A memoir of Woodridge, N. Y.

My great grandfather Abraham Wenglinsky, who died from natural causes in Czestochowa, Poland a few months after the German occupation in 1939, was called “Black Abraham'' because of his being so mean spirited. My father’s siblings jokingly claimed that he was so mean not even the Germans would kill him. My grandfather Louis, who I met many times, also was given the sobriquet “Black” because he was also so mean spirited. He bullied his wife and children. He threw a knife at my father because my father wanted to continue doing his elementary school homework rather than go down to work at the bakery he owned and that was on the property. Louis had his youngest daughter wash his feet. It wasn’t sexual, as far as I can tell, just a service, but she felt humiliated, not what proper people did, and she was aspiring to be more. She became what Adam Sandler called “a wedding singer”, Sandler just having eliminated its Jewish identification, thanks to my own father sending her money so she could get voice lessons and then, later on, working as an optician. Louis calmed down somewhat when his wife got a bit elderly, not knowing how to handle her when abuse no longer worked and when she became diminished because the youngest child had been killed when a truck backed up over him and she, Rose, would tell people not to sit next to her on a bench because that child was sitting next to her. When I was a child, Rose would give me raisins and cinnamon from the barrels in the bakery.