Where are the Women?

My cousin Seth poses a question I can't answer

Recently, my cousin Seth wrote to me:

Where are the women?  They were/are in less public roles, but surely they were active in the Synagogue/Temple.  A fellow at the Charleston synagogue told me that Ida taught him English when he first arrived. And my mom said that many of the businesses were jointly run- and often successful mostly due to the wives (Edith).

The truth is that I don’t know many stories about the women in our family, which is a lack I feel very keenly. The Polan men are almost all natural raconteurs. I have stories about the Polan men that we tell almost by rote; Uncle Eddie winning the mayor’s car and wife in a poker game, Uncle Frank telling the children “All I want out of you is silence, and damn little of that” and meaning (and Uncle Lake saying the same thing to us, but with “As your Uncle Frank used to say in front of it, and in a voice that let us know he didn’t mean it), AI davening in a rural church while on his peddler route because there were no synagogues, etc. But I know very few stories about the lives of the Polan women.

My great-grandmother Bertha Handler with (left to right) Uncle Eddie, Uncle Mickey, and Granddaddy.

This is the picture that first sparked my intense interest in family history; it’s taken of my great-grandmother and her three oldest children at their home in a more rural part of the state. (I’m not sure exactly where this was taken. Family with a better sense of where Lake and Bertha lived in what I’m guessing is 1910, assuming Uncle Mickey is between 1-2 years old in this shot, do you know where this would be? Lake’s residence is listed as Baltimore in the 1910 Census, and by the 1920 Census it’s listed as Huntington, but I’m unclear where he and Bertha lived in between, though I can track his work in places like Clarksburg through newspaper ads.)

I love this picture. I think you can see a lot of my grandfather in his mother’s face, and more than a little of mine and my mother’s, too. And I love how happy she looks here. In an era where people didn’t tend to smile in photographs, there she is, surrounded by her brood and smiling. I believe she is someone I would very much have liked if I had known her. But I don’t, and I only know one story about her. (As told earlier in this newsletter, it’s about her giving away a meat grinder that become unkosher either when the boys let a neighbor use it, or when one of the boys bled on it, depending on whether Mom or Cousin Marilyn is telling the story.) I would like to know more.

Maybe we know so little about Bertha because she died when the children were still young. But it’s also true that we just don’t tend to tell the women’s stories in the same way we tell the men’s, and not because the women were not interesting. They were VERY interesting, and many were accomplished in their own right. So why haven’t those stories come down to us?

So, family-who-reads-this, I’d love to hear your stories about Polan women. And readers-who-aren’t-also-Polans, does your family tell the stories of its women in the same way it tells the stories of its men? When those stories are missing, how can I can ensure that my own retelling doesn’t erase those women yet again?