Mr. Monday and other tales of Jewish Amsterdam

MY YIDDISHE GRANDMA 71

and for that reason there was always someone in the family with whom she was not on speaking terms. I have never known her to budge from a position. But woe to the outsider who might dare cause harm to a member of the family. Then all the internal quarrels were forgotten in an instant and she would fight like a lioness for us. And if I say "fight" I mean just that, literally.

She had never learned to read or write and her vocabulary was a hodgepodge of Middle-German dialects, distorted Hebrew andYiddish expressions with, here and there, like a raisin in the rice, some proper Dutch word. But her illiteracy never bothered her. Her explanation was simple and practical, from the old pushcart days.

"I know that an orange which has cost me three cents cannot be sold for two," she said. "That's all I need to know."

And: "Reading and writing you can learn, but brains you can only have." She never really felt this lack of knowledge ot the alphabet until one of her daughters moved to London. That daughter wrote letters to the others in Amsterdam, letters which Grandmother could not read. She suspected that there was more in those letters than was read to her. So therefore she had the letters read to her over and over again. And woe if her suspicious mind suspected that some phrase did not tally with a previous reading of the same letter. She had remembered every word.

The neighbours told Mother that Grandma sometimes came to them with letters from London that she had sneaked out of Mother's cupboard. Would the neighbours please read them to her, she had asked? She just couldn't get enough of them, she explained, but the truth was that she was trying to check on Mother.