The Year My Mother Came Back by Alice Eve Cohen Read Free Book Online

told you ’bout us?”
    â€œNope.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œI have no idea.” I turned on my tape recorder. “Tell me everything, Sylvia.”
    â€œOh, well, there’s a lot to talk about, isn’t there,” she chuckled. “Where should I begin? My parents, Jake and Hattie—your great-grandparents—sailed to America from Latvia in 1887 when they were just seventeen years old. Jake came first, and Hattie followed. Jake drove a streetcar in New York City for a while, but he didn’t like it one bit. When he found he could get a free plot of land in Kansas in exchange for plantin’ three trees to show good intent to cultivate the land, why that’s just what he did. Ya see, my daddy always had a mystical feelin’ ’bout nature and workin’ the land.
    â€œWhen Hattie got off the boat, she thought Jake was still livin’ in New York City, so she traipsed around the country, looking for Jake all over creation, carrying a feather bed and a samovar. It was her bridal trousseau. I still have that samovar, I’ll show it to ya.
    â€œHattie finally caught up with Jake in Garden City, Kansas. Lord knows how she ever found him. ’Course there weren’t any rabbis in Kansas at that time, so my parents were married by the banker, who was also the justice of the peace. They lived in a dirt dugout for two years. You see, there were no trees in the plains. Mama desperately wanted a wooden house and she wanted to cook on wood—she was plumb tired of cookin’ on ‘cow chips.’
    â€œIn 1889, they opened up the Oklahoma Territory. In order to get their hundred an’ sixty acres of free land in Oklahoma, homesteaders had to
cut down
three trees, to show good intent to cultivate the land. Mama figured there’d be plenty wood in Oklahoma, so they left Kansas for the Oklahoma Land Run of 1889.
    â€œPapa was missin’ a thumb. He always told us it got blown off by a
sooner
—that’s what they called the poachers at the Oklahoma Land Run, that crossed the startin’ line
sooner
’n they were s’posed to. Papa was the only Jew in the Land Run and the first peach farmer in Oklahoma Territory. The original homestead’s still standin’. Your mother never told you ’bout the homestead?”
    â€œNope.”
    â€œCan’t figure why not. Louise loved it here. She and I would go campin’ together in a little cabin in the woods. She and I used to go huntin’.”
    â€œMy mother hunted?”
    â€œYep. We’d shoot possum. Louise was good at it, too.
Heh-heh.
You sure she never told you about us?”
    â€œVery sure.”
    â€œI wonder why.”
    â€œSo do I.”
    Aunt Sylvia flew from Tulsa to see the premiere of
Oklahoma Samovar
two years later. She was so old, tiny, and frail that when I walked with her to the theater in the East Village, I feared the fierce November wind would carry her away. When the house lights faded and the performance began, Sylvia turned around to the man sitting behind her and proudly proclaimed, “That’s
me
they’re talkin’ about! They’re talkin’ about
me
!”
    IN THE PLAY’S first incarnation, I hadn’t yet figured out the story I wanted to tell. Each reading launched a new set of rewrites. A year ago, my friend Eric directed a workshop production of the play, which illuminated some questions and raised new ones. My mother is now a character in the play, a fictionalized version of her as an eight-year-old in 1929. I wonder if the play needs to be more about my mother or less about her. Now that she’s been showing up at my kitchen table, maybe I should ask her—
ha!
    How can I possibly finish this rewrite in two days?
    As I read through the script, scribbling notes, the phone rings. It’s my ex-husband, calling from his home in L.A.
    â€œHi, Brad.”
    â€œAlice, are you sitting