My mother, Frances Cohen, was the family story teller. She wrote this story while in a writing club at Coberg Village, Rexford, New York, sharing details of her marriage to my father, Bill Cohen, on August 20, 1940. It is one of the stories I captured in my 2021 book, Fradel’s Story.
On May 1940, Bill and I officially became engaged when Bill presented me with an Elgin wristwatch. We began planning our wedding. My brother Eli and his fiancé Zelda had planned a big Sunday afternoon wedding for August 18. To make it convenient for our out-of-town guests to attend both weddings, we planned a smaller event for two days later on Tuesday evening, August 20, 1940.
We had a difficult time writing the wedding invitation as both my maiden surname and Bill’s surname were Cohen. To make it even more complicated, thanks to the officials at Ellis Island, both my father’s and future father’s-in-law names were Joseph Cohen. Even our mothers’ names matched: My mother was Ethel Annie Cohen; Bill’s mother was Annie Ethel Cohen. To make it clearer, we used the first letter of our first names as the middle initials of their names, left our mothers’ first names completely off, and had the invitation printed as shown here.
Our wedding was not elegant. However, Bill and I made a handsome couple under the chuppa (wedding canopy), me in my rented wedding gown and floor length veil ($8), Bill in his rented tuxedo ($7), and both of us so happy we glowed. (Priceless!)
After the religious ceremony, the guests were served tea sandwiches, fruit, and wedding cake. Unfortunately, by the time the photographer finished taking our wedding pictures, most of the guests had left and most of the food was gone. We did keep the bride and groom figure from the top of our cake, which we still have in our china cabinet today.
Bill and I had a two-day honeymoon at the Hotel New York in a bridal suite at $10 a night. On Thursday morning, my cousin Elliot and my Aunt Rose met us at the hotel in his car to drive us to Malone in upstate New York where we were to make our first home. As this was before the Thruway and the Northway, the trip was over ten hours long. Bill and I planned to take advantage of long trip on the road by cuddling contentedly in the back seat, but that was not to be. The back seat was filled with suitcases, wedding gifts, and home furnishings, including a huge table lamp. Aunt Rose was prone to carsickness and needed to sit next to the window in the front seat. And so, we started the first chapter of our life together as Mr. and Mrs. Wilfred Cohen with me in the front seat between Elliot and Aunt Rose and with poor Bill squeezed into the back seat, balancing the lamp on his lap for the entire trip.
By September 1940, Bill and I spent our first few weeks as happy newlyweds living in Malone, New York, a small village only a few miles from the Canadian border. Bill had been working there for two years in the North Country and loved it. Since it was a new way of life for me, there were many adjustments to be made.
Before I was married, my life was very different. I worked in a job I loved, a bookkeeper for a large firm called the Dixie Dress Shop in the heart of New York City. At the end of the day, I took the subway home to Brighton Beach for five cents. I arrived home to the apartment I shared with my parents, warmed by the steam heat and the delicious aroma of my mother’s homemade meals she prepared for us each evening.
After we married, I moved from New York City to a tiny town in Upstate New York to be with Bill. I left a job making $19 a week to live with a man who was making $18 a week. That was before Women’s Lib. We were convinced that two could live as cheaply as one. We quickly found out that that wasn’t true.
Please do not misunderstand me. I loved being a married stay-at-home housewife, but I had so much to learn. I was now expected to prepare three meals a day on an old kerosene stove. My mother and mother-in-law were not much help living 350 miles away. Besides, they never cooked from a recipe, as their measurements consisted of a bisl (little) of this and shtik (piece) of that. My mother-in-law sent me more detailed recipe books and a mix master, and Aunt Rose, who lived close by, also gave me lessons. I eventually learned to cook and bake, but not without much trial and error.
My first experience cooking rice was a disaster. I started out following the directions exactly, using one cup of rice to two cups of water. After ten minutes, I checked the pot, and it didn’t look like one cup of rice would be enough for my husband’s hearty appetite. So, I added more rice and then more water and then more rice and then more water. By the time Bill came home for dinner, there were three huge pots of cooked rice sitting on the stove. For the next two weeks, we lived on tomato rice soup for lunch, rice casseroles for dinner, and rice pudding for dessert.
Soon after we were married, Bill was transferred to a Pearl’s department store in Rouses Point, New York. We were now farther from our family, and I often felt lonely. In the winter, the temperatures were always at least thirty degrees lower than New York City. The natives always described the winter weather as “a February thaw is thirty below and a hell of a blow.”
As the months wore on, I found it very difficult to adjust to all the snow and cold. Besides, our three-room furnished apartment was not fully winterized. The big potbelly stove with its dirty ashes sat in our living room, and that room was always too hot. The kitchen was just right, but the bedroom was always only forty degrees. I felt like Goldilocks!
I missed all the good things that the Big Apple had to offer. I missed browsing and shopping in the big department stores. I missed eating in Italian and Chinese and Jewish restaurants and in the automats. I missed the theater, the big glamorous movies houses with vaudeville shows, and Radio City Music Hall and the Rockettes.
But with a loving husband who was an optimist, I gradually changed my attitude. I started to look at the beautiful scenery of the Adirondacks and Lake Champlain and all the advantages a small town had to offer.
A version of this article originally appeared in the November 13, 2014, issue of the Jewish World News, a bi-weekly subscription-based newspaper in upstate New York.
There Goes My Heart 