Louisa Formann grew up on the German side of the German-Polish border among a contentious mélange of Kabbalists, logical positivists, Talmudic scholars, and ecstatic dervishes. In the company of this diverse set of male relatives the motherless girl ripened into a willful young woman given to romantic fantasies, none of which were to be realized when she was married off at nineteen to a handsome blue-eyed rag picker with fair hair named Solomon Kirsh. Solomon might have indeed been as wise as his namesake (he was, in fact, a learned biblical scholar, having been tutored at home from boyhood by an uncle reputed as a prominent disciple of the Vilna Gaon himself) but nothing of this came to be known, for Solomon was an inordinately silent man — so silent that he was often mistaken for mute.

Brooklyn Bridge at Night, 1909
(Oil on canvas, 36 x 50 in)
BY Edward Willis Redfield
Private Collection

Educated in three languages by her father, uncles, and brothers, Louisa translated Shakespeare from English into German and wrote poetry in biblical Hebrew. She was by no means a handsome woman, standing less than five feet, with a short waist, a taut, high bosom, and thick ankles. Yet her black eyes radiated such passionate intelligence that anyone falling under her glance was instantly tricked into finding her beautiful.

Solomon left for America soon after their second child was born in order to try his hand at the rag trade on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Louisa and the children stayed behind, she, nursing their son through a prolonged bout of sleeping sickness while doing her best to protect her daughter from the roving anti-Semitic hordes. (The breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had spawned numerous pogroms in and around Louisa’s border town, and it was not uncommon for an otherwise upright citizen filled with schnapps to turn rapist after Sunday church services.)

While she looked forward to the money packets her husband tucked into the occasional gifts of snuff and brown lisle winter stockings he sent her, Louisa did not miss her silent Solomon, and it took five years before she decided to join him in America. She was twenty-seven when, with her boy and girl in tow, she arrived at her husband’s Hester Street factory to find him coughing blood amidst a heap of multi-colored rags.

…the motherless girl ripened into a willful young woman given to romantic fantasies, none of which were to be realized when she was married off at nineteen to
a handsome blue-eyed rag picker with fair hair named Solomon Kirsh.

“For this I didn’t leave Europe,” she said, her accented English echoing throughout the abandoned ice house where the sun never shone. Then, with the children following behind her like a pair of ducklings, Louisa left Solomon standing in his factory and took the Elevated to Brooklyn. When the train pulled into the station of a tree-lined neighborhood and the doors opened, Louisa picked up her two suitcases and hustled the children out onto the platform. The “Young Israel of Borough Park” was the first building she saw on alighting, which she took as a sign to stay.

By the end of the week she had moved into an airy, spacious corner apartment with six windows and two views: both facing tree-lined streets within walking distance of a bustling Jewish shopping district. Louisa immediately enrolled her sickly but highly intelligent boy in a Talmud Torah and her fair-haired, blue-eyed silent daughter in the local public school, and then, literally with her last nickel, telephoned her husband.

“I found an apartment. It has six windows. The address is 101 Clara Street. If you want to come and live here, fine. If not, send money so I can feed the children,” she said, this time in German-accented Yiddish.

Thus, after seven years of separation, Solomon Kirsh, came to live again with his family, offering no complaint when, on the night he arrived, Louisa announced that she wanted no more children and shut the bedroom door in his face. When Solomon lost the lease, and had to shut down his rag factory, it was Louisa who saved the day. Determined never to give up the apartment with six windows and two tree-lined views, she dipped into her secret savings and paid the rent until her husband “got back on his feet.”

Louisa’s daughter also married when she was nineteen. Two years later, she died in childbirth, leaving her little girl in her grandparents’ care. (Offering no financial support, the child’s father had left for an ostensible job in St. Louis and was not to be heard from again for the next twenty years.) Louisa’s son proved a remarkably able scholar, excelling in Talmud and Mathematics. He remained sickly, however, until his high school years when, for lack of money, Louisa was forced to place him in a public school instead of a yeshiva. Hence the boy — despite her deepest yearnings, prayers, and admonitions — never became a rabbi.

Louisa kept house on Clara Street, played the piano Solomon brought home from the junk shop where he now worked, and joined the Ladies Auxiliary of the synagogue next door, which, in addition to the six windows and two tree-lined views, had been another major reason for choosing the apartment. But she soon quarreled with the other Auxiliary ladies, finding them “petty and illiterate” despite their blue-tinted hair, fine clothes, and unaccented American English. Adding to her isolation and — though Louisa would never admit it—her loneliness, she developed asthma. Claiming that only gold-tipped imported Turkish cigarettes provided relief for her condition, she insisted to all who commented on her newly acquired smoking habit that it was “strictly for medicinal purposes.” This took place at roughly the same time she developed an interest in health food and imposed a strict fresh air and exercise regimen on her granddaughter, feeding her grapefruit with wheat germ and a glass of milk for breakfast every morning. (In spite of — or perhaps because of — this diet, the girl would suffer from goiter trouble for the rest of her life.)

In the evenings, with Solomon working overtime, Louisa read the American classics (she was particularly fond of Melville) and wrote poetry in English. When the Second World War broke out, she took to writing long, amazingly prescient, letters to the Daily Forward about the genocidal fate of the Jewish people — supporting her argument with many impressive biblical references in Hebrew.

In her melancholy… she stopped attending Shabbat synagogue services. After putting on her black silk holiday dress and best jet earrings and dousing herself with lilac perfume, she’d sit staring out the window all day instead.

On his fifty-eighth birthday, Solomon was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and placed in the Chronic Home for the Disabled. With only his workman’s compensation check, and her dwindling secret savings to count on, Louisa nevertheless managed to keep the apartment on Clara Street and her son and granddaughter in school. But she had gotten used to having Solomon around, and his absence made her cranky, which resulted in more frequent asthma attacks requiring gold-tipped Turkish cigarettes for relief. Around this time, Louisa also noticed that she was having trouble seeing. When she could no longer read without developing violent headaches, she went to the doctor and was told she had glaucoma. Giving in to her gradual loss of sight, Louisa stopped reading and writing poetry and long letters to the Daily Forward. She had been closely following the ongoing debate over the true identity of the author of Shakespeare’s plays (some even going so far as to claim they were written by a woman) but now lost all interest. In her melancholy (“depression” wasn’t a word used in those days), she stopped attending Shabbat synagogue services. After putting on her black silk holiday dress and best jet earrings and dousing herself with lilac perfume, she’d sit staring out the window all day instead.

When her son, now married, took her out on Sunday drives in his new Oldsmobile, Louisa inevitably got carsick. Once, to her horror, she even vomited all over the back seat before she could get out of the car. Convinced that the Sunday outings were part of a conspiracy hatched by her son’s in-laws to turn him against her, she grew increasingly morose (“paranoid” wasn’t a word used in those days) and difficult to deal with. At the supermarket one day, she tossed a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup at the head of an Italian woman who’d yelled “Dirty Jew” when the near-blind Louisa ran into her with her shopping cart. The woman suffered no injuries and lodged no complaints, but Louisa, fearing arrest, locked herself in her apartment for two weeks after the incident.

When Solomon died and the workman’s compensation checks stopped coming, Louisa’s son, under great hardship, continued to support her. Now she lived only for the time when her granddaughter would find herself a husband and leave her to her old age surrounded by books she no longer read and a piano she no longer played. Since her granddaughter, now working as a receptionist at a New York City radio station, had moved into a Greenwich Village apartment with a roommate and seldom visited, Louisa briefly contemplated dictating her poetry to the landlord’s teenaged daughter who brought her a quart of milk once a week — and just as quickly decided against it. She drank the milk, and, except for an occasional grapefruit sprinkled with wheat germ, ate little else.

Then disaster struck…

Her grievances grew louder and more hyperbolic — aired to neighbors, storekeepers, the synagogue sexton — anyone who would listen, and even those who would not.

The landlord’s teenaged daughter married suddenly, and Louisa was given notice to clear out of the apartment within ninety days. Her son suggested hiring a lawyer and fighting the eviction, but she wouldn’t hear of it. While her son searched for another place for her to live, Louisa sat at the window composing imaginary letters pleading her case to the editor of the Daily Forward. Swallowing her pride, she even turned to the synagogue friends she’d once spurned. Too late, of course, for not one of the elegant blue-haired widows would take her in. It was during those trying final days at the apartment, with the landlord patiently granting one extension after the next, that Louisa, no doubt with Lear in mind, turned her wrath against her beloved son — even going so far as to accuse him of plotting to send her out into the wilderness to die. Her grievances grew louder and more hyperbolic — aired to neighbors, storekeepers, the synagogue sexton — anyone who would listen, and even those who would not.

No eleventh-hour Hollywood deus ex machina arrived with a reprieve. The apartment was lost. Her son found a kindly, conveniently deaf, old woman willing to share her flat behind a kosher butcher shop in the heart of the Jewish shopping district. Despite her consuming disgust for both the indignity of the butcher shop and the illiteracy of her new roommate, Louisa moved in. Spurred by her son’s gift of a tape recorder into renewed literary activity, her final years were filled with a continued stream of invective against the New York City Department of Health inspectors for failing to cite the butcher for the chicken feathers and roaches she found in her soup, the impenetrable stupidity and superstition of her “bovine” roommate, and — toward the end — a surprisingly clear-minded screed against Gamul A. Nasser, whom she’d dubbed “the 20th-century Nebuchadnezzer,” in her final published letter to the Daily Forward.

On a cold day in January, at the age of eighty-four or eighty-five (her exact date of birth is still in dispute), Louisa took ill and telephoned her son to announce that she would be “dead by this time tomorrow.” And it was so. On the day she was buried, the worst snowstorm in half a century began to rage. It continued for three days. The grave diggers went out on strike, and the highways leading to the cemetery were impassable. The cars in the funeral procession continually skidded off the road into snow banks along the entire route. Only the hearse in which Louisa lay in her casket moved smoothly ahead. (Witnesses later said it could have been no mortal man who was driving.) At the gravesite, the maniacal howling of the wind and snapping of falling tree branches drowned out the rabbi’s prayers. One great blast of wind nearly swept the mourners off their feet and into Louisa’s open grave, necessitating a hurried burial by her son and two hearse driver “volunteers.” It was a storm, as Louisa might put it, “of Shakespearean proportions.” Those present felt her wrath and were ashamed — for a time. Then Louisa gradually faded from memory.

Why am I telling you this story?

The truth is, I hadn’t thought about my grandmother’s brave and unfulfilled life until the day I received a message from her. Call it a dream, a hallucination, a voice from beyond — whatever you like. Here it is.

I am standing in front of the white stucco house on Clara Street wearing a chic black dress and black, large-brimmed garden party hat. I knock at the green front door. When it opens, I see the landlord’s teenaged daughter coming down the stairs in her bridal gown. As she passes me and goes out into the street, I realize that there are wedding guests gathered on the sidewalk behind me throwing rice. I look up and see unfamiliar garish curtains hanging in every window of Louisa’s apartment. And the walls beyond, what I can see of them, are no longer white but freshly painted yellow.

“Your grandmother’s not here anymore,” says the landlord, taking notice of me in my finery. “You have to take the Powell Street bus to East New York if you want to find her.”

I turn from the gay bridal party in time to see a huge empty city bus pull to a stop in front of the house. The driver beckons me; as I climb into the bus, I notice the words Powell Street on the destination board. The journey is smooth and silent. Nobody else gets on the bus. Finally, the driver pulls up to a shabby brick tenement building whose faded gilt sign informs me that I’ve reached my destination: a home for the elderly. The bus driver opens the doors and points to the building. This looks like a bad neighborhood, and I hesitate before getting off. I hold tightly to my purse then walk quickly to the front door of the building and ring the bell.

The Clara Street Synagogue’s bearded sexton appears in orthodox garb and skull cap and greets me not unpleasantly, as if he’s been expecting my visit. I say,

“I want to see Louisa Formann, please.”

I have always been struck by the crankiness of the dead. They have nothing to do but complain. Some, like Achilles, would rather be live pig farmers than glorious, but dead, heroes. Others are still bothering their astral selves about wills, dishonor, family feuds, misplaced or stolen brooches, and the political state of affairs…

Wordlessly, the old man leads me up a crooked wooden staircase that squeaks with every step we take. On each landing, we stop, and I look into a series of open doorways past hospital curtains into the rubbish-strewn rooms of the building’s so-far invisible inhabitants. At the third landing, there are no hospital curtains blocking the residents from view, and I catch a glimpse through an open doorway of a painfully thin, dark-haired young man with the maniacal eyes of an El Greco saint. The bearded sexton touches my arm and silently urges me quickly past. On the fourth floor, he ushers me into a stifling room with only a hospital bed and a window and points to its “resident” — a rectangular black leather box sprouting wires and a pair of black high-button shoes that once belonged to my grandmother. Apprehensive, but not wishing to insult the old sexton, I greet the rectangular black wired box on the bed. It’s just about Louisa’s size, and replies in exactly her voice through the complex tangle of wires. Oddly enough, it reminds me of my father’s black Tefillin box, which he straps to his head every morning before prayers.

I have always been struck by the crankiness of the dead. They have nothing to do but complain. Some, like Achilles, would rather be live pig farmers than glorious, but dead, heroes. Others are still bothering their astral selves about wills, dishonor, family feuds, misplaced or stolen brooches, and the political state of affairs that might or might not have led to their deaths. In her rectangular black wired box form, Louisa is cranky too, still complaining about her miserable last days on earth in the flat behind the butcher shop

“It’s unbearable here. Can’t you do something, talk to the landlord and get me a better apartment?”

I am stumped. I look to the sexton for help, but realize suddenly that he doesn’t understand English, and that, until I came along, Louisa’s complaints have landed on uncomprehending ears. Nobody but me there to listen. Suddenly, as if a recording has been turned off, the harangue ceases, and I am just as quickly and silently dispatched by the sexton to another wing of the building — this one crammed with cubicles stacked one on top of the next. Apparently soundproofed, this wing is brightly lit and its windows open to a view of a tree-lined street. It is also humid, and my fine clothes are now sticking to me.

I follow the sexton up a broad veined marble staircase. The next room we enter is considerably wider, more spacious than the first, and there is a handsome dresser in the corner with a jug full of bright orange marigolds. Here, in yet another hospital bed — this time with the rails down — lies my grandmother, exactly as I had last seen her — skinny, beak-nosed, sharp-eyed and eminently Louisa-like.

“You’ve passed the test. That’s why they let you come up here. You didn’t believe the black box, did you?”

“No, Grandma.”

“This is me. Or is it ‘I’? That always confused me in English.”

It suddenly strikes me that I could be dead, too; or that maybe everyone is both dead and not dead, alive and not alive — depending on the dimension one happens to be occupying at the moment. Or maybe we’re all no more than billions of mechanical talking boxes to be sloughed off in some eternal lunatic asylum called Hades or Hell, Sheol or Gehennah, Elysian Fields or Paradise — depending on our religious persuasion.

“Are you … are you comfortable, Grandma?”

“No. But was I ever comfortable … anywhere? That’s the way it is. Like here, like there, like everywhere.” She tries gesturing with her pitifully thin arms, but the effort is too great and she lets them fall back on the bed cover.

“Can I do something for you? Talk to the landlord?”

Louisa doesn’t answer me at first. She gazes toward the window as if searching for a tree-lined street somewhere.

“It never stops … the wanting … that’s the problem.”

I’m not sure I heard her correctly, so I repeat, “Can I do something for you?”

“Actually, yes,” she turns her alarmingly intelligent eyes on me. “Yes,” she says, “tell your father to pray for my soul. Tell him.” Then she adds, “And you pray for me, too. Never mind that nonsense about women not counting in a minyan…”

For a moment I think Louisa might be referring to her Kabbalist forbears’ belief that prayers for the dead release wandering souls for reincarnation into a higher sphere on the Tree of Life. It then occurs to me that she isn’t referring to religion at all, but to poetry, hoping that even a woman’s prayers, murmured in dutiful haste, might rescue hers from the purgatory of the forgotten.