Introduction

Our parents returned from a trip to Mexico in 1971 and retold the details of their trip to us (Jeff with his wife and Pete with his fiancée) via a slide show projected onto a portable movie screen set in their small living room. Like many of the trips they enjoyed in their life together, we tried to be a patient audience as we usually heard detailed explanations of most every one of the hundreds of slides dad took including all the many friends they met. Dad could always make us laugh with his levity and sense of humor. But at least one part of this trip, a Tauck Tour of Mexico was very different. Mom, who rarely took the main stage away from dad, narrated almost all of one remarkable lunch they had one day in Mexico City in1971. She enthralled us with her narration of this once-in-a lifetime coincidence. Unfortunately dad took no slides of this event but it didn't matter because mom illustrated it in our minds' eyes.

 

​Mom and dad on their 1971 trip to Mexico

 

The Girl from America

 

Mom punctuated much of her story with Yiddish (her first language) dialogue that occurred. None of us knew much Yiddish but she connoted the full meaning of each to us. Mom's story and her joke telling abilities were extraordinary when they involved Yiddish. Unfortunately we cannot reproduce this in her own words.

She interrupted dad when he began to talk about their tour of Mexico City.

 

"We took time away from the lunch arranged for us in Mexico City for one on our own," she told us. They had noted a restaurant conspicuously named The Jerusalem Cafe among the many small businesses along the congested Mexico city streets. "We just had to see what that was all about".

 

Mom didn't focus on details of the restaurant itself, the menu items or whether they enjoyed their meal only on the conversation that occurred with the waiter.  Their waiter and most of the staff they observed in the restaurant appeared to be all Mexicans.  Mom and dad didn't speak Spanish and the waiters didn't speak any English except for one who was assigned to their table. Mom asked him how the restaurant came to be. "The owner is a yid", he replied.

 

"Is he here?", mom asked. Without speaking the waiter disappeared behind the kitchen doors. After a short time, the owner came to their table. He was a man who appeared more European in heritage and to be in his seventies. He did not appear too happy to be out of the kitchen and he only spoke Spanish. Mom tried to ask him about the restaurant in Yiddish.

 

Without much reaction he replied tersely in Yiddish, using the same Litvak accent that my mother grew up with at her home. He eventually explained that he was forced to emigrate from Poland in the late 1930s but the United States would not accept his family there. Only after applying to Mexico and to a few South American countries could he find a new home. Mom only then understood his anger and could only guess that much of his family fared much worse. More than 25 years after the war he still harbored resentment to the United States for their heartless immigration policy for the Jews during the war.

 

Mom changed the subject to one that she thought might resonant with him although she didn't have any idea just how much it would. She spoke to him of her mother who had died just two years ago. She explained that Chana Sora, or Anna as she was known in the U.S., had immigrated to the United States as a very young girl (we now know through our genealogical research that she was only 14 years old when she went to live with her aunt and uncle in Syracuse, NY in the summer of 1900). She was from Grajewo, Poland, then part of Russia in Lomza gubernia (province). She used the Litvak pronunciation for Grajewo (much like Grrīvah).

 

Noting a gradual change in the man's demeanor as she spoke of the town of her mother's birth, mom continued, "My mother somehow found the money to return home to visit her mother after learning of her father's death. That was 1905 or 1906."