by Ann Huber
Our wedding was to be in Montreal, paid for by the small reparation that was paid to my mother by the German government when I was about twelve. She had invested the money for my future wedding. Now that the time approached, even calm and unflappable Herm began to get excited, “Well, here I am and there you are; but soon, Kaboom. It’s really hard to believe that soon us two punks will be married ‘together with ‘presha’.” (Herm’s father fondly observed us when we lived in their home before the wedding. He commented, “One goes upstairs, the other one goes upstairs. One comes downstairs, the other one comes downstairs. They’re always together with pressure.”)
Shopping for a wedding dress wholesale at one of the Montreal factories recommended by my mother’s friend was painful. The place was dark and crowded, crammed with dresses, with only one elderly saleswoman to help, and of course, none of my friends. What should have been fun turned into a dismal experience.
I settled on a gown I never really liked, but my mother insisted it would do the job. Although she did not love it either, it was all we could afford. The gown had a lacey bodice, sleeveless with no collar, ending in a simple waist that met a full skirt, not a princess full, just full. Neither flattering to my figure nor to my neck, it turned me into a giraffe! We bought it just a few weeks before I went to Lenny’s wedding where his petite, beautiful bride, Sarita, wore a lovely gown. I couldn’t have worn the kind of gown she wore, but there were plenty of flattering styles beyond my reach.
In addition to wedding preparations, there were marriage preparations, a trousseau. My mother and I shopped for bedding and linens, but my mother decided we would make our own feather pillows from two huge feather pillows we’d brought from Israel, each about 48-inches square. We figured out one of those would yield two normal-size pillows. As we went about it, we recreated a mess as funny as the wine-making scene in I Love Lucy where Lucy is stomping grapes in a low wine barrel. Hilarious!
To make the pillows, we locked ourselves in the bathroom, wearing nothing but underwear. As we emptied all the feathers from the large pillow, we tried unsuccessfully to contain all of them in the old bathtub. Then came the problem of filling each of the new pillowcases as feathers flew wildly all around the bathroom. As we chased them around laughing hysterically, feathers infiltrated our hair, noses and eyes. We were both covered in feathers by the time we finished, looking like disheveled chickens. It took days to get rid of the excess feathers, but I still have the pillows we made, re-covered a few times over the years. Some of our guests even ask for them.
My mother was frugal, always afraid to spend what little there was, but in a surprising gesture she took me to her favorite department store, Eaton’s, to buy a negligee set for my honeymoon. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever worn. All in beige silk with little adornment, it was a long nightgown with a robe to match. My mother was much more interested in this purchase than in the wedding gown. Needless to say, I never wore it for more than a few minutes at a time.
I received Herm’s last letter, posted on April 29, 1969, already celebrating the end of a phase and the beginning of a new one. “Well, I think this may be the last letter I’ll ever write to you (I hope).”
The ceremony and reception both took place at our synagogue on Cote-des-Neiges. Coincidently, our rabbi was the brother of one of Herm’s high school teachers. It was a pink and red affair with a large turnout including my Aunt Lontzi who traveled all night by bus from New York City. She had flown in from San Paulo at the last minute, delayed by a hard-to-get visa. She did the same thing four years later to see my first baby, spending less than twelve hours with us. In addition, Pesche’s only surviving nephew, Shimon had traveled with his wife all the way from Argentina. And Moishe’s nephew Shmilke, who had immigrated to Palestine before the war, came from New York City.
My cousin Anna, a bridesmaid at my wedding.
Herm’s brother, Lenny, was best man and his new bride, Sarita, was my matron of honor. My maid of honor was my cousin, Anna. Yes, the same cousin who ignored me on the school playground. My mother, in a borrowed pink gown and my father in a rented suit, smiled little as they walked down the aisle, and looked very somber during the entire affair. I don’t think they could believe they were actually there without worrying about some last-minute problem.
The traditional Jewish wedding ceremony began with our signing of the ketubah (marriage contract), witnessed by Sandu and Lenny, in a private space. I then walked down the aisle toward the chupah (wedding canopy) to the music of one of my favorite Hebrew songs, Erev Shel Shoshanim (Evening of Roses) played by my former piano teacher, Mr. Andre.
Herm was waiting before the chupah where he met me and raised my veil, folding it back during the unveiling (to make sure he was marrying the right bride), another Jewish custom. God forbid I was the wrong one! Not that there was another one available. I circled the groom seven times. The vows themselves were very moving and Herm had tears in his eyes, probably out of relief—his letter-writing days were finally over. Next, Herm broke the glass. “Mazel tov,” shouted the guests.
A reception followed in the synagogue’s party room, a simple space with a white painted wooden fence along the back wall. We sat just in front of it at a rectangular head table with our parents and other immediate relatives. In front of us, on the dessert table, was a large bouquet of pink and red carnations, and white daffodils. Our friends and relatives sat at tables in front of that.
During the reception, I was endlessly called upon by staff to answer questions. I wish someone had imparted to me the wisdom I shared with our daughters for their weddings about thirty years later: “Only you know what everything is supposed look like and how it is meant to work out. None of the guests do. So, they will not be disappointed. You have hired competent, experienced staff. Leave it all to them and enjoy yourself.”
Ann and Herm walking back up the aisle after the ceremony.
As Herm and I mingled among the guests, the most frequently asked question was, “Where are you going for your honeymoon?” “Quebec City for a week,” we answered with nervous excitement. “We are going to spend our first night at the Chateau Champlain in Montreal and tomorrow we will take a bus to Quebec City.”
We originally planned an exciting and adventurous honeymoon, and had spent months researching a motorcycle trip through Europe, following the philosophy expressed in a popular travel guide—Europe on $10 a Day. We thought we could write a book about our travels in Europe on a motorcycle.
When we started to explore the airfare, however, Lenny began to question our judgment. At first, we decided to ignore his advice which we felt was wrong for us and went ahead and bought tickets, borrowing the money from Herm’s parents. Lenny, however, does not give up that easily either, having been sewn from the same cloth as his brother. He continued to nag us. In his view, it was frivolous to go off to Europe for a few weeks when we had no place to live in New Jersey, where Herm would be attending graduate school at Rutgers, no job and little money to count on besides Herm’s assistantship. In our view, we could take care of these things when we returned. Since we were starting with nothing, what difference did it make if we started with nothing a few weeks later?
Eventually and grudgingly, we came to the conclusion that he was probably right and surrendered our tickets. We could not get a refund. To our surprise and great relief, Herm’s parents graciously never said a word about the money they had loaned us for the tickets.
In retrospect, I think perhaps we should have followed our own instincts. For many years, I deeply regretted that we did not go on a trip that would have been so meaningful for us. We have since traveled to many places where we had wonderful and interesting times; Morocco, Italy, Spain, England, Ireland, and more recently Poland, Germany, and Romania, but our dream adventure at the beginning of our married life could never be recaptured.
When it was time for us to leave the wedding, I changed into a green suit with a short skirt and a matching wide-brimmed hat. I loved
that outfit, much more than my wedding gown. As we said our goodbyes and hugged so many friends and relatives, Mamaia started to cry. Soon, everyone else was crying, including Mr. Andre, my music teacher. A photograph of me hugging my grandmother is memorable for my aunt Lily standing next to us, holding back tears. Behind me is one of my parents’ friends smiling. He was the person who taught me to dance when I was twelve. I was not just getting married, but I was leaving the country.
Ann kissing Mamaia goodbye after the wedding.
Sandu and Netty only came to visit us in New Jersey once, in the fall of 1969 for a short visit after a long and dusty overnight bus ride. Sadly, Sandu was diagnosed with liver cancer a year later, prompting us to make a trip to Montreal. When we saw him, I was surprised that he showed no visible signs of ill health and it was hard for me to believe that we would lose him so quickly. My mother had called to tell us he was in a great pain, but he still had his ruddy complexion and had not lost weight. I hadn’t lost anyone but my grandfather Carol, who died when I was so young; I didn’t know what to expect. Intellectually, I knew it would be a huge loss but I didn’t anticipate the emptiness I would feel.
I had always believed that Sandu loved me. When I was small, he’d held my hand on our weekly Saturday outings to the park. As I approached puberty, he became more uncomfortable in my presence and grew more distant. He would blush if he had to speak to me directly about my skirt being too short. But the smile he had for me was his broadest, and his touch gentle. He was not a hugger or a kisser, but no one in my family was demonstratively affectionate. There was obvious love in the way he crowed proudly about me to others—I was the brightest, the best, the smartest. That pedestal was so high, he thought McGill would have no choice but to accept me into their mighty university.
Everything happened so fast—only about eight weeks from symptoms to the end. There was so little time to adjust. Fortunately, I was able to visit him one more time. I stayed with him at the hospital for a couple of days towards the very end of his illness. He lay in a private room, supported high on pillows, with intravenous tubes running across the bed. If I tried to sit on the bed to hold his warm hands, he would wince in pain. Even in pain, he smiled at me as I sat on a chair in the corner of the room, watching me as I studied for a test from a heavy textbook, probably biology. He extracted a deathbed promise from me to graduate from college, a promise I kept, and even did one better—graduating from law school after I had given birth to three children. I promised him, repeatedly, I would do so. He made no other demands on me just as he never had in life. When I left, I kissed him on his deeply furrowed forehead as tears rolled down both our cheeks. That’s my last memory of him.
Herm and I drove to Montreal for the funeral only a week or so later. It was a small one, attended by a few family friends and his sister Lily’s family. Mamaia, Lily, and I seemed to be doing most of the crying. As I stood in the cold, staring at the freshly dug earth and a new layer of snow, I did not know why I was crying or what I was feeling. My mother was stone-faced. I thought she was in shock. We sat shiva (mourning period) in Montreal for the first day but then had to leave, after the third eight-inch snowstorm of the season.
A profound sadness hit me after I returned home, for all that he missed out on with such an early death, like seeing me graduate from college, then law school, and meeting his grandchildren. He would have loved the freedom of grandchildren in a way he could not enjoy the love of a child because of the responsibility.
Not long after Sandu’s death, we went to see the movie La Strada that left me helplessly sobbing at its end. My father, as he aged, started to look a lot like Anthony Quinn in that role. And like Quinn’s character who was ambitious but deeply flawed, failed, and closed off, Sandu’s life was filled with sadness and unfulfilled dreams, which I felt profoundly after he was gone.
I don’t know what Sandu wanted or expected out of life. I don’t know what any of them wanted. They struggled for so many years just to survive—to achieve safety. Then the struggle turned to providing a roof over their heads with the other necessities like food and clothing for all of us. I can’t imagine what else they aspired to other than financial security. We never had a house, or a car, or took vacations other than the two my mother and I took to Atlantic City. My parents’ life after the war was never as affluent as it had been before. Financial security never came to my father. There were no savings at his death, but a small insurance policy that paid for the funeral, a fur coat for my mother, and a small loan to Herm and me for our first house. Netty did not want us to repay the loan. I still have her fur coat.
Ten months after Sandu died my mother remarried without even telling us because she was embarrassed at how little time had passed. She met Simon at a synagogue meeting of “Parents Without Partners.” She was still young, 48, and fell in love, I think. He was an electrician and more financially stable than Sandu, though he was a gambler. Simon also was a survivor, a concentration camp escapee, who had only been previously married in the “camps,” went to Israel, and followed a wealthy friend to Montreal, who’d promised to give him work. Netty’s quality of life improved a bit as a result of that marriage. They lived in her apartment, Simon had a car and they would come down to see us a few times a year. Simon liked my family and me and turned out to be a caring grandfather.
My mother’s life only saw more financial stability after Herm and I achieved some financial stability ourselves, when we were able to help provide for her, about 20 years into our marriage, just in time for our daughters’ college educations and weddings.
Chapter Twenty
ISRAEL, AT LAST
AFTER OUR GLORIOUS honeymoon in Quebec City, where housekeeping had to wait each morning for us to leave the marital bed, and where Herm ate his first non-kosher food (spare ribs), we returned to Montreal to my parents’ apartment. But we were unable to leave for the United States as planned. I had applied for an immigrant visa based on my marriage to an American citizen. However, it had not yet come through, reportedly because the Romanian quota was filled. About a week later, we were allowed to fly to Philadelphia.
My previous retail experience in Montreal’s Woolworth’s store became a ticket to a job in the Woolworth’s store at the Bala Cynwyd Shopping Center, where I started a job as a cashier. I brought a letter of recommendation to the manager and started work the next day. Two months later, I guiltily quit. My new role was to support Herm’s graduate studies in psychology at Rutgers University as I continued my studies at night, but now in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
We moved to a first floor apartment in a two-family house, near the Rutgers campus. Unrealistic to our core, we thought we might develop the same relationship with our landlord that Herm’s family had with Florence and Charlie, but nothing could have been further from the truth. Our landlords were over-controlling meddlers who regularly entered our apartment to see what we were up to whenever our shoes or boots were not outside our door. We tricked them once by taking our footwear into the apartment and waiting for them to come in. You can imagine their surprise; however, they were neither embarrassed nor apologetic. They just retreated.
With $600 in wedding gifts and a little earnings from our summer jobs, we paid our security deposit (the first month’s rent of $100) and bought some furniture: a bed with a headboard that matched the cheap double dresser trimmed with plastic faux wood, a used black and white television, a used small couch with matching chair both covered in Naugahyde (black fake leather), a white outdoor wrought iron table and two chairs with blue plastic seat cushions, and a $10 homemade cabinet we found at a house sale, which we painted blue and white. The cabinet always had sentimental value because the widow from whom we bought it explained that her husband had made it early in their 60-year marriage. Moving day was August 1 with a U-Haul and our trusty haulers, Moishe, Pesche, and their neighbors Florence, and Charlie.
I landed a job as a service representative at New Jersey Bell Telephone Company. I had initially ap
plied to be a telephone operator but thankfully was rejected. “You’re too smart to be just an operator,” someone said after a full day of testing. Everything seemed to be working out as planned.
The yearning to see Israel again never went away. After our marriage, I often spoke about my need to go back. Finally, Herm’s response was a challenge—“If you really feel the need to go, you can do something about it.” So, I did.
I was the main wage earner since Herm only had a small research assistantship. It was up to me. One day at lunchtime, I walked around the corner from the New Jersey Bell office where I worked and opened up a vacation club account at the nearest bank. Fifty dollars out of every paycheck went to the account until we had enough money for the airfare. I knew we would not need any hotel money. We had lots of relatives who would and did put us up. It was 1973 and we were expecting our first child.
It was exhilarating to be back in Israel. Everything felt so comfortable and natural, including my pregnant ride in the side bucket of a motorcycle owned of one of Herm’s cousins, also named Moishe Huber, who drove us around Tel Aviv in his only mode of transportation. We slept in his teenage children’s beds while they were off on their mandatory military service.
My mother’s cousin Shelley also put us up on folding beds on her balcony in Haifa. Her apartment was so small that there was barely enough room for two stools to accommodate us for the Seder table at the holiday. But being there for Passover was so special because we visited so many of the places we’d read about like the Dead Sea and Masada.
