At the Edge of the World

by Barbara Krasner

Esther Toby, born Estera Taube Drewno, was my mother’s beloved maternal grandmother. She left her world behind. She was illiterate. No artifacts, photographs, or heirlooms. Only her name, Esther Toby, was given to three of her great-grandchildren, none of whom recall any stories about her.

Esther Toby was a woman of great tradition, I imagine. When this 4-foot, 10-inch forty-four-year old grandmother boarded the SS George Washington in Bremen, Germany, on May 30, 1914 — along with my grandmother, seventeen; her daughter-in-law, Leah; and grandchildren Beile, seven; Ayzyk, five; and Ruchel, two — she brought along her featherbeds and candlesticks and not much else.

Her son had been the first to leave for New York from their home in Ostrów Mazowiecka, Russian Poland, in 1913. Her husband followed. She thought that would be it for a while, until she just five days later, she sent her first daughter after him to keep house for her son and husband, and just maybe to keep them on the straight and narrow.

For her children and grandchildren, she was giving up all she knew. The back lanes she once skipped through with her friends to exchange secrets in the Brok or Warszawa forests. The marketplace where people set up stalls every week to sell their wares and where she hauled her enamel pail to draw water from the communal well. The narrow walk from the jail to the town hall. The fields beyond Warszawa Street, with their tall and golden wheat stalks, filling the air with sweet summer. The brick synagogue with carved lions guarding the Torah and the stained-glass windows and the women’s gallery upstairs. And her Drewno family’s butcher shop, where the men waited outside in their bloodstained aprons for the gravelly crunch of hoofbeats and wagon wheels signaling the arrival of deliveries while Esther Toby swung the stew pot back and forth over the hearth and announced when dinner was ready.

Although the butcher business provided stability, it could only go so far. Her father, Zelig, died when she was only fifteen. As the eldest of four, and being a girl, it was up to her to care for her two younger brothers and sister. Perhaps the family relied on uncles to lend a financial hand. Perhaps she did some kind of work to help her mother.

Esther Toby married Chaim Joseph Entel, three years her junior, in 1886. They lived outside Ostrów Mazowiecka in Dąbrowa, a place so small, a breath could wipe it off the map, but it was where Chaim worked as a blacksmith on a nobleman’s estate. The family traveled by wagon to Ostrów Mazowiecka for the High Holy Days, the only time my grandmother wore shoes.

Loss visited Esther Toby once again when her mother, Chaja Rojza née Mularzewicz, died in 1894. A son Hersz died in 1898 at age four in nearby Czyżew-Osada. Her brother Hersz Ayzyk died in February 1914. Perhaps his death and money from son Abie gave her the impetus to leave home in June that year, just before the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo and the onset of a world war. Had she waited just a few more weeks, she would not have been able to leave Europe at all.

In New York, where she now found herself, war and the Atlantic made it impossible for her to correspond with relatives in Ostrów Mazowiecka for years (that is, if she had ever learned to write). In Ostrova, as the shtetl was called in Yiddish, villagers scrambled to hide in their root cellars, the area ravaged first by the Russian Army and then by the German Army. She made it out of Europe just in time, but the wall of silence must have been deafening. Esther Toby lived between the rocky edges of the Old and New like the Colossus of Rhodes.

At the edge of New York City, son Abie found her a flat on the Lower East Side in a brick-faced tenement near the Orthodox Bialystoker Shul on Willett Street. Esther Toby knew the prayers by heart. She would have entered this fieldstone building with stained glass windows to sit in the women’s gallery, where she could look at the painted Zodiac panels and scenes of Eretz Yisroel, the three massive chandeliers, and the blue Torah ark brought over from Russia.

By 1930, Esther Toby and Chaim, who got a job in the bedspring factory where Abie worked, were living at 28 Orchard Street. But according to my great-grandfather’s death certificate, they had been living in my grandfather’s apartment building at 1854 68th Street in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, since 1930, verified a decade later by “information from Max Perlman’s daughter” (a notation the 1940 U.S. Census enumerator scribbled in the margin). Max’s apartment building provided space for his family and his in-laws, all living cozily together under one roof as if they lived next to each other in Ostrova.

These living arrangements made it easier for Esther Toby to bond with her American granddaughters. It was up to Esther Toby to teach her granddaughters the Jewish way of life: the food, the traditions, the values, how to be smart but not too smart.

Esther Toby’s transgenerational gifts went beyond the mere boundaries of physicality and a grandmother’s love. She passed on to my mother her guttural, phlegmy “r.” How to commit to memory the Shabbos prayers (books weren’t necessary for women). To always serve the men first and most. To always wear a hat (if the head was warm, the body would be, too).

Esther Toby never learned English. She lived in her insular world of Yiddish. When the police found her wandering the streets, she didn’t know what they were asking, saying, or demanding. She was likely terrified of their uniforms and shiny badges.

Yiddish was my mother’s mamaloshn, though she was born in Brooklyn. She didn’t begin to speak English until she started public school. I can still hear her super-guttural syllables as she spoke to her sister on the phone when I was within earshot. That hard “ikh” — “I” — that cleared the throat. Her pronunciation of “hungry” with an extra syllable between the “g” and “ry” to mimic the Yiddish “hungarik.” Her pronunciation of “Barbara” with three distinct syllables. The way she said “antisemite” as “ahntee-semit.”

Esther Toby also passed down her language of superstition. She warned against inviting the evil eye, keynehora. Then she’d spit three times. My mother repeated this instruction to her children. When my eldest sister became pregnant, my mother wanted her to tie a red ribbon to her undergarments to ward off evil spirits. We weren’t allowed to buy baby furniture before our respective babies arrived healthy and safe. My mother would never compliment us to our faces, but she’d sing our praises to our siblings. All of this my mother learned from Esther Toby.

Esther Toby never allowed photographs, because, she reasoned, they’d steal her soul. But my mother described her distinctive Drewno pug nose. When I look at the photo of Esther Toby’s first cousin, Sender Drewno, who perished in the Holocaust, I try to imagine her face like his, with that wide nose.

Esther Toby passed on her tradition in the way my mother singed feathers off chickens using the stove’s front burner. The way she covered her head with a kerchief to light the Shabbos candles. The way she made homemade lokshen noodles for Pesach. The way she peeled an apple with a knife, moving the knife toward her body like a carver and removing the peel in a single curving ribbon. The way her eyes sparkled talking about her grandmother’s shmaltz sandwiches on pumpernickel. The way she used her tools: a mortar and pestle, a hand grinder, and a wooden bowl that eventually cracked from the impact of chopping.

Esther Toby did everything in America the way she did it in Poland. Her acts were built on solid foundations of what her mother probably taught her in that collective wisdom of Jewish women. She had a strong, fearless voice in actions as well as words. She walked everywhere. One time, she dragged my mother a mile and a half to Bath Beach to cast their sins in the Atlantic Ocean for Tashlich.

On the beach, they removed their shoes and stockings. Esther Toby said to my mother, “I take your sins onto me and now I cast them away.” Between her toes she could feel the sand and water-worn pebbles. She prayed to G-d in the open air where perhaps He could hear her better than in the shul’s women’s section. Here at the edge of the world, she could dig in and find her balance, even as the sands shifted with the water’s ebb and flow. Here she could depend on herself and herself alone.

My mother remembered this day all her life. Esther Toby wrapped her in a featherbed of love and kept her secure, forever her fierce protector. When my mother told this story — I remember she was smoking a Kent in her kitchen chair by the wall phone — she mimicked her grandmother, bringing her arms up to her chest to show the burden, the absorption of sins that Esther Toby would take on herself for a grandchild.

By the 1940s, she must have wondered about the fate of her relatives in Europe. Those who remained in Ostrova, perished in the fall of 1939, burned alive in the Teitelbaum brewery, or Treblinka, or elsewhere as residents fled to the east into the Soviet Union. I don’t know the fate of her brother Leibl, or her sister, Chaszka. Perhaps the brother came to America, or perhaps he was murdered by the Nazis. The sister is even more difficult to track since I don’t know if she married, and if so, to whom. She may have known her cousins who had emigrated from Ostrów Mazowiecka and settled in Chicago. But I never did find out.

After her husband died in February 1944, Esther Toby’s world unraveled. Perhaps as a result of his death, perhaps not, she developed dementia. Her mental state became obvious when policemen brought her home from Coney Island Beach three-and-a-half miles away, where she’d been found selling bagels or pretzels without English, without knowing American money. The policemen told her she needed a license, but she didn’t understand. She was not about to be confined or feel sorry for herself. She wanted to get out beyond her perimeter, even with the limitations of language and age.

My mother was twenty-three when Esther Toby died, just a few months after her husband. The edges of her life now blurred beyond recognition. I don’t know when she was admitted to Coney Island Hospital. There, she fell, broke a hip. My mother said she was pushed because she had become so difficult. The so-called accident hastened her death.

My mother passed on some stories, but only some, and apparently, only to me, because I asked. Her sister never told stories about Esther Toby. This dearth of narrative relates to the lack of photographs. And the lack of cemetery visits, in sharp contrast to other family rituals. For instance, my mother and her siblings were fervent about visiting their parents’ graves at Montefiore Cemetery on Springfield Avenue in Queens, just past the mausoleum of Rabbi Schneerson, every Sunday of Labor Day weekend, prayer books in their purses and hands pushing metal walkers forward.

But I don’t recall my mother ever visiting Esther Toby’s grave. I had the death certificates of both Esther Toby and Chaim Joseph tucked away in a metal file cabinet in the garage. The death certificates said they were buried at United Hebrew Cemetery in Staten Island.

In my files is also the agreement my grandmother signed with Agudath Anshei Mamod at 156 Henry Street, in association with House of Sages, Inc. A call to the cemetery tells me they’re buried in the United Hebrew Community plot in Block 62, graves 49 and 50. Interestingly, Esther Toby is buried with the surname Antel, and Chaim Joseph with the surname Antell. I’m sure they are there. I’ve seen photos of their gravesites.

Esther Toby left her footprints in the sand of our family’s history, but they are light, delicate, fading. No one in my sister’s family will likely follow Ashkenazic naming tradition, so the name will not endure. I’m hoping that my grandmother’s sister’s descendants might continue the tradition somehow. I am grateful for the stories my mother told. At least it’s something.

Esther Toby is lost, buried in the dunes, the brittle shreds of her shroud having fallen away, lost where the enchanted live, but my mother’s stories about her remain with me. It is jarring to think that a once vibrant and well-loved woman could disappear through the slats of time. Maybe if it were possible now to visit Bath Beach before the sand was paved over to make way for a new highway in the mid-twentieth century, I could hear her whispered prayers, could hear the music of her guardian protection of my mother. But now, even the beach has been forgotten.