotitis was 80%. Before antibiotics and intravenous administration of fluids were available, bacterial parotitis occurred in postoperative patients or other severely ill patients who became dehydrated and contributed to their demise as an incurable sepsis. Early in the 20th century, surgeons were hesitant to incise and drain parotid abscesses and frequently used ineffective conservative measures until the process was irreversible. They feared the consequences of the unsightly scar and facial paralysis.”

Poor Dorothy and her sweet sweet face.  And poor Lena, who stopped believing in God the day she had to bury her daughter. It is hard to see it as anything but a deliberate challenge to the Almighty that within a month – and after seven fallow years – my grandmother got herself pregant again.

The new child – born September 16, 1920 — was named Elmer Milton.  I have no idea how they came up with that.   The Jewishgen Given Names Database doesn’t acknowledge either Elmer or Milton as being derived from the Mameloshn.  I expect they were thought of as “American” names as filtered through a bunch of UK neighbors.  However, not to overstate the obvious, Elmer Milton was a boy.   As pleased as Peish might have been to have an ally in the gender wars, a son never could take the place of a lost little girl.  Which is why, I think, four years later Lena made room for another daughter, my mother.    And why my brothers and I  got our crack at being born.

But I don’t think there’s any question that the death of Dorothy seared a fault line through the little family.  On one side was Lil  who actually experienced the agonizing loss of a beloved playmate and was later forced by the Depression to quit college and go to work, giving up forever her dream of being a teacher… but who nonetheless was more relaxed about her life than either of of her Ivy League-educated siblings managed to be.  Because on the other side were Elmer and Sybil who yes, were probably impacted by the  Depression at an age when they were far too young to understand it:  Peish losing his Dry Goods store because he couldn’t stop giving away shoes and food to his struggling neighbors;  and then losing his first and only house and having to move the family back into tenements again.  But some heart had gone out of these Blisteins, some sort of resiliance.  Both Elmer and Sybil were brittle.  They didn’t bend, they cracked.  And I think that’s because in America, the land where one left all the scary and uncontrollable and just plain evil behind at the gates to Ellis Island, the unimaginable happened:  the perfect child was taken, the perfect dream destroyed.

 

Chapter 10: The Doll

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

¹This is the picture of the SS Potsdam that appears on the Ellis Island site where I first found it. I couldn’t repress a shudder at the thought of my young grandmother on that vast depressing ship. Only much later did I realize that this was the Potsdam after a  rough life as a World War 1 troop carrier.  The Potsdam Lena took was only four years fresh from launching; and while she was in steerage, the ship still had a more jaunty air.