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A Very Personal Holiday

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Mom and Me Circa 1950

Let’s see, the celebrations this last week have come fast and furious:

  • Halloween (October 31)
  • All Saints’ Day (November 1)
  • All Souls’ Day (November 2)

And now:

  • My Mother’s Birthday (November 3)

It was Sophie Paris’s goal to make it to her 80th birthday. She admired her grandmother, my great-grandmother Lidia Toth, who made it into her mid-eighties. Unfortunately, she died several months short of her 80th birthday in the summer of 1998.

I don’t write often enough about my mother, although I owe my life and much of my happiness to her. She was abandoned by her own parents, so her grandmother and grandfather raised her. Although she was born in the United States, Daniel and Lidia Toth took her and raised her on a farm near Felcsut, Hungary in the Province of Fehérmegye. She returned to the U.S. with them in 1937 as the Nazi menace began to loom throughout Central Europe.

She met my father in Cleveland around 1943 and married him shortly thereafter. I was born in 1945, and Daniel Toth died in that year. Lidia never really liked my father, Alex Paris, and told my mother that, being his son, I should be allowed to die in my crib. In time, my brother and I developed a strong relationship with Lidia, who helped bring us up. With my father, however, it was war from start to finish.

Sophie was about 5 feet (1.525 meters) tall in her stocking feet. To compensate for her short stature, she had an oversized heart and loved my brother and me. That love has been very instrumental in Dan’s happiness and certainly mine.

Today, as Martine and I ate lunch at the Siam Chan in West L.A., we overheard two tattooed and pierced young men talking about getting up enough energy to attend an Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) meeting. The streets in our neighborhood are full of bums who suffering from various stages of mental illness and dependency on drugs and alcohol. I realize how lucky we are because of the love of our parents, Alex and Sophie Paris.

So Happy Birthday, Mom. You are not forgotten and never will be.

At Sea in 1949

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Boats and Fish Seen By Me at the Age of Four

It’s in execrable shape—but then, so am I—but here is a pencil drawing I made at the age of four. It is inscribed by my mother in Hungarian “Jimmy drew this in March 1949.” It displays an attention to detail surprising for a little boy who did not have access to television and who did not know a word of English. All I had were the stories my mother told me. Interestingly, she made them up herself most of the time. A lot of them involved fairy princesses and dark forests.

Then, too, there were the stories she read to me from library books. We would go together to the public library near Harvey Rice School (where I would go for kindergarten and half of first grade) and pick them out, mostly based on the pictures in them. My mother knew English: she was born in Cleveland, but taken back to Hungary to be raised. She would meticulously translate the selected stories from English to my little-boy Magyar tongue. (Magyar means Hungarian in the Hungarian language.)

At the time, we were living at 2814 East 120th Street in the Buckeye Road Hungarian neighborhood of Cleveland. For several blocks around, one could be born, live, and die without knowing a word of English. Not any more, of course. Eventually all the Hungarians moved out and it became a black ghetto. We moved out, too, in 1951, shortly after my brother was born.

100 Years Old Today

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The Paris Family in the Early 1960s

If my mother were alive, today would be her 100th birthday. Unfortunately, she didn’t make it to her 80th birthday. In August 1998, shortly after she hung up after my usual Saturday morning call to her, she pitched forward upon getting up from her phoneside chair, hemorrhaged, and died immediately. Within a couple of hours, my brother and I both knew what had happened. Dan was living only a few miles west of Kings Beach, CA on the north shore of Lake Tahoe at the time. She didn’t answer the phone when he called her, so he sent a neighbor to investigate, and he found her body.

Sophie (or Zsófi) Paris born in Cleveland, Ohio and raised by her grandparents, Daniel and Lidia Toth, who gave up on the United States and took her back to their farm in Felcsut, Hungary. But when the specter of Hitler was beginning to loom, they returned to Cleveland in 1937 on the Queen Mary. There, she met my father, Alex (or Elek) around 1943. Despite the opposition of her grandparents, she married him in 1944 and became pregnant with me. My brother Dan came along in April 1951.

My mother wise incredibly street savvy. She applied for jobs for which she was not qualified, stating on the applications that she was a graduate of the University of Hakapeszik in Budapest, Hungary. Now “Hakapeszik” is another way of saying “The School of Hard Knocks,” or “If one gets his hands on some food, one eats” in literal translation.

She worked as a supermarket checker, a woolen mill, a manufacturer of earphones for pilots (the Rola Company), and eventually an assistant occupational therapist working in a hospital for the terminally ill. She was a wonderful cook and a good-hearted person. She did, however, break a number of wooden spoons on my recalcitrant butt when necessary. At the same time, she was incredibly kind and made friends easily. She was also wise. To this day, I consult her usual practice before making any big decisions. If Sophie wouldn’t have gone for it, neither would I.

 

Zsofi Sebek Returns to Cleveland

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My Mother Before She Married

My Mother Before She Married

My mother was actually born in Cleveland, Ohio, but was raised by her grandparents, Daniel and Lidia Toth. Her own mother and father were too feckless to be trusted with the care of a child, and the mother eventually became an alcoholic and ended up at the State Mental Hospital in Pontiac, Michigan. Daniel and Lidia decided that it would be best to bring up their little Zsofi in the Old Country, so they went back to their little farmstead in Felcsut, just southwest of Budapest.

It was not until 1937, when Zsofi was nineteen, that the three returned to Cleveland. Hitler was threatening, and Austria had already fallen. So the Toths and Zsofi sailed on the Queen Mary from Cherbourg to Southampton, England, and from thence to New York. Below is the cover of the passenger list for that sailing:

The Title Page of the Passenger List

The Title Page of the Passenger List

And here, below, is my mother’s name on the passenger list:

Not Quite Spelled Right

Not Quite Spelled Right

The Cunard Lines people who signed her in misspelled her name, as if she were German. In Hungarian, the letter “s” by itself is pronounced as if it were “sh” or “sch” if you’re of the German persuasion.

One would think that my Mom was able to hit the ground running, inasmuch as she was born here. Not quite. She didn’t speak a word of English, and neither did my great grandparents Daniel and Lidia. She had to work as a maid and take night school classes in English before she was able to get hired for a better job. Years later, Mom got a professional certification by a humorous white lie on her application. When asked about her college education, she penciled in, “University of Hakapeszik.” That’s Magyar for “School of Hard Knocks.” P.S.: She got the job.