Sara Abrams Winer, Part 1

    Writing about my mother will be quite a task as she was really a character with a busy, amusing, annoying and adventurous life.  I’m like her in many ways and her voice is in my head – not as often as it used to be – but it’s still there.  “Why do you want to buy that?  You’ll just have to clean it.”

    She was born Sarah Avramovitz (in the 1920 census), probably somewhere in the vicinity of Irkutsk, Russia (her mother’s home town), which is in Siberia, in 1912, possibly December 12^th although she could have made that up.  I know why her father (my grandfather) was there.   In all documents I can find he’s named Roy and yet in one writing of hers she calls him Leon.  He was a conscripted soldier in the Imperial Russian Army, a furrier and a tailor.  He made those tall fur hats emblematic of Russian headgear of the elite in winter, as well as many other coats, jackets, and muffs, etc. 

    

He often spoke of his relationship with “the general” for whom he did a lot of work.  When I was doing genealogical research, I actually found a father and son who were both generals in the southern part of Siberia and I believe it’s very possible that the father (who had the same name as his son) is, in fact, this general.  In Wikipedia he is Mikhail Mikhailovich Pleshkov.  He fought on the “wrong side” against the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution and when that was over he moved to Harbin, China where he lived for the rest of his life. 

Now it turns out that Sarah’s mother and father were married in Harbin, which had a sizeable Jewish population and a synagogue.

 

 

 

 

 

    Her mother Lena Shusterman Avramovitz, was certainly born in Irkutsk.  How her family came to be there is quite a puzzle.  It seems unlikely although possible that someone was a political prisoner, as it surely would have been a family story, yet there was a long period when Jews were not allowed to move to Siberia that had rich land for farming.  It’s a mystery.  The only story I have from my grandmother of her youth was when she was a young teen, which would have been just before the turn of the 20^th century.  According to her, she and some of her friends were arrested for political activity. My grandmother the Bolshevik?  While in jail, she had her mother bring in her skates so she and her friends could skate in the prison yard.  She never spoke of it as a great hardship and I’m guessing the authorities just wanted to tamp down the unrest of the youth.

    I don’t know how my grandparents met, but Lena was a seamstress and my grandfather was a tailor, handsome and Jewish.  So there we are.  Lena wound up working for the general’s wife, which makes sense. 

 

    Here’s the story of how they left Russia.  At some point, I would guess around 1911 or early 1912, my grandfather discovered that Jews who were due to leave military service would be retained for an indeterminate time.  Uh oh.  My grandmother’s two or three brothers (Samuel and Joseph), had already emigrated to Duluth, Minnesota and Roy and Lena determined to leave.  I don’t know how long it took to make preparations, but my grandfather asked the general for a leave of absence.  He used to say that the general knew full well that he would never see Roy again, but he gave him the leave.  I don’t know how long it took for them to cross Russia, although I’m quite sure it was by train, and then on through Belarus, Poland and Germany to Hamburg, where they crossed the Atlantic and landed at Liberty Island in New York in 1913.  My mother at that point was 8 or 9 months old, very pudgy and active.

 

    This leads us to the next story, which is of my grandmother and the banana.  On the train to Duluth an American woman notices my mother and fusses over her, says how cute she is, etc. and gives my grandmother a banana for the baby.  Now my grandmother had never seen a banana in her life but understands it is something for the baby to eat.  When the woman left my grandmother took a bite of the banana, skin and all.  “Feh! Who would give this to a baby?”  This pretty much wraps up my mother’s stories of infancy.

 

    As a little girl, her stories of herself paint her as mischievous, a tomboy and a bully.  She would sometimes involve her younger sister Helen, who was the “good child” that was dragged into trouble by Sarah.  The emblematic story is about the sheets.  White starched sheets hanging on the clothesline to dry in the summer.  Sarah decides they would make a perfect tent but there need to be windows.  I’m sure my grandmother had sharp scissors handy which Sarah took and cut out the required windows.  Much trouble ensued and it added to the family lore. 

 

    She was a tree climber and the one who got dirty.  My grandmother made all their clothes and in the formal picture taken at a studio, they’re in beautiful white appearing dresses with ruffles, embroidery and pinafores.  I’d guess they were about 6 and 8 years old.

 

    The final childhood story is the time she and some neighbor boy got into a fight.  According to Sarah, she beat him up and then tied him to a tree where he was found crying by his mother.  I imagine she got quite the beating.

 

    By now, her mother had opened a little grocery store in the front of their house and my grandfather was a tailor at a men’s shop six or seven blocks down the steep hill to downtown.  So they were making a living and possibly even saving.

 

    There are no more stories until she graduates from high school. She then was able to travel to Chicago for nursing school.  Now I would ask, were there no nursing schools in Duluth or even Minneapolis?  Why Chicago?  I’ll never know.  I have no stories from this period but the next thing I know is that somehow she’s in New York City and is head surgical nurse at Mt. Sinai Hospital.  How did that happen?  Where did she get the experience to have that position?  Unknown.  Her one story from the operating room shows her as unwilling to take any flak.  A very short surgeon – she had definite opinions of short men in power – was operating and she was assisting.  He held out his hand for a suturing instrument, but didn’t like the size she gave him and threw it across the room.  Specifying what he wanted in a shout and a brusque tone, he held out his hand.  I can almost see her eyes narrowing as she took the instrument and slapped it as hard as she could into his hand while meeting his glare.  Suturing instruments look like scissors but with small teeth at the end for grabbing the needle with thread.  Imagine being hit hard in your hand with the rounded finger holes of scissors.  Ouch!  She did enjoy telling and retelling this tale.

 

On to WWII

 

    I remember asking why she volunteered to join the military after the outbreak of war.  Her response is that she felt it was her duty.  So, first there’s the story of the train trip to a training camp somewhere in the Arizona desert.  She and a friend, Ione Vogel who is in the photo below, got off at the required stop, which was merely a platform, no building.  They looked around, but the only visible thing was the train heading off to the West.  The rest was empty dessert as far as the eye could see.  I have no stories about the training.

 

    Things get very interesting though when she arrives at the tiny island in the Admiralty Islands chain in the South Pacific.  This is part of an island chain close to New Guinea.  The island she was on had to be Los Negros because in the research I’ve done, there was a huge naval base there with medical facilities.  While the Women’ Army Corps was in existence, I’m not sure if she was actually attached to them, although she was certainly in the Army.

    How I wish I’d written down these stories when mom was still alive because so many details are missing.  But here’s what I have from memory.

 

    There were local women who served as maids and general helpers to the nurses.  The one who worked for mom once said to her, “Oh, Miss Sarah you are so beautiful!”.  My mom replies, “What makes you say that?”  “You have such a big nose!”  As long as I knew her, she was always sensitive about the size of her nose, which really couldn’t have been termed big.

 

    The local people were dark with very Negroid features and extremely kinky/curly hair.  They, of course, found the Westerners themselves as well as their things, including some of the trash, to be quite exotic and useful.  Mom talked about the fact that most of them loved the empty cans found in the trash and would wrap their hair around these “ornaments’.  These were different times, of course, certainly not politically sensitive or aware, and the term everyone used to refer to the island natives was ‘fuzzy wuzzies’.  No longer an appropriate term for human beings.

 

    The next to last story from this episode involves an officer from the Navy and happens on Los Negros.  I know she dated some officers and this was one.  His name?  Unknown.  In any event, the story goes that he said his men had nothing to do and were bored.  Would he like them to make her some furniture?  I’m sure, “of course”, would be her answer.  Some weeks go by and then one day – just like on the TV show Mash, the loudspeaker calls her name.  “Sara Abrams, Sara Abrams, come to the receiving gate”.  She arrives and a convoy of Navy trucks is there with dressers, and desks for all the nurses.  Everyone was thrilled. 

 

    At some point in the 1980’s it occurs to me to ask her about this episode and refer to her as “Hot Lips”.  What an angry reaction that engendered.  Methinks the lady doth protest too much?  I’ll never know. 

    Finally, in 1945, Mom is sent home on a convoy ship where she is very seasick and also where there is (somewhere) a very colorful certificate that shows she crossed the equator.  After landing in California, she travels by train back to Duluth.  Her sister, Helen, once told me that she thought a skeleton was getting off the train.  In contrast, my mother’s memory is that her parents and her sister looked like they’d been pumped up with air, they were so robust. 

 

And so ends part 1 of her life.