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My mother as a very young girl. Photo undated.
Opposite
Elia and Eva Levine.
lena levine and the levine brothers by Max
My mother, Lena, was the third-oldest child and only daughter in a family with seven children. When she was young, her parents, Eva Sklar and Elia Levine, came to the United States, bringing
with them Lena and three of her brothers, Max, Abe and Moe. Her three younger brothers, Sol, Harry and Mike, were born in this country.
My ancestors emigrated from the town of Slutz in the state of Minsk, in the Kiev region of Russia. On June 6th, 1891, the SS Columbia arrived at Castle Garden or the Barge Office from Hamburg, Germany. On board was the Levine family, which had come to New York to join Elia’s father, Reb Herschel Levine. Like hundreds of thousands of other Jews, the Levine family fled from the pogroms. Jews usually end up with what they can carry. That’s why Jews are all violinists — nobody can carry a piano.
BUBBIE AND ZADIE
My grandparents, Eva and Elia, lived in the same house, at 87 East Broadway, in the Lower East Side of New York City, for more than 50 years. Elia was a winemaker, but once Prohibition came, he made wine only for religious purposes.
I knew my Levine grandparents as Zadie and Bubbie. They never spoke English, only Yiddish. No one spoke to me in Yiddish, so I only knew a few words and phrases. My grandparents and I didn’t really communicate and saw each other mostly during special occasions.