Greetings, friends. (LXXII)

Greetings, friends. My grandparents, though dead for many years, nearly caused me to make a grave error in my mother’s name this past weekend.

As I mentioned previously, when my mother passed back in November, we buried her in the Manchester Hebrew Cemetery, which is, incidentally, the only Jewish cemetery in New Hampshire.

How my mother’s final resting place came to be in New Hampshire, of all places, was a simple process of elimination. The rest of our family, including my grandparents and great-grandparents, are all buried in Old Montefiore Cemetery in Queens. My grandmother Lenore is buried in between both of her husbands, a fact which occasioned a wink and an elbow from my uncles during her headstone unveiling.

“I don’t want to spend eternity in Queens,” my mother complained, with the firm chauvinism of someone born and raised in Brooklyn.

The reality was more complex, which is to say that my mother’s family was a source of repeated disappointment to her. In fact, they were the major cause of most of her mental illness, and she knew it. She had no interest in being buried with them.

Which sort of left the Manchester Hebrew Cemetery as the default option, really. One of her few sane acts of estate planning in her waning days was to buy a plot there, and so that’s where we buried her.

As soon as the probate court recognized Adah as executor of the estate, she started the process of having a headstone made. These things take time, and it is a Jewish tradition to unveil the monument on the first anniversary of the deceased’s passing, so we had to get cracking.

My mother being my mother, she had avoided talking or thinking about her death for as long as humanly possible. It wasn't until she wound up in the hospital yet again, about two months before her passing, when Adah basically had to drag our mother's wishes for her funerary monument out of her.

(I was hiking with Cousin Dan in the Tyrolean Alps at the time and missed the whole thing, which sort of encapsulates my relationship to my mother and Adah and Mom's final days. I regret the burden that this placed on my sister, but that is another story.)

Thanks to Adah's diligence, I can report that what Mom finally admitted wanting was 18th century period headstone design with a winged skull, because of course she did, but with Jewish elements, because of course she did. She wanted it engraved with her name in English and in Hebrew, and the epitaph “BELOVED MOTHER, SCHOLAR, AND FRIEND.” Because of course she did.

The wrinkle — because, with my mother, there was always at least one wrinkle — was that her name was Sheyneh Brucha, which is not a Hebrew name at all, but rather a Yiddish one. She was named for her great-grandmother Sheyneh Henye, or Jenny in English, and I believe her grandfather Bernard, whom I wrote of previously, who was born Baruch. If so, she never met either of them, of course. The name means “beautiful blessing” in Yiddish, a translation my mother would report with a beaming grin whenever the subject came up.

It was no great wonder that my mother was given a Yiddish name, even though she could not speak it. Yiddish was her father’s Sidney’s native tongue, and her mother Lenore grew up surrounded on all sides by native Yiddish speakers.

Yet my grandparents, who were fluent in Yiddish, did not teach it to their children. It may have been an immigrant’s disdain for the cultural trappings of the old country. My grandfather was a devout Jew, to be sure, but Hebrew is the language of our liturgy and prayer, and so it was Hebrew that his children were taught.

The other reason my mother and her brothers never learned to speak Yiddish may have been that Sidney and Lenore leaned on the language as a way to speak privately to one another within earshot of the children. Kids being the linguistic sponges they are, my mother and her older brother managed to absorb enough to follow along anyway, but never enough to speak it on their own.

The result is that Adah and I were subsequently also taught Hebrew, but never even a lick of Yiddish, except for a few canned phrases on the occasions when Mom was annoyed with one of us, and would shout some imprecation straight from her grandmother’s lips, things like hakn mir nisht kein chainik! which literally means Don’t rattle my teapot!

The joke’s on Mom, of course, because today it’s the year 2023 of the Common Era, and I’m the one tasked with figuring out what actually goes on her headstone. The stonecutter doesn’t speak a lick of Hebrew, but he is an artisan and can trace a letterform, if given one. Adah’s Hebrew is decent but not as good as mine, rusty beyond repair as it is.

The stonecutter’s first sketch with the Hebrew / Yiddish has all the letters left-to-right, completely backwards. Probably an artifact of using MS Word or something. So I load up a Hebrew keyboard and painstakingly type out שיינה ברכה בת שמואל ולאה into the email thread. Sheyna Brucha bat Shmuel v’Leyah, just like Mom used to be called to the bimah in shul for aliyah. Sharon Ann, daughter of Sidney and Lenore.

“I will verify everything before I carve for sure, especially the Hebrew!” the stonecutter replied.

“Thank you!” Adah wrote back, “Yes, we’d love to see the Hebrew proof to make sure it’s correct or our mother may haunt us.”

“(R) Shin, yod yod, nun, he / bet, resh, kaph, he / bet, tav shin, mem, vav, aleph, lamed / vav lamed, aleph, he ( L)” he replies, just to be sure.

Adah texts me and asks me to confirm.

“Just sent you Hebrew proof of stone can you make sure it’s right,” she writes. “Mom didn’t send me to Jewish day school.” My sister sometimes has a way of making jokes that also maybe aren’t jokes.

“Only because there wasn’t one in New Hampshire,” I replied with as much tact as I know how.

“Still true!” she responded.

I opened up the stonecutter’s email and double checked it and triple checked it, spelling the entire thing out in my head and on paper.

“Your letter-by-letter transliteration looks correct to me,” I write back. “No need to worry about vowels or diacritics -- the text as you have it is sufficiently idiomatic and unambiguous. Thanks again for taking such care on this commission.”

I hit send.

Something tickles at my brain.

I look at the proof again.

No need to worry about vowels or diacritics…

Then I realize that I have never seen my mother’s Yiddish name in writing, not that I can recall. I have spelled her name phonetically, using the final letter heh to indicate a feminine noun, just as it would be in Hebrew.

Except that Yiddish isn’t Hebrew, and, where Hebrew uses a series of diacritics around each consonant to indicate the vowels in a word, Yiddish does not. Instead Yiddish re-uses some of the vowel-like consonants in Hebrew to indicate its (mostly Germanic) vowel sounds.

A bolt of cold lightning goes down my spine. The joke’s on me. Have I, in fact, spelled Sheyneh Brucha incorrectly?

Here’s another question: Have you ever seen a headstone with a typo? Or, almost as bad, a headstone with a corrected typo?

Can you imagine my mother’s reaction, as fastidious as she was with certain details, if we were to misspell her name on her own headstone?

A total of four minutes passed between the two emails I sent to the stonecutter, but it felt like approximately a week when it was happening. In that time, I checked Google Translate, read this very lovely article on the word sheyn which means “beautiful,” yes, but is used idiomatically to means all kinds of other things, and then finally the Wikipedia article on the name Shayna, which clinched it.

To quote the Yiddish Word of the Week article:

… the Yiddish name Sheyne (שיינע; along with its diminutive variant, Sheyndl - שיינדל) is a direct Yiddish translation of another name, Beyle, which came over into Yiddish from French "Belle” and Italian “Bella.”

I’ll spare you checking the Yiddish spelling yourself — I definitely got it wrong on the first try, and then doubled down and confirmed to both my sister and the stonecutter that my misspelling was correct.

I nearly sprained myself hitting send on the retraction email. As if the stonecutter might have been waiting on the other end, hammer in one hand and chisel in the other, ready to strike as soon as the confirmation email arrived.

In the words of a common saying of our people (that I just read in that article): Oyf der matseyve, kukt yederer oys sheyn. “On the headstone, everyone is beautiful.”

Good Lord, can you imagine? Haunting us wouldn’t have even begun to cover it.

And that’s how my grandparents nearly caused me to make a grave error in my mother’s name. If you’re reading this, thank you. I send you my love. I’m going to try to get back into the swing of this, I swear it. Toodles.