Thinking of my mother

This week is my mother's Yahr Zeit, the anniversary of her death. She was 87 when she died. She didn't linger long. She had a major stroke, she appeared to be unconscious for a few days, though seemed to struggle to breathe, then she gave up the struggle. Those who remember her as a strong willed old lady might find it hard to visualise her as a young flapper of the 1920s. She loved to dance, she enjoyed the company of her many friends, men and women. She was one of the first generation of Jewish girls to get a solid secondary school education. She matriculated from one of the best girls' gymnasiums, an elite academic girls' secondary school, in Budapest. Her teachers included some eminent scholars. Teachers in a good gymnasium were more highly regarded than university lecturers. She was taught Latin, Greek, German, as well as Hungarian literature, and learned French from the sisters of Sacré Cœur She was fluent in four languages and had a very broad general education. It was her mother who insisted that she and her younger sister should go to a gymnasiums. A few years earlier, when her older sister went to high school it was almost unheard of for a Jewish girl to aspire to get the kind of education that smart boys from middle class homes were entitled to. My grandmother, my mother's mother, was an impoverished, orphan girl from the country who had only a spasmodic, interrupted primary school education, but all her life she tried to educate herself. Educating her daughters was important to her, and insisted on this in face her husbands mild objections. He couldn't see the point of educating girls, though later he made good use of my mother's ability to correspond in four languages. Upon leaving school, my mother wanted to train as an optician, but the 1920s were dangerous times for Jewish students at universities. If they were fortunate to be accepted they were beaten up by their brave heroic fellow students. So my mother ended up with exactly what she had hoped to avoid, running the office of my grandfather's import export business. She was 25 when she married my father, who was a young man with good prospects, but with the great depression of the 1930s, my father was made redundant, the job he managed to get didn't pay enough to cover his tram fares. With my grandfather's help, through his contacts, my father went into business on his own account, running a modestly successful wholesale business. When my father was conscripted first into the army, then into the Jewish unarmed labour unit, my mother had to take charge of this business as well as helping to run her father's office, and at one time looking after two very sick children. She was a very strong woman. She coped and was never discouraged. She was surrounded by good friends, and despite the great difficulties she faced, she had the capacity to enjoy herself, have a good time whenever the opportunity presented itself. New Year's Eve, my father's birthday, was always an occasion for exuberant celebrations. They would roll up the carpet, my father would sit at the piano and play for hours on end while his friends plied him with apricot brandy or good cognac. To my mother's regret, my father was no dancer. He was more at home in front of a piano keyboard. Emigrating to New Zealand after the war was my father's choice. My mother had to leave her father, her sister and her many friends behind. In her new country she was the one who enabled us to adapt. She could speak and write English. She spent hours with me translating the English textbooks, helping me with New Zealand history, science, English literature and grammar. She was a mother hen, who was there for us when in our bewilderment we tried to make sense of a world of a language we could not understand and customs that were quote alien. She also held down a job during the day and earned additional income with machine embroidery that she worked on at night. All this in addition to cooking, and she was a good cook, and running the household. She was also very hospitable. Her saying was 'Just drop in whenever you like' and people did. Everybody was my father's and mother's friend from all walks of life. And they retained these friendships all their lives. Think of the little plump lady that was my mother as a tower of strength, never discouraged, never dejected, always looking forward in life. The year she died she was already too frail to go to Japan on her annual visit to my brother, but she planned ahead, if she could not go that years she would go the following year. She never made it. She had a good life, despite all its hardships. Regret was not in her vocabulary.