Memory Traces
A Family's Life Journey
by
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Frozen Kittens
The price of eggs totally controlled our livelihood in the early years of our young family. Many of those years struggling on our poultry farm were more than troublesome but then there were also many moments filled with life’s abundant rewards.
I felt trouble brewing one very cold night on my scheduled rounds to check the coops and the flock of my egg-laying birds. A perceptible hissing hurried my step to the largest of the coops where the major portion of our flock was housed. The sound I anticipated with dread became clear and sharp: the heaving of thousands of struggling lungs to breathe, this from my breadwinners just reaching their prime. That dreaded disease, Newcastle, had struck.
Not much was known then about Newcastle, just that its rapid onslaught was followed by its more rapid rate of bird mortality. There was no cure. Grappling to separate those not yet infected, the entire family struggled through a nightmare of thrashing and dying birds. The battle was lost and at the break of dawn, we became final witnesses to Newcastle’s virulence: hundreds of dead birds on floor and in cages, dozens more dropping like flies, dead. Also dead, the entire year’s investment. The bulldozer buried all.
It was late evening on that bitter day when we became aware of our four-year old Michael’s absence. Panic perhaps had not had the strength to surface and dull the day’s tragedy. He appeared at the door, agitated, with woolen hat totally covering his eyes, red and running nose, and bulging pockets.
Not saying a word, he rushed to the kitchen oven, emptied his pockets, and tenderly placed the contents on the warmest corner. "They are so cold. I have to warm them right away," he said as he placed four tiny kittens, frozen solid, on the oven with complete confidence, a legacy endowed only to the very young, of rapidly reviving them.
Goodness knows how long he had those frozen kittens in his pockets but he knew they had to be saved, and to do that he must warm them. If wiser, I would have told him how, for the moment, he had erased the specter of the day’s tragedy and the trauma of so much fear, balancing life’s hard statement briefly, and garnering a sense of moral sensibility in his short time on this earth. But then again, how could I have said all those things to him? I was still pretty young myself.
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About the Book
Fears and intimidation as Mom and Dad are propelled into generational doors of changing morality and a frightening new high-tech world. An episodic narrative of struggles, fears, and dreams of great expectations and humbling defeats, chapters of accidents and fortune’s humors on the road traveled on a lifetime journey. But above all, a love story, a story about a beautiful Princess, my very own, the mother of three, a pillar of strength and deep-rooted integrity each moment of each hour of each day, the unerring guide of the family’s odyssey.
About the Author
Isaak Lubansky was born in Europe, somewhere along the border of Poland and Russia, on or about 1917, as mother Ruchel’s yearlong flight kept her just ahead of the death-dealing pogroms at their virulent peak in those years. Also in tow along country roads through hostile natives was sister Feige, age two. Before his second birthday and after thirty days in steerage class, his family disembarked in Vera Cruz, Mexico. They found themselves in a small hill town, Guanajuato, straddling a valley between two mountain ranges and sitting above silver-producing mines hundreds of feet below. They lived among the local indigent Mexican Indians. Both children quickly learned the language and received their primary education in the local one-room school. The natives never saw a Jew in their lives. They knew however that Jews had horns. So while Feige, now Francea, and Isaak, now Isidro, attended school Mom Ruchel, now Rosa, earned sustenance by selling stockings, aprons, and dresses to the local population. Isidro had to attend church and, at Mass, kissed Monsignor’s ring. Eight years in Guanajuato and the family was allowed to enter the United States of America after their father, Louis, who had long departed from Russia to escape the Czarist army bondage and who had traveled through Manchuria and Japan to America, finally received his citizenship papers. It was imperative in those days for foreigners to become Americanized as soon as possible, so Isidro Lubansky, age eight or so, who spoke not one word of English, only Spanish, suddenly became Irving Luban. When his army tour was over, Irv met and fell deeply in love with Mildred Irene Helerstein. He married her and carried the lifelong Brooklyn native off to the Pine Barrens of New Jersey where she became a farmer’s wife and mother of three . . . the pillar of strength each moment of each hour of each day, the unerring guide of the family’s odyssey.