DON'T HANG OUT YOUR DIRTY LAUNDRY
After receiving an email reply to a letter that I copied and sent to a cousin in Russia, it dawned on me that I should have considered my husband’s best suggestion from our dating years. He once said, “never hang out your dirty laundry.” He cautioned that was what people would remember.
In 2022, my cousin is questioning her great-great-grandmother’s shortcoming as “hung out” by her sister in a letter from 100 years ago. I forwarded that letter from our family keepsakes for innocent reasons. The letter was to show the status of our family in Ukraine during the previous century.
Upon reading the frantic letter from her great-great-grandmother’s sister Fruma, my cousin replied, “Oh, how hard life was for them! It’s strange why Eida didn’t help her sister.”
In hindsight, maybe I shouldn’t have “hung out the family’s dirty laundry” and sent the letter from Fruma, in which she declared that her sister Ida (Eida) is “better off than I am, but she refused to give you even a piece of bread for your children.”
As my cousin, Harry, my hero, cautioned after translating all the letters, which my aunt saved without sharing, “read closely and you’ll see how your relatives lived in poverty and some jealousy...” It could have been just that which caused our ancestor to write what she did. Possibly, some jealousy was the cause of their desperation. In 2022, it did feel like the time was now to share all the antique letters from our ancestors, but maybe I should have kept some undercover.
While ranting, out of desperation, Fruma didn’t know that their siblings on the other side of the ocean were faring no better in the so-called Goldene Medina. How frantic my grandparents in Newark, New Jersey, and Granduncle Louis in Philadelphia must have been when they received such heart-wrenching letters from abroad.
How frustrating for the family in America to be sending letters, packages, and whatever little money they could and not knowing if it was received by their nearest and dearest. Were there even sadder letters written and destroyed before being sent? There are all sorts of unanswered questions.
It all goes back to the lessons of my youth, learning that you don’t know what’s in someone else’s pocket. How true. Who knows what another person’s expenses are?
In one situation, a woman in our religious institution, during the High Holidays of all times, predicted the wealth of various congregants who wore the latest fashions while donning the classiest jewels. How can you determine that as a person’s wealth? The fellow congregant may have inherited the jewelry, and her husband told my husband, so I know for a fact that she only buys one fashionable item per season and wears it to multiple events rather than having a closet full of clothes.
She likely spends as much in total as the other woman does on her wardrobe. The difference could be that one pays for one high-priced item, whereas the other woman has a closet full of less expensive clothes, which she rotates wearing and keeps for the following season.
Thinking about my relatives as they wrote about their siblings, in their desperation, my hope is that we can all think of it as just “hanging out her dirty laundry” on a bad day. Let’s learn from the temptations of doing that and, as my husband cautioned so long ago, before hanging out your dirty laundry, know that it’s the first thing people will remember.
Next week’s blog post, Where's Chudnov? concludes my 18-part series detailing my paternal side of our family. How rewarding to have so many photographs and stories accessible to all and for future generations to share. It may have taken decades to find the time and the spark to do the work, but this labor of love will leave a lasting legacy for the family of my grandparents, Sarah Temnogorod and Nathan Mark (Nachman Murovany). They graced the earth, and while I never knew them, I feel their spirit in my very being.