“MY MOTHER’S DREAM”- A Short Story by Sarah Hamer-Jacklyn

“My Mother’s Dream” by Sarah Hamer-Jacklyn, translated from Yiddish by Frieda Forman and Ethel Raicus

In this story the author goes back to the family environment she, and most of her first readers, left forty plus years ago, a small shtetl in Eastern Europe.

In Eastern European Jewish families sons were much more valued than daughters.  A woman who gave birth to only girls was considered a failure in her wifely duties.  A son was needed to say memorial prayers when his father died.  The wife in this story is pregnant again, hoping after several daughters to have a son.  Having only daughters was a reflection on her husband’s character.  As the story opens, narrated by the oldest daughter, early teenage, the husband’s mother is paying a visit.  The wife tells her she has been having unusual pains and at suggestion of a neighbor went to see a male doctor.  The mother in Law blows up, saying it was a disgrace to visit a male doctor, especially as the neighbor who recommended him has abandoned her faith and most shockingly “no longer even keeps a kosher house”.

We see the wife progress with her pregnancy, her pains persist.  Everyone has suggestions based on old practices but she never sees a doctor again.

As few can read this story, I’m going to reveal the shocking close.  The mother bleeds to death after a miscarriage.  The emotional torment inflicted by this comes across very powerfully.

A good story.

SARAH HAMER-JACKLYN (1905 –1975) Born in Novoradomsk, Poland in 1905, Sarah Hamer-Jacklyn immigrated with her parents to Canada in 1914 at the age of nine. She was educated in the public schools of Toronto and received private Jewish lessons. Captivated at an early age by the Yiddish theatre in Toronto, she began her career as an actress and singer at sixteen, travelling with a troupe across North America. Hamer-Jacklyn made her writing debut in 1934 with the story, “A Shopgirl,” which was serialized in Dcr tog. Her work continued to be published in the Tsukunft, Yidisber kemfer, Kanader odler, Der forvcrts and other periodicals in North America. Her first book, Lcbns un geshtaltn [Lives and Portraits], Europe and in America. Hamer-Jacklyn’s writing was praised by the critics for its richly coloured terrain, full-blooded characters and fluent dialogue; she was attuned to the life around her, whether in the rootedness and intimacy of the shtetl or in the raw and bewildering world of immigrants. Author and critic Yankev Glatshteyn marvelled at HamerJacklyn’s capacity to capture, decades after her emigration, the spiritual climate, daily life and family portraits of the shtetl. Her use of local dialect and idiom and of folklore contributes not only to the authenticity and freshness of her stories but also to the preservation of the linguistic aspect of pre-Holocaust Eastern European Jewish life. The dramatic impact of Hamer-Jacklyn’s old world stories 

reflects her background in theatre; they are, at the same time, true childhood memoirs. Hamer-Jacklyn later lived in New York. Her marriage ended in divorce, and she raised her son alone. She died on February 9, 1975.

I read this in FOUND TREASURES STORIES BY YIDDISH WOMEN WRITERS EDITED BY FRIEDA FORMAN, ETHEL RAICUS, SARAH SILBERSTEIN SWARTZ AND MARGIE WOLFE, from where the above bio is taken

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