Sarah Epstein didn’t really know how old she was. Born in Lodz, Poland, she lived in her tiny village, grew potatoes for her family, never had an education, and lived through the murderous Cossack pogroms that killed family and friends. As Hitler was rising to power, she left Poland for the United States, settled in California and then worked tirelessly as a sweatshop seamstress to bring her family members over before they were sent to concentration camps. Her greatest anguish was that she could not save her sister who she said I resembled. The people she did save slept on her floors as she worked to find them work and homes. She lost her first two children to common childhood diseases then had two more, my mother being the youngest. This feisty little, under five feet tall immigrant taught me to sing in Yiddish, make matzah ball soup with real chicken fat, throw salt over my shoulder to keep away malicious forces, and stopped me from marrying a “momma’s boy!” When I performed on stage, she would stand up in the audience and sing with me! She spoke to the television, passionately telling TV characters what they should or should not do, and cried when she told stories about “the old country.” My grandma Sarah always sang Yiddish songs in the back seat of our car and would always plant kisses all over my face! To my chagrin, it left me smelling of garlic! She made my clothes, my dolls’ clothes, and did it all without a single pattern. She made boobala from matzah meal and never measured a thing. She’d just do it all by feel! I loved her madly.
Dev Ross