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Celebrating the Unsung Mothers in Our Lives

Blog, On Writing, What I'm Thinking

Women wield far greater power than we realize, and in subtle ways that we often miss.

In honor of all those women, I’m writing a tribute this Mother’s Day to a particular woman who had a huge, if indefinable, impact on my family. She died when I was a small boy and I don’t ever remember meeting her, but she is an iconic figure in the mythology of my family. Her name was Basha Liebe Feldman.

Basha Liebe emigrated from Latvia to South Africa in the late 1800s. There she and her husband started and managed a small business, eventually purchasing a house in a suburb outside Johannesburg. When her husband passed away and her children were grown, she continued to live in the house, now too big for her alone. Perhaps to make ends meet, perhaps for company, and perhaps to fill a need that she saw required filling, she began to take in boarders — young people alone who needed a place to live.

Enter my family. My great-grandparents must have known her — they were Landsmen, people who had emigrated from the same place. Around 1910, my great-grandmother died in childbirth, and although he tried, my great-grandfather was unable to cope alone with several small children. I wonder whether Basha Liebe was there to help him, bringing over pots of soup and stewed chicken to feed the children; I wonder whether she was a part of the children’s lives. Because for two of them, she was to become the only parent they had.

At the urging of his family, my great-grandfather returned to Latvia to find a wife to bring back to South Africa. He couldn’t afford passage to take all his children with him, so he took the four youngest, leaving his two oldest sons—my grandfather Charlie and his brother Joe—as boarders with Basha Liebe until he returned. Joe was thirteen; Charlie, two years older. They were barely out of childhood, but board had to be paid. School was out of the question. Before he left, my great-grandfather found work for his sons at a coal distribution plant.

The boys waited in vain for their father to return, but he and the children he took with him became trapped in the maelstrom of World War I. Then came the Russian Revolution and the Stalinist era, the USSR and the Cold War. They lost contact, and for close to fifty years we didn’t know whether my great-grandfather and his four small children had survived. But that’s a different story.

I wonder sometimes about the woman who gave my grandfather and my great-uncle what little nurture they had. I was aware, as a young child, of a deep sadness about them both. It must have been related to the death of their mother, and lives spent waiting for a father and siblings who disappeared as if into thin air. Did Basha Liebe understand their grief? Embrace them? Did she make them lunch to take to the coal plant when they left in the morning? Did she make sure that they had clean clothes and enough sleep, or was that beyond her responsibility? What did they learn from her? Was she strict or warm? Did she run a clean and welcoming home for the young people in her care?  Did she even recognize the massive responsibility she had undertaken? The answers emerge from what we later learned about her, and from what happened to the young people in her boarding house.

Basha Liebe was an essential part of the community she lived in, and deeply concerned about the young people around her.  On Saturday mornings she would canvass the neighborhood, going house to house collecting clothes and money for girls from poor families who wanted to marry but couldn’t afford a trousseau. The young people who boarded with her remained in touch with her all their lives.

Perhaps just as importantly, the young people who boarded with Basha Liebe became lifelong friends. They went into business together, and they helped each other in the way loving siblings do. There must have been something about living under Basha Liebe’s roof that bound them to one another, and they became a family of choice.

I like to think the warmth of that substitute family, the humor and strength of character of this larger-than-life woman, created those unbreakable bonds. And I like to imagine, for the sake of the young boys who grew up to be my grandfather and my great-uncle Joe, that Basha Liebe Feldman sat them all down for supper at night and urged them to be thankful for their blessings.

As a child I knew all my grandparents’ friends, these young single boarders, now old and wrinkled and smiling, sedate and self-satisfied. Only a few completed high school. They were all self-made, rough-hewn, without the gentility and softness that come from privilege. They were overweight; the women perfumed and heavily powdered; the men cigar-smoking and always dressed in suits. They were named Fatty and Pearl, Louie and Max and Lilly. Ray lived near the zoo, and she made fried bananas and fruit soup.  They treated me with a familiarity and love. They weren’t family, but they behaved as if they were. Back then, I didn’t understand. Now, older than my grandfather when he died in his fifties, I get it. Here’s to Basha Liebe, with gratitude and love. Here’s to Basha Liebe, who became a mother and matriarch to us all.