GRANDMA’S NEEDLE BOOK

“Sometimes she gave me a small piece of cloth and a threaded needle and we’d work together, conversation at a minimum except for the occasional praise or a kiss on my cheek….”

My grandmother, Bertha Goldman, née Romanoff, was born in Russia in 1902 and immigrated to America with her parents a year later. The family settled on Eldridge Street on New York City’s Lower East Side, in the Jewish tenements, where six more children would be born. The babies slept in dresser drawers made soft with quilts pieced from fabric ends. For Grandma, growing up, sewing was a survival skill. They couldn’t afford anything store-bought, and with seven children clothes were mended and re-mended until the hand-me-downs simply wore out. 

By the time I was born, my grandparents lived in a house in Brooklyn, and Grandma had her own sewing room converted from a walk-in closet. In our extended family, she was the person everyone relied on to rise to every challenge with skill and grace, and though she took great pleasure in being around her large family and happily cared for all the grandchildren whenever needed, I think sewing gave her a way to do a quiet thing. 

While I sat beside her on the floor, busy with the scraps she gave me to play with, she would sew on her glossy black Singer, her capable hands effortlessly sliding the fabric through, the hum of the motor comforting as song. 

Other times we’d sit contentedly on the couch, wicker basket at her side as she mended and showed me the stitches—basting, running, chain. Her hand had its own rhythm, never missing a beat as her needle arced through the air. Sometimes she gave me a small piece of cloth and a threaded needle and we’d work together, conversation at a minimum except for the occasional praise or a kiss on my cheek even if my stitches were crooked. 

What else can I tell you about her? She cut lilacs in her backyard with a huge ancient kitchen knife; she would cut, I would carry. She never threw out a rubber band or length of bake-shop twine. She was briefly kidnapped at age 5 while her mother shopped the pushcarts; her cries alerted someone in the building she was spirited away to, and they summoned the police. She was excellent at tweezing and shaping eyebrows. My mom, aunt and older cousins would lie on the couch with their heads in her lap as she plucked away. 

All my life she made me feel special and unconditionally loved. When I was a newborn and my mother was nervous about giving me my first bath, it was Grandma who stepped in. I think I have a cellular memory of her love. When she passed away, at 98, and her granddaughters spoke at her service, each of us noted that we felt we were her favorite. That’s how she was. 

Recently, while cleaning out a closet, I found a yellowed envelope that had slipped between shelves. It was labeled, in my mother’s hand, “Needle Book, Mom’s.” The booklet inside was fragile; its shiny strips of colored foil held needles of different sizes and a threader I doubt my grandmother ever had to use. She could thread even the finest needle. Holding this packet that her sturdy, always-kind hands likely opened dozens of times, I felt as if I’d threaded the needle of time itself and a running stitch had been sewn into my heart.

—Cathy Deutsch

With Grandma in the Catskills, summer 1957. Though at the end of her life her memory was thin, she always responded to touch. For her, holding hands was enough.

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Cathy Deutsch writes for Katonah Connect and Inside Press magazines, and her essays have appeared in Dorothy Parker’s Ashes. She lives with her husband in Westchester, New York.

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