Regrets 2

In 1904, my maternal grandmother, Naomi (Elkin) Karchevsky, a woman in her early twenties, carrying her infant daughter (my aunt Francis), travelled from a small town in the Russian Empire all the way to Ellis Island in the New York City harbor to begin a new life.

Eventually, she and my grandfather, Julius, who arrived in the USA a year earlier, settled in Oswego, New York when my mother Margaret was born in 1907.  My parents met eighteen years later in 1925.  I was born twenty years after that in 1945.

My grandmother lived a long life passing away in December 1976 at more than 90 years of age.  At the time, she was living in a nursing home in upstate New York.  She was in reasonably good health, physically and mentally, when she suffered a stroke and died one day later.

I was (for the first time) a pall bearer at her funeral in Rochester, NY.  Afterwards I had my first experience sitting shiva.  "Eat...eat," I was told, so I ate.  The food was very good and plentiful.

My grandmother died just after my daughter Rachel celebrated her first birthday on December 7, 1976.  All that year 1976, I thought about taking her to the nursing home to introduce my grandmother to another of her many great-grandchildren.  I kept putting it off thinking I could do it another time...but it didn't happen.  It is another of my life's regrets.

As we lived not far from each other, I frequently saw my grandmother, especially when she lived in Rochester.  I had many happy memories of her.  

But, since my grandmother passed away, I have developed a curiosity about what her early life was like and what happened on that fateful journey from Russia to America.  That story is gone, but I imagine a little bit from the film Fiddler on the Roof (1971).