Our grandmother was southern, gentile, much like Miss Daisy. Our father can't handle watching that movie. Her accent was like slow, southern molasses, 'Suthunas confowmm,' she said when telling us the Baton Rogue Temple Congregation met on Sundays. We have the Hebrew prayer books presented to our grandmother by her Rabbi in 1941. She never did lose her accent, even after 50 years living in New York. Now that's grit.
What can we say? A small present every Sunday, our very own New York Giants placemat, chocolate and raspberry souce. The woman knitted us a tank sweater (a skill she learned doing the same for British Tommies during World War Two**)and used to get down on the floor and play army men with us. She'd hold tea parties with our sister using her fancy expensive china.
Our sister named her oldest for our grandmother. Hannah practically has cult status in Casa de Stroock. As she likes to say when we start talking about her great-grandmother a lot, 'Mom, they're doing it again!' Yes the two Hannah's did meet. In 50 years Hannah will be telling her own grandchildren, 'I don't understand what hold she had over my mom and her brother. It was soooo weird. Especially up at The Red House.' That was a grandparents house, decorated by our grandmother, which toddler Hannah christened The Red House. You people have seen the photos.
As it happens today is Hannah Marx's (as our grandfather called her) birthday. Here she is in 1941.
* We are named for her father, a pilot in the Luftwaffe during the Great War, who bugged out in 1919 and settled in Louisiana. We once asked, in our 20's mind you, 'Dad what was her father's name?' Our father glared back at us and said, 'You twit!'
**To Hannah Stroock, 'The War' was The War Between the States, sometimes called The Civil War, mostly 'up North'.
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