Robert Rosen

 

My semi-annual journey to West Palm Beach to visit my mother, Eleanor Rosen, in her assisted-living facility coincided with Passover this year. The facility, Morse Life, observes the holiday. As we were sitting under an umbrella in the lush garden, an aide brought my mother her lunch, matzo pizzas consisting of tomato sauce and melted kosher-for-Passover mozzarella cheese on matzo. I reminded her of all the good food she used to prepare for Passover when I was living at home.

 

My mother is one of the main characters in A Brooklyn Memoir, a book she hasn't been able to read due to failing eyesight. In the book, set in the 1950s and 60s, I describe her as a magician in the kitchen who often cooked gourmet meals like crêpes suzette. When I visit, she likes me to read to her from the book. In honor of her 97th Passover, I read from her favorite chapter, 15, "The Flatbush Diet":

 

Sometimes on weekends, she'd whip up a batch of blueberry pancakes or a cheese omelet or cinnamon toast or French toast (often made with challah), occasionally with a serving of ambrosia-like bacon on the side. Though we routinely consumed other pig meats as well—notably pork chops and ham—we also observed Passover. And to make more bearable those eight days of giving up virtually every food I liked to eat, my mother made a mouthwatering matzoh brei, latkes as light as feathers, and a sponge cake that she then transformed into a strawberry shortcake so delectable it seemed to defeat the very purpose of the holiday—to remember the suffering and deprivations of the Jews who'd wandered in the desert for 40 years.

 

And the only reason I can think of that she didn't add matzo pizzas—a variation on English-muffin pizzas—to her repertoire is because kosher-for-Passover mozzarella cheese hadn't been invented yet.

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I describe my mother, Eleanor Rosen, one of the main characters in A Brooklyn Memoir, as an obsessively clean housekeeper, an excellent cook, a lover of art and literature, a hater of Nazis, and a status-conscious woman who was dissatisfied with her lower-middle-class life in a shabby apartment on East 17th Street in 1950s and 60s Flatbush.

 

Today she resides in an assisted-living facility in West Palm Beach, Florida, and last week my wife, Mary Lyn Maiscott, my cousin Mark Coplon, and I visited her. Such visits are emotionally difficult, mostly because my mother is unhappy being "in an institution," as she puts it, and would like to live with my brother, Jerry, or me, which would be impossible. She's having memory issues and problems walking; she'd require a full-time aide. Even putting aside the cost of such an endeavor, neither Jerry nor I have enough space.

 

A conversation with my mother goes something like this:

 

"How old am I?"

 

"You're 96, Mom."

 

"That's old. Do you think I'll make it to a hundred?"

 

"Could happen."

 

"Would you ever move to Florida? I'd feel so much better knowing you were near me."

 

"Our lives are in New York, Mom, but we'll visit you as much as we can. And so will Jerry and Cindy."

 

To distract my mother from her obsessions, we went outside to the patio, where I showed her the copy of A Brooklyn Memoir that I'd brought with me. Despite her failing eyesight, she recognized my father and me on the cover, and that the photo was taken, probably by her, on Church Avenue and East 17th, down the block from my father's candy store. Then I read her favorite passage, which begins, "Say what you will about my mother. She knew how to cook, and must be given full credit for her near-supernatural ability to transform the most ordinary cut of meat or low-budget piece of fish into something delicious."

 

My cousin Mark Coplon, a drummer in The Nickel Bag back in the day.

 

Later, Mary Lyn took out her guitar and sang for my mother, as Mark, who back in the day was a drummer in a suburban garage band called The Nickel Bag, drummed on the tabletop. My mother then looked up into the cloudless Florida sky and saw two hawks circling above us. It reminded her of a lyric from Oklahoma, which she and my father saw on Broadway before I was born. She asked Mary Lyn if she could play the title song from the show. So that's what Mary Lyn played. My mother remembered the words, and we all sang together:

 

Oklahoma, every night my honey lamb and I

Sit alone and talk
And watch a hawk

Making lazy circles in the sky.

 

And for a moment my mother was happy.

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Even when she was young, my mother, Eleanor Rosen, a major character in Bobby in Naziland, didn't like being photographed. So I don't have many photographs of her. But I have this one, probably taken in the early winter of 1956. I was 4½, she was 30, and her nail polish was red. You may have seen this photo several years ago when it ran with an interview published on Huffpost. It's one of the few photos from that era I have in my possession.

 

The wall we're posing in front of is on East 17th Street, near Church Avenue, down the block from where we lived and around the corner from my father's candy store. (Here's a 1940s municipal archives shot of the wall as seen from the corner of Church Avenue, and here's a recent Google-maps shot; rotate it to the left to see the wall.)

 

I don't know why we're posing there or who took the photo, but it's a wall I knew well. It's one of the walls where we used to play Chinese handball and when we were older, regular handball.

 

My expression, too, seems familiar—certainly more familiar than my expression in some of the photos that show me smiling that I ran in earlier blog posts. I didn't like being photographed, either, because it generally involved my mother yelling at me to "Smile naturally!"

 

This, then, is my more natural expression—more or less that of a hostage under duress. As I said in the book, "My mother, in particular, doled out her affections—the occasional hug and kiss, or the sentence spoken in a pleasant and non-accusatory tone—only on those rare days when I obeyed her without question or brought home sterling marks on my report card. And whatever emotion I felt in return was probably more akin to Stockholm syndrome than love, and was grounded in the fear that if my parents didn't stop smoking cigarettes, then I'd end up an orphan like the Rosenberg kids."

 

These days I get along well with my mother, who now resides in an assisted-living facility in West Palm Beach. Though she's not read Bobby in Naziland—eye problems—she's proud of having taken the cover photo.

 

Click on the links below to see other Flatbush photos from the Bobby in Naziland era.

Prospect Park, 1959.

East 17th Street and Caton Avenue, circa 1954.

Church Avenue, 1956.

East 17th Street, April 1955.

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Bobby in Naziland is available on Amazon and all other online booksellers, as well as at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore, where you really should buy it.

 

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