Hanna Marcus came here with her mother to start a better life in 1949.
Hanna Perlstein Marcus and her mother Sidonia Perlstein at the corner of Osgood and Dwight Street in Springfield in 1957. Hanna is wearing homemade cotton shorts and puff sleeve shirt; her mother, a striped cotton sleeveless dress that she made.
Hanna Marcus and her mother Sidonia Perlstein wearing their homemade slacks on Thanksgiving Day in 1998.
Hanna, at right, standing with Esther Ferster and Eileen Lewkowicz (kneeling), on the steps of the Russiche Shul (B’nai Israel) on Dwight Street in Springfield, around 1957 .
Hanna and her mother, two months before Sidonia Perlstein died in 2006 at the age of 93 at the Jewish Nursing Homein Longmeadow. Also pictured are Hanna’s daughter, Brenda Marcus Bula and son Stephen Marcus, and grand daughter Lauren Bula.
Former Springfield resident Hanna Perlstein Marcus, 62, was recently asked to share her memories of growing up in Springfield with her Hungarian-born mother, Holocaust survivor Sidonia Perlstein, who worked as an area seamstress before her death on Mother’s Day in 2006 at the age of 93.
Marcus, a licensed social worker in Vernon, Conn., has written a book that she calls “a love story that uses sewing metaphors to tell the tale of my mother’s and my life together.”
The working title of the yet-to-be published book is called “Sidonia’s Thread” because, Marcus said, thread “represents Sidonia’s vision for her daughter’s future, her weaving of stories that tie early 20th century Hungary with 21st century America.”
Marcus notes that the two “came to Springfield in July, 1949, when Americans were celebrating their independence. I was 22 months old and my mother was 36.”
In an interview, Marcus looks back on what it was like to make Springfield home, find a connection to other Holocaust refugees here and shop for kosher meat in Springfield’s North End.
What brought you to Springfield?
My mother grew up in a small farming village called Dámóc (pronounced Da-motz), Hungary.
Her family was one of only five Jewish families in a community of Greek Orthodox Catholics, who lived in harmony for over a century.
She learned to sew from her mother and three sisters who were all expert seamstresses and sewed for many of the other residents of the village.
She was the youngest of six children, one boy and five girls, one of whom died of the Spanish flu after World War I.
My mother’s father, Simon Perlstein, was a soykher, Yiddish for tradesman or dealer who brought the crops grown in their little village to the larger markets in the nearby cities, and thereby helped to maintain the economic viability of the village.
Living in a remote hamlet where not too many Jewish bachelors were available for marriage to his many daughters, Simon was able to marry off his two older daughters to widowers, but by 1940 he still had his two youngest, Laura and Sidonia, at home
In that same year, the Jews of Hungary were required to show their proof of citizenship, which helped to identify them.
In March of 1944, the town crier banged his drum asking that all the Jews of Dámóc appear in front of their homes by the following morning.
My mother and her family were taken to a Jewish ghetto in the nearest large city, and several weeks later, to the death camp at Auschwitz.
All the members of her family were selected for death in the gas chambers except my mother and her next oldest sister, Laura.They both stuck together through Auschwitz, then Dachau, and finally at the Bergen Belsen camp, where Laura died of typhus two months before they were liberated by the British Army.
My mother emerged as the only surviving member of her family.
The British Army set up a displaced persons camp at a nearby army training camp, where my mother lived for four years.
Although during my childhood, my mother spoke often of her time as a prisoner in three concentration camps, she was never able to speak very much about her four years as a displaced person.
She was never able to answer questions about the circumstances of my birth and the identity of my father.
I would have to wait to discover why she couldn’t share the truth with me.
Why Springfield?
Hanna Perlstein (Marcus) and her mother Sidonia Perlstein in Bergen Belsen Displaced Persons Camp in Germany in 1948.
We came from the Bergen Belsen Displaced Persons Camp in Germany, where my mother lived from 1945 to 1949, and where I was born in 1947.
We arrived by the United States Army Transport General R. L. Howze, a former naval ship that had transported troops, supplies and Japanese prisoners during World War II.
We came into New York Harbor on July 3,1949, and were sponsored by the Springfield Committee for New Americans (now Jewish Family Service of Western Massachusetts) to come to Springfield, where we arrived two days later.
We were assigned to come to Springfield by pure chance as we were processed for emigration to the United States by the American Joint Distribution Committee that helped to settle refugees after World War II.
We didn’t know anyone in this country before our arrival.All we knew at the time was that the tag on our luggage read, “Springfield, Massachusetts, USA.”
Where did you first live?
We shared a room in the home of a Mrs. Sarah Alpert, a widow and her two adult sons, Gerald and Arnold, at 44 Brookline Ave., near the corner of Brookline and Chestnut Street in the North End.
Brookline Avenue was my home for the first three years I lived in Springfield.
The homes there were built during the Victorian era at the turn of the 20th century.
Most of them were large, comfortable two-story houses, with front porches at both levels.
Mrs. Alpert and her sons were generous and welcoming to us.My mother, who was a masterful clothes designer and dressmaker, helped with the sewing and ironing for the family.
I remember winter time on Brookline Avenue the best.
My mother and Mrs. Alpert would take me for walks in the snow, bundled up in a tailored snowsuit with matching hat.
I thought the street looked beautiful when it was covered with a thick blanket of soft, white frozen crystals.
How did your life in Springfield evolve?
Mrs. Alpert remarried in 1952, so we left Brookline Avenue when I was 5 and moved to nearby apartments at 64-68 Osgood St., near the corner of Osgood and Dwight streets.
The apartment building, which still stands today, had 32 units, and more than half were occupied by refugees from the Holocaust.The refugees were called “di grine” (pronounced di-green-eh), Yiddish for “the greenhorns.”
I considered them, in many ways, my extended family. My identification with them was as strong as, or perhaps stronger than, any community of which I have ever been a part.
I started school at an orthodox Jewish day school, the Lubavitcher Yeshiva, at their former location in a mansion on Sumner Avenue, now the Lathrop House Bed and Breakfast.
After third grade, I enrolled at Lincoln School where I attended fourth through sixth grades, and then Chestnut Street Junior High School for seventh grade.
When I was 12, just before starting the eighth grade, many of the di grine moved to the Forest Park area of the city, including us.
We moved to the upstairs apartment of a two-family house at 72 Maryland St., near the old zoo entrance to Forest Park.
I enrolled at Forest Park Junior High School for eighth and ninth grade.
Hanna Perlstein (Marcus) as a sixth grader at Lincoln School in Springfield in 1958.
When we lived in the North End, we attended a small Jewish synagogue on Dwight Street that was referred to as the Russische Shul (the Russian Synagogue), founded by Eastern European and Russian Jews, and where Daniel’s New Bethel Church of God in Christ currently has its home.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Springfield was a bustling place where an immigrant could find work in its factories, retail stores and industrial infrastructure.
Many of the members of our community were welcomed as workers in the coat factories, like Belsky’s and Kinsler’s, and the dress factories, such as the Victoria Dress Co.
The Jewish communities of Springfield and Longmeadow helped to settle and assimilate the new refugees into Springfield and American life.
The new immigrants formed a social organization called Club Hatikvah, where everyone could come together for dinners, music and social support.
Was there any area where you shopped for kosher meats and other items?
As a child, Springfield, and for that matter America, was six blocks off of Dwight Street, from Calhoun to Ringgold streets, where di grine conducted the daily life tasks of their universe.
Often, my mother and I would stroll down Dwight Street and stop at Klibanoff’s Delicatessen for a corned beef sandwich and kosher dill pickle.
Just a few doors down, we would enter Ruby’s Market where the owner, Ruby himself, and Lena Hutt, one of di grine, would greet us with their white aprons, and provide personal service in shopping for our week’s groceries.
When we were finished, we walked a few more blocks and ordered a couple of cupcakes and a half loaf of seedless rye bread, freshly sliced before our eyes, at Magaziner’s Bakery.
Crossing the street, we landed at Shankman’s Pharmacy to purchase a bottle of aspirin or a tube of toothpaste, and then walked back north a little ways on Dwight Street to Chernick’s Kosher Meat Market.
There, Mr. Chernick stood behind his butcher block table, surrounded by his assorted meat knives, deftly slicing and chopping cuts of chicken and beef, his white apron streaked with blood.
Outside of Chernick’s, a group of di grine men usually stood talking together in Yiddish, their faces and hands animated in discussion as if daring each other to come up with the answer to some esoteric philosophical question which had been posed.
“Nu?” (“Well?” or “So?”) I overheard them saying, coaxing the responder to provide them with some weighty, thought-provoking reply.
Occasionally, my mother and I would take the bus across the street from the corner of Osgood and Main streets to downtown Springfield.
Since my mother made all of our clothing, we would shop for accessories and household items downtown.
We especially loved our trips to Steiger’s and the old Forbes & Wallace department store, where we ate in the cafeteria, and my mother bought the only set of china she ever purchased in America.
How was it for your mom, raising a child by herself in the 1950s?By 1951, my mother found work as a seamstress and later forewoman at the Victoria Dress Co. on William Street, next door to the enticing fragrances of Frigo’s Italian cheeses and meats.
The owner, Charles Podell, must have had his heart jump in his chest to see my mother fly through the pieces of fabric with such speed and accuracy.
Her skill at the sewing machine was unprecedented in Springfield.Mr. Podell understood my mother’s situation as a single woman with a child in a new country, and kept a close watch over her, making sure she was safe and comfortable.
My mother made friends with her mainly Italian co-workers at the Victoria Dress Co., and we were often invited to their homes in the South End of Springfield or Thompsonville, Conn.
She learned English with a remarkably Italian and Hungarian flavored accent.
It was difficult in those days for a single mother, even as it is today, not only due to the stigma of single parenthood, but for finding and maintaining a job to support her family, often at low pay.
My mother was sometimes excessively proud of her sewing skills and how she could run a household, work long hours and raise a child by herself at the same time.
Since she had lost her family during the war, she had only a few surviving cousins, most of them far away, so she was really on her own.
Hanna Perlstein with Mrs. Sarah Alpert on Brookline Avenue in Springfield's North End in 1951.
Mr. Podell retired in 1964, and my mother left the Victoria Dress Co. wondering how she would make a living in the future.She decided to become an entrepreneur, opening her own home design and dressmaking business, and acquired many customers in the Springfield and Longmeadow area.
As is the case with the great fashion houses of the world, she had her favorite model — me.
For many years, I was her fashion ambassador to the world, sporting thousands of garments she made over a 50-year period, most of the fabric purchased at Osgood Textile, which formerly had a store across from our apartment on Osgood Street.
What did your mother enjoy about Springfield?
My mother was able to meet people in the Springfield area from all walks of life through her expert sewing skills.
Starting with her co-workers at the dress factory and then the customers and friendships she acquired through her dressmaking business, she felt comfortable with the people and the streets of Springfield, which she knew like the back of her hand.
She didn’t purchase a car until 1961, a beige Chevy Impala with a white stripe on the side, and then traveled through the area, from north to south.
Springfield was her home, and she never wanted to leave it, even when she grew old and couldn’t travel as much on her own.
My mother and I went to visit the village in which she was born and raised in Hungary with my daughter, Brenda, in the 1980s.It was a heartwarming and revealing trip, but she couldn’t wait to return to Springfield, to the place she had grown to love.
In my youth, we visited Forest Park many times, skating at Porter Lake during the winter, and picnicking during the summer, gazing at the ducks swimming serenely in the Duck Pond. Later, we vacationed at the resorts in Moodus, Conn., and New London’s Ocean Beach.
What prompted you to write the book?
I have always felt that I needed to know more about my mother in the past — her life in Hungary, her years during the Holocaust, and afterwards in a displaced persons camp — to better understand her behavior in the present.
The mystery about my father, and her inability to convey the truth about my conception had always haunted, me since I was a small child in Springfield.
I knew from the time I was an adolescent that when the time was right, if I ever obtained the key to her secrets, I would someday write a book about our life together.
When my mother was 85 years old, she moved to Genesis House elderly housing, operated by Jewish Geriatric Services in Longmeadow.
During the course of that move, I secretly found the 100 or so letters and photos in her nightstand drawer, and stole a number of them without ever telling her.
It was through these documents that I finally found the clues to the mysteries that my mother had kept from me for so long.
My book is a love story that uses sewing metaphors to tell the tale of my mother’s and my life together.
Each chapter of the book is titled by a sewing technique like “Pressing,” “Interfacing,” “Ripping Out Stitching” and “Marking.”No metaphor, however, is more important than thread.
Thread represents Sidonia’s vision for her daughter’s future, her weaving of stories that tie early 20th century Hungary with 21st century America, her ability to create the texture of a family that her daughter never had as a child, and her artistic gifts as a designer and fabricator of beautiful garments.
The theme of the book is how a mother, through self-reliance and hard- nosed perseverance, teaches her daughter to stand up straight in countless ways.
Readers may contact Hanna Perlstein Marcus at hmar45@comcast.net for more information about “Sidonia’s Thread.”
A licensed clinical social worker , Marcus says that her work, combined with her mother’s stories, “have helped me understand the nature of human oppression and the struggle to overcome and succeed in spite of it.”
A graduate of the former Classical High School, Hanna Marcus holds a degree in psychology from the University of Massachusetts and holds master’s degrees in counseling and social work from the University of Connecticut.
She has a grown daughter and son and is grandmother two Lauren and Sydney, named after her aunt and mother.
Her 30-year-career has has focused on social work and municipal human services. She has been a senior social worker and neighborhood project manager for the City of Hartford and director of human services for the town of Manchester, Conn.
She was the first female recipient of the Dr. Edward R. Browne Humanitarian of the Year Award bestowed by Community Prevention and Addiction Services of Eastern Connecticut.
Hanna Perlstein Marcus in the lobby of a Springfield synagogue, 1991, wearing a purple cotton gabardine long jacket with black lacquer buttons and matching skirt made by her mother, Sidonia Perlstein.