Praise for You Don’t Cry Out Loud

Lily Isaacs book is one of the most incredible stories that I have ever read, and everyone now has an opportunity to share in this magnificent journey and testimony. From roots embedded in the ashes of the Holocaust to a triumphant life of music, Lily has lived a life of trials like no other and her unending faith in Jesus Christ has brought her through to unimaginable blessings. . . . and victories! Yes, I do LOVE the Isaacs. They are the finest singing group I have ever heard, and I just adore LILY! She is a constant blessing to ALL who are fortunate enough to know her. You Don’t Cry Out Loud is an amazingly well-written story of one very special life. . . . Be prepared. . . . You will never read another book quite like this one! It just might change your life!

— Joseph S Bonsall, 40-year member of the

Oak Ridge Boys and author of GI Joe and Lillie

If ever there was a story that has all the elements, it is Lily Isaac’s story: the Holocaust, ill-fated love, alcoholism, teenage angst, urban ethnic ghetto life, Greenwich Village folk-music scene in the sixties. It is the stuff of which movies are made. Amazingly, it is all the true-life story of the smooth-singing gospel-bluegrass matriarch who, with her three children, has endeared herself to audiences around the world. Lily’s memoir will break your heart, make you laugh, inspire your soul. And it will explain why she looks so adoringly at her grandchildren, treasures every friendship, and savors every day she has to live.

— Gloria Gaither

How did a Jewish girl from the Bronx, the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, become a groundbreaking presence in gospel music? Lily Isaacs’ story is both heart-wrenching and heartwarming. She holds nothing back as she reveals the laughter and tears, joys and sorrows of a journey that could have only been accomplished with the guidance of the loving hand of an almighty God. You Don’t Cry Out Loud lets us know that every challenge can be overcome; every trial will yield to persistent faith; every foreboding valley will give way to the sunlit upland of a brighter tomorrow. You will be inspired, challenged, energized, and changed as she shares her life with you.

— Pastor Rod Parsley

We’ve known Lily Isaacs and her talented musical family, the Isaacs, for many years. We knew that Lily’s parents were survivors of the Holocaust. And we have seen Lily face several personal trials (including breast cancer) with dignity, courage, and great faith. We did not know, however, what a wonderfully gifted writer she is! In her autobiography, You Don’t Cry Out Loud, Lily pulled us into the story in a way that was totally captivating and very moving. Her life story is a testament to the love and mercy of GOD and the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. We were inspired and encouraged, and we know you will be too!

— Sharon White and Ricky Skaggs

A story that people of all faiths, all walks of life, will enjoy! So inspiring and so uplifting — it will transform hearts. Anyone can see how God works in people’s lives through this amazing story I just couldn’t put down! We live in a world that is filled with immorality and godlessness .  . . this is a book that is filled with hope to lift you out of that darkness. I love and admire the Isaacs, and this is a book you’ll want to carry with you so that when you feel down or hopeless, reading it will lift your heart again!

— Terry Bradshaw, television sports analyst,

NFL Hall of Fame member

"Mama" Isaacs is my dear, sweet friend. I always sit with her backstage at the Gaither Gatherings. I always knock on the Isaacs' bus door at concerts, just hoping "Mama" is there. She is a very special spirit. She passed down her "talent DNA" to Becky, Sonya, and Benjie, her three incredibly talented kids. She always has a word of hope and good cheer. She is a mensch. (Google it, Christians.) And now she has written a book. She emailed a few pages to me and asked if I would say a few things about it. Well, here's what I have to say about You Don't Cry Out Loud — I can't wait for my autographed copy to arrive. I only had to read the first few pages in the email to know that she is a real wordsmith and a great storyteller . . . and she has a great story to tell. Speaking of stories, here's my story and I'm stickin' to it . . . I LOVE MAMA ISAACS!! After you read You Don't Cry Out Loud, you will love her too. KEEP THE FAITH,

— Larry Gatlin

P. S. Oops . . . almost forgot . . . she makes a mean fried bologna sandwich.

First printing: May 2014

Copyright © 2014 by Lily Isaacs. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations in articles and reviews. For information write:

New Leaf Press, P.O. Box 726, Green Forest, AR 72638

New Leaf Press is a division of the New Leaf Publishing Group, Inc.

ISBN: 978-0-89221-724-3

Library of Congress Number: 2014938158

Cover by Diana Bogardus

Please consider requesting that a copy of this volume be purchased by your local library system.

Printed in the United States of America

Please visit our website for other great titles:

www.newleafpress.net

For information regarding author interviews, please contact the publicity department at (870) 438-5288

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my family who never survived WWII— My grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins who were killed before I ever had a chance to know them. I love you all.

To all the Holocaust victims who died or are still alive and still carry the scars of that nightmare.

To my dear father Oscar Fishman, who died in 1977 — Daddy, I will always love you. I'm so sorry I didn't understand your pain. I was young and self-absorbed in my own life's drama. I miss you always.

To my mother, still living and still a fighter at age 94 — Even with dementia you still have more energy and "chutzpah" than anyone I know! Mom, I love you very much and respect the decisions and sacrifices you have made in your life to give Hy and me a better life.

To my brother, Hy . . . my baby brother — We've been through so much together throughout our lives. I'm proud of the man you are today. You are an amazing husband, father, and soon-to-be grandpa! I love you.

To my wonderful children Ben, Sonya, and Becky — You three are my life! I admire and respect you. I am the most blessed mother in the world. Your talents are endless, and you have all become amazing human beings. I also want to thank Mindy (my daughter-in-law) and John and Jimmy (my sons-in-law) for being a part of my life. I couldn't ask for better spouses for my children, and you all have given me the joys of being a grandmother to some beautiful grandbabies! I couldn't ask for a more loving family. You have "loved me through the hardest times of my life." We've shared tears and laughter and worshiped God together. We've traveled many thousands of miles together, and you are MY ROCKS! I can't imagine life without any of you. Sonya, thank you for helping finish my book — you are a talented writer.

To my grandchildren, Levi, Jacob, Madeleine, Cameron, Kyra, Jakobi, and Ayden — you are truly a gift to me, and I am so proud of all of you. I love you.

To Joe — although we have been divorced for many years now, I'm grateful for the years we've had together. I probably would have never found the Lord if we hadn't met in NYC. And we wouldn't have had our three children that we both adore. We have shared many hard times and good times. Thanks for being a friend to my parents and Hy and for being a good father to our children. Thank you for sharing your family with me all these years. The Isaacs family are wonderful people, and I've been blessed to be a part of them all!

To Stacy — I'm grateful for you being a good stepmother to my kids and grandkids. I know this has been an overwhelming year, with the loss of your son, Jonas. My prayers are always with you and Jordan.

To Julie Beth and Little Joe — Thank you for being "my other kids!" I'm so thankful that you are a part of my life. I love you and your families, and I am proud of you and my other grandkids — Bradley & Ben, Daniel, Amanda, Megan, Dalton & Katie.

CONTENTS

Foreword

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Postscript

Hearthfelt Thanks to

Special Thanks to

FOREWORD BY ANDY ANDREWS

As an author, I am frequently asked to contribute things such as endorsements and forewords for friends of mine who have written books. I’ve come to learn that the old adage is true — everyone has a book in them.

This often puts me in an awkward position because, to be honest, many of the books I’ve been handed over the years should have stayed in the people who wrote them. Success in one field does not translate as seamlessly into publishing as many people think. Trust me — as someone who has seen his fair share of rejection letters from publishers (over 50 on my first book), I understand how difficult it is to break into this world.

So you can imagine the pleasant surprise I experienced upon reading the manuscript from my friend Lily Isaacs entitled You Don’tCry Out Loud.

Having seen Lily perform many times, I was no stranger to the immense amount of talent she possesses. I have seen her bring audiences to tears. She has the rare ability to open up the deepest wounds life has given us, only to heal them anew with a careful turn of phrase.

I knew she could do all these things on stage — but I had no idea she would be able to accomplish the same feat on paper.

I often like to remind folks that we’re all either in a crisis, coming out of a crisis, or headed for a crisis. It’s just part of being with us on this planet. You Don’t Cry Out Loud is the rare book that is appropriate for all three of those seasons in life.

Lily Isaacs has experienced the full breadth of what life has to offer. Through the very best and the very worst, she has looked for — and found — opportunities of faith.

Regardless of the challenges you face in your life, you will never look at them the same after reading You Don’t Cry Out Loud.

Andy Andrews is the New York Times best-selling author of The Traveler’s Gift and The Noticer. He lives in Orange Beach, Alabama, with his wife, Polly, and their two sons.

First entry of Lily's childhood diary.

CHAPTER ONE

I remember those Ohio winters: cold and biting with low gray skies and a harsh wind that swept over flat stretches of land. When the snow came, it stayed for weeks, white powder blowing around on the barren fields. At night the sky was crisp and clear, and you could see a million stars, each one lonely and still. More stars than I could ever see when I lived in the Bronx. The dark silhouettes of trees branched out against the moonlit sky, or storm clouds slipped from one end of the world to the other, drowning out the stars.

During those winters we all drew closer to the wood-burning stove in our Morrow, Ohio, home. Joe brought home scrap wood that he found where he worked at the Morrow Gravel Company, and when he opened the door and threw the wood inside the furnace, the flickering light would shine off the mirrors that lined one of our living room walls.

Evenings in that house bustled with life, filled with the sounds of children talking and arguing and plucking strings. Often our three 13 children played with Joe’s instruments. He left them lying around the house, cases open, knowing that curiosity would lead them to explore.

I made dinner. When Joe got home and opened the door, the cold winter air rushed in.

“Brrr,” he said. “Cold out there today.”

The kids crowded around him as he opened the furnace door and stoked the fire. Six-year-old Ben carried a piece of wood, happy to help. I held on to Sonya and Becky, four and three, so they wouldn’t burn themselves. Air swept in on the coals and the flames glowed on the faces of the children, sparkling in their eyes.

The only sound on those evenings was the wind against the house, or the kids getting settled in for the night, or a quietly played instrument singing from the other room, one string at a time. When I finally caught up with the housework, I sat at one end of the couch and buried my toes in the tan, shag carpet. The dusk was so quiet and peaceful there, nothing like the Bronx where I grew up. But my mother would often call in the evenings, and her voice reminded me of the busy streets, the tiny apartment where I had grown up, and the bustling life of the city.

I remember one particular phone call in those early months of 1978.

The little phone on the end table beside the sofa rang. I answered quickly so it wouldn’t wake the children.

“Hello?”

“Lily?”

“Hi, mom,” I said, but there was something in the way she said my name that made me catch my breath. “Everything okay?”

“I’m not sure,” she said in a hushed voice.

I pictured her there in her Bronx apartment. She was a small lady and so full of energy. It sounded like she was holding her hand over the phone, as if she tried to talk in secret.

“Mother, what’s wrong?”

“It’s your father. I don’t think he’s well.”

“Why?” I asked. “What’s going on?”

“This morning he got up, got dressed for work, and was about to walk out the door for work!”

“But he hasn’t worked in five years!” I protested.

Silence from her end of the phone. I took a deep breath.

“What’s wrong with him, Mother?”

“I don’t know. He seems so out of it.”

She sounded scared.

“What’s he doing now?” I asked.

She paused.

“Well, he’s sitting at the dining room table with his newspaper.”

I could picture that, too, the way he sat there for hours every night looking through the Yiddish paper, not saying a word, just rustling from one page to the next.

“That seems normal enough to me,” I said.

“No, Lily, he’s not reading it. He’s tearing it up into tiny, tiny pieces. He’s shredding it. It’s as if he’s not even in the room.”

I closed my eyes for a moment and sighed, wondering what was wrong.

“Mother, you have to get him to the doctor.”

But both of us knew what a monumental task that might be. A recent hip surgery had him skittish about hospitals, and he had even quit smoking in an effort to avoid any further visits. I think his days in the concentration camps a half-century before led him to avoid any sort of confinement.

“I can’t do it, Lily. He’s too strong for me. I could barely keep him in the apartment this morning! He kept pushing toward the door.”

She started crying quietly. I wished I was there with her. I could picture her tiny frame shoving with all her might as he tried to make it to a job he hadn’t been at for five years. I wished someone could help her.

“What about Basha, Mother? Can’t she help you?”

“I guess,” she said.

“You have to get him to the hospital,” I insisted. “Something is seriously wrong.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

My father, born in Poland in 1912, spent his early years traveling with his father, a glazier. From town to town they went, working hard on tedious jobs. His own father drank, perhaps to ease the boredom of his life, perhaps to pass the time. I can picture my grandfather, at the end of a long day in a strange town, maybe sleeping outside or in a barn. I imagine him taking out a bottle and drinking to dull the pain of that life.

By the age of 14, my father also found solace in the bottle. I don’t know if he had to sneak his drinks or if his own father gave them to him. I don’t know if he, too, drank out of boredom or it was rebellion or that typical rushing to grow up. Whatever the case, his life consisted of traveling through the Polish countryside, working with glass during the day, then escaping with the bottle at night. My poor father. He never had much of a childhood.

What did he think, then, after the German invasion, when Jews began arriving from all over Europe to his hometown of Chenstechov, brought by the Nazis to six extermination camps established in Poland? My father rarely spoke of those long ago days. He kept his nightmares to himself. But when he occasionally told us stories, we grabbed on to them, desperate for some glimpse into our history.

I find great strength in the perseverance of my parents, a fortitude that wants to be told, that needs to be passed to my children and to their children. These are the things that are left to us, when our ancestors have already journeyed out of this life — memories and little stories and things to hold on to. Such things as these.

In September of 1942 the Nazis sent 39,000 Jews to Treblinka and killed the residents of Chenstochov’s orphanage and its home for the elderly. My father’s hometown was being disassembled, one human being at a time. Those who were not old or orphaned were taken as slaves to a munitions factory. Eventually, the ghetto would be emptied. Hitler’s final solution.

Voices shouted through loudspeakers mounted on the back of the Nazi trucks.

“Everyone out! No one left behind! Out on the street! You may bring one small bag!”

The trucks stirred up dust as they rumbled through my father’s neighborhood, and that dust floated through the open doors, settled on the abandoned furniture, and slipped down into the cracks in the floor.

“Everyone out!” the soldiers shouted in their foreign-sounding accents.

Soldiers ordered my father and his family to lie on the ground in the street, their hands on the back of their heads. They remained there at gunpoint for over ten hours, the hard ground making impressions in the sides of their faces. Tiny pebbles dug into their legs, their stomachs. They tried to hold their breath, afraid that even heavy breathing would gain unwanted attention. They willed their small children to lie still.

“Please, little one,” I can imagine mothers pleading with their toddlers, tears in their eyes. “Please, little one, don’t move.”

They couldn’t look around. They dared not move. Occasionally gunshots echoed through the ghetto — those who moved, those who grew restless or tired, were shot.

Finally the soldiers told them to get up. After that, they were separated from their families, some going here while others were told to go there. Other than one brother who he managed to stay with, my father never saw his family again. Not his siblings. Not his parents.

They were led to a train, endless chains of cattle cars sitting quietly on the iron tracks. I can imagine my father looking through the slats in the train car, watching the countryside roll away. The train took him away from Poland, away from his life, away from his family. He didn’t know it at the time, but he was on his way into the heart of Germany, into the heart of the Nazi machine.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The telephone rang

“Hello?”

“Lily?”

“Mother! Did you get father to the hospital yet?”

It sounded quiet in the background. I could feel the emptiness in the apartment through the phone lines.

“Yes, yes, we did it. I tricked him, told him we were going downtown. When we got back to the hospital, I parked and your uncle and Aunt Basha helped me get him inside.”

“He went in with you?”

“Not at first. He just sat there for a minute, stubborn as could be. But we pulled on him and told him he had to, so finally he came inside with us.”

“So what did the doctor say?”

“His blood is poisoned, Lily. His kidneys are not working. They gave him a transfusion, Lily. Do you know what that is?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“They gave him blood. Someone’s clean blood.”

“Is he okay now?” I asked. “What did they say?”

“He has to stay in the hospital for two or three days, and then he has to get dialysis three times a week.”

“What does that mean, Mother? Every week? Will he get better?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. He’s too big for me. He still seems confused. How can I keep him inside? He’s too big for me.”

“I know, Mother.”

“Lily,” she began, then hesitated.

“Yes?”

“Lily, I think you should come here. I think we should look for a home for him to live in, somewhere safe. He’s too big for me, Lily.”

“Mother!” I said in surprise. Then I sighed. “That would kill him. He would hate it, you know that. He would think we didn’t love him anymore.”

“Please, Lily,” she said. “Just come here and see him? Help me look. Maybe he will get better and we won’t need a home for him. But I need your help.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

For days my father stood on that train as it clicked and clacked across the Polish countryside. It was too full for anyone to sit or lie down. I can picture him, in his 20s, a young man whose quiet hope for some kind of future had evaporated in front of his eyes. I often wonder if he had a girlfriend or if he had his eye on someone before the soldiers came and took him away. I wonder what kind of friends he had, what they did for fun or how the spent what little leisure time they had.

But in a matter of hours, days, weeks, it all stopped: the games, the work, the courting, the marriages. Birth and death did not stop, but they were flipped upside-down: being pregnant, giving birth, was almost a curse in those days. And death, well, many would long for death.

My father was strong. All around him the weak and the sick and the old passed out or died, held up by the tightly packed bodies of those standing around them. They were not let off the train. There was no food. No toilets. The air in the car was filled with agonized moans and the stench of urine and feces. The smell of the dead.

It was the train to hell.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It was still dark when Joe, the kids, and I pulled out of our lane in Morrow, Ohio. The suitcases were packed, and the kids were excited to see their grandparents and the skyscrapers of New York City. But I felt nervous at the thought of returning home, as I always did in those days. I wanted my parents to accept my children, even though I had become a Christian, something which, in their minds, was an offense to their Jewish heritage. I wanted to be a source of pride to them, but in my mind I could only picture them shaking their finger at me.

We drove through Pennsylvania on roads with low-hanging branches and turned northeast toward New York. The sun was just beginning to soften the eastern sky when the city skyline appeared off in the distance. My heart warmed whenever I saw those buildings come into view, and I glanced at the back seat where all three kids slept, oblivious to everything. Their little mouths hung open, and their eyelids twitched as they dreamed.

The smells of the city greeted us as we pulled up to the corner of Waring Avenue and Bronx Park East: car exhaust and hot air blasting up from the subway mingled with the smell of fresh bread baking at the corner bakery. Even after all of those years, my parents lived in the same place, and so much about it was exactly the same as when I had left. Joe parked the car while I woke the kids, and we walked up through that old, familiar stairwell.

“Lily,” my mother said in a relieved voice as she opened the door. She hugged each of the children. When Joe came to the door she smiled and started going through the list. He smiled back at her. It had become somewhat of a tradition for mother to give him a to-do list of things she wanted him to take care of while he was there. The apartment was old, and there were always knobs that needed fixing or hinges that needed tightening. He almost always gave their car a tuneup while we were there. I think Joe liked it, too. Somehow it made him feel like he fit in and was appreciated.

As our family filled the apartment with life and the kids swarmed my mother, pressing in for hugs and the chance to tell her their most recent stories, Joe made his way over to my father and sat down next to him. My father had recently returned from the hospital and was feeling a little better.

The two of them had always hit it off, even with such different backgrounds. Joe could talk to my father in ways that I had never been able to. They would have long conversations about serious topics and still be able to joke around with each other. Sometimes I wished that I could talk to my father that way.

It wasn’t long before the real reason for our visit cut through the light banter. We had driven up to help Mother find a nursing home for my father. I glanced over at him where he sat talking to Joe. I hoped the situation wouldn’t give him flashbacks to his days in the concentrations camps. I hoped he wouldn’t hate us for it.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The train took my father to Buchenwald, one of the largest concentration camps in Germany. It was originally established as a refugee tent camp for Polish nationals after the German invasion of 1939. The first 110 Polish prisoners had died in weeks from exposure and starvation. Two thousand more arrived in October, and an additional ten thousand arrived by the end of the year.

Initially, my father received a quart of soup and 12 ounces of bread each day, and that was meant to support him while he worked upwards of 15 hours each day. The rations were soon changed to a bowl of soup and bread crust, and my father’s weight plummeted. Sickness ruled the camp. Additional clothing or shoes were not provided, so as the weeks wore on and the clothes wore out, some worked with no shoes. Their clothes disintegrated into rags.

Early on, his job involved carrying heavy bricks up a ladder. Balance, take a step up, balance again, another step. Do not move too fast or you will fall. Do not move too slow or you will be shot. Keep moving, keep balancing, keep living.

One day he paused, just a moment. Rest. The bricks were so heavy. He was so hungry. He closed his eyes. Just a moment.

When I was a child I would reach up to my father’s face and feel the tiny scar on his forehead, that smooth gash of silent skin. I wouldn’t ask him how he got it, but I would run my small finger along it, marvel at its smoothness, the way it dipped into his skin.

But all scars have a story.

A passing soldier, perhaps catching my father resting for just a moment, slammed a brick into his head. My father collapsed on to the ground. Blood ran, life puddled among the stones. My own existence was in the balance in that moment, and the existence of my children and grandchildren. How fragile that small green shoot of life that brought me into being! How tenaciously it pushed toward the sun!

When my father finally stood, blood ran into his eyes, down his neck, on to his clothing. He had to keep moving. He had to work. He had to live.

Meanwhile, the commandant decided to have an indoor riding arena built for his wife, adding to the workload of the inmates. Elsewhere in the camp, doctors performed medical experiments on the prisoners. By the end of 1943, Buchenwald contained 37,000 people. Later, in 1944, inmates at forced labor camps in Chenstochov were also shipped to Buchenwald, swelling the numbers to 112,000. But when the Sixth Armored Division of the U.S. Army reached camp on April 11, 1945, there were only 21,000 people left to be liberated. The missing 90,000 had been exterminated.

Yet my father survived it all. He survived the brick to the head and the years of malnutrition. He survived the cold and the heat, the sicknesses and the loneliness. He survived multiple concentration camps.

When he walked out of that hell in 1945, his 6 foot, 1 inch frame was wrapped tightly with just 100 pounds of flesh. Deteriorating muscle. He left the camp but had no idea where to go. He had no family. He was stunned by the state of the world, and initially his freedom was nearly as overwhelming as his captivity.

What did freedom have to offer? He still had no clothes, no food, no work. He found a relief camp and took refuge there among the thousands of other people who couldn’t believe what they had been through, what they had just survived.

My father’s brother, who had survived all those years in the camps, died shortly after they were liberated.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Joe and I took a second trip to New York City to see my father. He had contracted pneumonia during one of his trips for dialysis, and it seemed things were drawing to a close. We left the children home with a babysitter for that trip, hoping to get up to see my father and then return quickly. It was hard for us in those days to travel so much.

So for three short days in the spring of 1978 we ate breakfast at my parents’ apartment, then went in to the hospital for the day with dad. We heard all the normal hospital sounds and smelled the hospital smells and talked in that hushed hospital tone. Quick meals in the cafeteria. Endless waiting while he slept or sat quietly staring at the wall. After three days we had to return to Morrow.

On the night we were to drive away, Joe and I went into my father’s hospital room one last time. Something inside of me knew it was good-bye.

My father was so weak and frail, and all I wanted to do was pray for him, but I also didn’t want to cause him grief as he lay there, dying. I didn’t want our last memory together to be of me pushing my unwanted Christianity in his face. I didn’t want to be rejected by him in that last moment.

Yet inside of me I knew that I had to pray with him or I’d drive back to Ohio and go on with my life and regret it forever. So when it came time for us to leave I looked nervously at Joe then edged closer to my father’s hospital bed. The monitors beeped in the background and, outside the door, nurses and doctors walked down the hall.

I moved even closer, sitting on the side of his bed.

“Dad, can I pray with you?”

He couldn’t speak, but his eyes looked deep inside of me, as if doing a final inventory. Then he nodded. Yes, I could pray with him.

I teared up but quickly grabbed his hand. I closed my eyes in order to pray, then opened them again and found that he was looking right at me, listening intently. I asked God that my father would feel peace, and that he would know that we loved him so much. I wanted to say so many things, I wanted to say everything, but those are the words that came out. And my father sat there quietly, squeezing my hand. If I think about it now I can still feel his leathery grip.

I kissed him on the forehead, and he managed a smile. I thought of the life that he had lived: the unspeakable horrors in the camps, the scary journey to America, the alcohol, his tenuous relationship with my mother, and now this, the last few moments of his life. I wanted so many things for him at that moment. I desperately wished that his life could have been different. Happier, perhaps, or more rewarding. Easier. As I sat there, I felt such sadness at what he had been through.

I walked away from him, but I stopped in the doorway. I turned around and blew him a kiss. It was the last time I would see him.

Goodbye.

CHAPTER TWO

In 1934, my mother, Feigle, walked the Chenstechov streets with her younger brother, Mendel. She was 12 years old at the time. Papers littered the sidewalk, the remnants of a rally from the night before. They kicked at the pamphlets as they walked, then stopped and picked one up. They were too young to understand that they were reading Communist propaganda.

A police officer happened to walk by and saw them holding the pamphlets, so he arrested them on the spot. In those days it was illegal in Poland to distribute that kind of material. The officer took the children to the police station, and they spent the night in jail.

My grandmother bailed them out in the morning after what was certainly a restless night. She let them have it all the way home, her shouts echoing in the early morning streets.

“What were you doing?” she asked. (I imagine her smacking the back of Mendel’s head in disgust.) “Why are you reading that trash? Why are you looking at things you shouldn’t be looking at?”

The children felt more relief than anything else, finally arriving home after a dark night in a Polish jail cell. They probably welcomed her admonishments, glad to be hearing her voice again. My grandmother ended her tirade with one final command.

“Now, mind your own business!”

I wish that was it. I wish that was the worst thing that ever happened to my mother, that frightful one-night stay in prison. How that night would have grown in significance! I am sure that story would have been passed down and retold, over and over again: the scary inmates, the mean police officers.

But that night paled in comparison to that which was to come. It became a footnote, my mother’s night in a polish prison.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Everything changed when the Germans invaded Poland on Friday, September 1, 1939. By Sunday, only two short days later, Nazi troops had reached Chenstochov. The next day, known as “Bloody Monday,” the Nazis killed nearly 1,000 Poles, including 300 Jews, and began beating and humiliating anyone in their way. They confiscated Jewish property and took over Jewish businesses, seizing all possessions including bank accounts. They destroyed the city’s historic synagogues, closed Jewish schools, and appointed a Council of the Elders to administer Jewish affairs under the thumb of the occupation. Poland was to be Germanized, and Hitler’s Final Solution called for the eventual extermination of its Jews.

But in the beginning, my mother had hope that things might return to normal, or at least become bearable. She heard the triumphant Germans marching in the streets and the sound of their music and it frightened her. Yet even then a small glimmer of hope remained that things might change for the better. After all, a world power would be governing their country. Could this bring in more business? Make life better for everyone?

But their optimism would not last.

About one year after the invasion, in August of 1940, approximately one thousand Jews in their late teens and early 20s were sent to forced labor camps. Eight months after that, in April of 1941, the remaining Jews were pulled out of their homes and sent to a ghetto in the older eastern part of Chenstochov. The three million Jews throughout Poland were gathered into such ghettos in each of the larger cities.

Mother’s oldest siblings, Moloch and Basha, escaped to Russia.

“They suffered there,” my mother said. “They were hungry. But they weren’t killed.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“Feigle,” my grandmother said one day, putting money into her hand, “take Zlotta and Mendel to buy groceries.”

She sent my mother to a neighboring town. My mother always felt a foreboding when she left the house and left her mother, but on that particular morning, she walked away with her two younger siblings feeling very certain that something bad was going to happen, certain that she would not see her mother again.

Several hours later, when they returned, her mother and her crippled sister, Tsurah, were gone.

My mother soon discovered they had been taken out and shot.

I wonder if my grandmother had a feeling that day, a premonition that the children needed to leave the house. Is that why she sent them to a neighboring town for groceries, instead of to their own market? Would my mother have survived that morning if she had been at home? She was 19 years old, now the matriarch of the family, with Mendel and Zlotta to look after.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It wasn’t long before the thudding boots of German soldiers arrived on their street, their harsh voices shouting cruel orders, demanding that my mother and her brother and sister, along with everyone else on their street, leave their homes with nothing more than the clothes they had on their backs. She still refused to believe that her mother and sister had been killed — she desperately looked through the crowds. Maybe everyone was mistaken. Maybe her mother wasn’t dead. Maybe she would come back.

Complete chaos set in as soldiers stormed houses and beat those who did not move fast enough. Belongings were thrown out into the street. My mother, her sister, Zlotta, and her brother, Mendel, were led to a room in a church before being separated. The girls went one way; Mendel was taken to another room, along with the rest of the men.

My mother witnessed thousands of Jews stream into the city from other areas in Poland, and once they arrived they mostly fled to the ghetto. Soon, 48,000 Jews lived in their ghetto, scrambling for rations, terrified for their families. By the end of the summer, they were completely sealed off from the outside by guards and barricades lining the streets, hemming them in. My mother watched helplessly as neighbors who complained about the conditions were taken away. No one knew for sure what happened to them, but there were horrible rumors.

Soon the fate of anyone who complained or didn’t follow orders became obvious and straightforward: instead of being taken to a separate room and never being seen again, they were simply shot in the street.

My mother struggled to care for her younger sister. If she became sick, there was no medicine and not nearly enough food to get well on. More than once my mother had to sneak out of the barracks to find milk, or bread, or some other food for Zlotta. When the soldiers celebrated a holiday, the residents of the ghetto searched the trash after their parties, hoping to find potato skins or coffee grounds.

My father never stopped eating the skins of potatoes his entire life. I wonder now what went through his mind when he did something as simple as eat a potato or drink the broth from his soup. I wonder if his body ever forgot those things or if, like muscle-memory, his mind would always flash back to the days he hungrily ate a cold potato the way I eat an apple.

My mother must have had difficulty keeping track of Mendel once he was put in the separate area with the men. The last word she had of him was that he and perhaps ten other teenage boys, wanting to join the sporadic resistance springing up around the ghetto, or perhaps simply wanting to escape, got hold of some guns and ammunition and decided in desperation to fight back. I picture him as a brave and gangly teenager joining a group of scared but determined comrades, aiming their weapons at the Germans and having their futures snuffed out in a loud and furious round of gunfire.

“They killed them all,” my mother told me, shaking her head slowly. “They killed them all.”

He was only a boy.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

When the round up of Jews began in the ghetto of Chenstochov, my mother fought to stay with Zlotta. They clung to one another against the chaos sweeping through the neighborhood. First they went to a work camp in Poland. But soon they were herded together yet again, for another purpose. This time they were loaded on to a train’s crowded cattle cars.

Rolling over those endless miles of track, the train sounded ominous to the passengers. Would they be tortured? Killed? Wherever they were going, they knew it wasn’t good, and the train was taking them there. For hours it moved, stopping only to take on more Jews. There was no food. Sometimes a German soldier doused the windowless cars in water and the passengers looked toward the sky, mouths open, trying to capture the drops that dripped from the dirty ceiling. Anything to quench their thirst.

“Every time the train stopped,” my mother said, “we thought everybody was going to get killed. They could have done it just like that. They often did.”

The train came to a stop, and for the first time, the passengers were allowed to walk around. My mother looked through the door and saw a small town. Standing at the edge of the town was someone selling bread. Her stomach rumbled at the thought of food, real food, so she and a friend wandered close to a guard. The two young girls flirted with the Nazi soldier. He smiled. He let them buy bread. My mother and her four friends broke it into five pieces, devouring it in a matter of seconds before getting back on to the train.

For over a week they rode that train, a few bites of bread their only meal. I have never gone that long without food. I can only imagine how weak they must have felt, how they dreamed of eating and of a comfortable place to rest. But the only relief they received came in a series of shouts.

“Get out!” soldiers shouted, banging on the train with their hands and their guns. “Get out! Get out!”

As they got out of the train cars, they left many dead or nearly dead lying on the floor behind them.

They had arrived. They were at the camp of Bergen-Belsen.

The Nazis established Bergen-Belsen in 1940, originally for the French and Belgian prisoners of war. But, like many camps, it quickly filled with Jews the Nazis either wanted to exterminate or exchange with the Allied forces for captured German soldiers.

My mother arrived at Bergen-Belsen in January. The ground was hard, covered in snow, and the air was cold. The Nazis stripped her, and soon she was numb, standing there in the winter air. The women all stood around, naked in that January day, crossing their arms, trying to stay decent, trying to stay warm. Guards shaved her entire body, and then she was driven, along with the others, into a large building.

She thought she was about to die.

Instead, they were given showers and a camp outfit and then led to the barracks. The building was designed for 100 people, but each barrack would eventually house 500 to 1,000. My mother’s unheated building contained girls in their teens and 20s. The guards gave them burlap sacks to use as blankets and chamber pots to use as toilets. The smell inside the barracks was overwhelming.

My mother’s schedule was basic and, for the most part, unchanging. Sleep as well as she could, on a bed if she could find an empty space, or on the wooden floor among the chamber pots. Guards woke them at 5 a.m., and a roll call was given, out in the cold. Some days it went on for hours. Some days they stood there in sleet or snow or a cold rain while the Germans called out their names. Feet grew numb. Muscles shouted with pain. Those who fell over were usually shot where they lay.

As poor as the conditions were inside the wooden barracks, my mother still chose to stay inside as much as possible. Outside of its walls, predatory Nazi guards looked to rape or kill, based on their mood. Get too close to the gate? They would shoot you. Of course, you could also be shot for absolutely no reason at all.

“Everybody was just scared,” my mother said. “Scared they’re gonna get killed.”

Nourishment came at the front of the food line: a roll of bread that had to last for several days, one cup of black coffee, and one cup of watery soup, sometimes with nothing in it but grass. Later in the war, as German stores depleted, the daily ration dwindled to even less than that.

It seemed they were always being put in lines and separated, either to do jobs or to get food or to simply turn around and go back to the barracks. Yet lines often led to worse things than a cup of grassfilled soup and watered-down coffee.

One day, as my mother waited in line with her sister Zlotta and her friend Sabrina, a soldier began separating the women.

“You! This way. You! That way.”

Initially, the girls were separated, my mother directed to the left while Sabrina and Zlotta remained in line. Suddenly, as the line began to move forward, Sabrina grabbed my mom’s arm.

“She’s coming with me,” Sabrina said, and the guard ignored her, allowing my mother to change lines.

The line my mother had been in at first went to the gas chamber. Everyone in that line was killed that day. The line that Sabrina pulled my mother into received their normal ration and went back to their barracks.

Day after day, week after week, year after year, the difference between life and death could be something as simple as a guard separating people into lines, or a prisoner taking one step too close to a fence. Or the random tug of a soldier’s trigger finger.

Or the angelic action of a friend named Sabrina.

More and more people in Mother’s barracks began to die as illness and malnutrition took over.

“What can you do?” my mother asked while reflecting on those nightmare days. “Tell me, what can you do? In a situation like that the only thing you think is, I hope I survive. I want to see where my family is. That’s what I was thinking. Nothing else. Sure, you cry inside, but you don’t cry out loud.”

Thinking about her words, I cry inside, too. Thinking of her in that camp, her hope and life slowly draining from her body, causes sorrow to flood over me. I try to picture myself in that camp and find it hard to breathe. A heaviness sits on my heart until I cannot allow myself to think of it.

The work was relentless and mind-numbingly dull. Carry rocks from here and pile them there. Now that all of the rocks have been moved, bring them back. In the meantime, she grew thinner and thinner. Her beautiful, young body, so feminine and lively, began to disappear. Her breasts all but vanished. Her periods stopped coming. Her bones protruded. There was nothing left, only a brittle frame wrapped in fragile skin, constantly pounded by more work and cold and illness.

Meanwhile, her camp continued to fill, and by the end of the war 125,000 prisoners were crammed inside. Anne Frank arrived in October of 1944, eventually dying of typhus as disease swept the camp. Every morning someone from each barracks would report to the guard how many had died in the night. It was at night when most would give up, their souls striving for some sort of peace no longer available in the world. In the morning, all that was left was a thin body no longer breathing, eyes open but still. Early in the war the bodies were taken out and burned, thrown into a large bonfire like lumber. Later, the Nazis did not even do that.

“Some bodies remained in the barracks until we were liberated,” my mother recalls. “And it smelled like hell. We stepped on the bodies — you couldn’t help it. When you walked you would have to step on them. You just went on. You couldn’t help yourself. You didn’t look at death if you wanted to survive.”

Soldiers from the British army reached my mother’s camp on the afternoon of Sunday, April 15, 1945. The German Commandant Kramer put on a crisp, fresh uniform and met the soldiers at the gate. Although the world, in general terms, knew what the Nazis were doing to the Jews and the others in the concentration camps, the British troops were horrified at what they found in Bergen-Belsen.

At least 13,000 corpses remained unburied. Mass graves lay hidden, waiting to be discovered. At least 40,000 people lost their lives in that particular camp, many from starvation despite the fact that warehouses full of food from the World Jewish Congress sat nearby. The Nazis had refused to distribute it.

Many of the 60,000 prisoners remaining were so weak and lethargic that the idea of liberation didn’t sink in for days, and there was little joy in the camp at their release. Most believed their survival had been a matter of luck and timing.

“I don’t know how I survived,” my mother said. “I came out at the end weighing only 80 pounds. I was like a skeleton.”

But she was a survivor. When the British came, she made her way to the camp’s kitchen as quickly as possible.

“I grabbed potatoes and grabbed everything that I should not be hungry anymore,” she said. “There were people working there but I went in to get food for people in the barracks. I brought out bunches of everything because the other people couldn’t walk. A lot of them were sick. They couldn’t do nothing.”

The prison population was so weakened that 9,000 people died in the two weeks after liberation. My mother saw many people she had grown to know, people who had lived through such horror, die before her eyes after they were free. Another 4,000 would die in the following month.

For over four years my parents lived either in the ghettos or the concentration camps. A four-year nightmare, carried on 24 hours a day, and I know those experiences went to the core of who they were, who they would become.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Freedom. Liberation. I thought that must have been the most exciting day of my mother’s life, but after she was released, she didn’t know what to do. In fact, she feared what she would find.

“I didn’t know where anybody was. I didn’t know if anybody was alive,” she said.

It was the spring of 1945, and my mother was just one individual of the ten million displaced people traveling through a shattered Germany.

The Allies, along with various international aid organizations, transported the Jews to relief camps. My mother watched desperately as her train traveled over the countryside. Unaccustomed to such freedom, she stared into the passing villages and towns and cities, wondering what the world was like. What had changed? I am sure her nights were filled with flashbacks to other, more terror-filled train rides, but each morning she woke to the clack-clacking of the train taking her farther and farther away from Bergen-Belsen.

But then the ride stopped, and she had to figure out what to do. As she walked away from the train, toward the relief camp in Feldafing, Germany, she tallied up the dead: her widowed mother who had worked so tirelessly all those years, only to be shot; Tsurah, the sister she had bathed and fed and told stories to, helpless Tsurah, never given a chance; little Mendel, her younger brother, filled with that youthful fire, overwhelmed by the Nazi soldiers.

Yet there were others whose fates she did not know. Her younger sister, Zlotta. Basha, her second mother and older sister. Her older half-sister, Mania, who moved to Israel before the war. Moloch, her gentle older brother who had already left the house when she was very young. They might be out there. They must be. Her loving family. Their pet name for her had always been Feigle — Yiddish for little bird. How she longed to hear that name again!

“I thought maybe Basha was somewhere alive, but I didn’t know which way to go. I didn’t know what to do.”

So she wandered the streets of that small town in ill-fitting shoes and clothes that hung loosely from her bony frame. She sometimes stopped to sit and rest, sometimes wept at what life had become, but she always stood up again, shook off the fear that everyone had died, and continued on.

Finally, one beautiful day, she walked down a street full of shops and little businesses. The sunlight reflected off the glass and the blue sky filled her with hope. And she heard it.

“Feigle?”

Standing in front of her was an old friend from home. They hugged each other and wept in the middle of the street, my mother feeling that her life was finally turning. It was her first bit of hope, of home, and she held tightly to that friend.

Her friend had a little money, so the two of them hung out together, telling stories of what they had seen. They talked late into the night until my mother, exhausted, fell asleep. The next morning she hugged her friend goodbye and continued looking for anyone else she might know. It didn’t take long.

“Feigle! Feigle! Come here!” a woman called out. She was from my mother’s old neighborhood. Before my mother could even run to her, the woman shouted something else.

“I know where your sister Basha is!”

For a moment the news overwhelmed my mother, and she couldn’t move. She started to shake. Then, holding both of her hands to her head and weeping the entire way, she followed the woman to a house.

They both knocked on the door and waited. My mother looked again at the woman. Could it be true? Silence. Then the door swung open.

It was Moloch, her older brother.

He was thinner and older, and for a moment his eyes slowly studied the tiny woman in front of him. My mother must have looked like a little girl, even though she was over 20 years old by then. Then he recognized her, and in that moment was perfect joy.

They held each other close for a long time.

“Basha is out,” he said. “She will be home soon. Feigle! She will be home so soon. Please sit down.”

My mother, exhausted, fell asleep. A joyful screaming woke her up.

“My God, my God!” Basha cried out. “This is my Feigle! Oh, this is my Feigle!”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

In the late spring sun, Feldafing’s stone and wooden barracks were welcoming. Accommodations were simple, but the comforts were so much greater than those of the camps. The flowers and the green countryside were like food to my mother after seeing so much violence and death. For a moment she allowed herself to dream of happiness and a new life in Germany.

Then their paths finally crossed: my 22-year-old mother now known by everyone as Feigle Jakobowitz and my father, the 32-yearold Uszer Fiszman. In the camp, she was known as an attractive and vivacious young woman. She slowly put on weight and regained her girlish curves. When she met the older man, her future husband, she was hardly impressed.

“I didn’t like him,” she said. “He was older.”

Feigle had always dreamed of glamour and beauty. As a young girl she had crept into her older sister’s closet and put on one of her beautiful dresses, then paraded up and down the street. When Basha saw her she was furious and gave her a beating, the type of beating only a sister can give. Mom always said it had been worth it though, just to experience that feeling of walking up and down the street in beautiful clothing.

So the thought of marrying this staid man ten years her senior did not fit the image she had for her life. So many years had been lost in the terror of the camps, and she had no time for practicality.

But Basha spoke to her.

“He’ll make a living for you,” she urged my mother. “He’s not going to run around on you. These other youngsters are just flying wild.”

My mother was young, and she let her sister talk her into it.

My father, on the other hand, fell madly in love with that attractive, high-spirited woman, and he did his best to win her. She heard rumors of his drinking, but she wasn’t going to let those rumors influence her decision.

They married in the summer of 1946. Old friends from their apartment and the ghetto in Chenstochov joined with new friends from Feldafing to celebrate. Ceremonies in those days took on added meaning, symbolizing a return to life, a return to hope. There was this fragile belief that perhaps they could gather the scraps that were left and create a beautiful life.

And then I was born on September 20, 1947, another confirmation of hope: Leia Cirla Fiszman, after my grandmother and my mother’s beloved sister Tsura (Cirla). After my birth, my parents became determined to leave Europe. They made plans to move to Israel to join Mania, packed their meager belongings, and prepared for the trip.

But a letter arrived from my mother’s uncle Lou Ultmann. He lived in the United States. He was a baker. He would sponsor our family if we wanted to come.

“Feigle, don’t go nowhere. I’m sending you visas to America,” is how my mother recalls the letter.

So it was decided. America would be our new home.

CHAPTER THREE

City sounds came through the open door that led to the fire escape. I could feel the cold kitchen floor under my feet as I walked slowly across the smooth surface. My mom worked at the sink, silverware clinking together, cabinets closing. The summer air was all around us, gently moving through our Bronx apartment. I looked at a small mouse in the corner of the kitchen — its tail twitched, but apart from that it stayed completely still.

I was four years old.

Then Mother scooped me up in her sweet-smelling arms, humming a Yiddish song in my ear, placing me gently through the window and onto the first-floor fire escape — because it was on the first floor and was completely closed in, Mother let me play around out there. I cradled my doll, dressed her, and put her to sleep as the cars moved past the house. The rusty, wrought iron was warm and gritty under my feet. The city air was hot and relaxing.

Children’s voices rose up like music to where I sat. I peered through the bars, gripped them with both hands and pushed my forehead up against them, trying to see down to the street. I leaned against the iron and caught a glimpse of them playing on the sidewalk, colorful and dancing. Then, the gentlest easing, and my head slipped through the gap in the rails. I was stuck.

Screaming, Mother panicked, greasing my ears and head with butter and Crisco and anything slick. But the iron bars would not let me go. Pushing for a glimpse of what went on beyond that small metal platform, I had trapped myself.

Sirens screamed down the city streets, then I saw the fire engine move through, cars slowly pulling to the side. Beneath me the children stopped and stared. A fireman came through the window behind me — I couldn’t see him but the weight of him on the fire escape made it creak and sway. He forced the bars apart, freeing me.

My eyes were swollen from crying. I clung to my mother’s neck.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I grew older, and the city became a part of me. That old apartment formed the backdrop for my life, a backdrop that wouldn’t change.

Sometimes I fell asleep in the evening before father left for work. He was a baker and worked the night shift. Sometimes, in the dark, I heard him whisper into the room.

“Leiala? Leiala?”

Sometimes I woke up slightly at the sound of his voice, warm and kind. I pictured him squinting into the darkness.

But I was still half asleep, and I didn’t move. I felt him kiss my forehead, press back my hair. After he left, and the room was silent again, I rolled over and put my hand under the pillow, clutching the dollar bill he had left behind.

One day Father came home from work holding a stray cat at arm’s length, wrapped up in his coat, the answer to our mice problem. The roaches we had given up on. So on his way home that morning he had tempted the stray with his lunch, then snatched the cat and wrapped it in his jacket. But when he released it into the apartment, it hissed and swiped at us with its claws. It scratched us and clung to our clothes.

My brother Hymie and I avoided that mangy animal and crept around the apartment like stalked prey. Those were long, scary nights, and my brother and I slept in the same bed because we thought that cat would jump on us in the night and attack us. Before father left for work, he checked in on us. After seeing how jumpy we had become due to that cat, he took it out with him and we never saw it again.

This was my family’s existence in the city. Out of nothing, my parents had created a life for us. We made the best of things, and if they didn’t work out we did something different. Whether it was a cat or a job or an apartment, we worked for what we had, and sometimes we got lucky, and sometimes we got unlucky, but there was always a feeling that we were forging our way, and that in America anything was possible.

Lillian Fishman.

Lillian Fishman.

Lillian Fishman.

Someone important to me had suggested “Lillian” as my official name, so I wrote it over and over again in cursive, trying to prepare myself for the big day. I would show it to my mother and she would critique my writing, and then I would go back to the table and keep writing it over and over again, the curving letters etching their form into my mind.

Lillian Fishman.

Then, finally, the day came. April 15, 1955. That morning when I woke up, the importance of what was about to happen overwhelmed me. The night before, I hadn’t slept a bit. Mother helped me get dressed, and everything had to be perfect: my blouse, unwrinkled, my skirt, just so. I felt very grown up as we boarded the subway to Ellis Island.

The four of us stood close together as the train carried us under the city. My brother was already a citizen because he had been born in the States, but for my mother, my father, and me, this was a huge day. The beginning of something wonderful. I would finally belong here.

We traveled to the tip of Manhattan, joined a long line, and were eventually taken into a large, open area. I remember how all of us stood together, expectation reverberating around us. I raised my right hand, along with everyone else, and said the oath of citizenship.

The certificate I received nearly one year later lists only the facts: Lillian Fishman, 4 feet 6 inches, 70 pounds. But I remember how exhilarating it was to be part of that. America was a place where anything could happen. It was a place where anything would happen.

Most of all, I remember how tall I felt, signing my name on that certificate in perfect, curving script:

Lillian Fishman.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“Why do we celebrate Rosh Hashana?” I asked my father as we left the house.

“Because it’s the Law,” he said without emotion, as if that was the answer for everything. The Law. I knew by the way he said it that it was all very serious and somber and important, but I didn’t understand it at all.

Yet it felt good to be together as a family, something we rarely experienced with my father working the night shift and my mother always out with her friends. It was a slow, meditative walk to the synagogue on Astor Avenue twice a year, once for Rosh Hashana and then again nine days later for Yom Kippur. We were not a religious family, but our Jewish roots were deep, and my parents made sure that we were in attendance for these festivals.

The inside of the synagogue was very plain with long wooden pews, and I tried to walk quietly with my mother and Hymie (because he was a young boy) to the women’s side, keeping my gaze respectfully on the floor. All of the women wore prayer scarves to cover their heads. I liked wearing mine — it was different, and it made me feel like I belonged in the community with these people, many of whom were our neighbors in the apartment building.

On the other side of the aisle the men stood looking large and serious, their broad backs covered by prayer shawls. Perched on the top of their heads were small, round yarmulkes. I spotted my father through the crowd, his prayer shawl long and white with the Star of David in the middle and tassels hanging from the edges. I remembered him taking it out of its small case that morning, unrolling it slowly and sweeping it around behind him so that it came to rest on his back like a cape with special powers.

A feeling of mystery and reverence filled the silence as the rabbi went to stand at the front. Two younger boys took the scrolls wrapped in beautiful blue velvet and walked through the congregation. Then it seemed there were reaching hands everywhere, all of us wanting to touch the Torah. I loved the feel of the soft velvet, the idea of its holiness. I kissed my hand after I touched it, feeling a certain sense of awe.

Then the rabbi read in Hebrew, the words sounding like an ancient incantation I didn’t understand. We repeated after him, standing, our voices sounding out together in a sing-song manner.

It was all very comforting, but I had no idea about God. Who was He? Where was He? Sometimes, if I had a big test, or mother and father were fighting, I would touch the mezuzah on the doorframe leading into our apartment, then kiss my hand and pray to God. The mezuzah is a small case affixed to the outside of the front door, in which is held a parchment with a Hebrew prayer. The prayer was one of protection over the home. If I asked my father why we had a mezuzah, I’m sure he would have said the same thing he always said.

“Leiala, it is the Law.”

But again I wondered, Who is this God? Does He even exist?

Why were these things that we did so important to God? Eventually, on Rosh Hoshana, we walked out of the synagogue, the parents mingling together while the smaller children ran up and down the sidewalk. I felt pure after those days in the synagogue, as if I had done something right and noble, even though I wasn’t sure exactly what.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

My flip-flops slapped on the concrete steps, all the way down the stairwell of our six-story apartment building on the corner of Waring Avenue and Bronx Park East. They felt familiar in between my toes, cool against the bottoms of my feet, and their sound echoed back at me. It was a lazy summer morning in 1959, and I made my way to the lobby of our building.

I hung out there for a little while, watched people come and go, hoping to spot the cute high school boy from the floor below us. When the front doors opened, a wave of stuffy heat and city noise billowed in like a cloud. I adjusted the strap on my bathing suit and hugged my towel, leaned back against the wall and looked around. My 12-year-old body felt foreign to me, too tall and skinny. One girl at school, a mean, spiteful girl, took to calling me Olive Oyl because of my long legs and the way I walked.

I pretended to wait for my friend Gloria Feldman, but I didn’t stay in the lobby very long. I was only hoping for a glimpse of the boy and had no idea what to do if I did see him. When he didn’t show, I went through the doors and on to the Bronx sidewalk. I didn’t want to be the last one of our group to the pool. Otherwise they would probably all start talking about me before I got there.

Through those doors were the sounds of my adolescent summers: car horns and kids playing with one another and shop owners’ voices shouting from their storefronts. A group of boys threw ball in the empty lot across the street, hollering back and forth to each other. I showed my pool pass from the sidewalk and they let me through the rusty iron gate, into the pool area. Two six-story apartment blocks rose on either side of the pool, and our own personal square patch of blue sky looked down on the shimmering liquid. I could smell the water roasting on the cement slab. I started to sweat almost as soon as I walked into the sunlight.

The pool was full of people, and all the chairs and small squares of grass around the outside edge were filled. Children’s delighted screams were punctuated by plunging splashes. I looked around and happiness overwhelmed me — we had recently moved from a rough area of town, and those buildings, that pool, even those people, represented a better life. Our family was moving up. No more worrying about being mugged as soon as we walked out of the building. No more worrying about what might happen to us in the dark stairwells. We could even cross the street to play ball, and our parents didn’t care.

The families in our new building were hardworking, blue-collar families living the American dream: African American families and Italian families and Jewish families. And we were all different, which made us all the same. That’s all I wanted in those days — to be the same as everyone else. I walked toward the pool, unable to stop the smile rising.

Then I saw my friends: Gloria, Elana, Lauren, and Barbie. They sat on the edge of the pool, dangling their thin legs into the coolness. Kids played all around them, and they leaned back to avoid the larger splashes, shielding themselves with their arms, talking all the while. I suppose we were a typical group of adolescent girlfriends, with constantly ebbing levels of affection, constantly changing alliances. One day, four of us would despise the loner; the next day, three would have disdain for two; and then suddenly, without warning, I would be the one on the outside. Then I would be back in, complaining about one of the other four. Our spats were silly and numerous. But they were my friends, and their friendship, no matter how fickle, meant I was not alone.

I kicked off my flip-flops and sat down on the end beside Gloria. My legs sank softly into the cold water.

“Hi, Gloria,” I said.

She smiled widely. She was my favorite.

“Hi, Lily. Did you see Joel over there?” she asked, looking out of the corner of her eye.

I glanced across the pool in his direction. Then, when he looked toward us, I looked away.

“He’s so cute!” she said, laughing, reaching forward and splashing me.

I laughed, then glanced over at the other three girls.

“Hi, Lauren,” I said nonchalantly.

She just looked at me then whispered something to Barbie and Elana.

I looked at Gloria and raised my eyebrows in an unspoken question.

She rolled her eyes.

“I’ll tell you later,” she hissed.

I closed my eyes and faced the sky, my weightless legs floating in the water, the sandpaper cement under my thighs, the warmth of the sun glowing deep red through my eyelids. We all wanted to be tan in those days, like the movie stars. And we all wanted to be blonde, so Gloria would bring lemon juice for us to put in our hair, and the sun would lighten it. The sun seemed to provide a solution for nearly everything.

“Barbie stuffed her bra yesterday,” Gloria said, whispering again and giggling. I snickered, trying hard not to blush because I had tried the same thing, with very lumpy results. But we laughed and laughed.

Yet on that afternoon, in the midst of a long-sought feeling of security and belonging, one of the most terrible things that could possibly have taken place came to pass. As I sat there on the edge of the pool with my four friends feeling the sun and the water and the sounds of a community, it happened.

My father arrived back from work.

He still worked at night in a bakery that he co-owned — my father made the bread and his partner made the cakes. His trips home consisted of a 45-minute ride on the subway and then a five-block walk from the train to the apartment building. He usually got home late in the morning, any time from nine until noon. Part of that was due to the nature of his job, having so much to do to keep the business going. But his widely fluctuating return times were also a result of the couch he kept in the back room of his bakery where he drowned his sorrows early every morning in a bottle of whiskey.

My father drank nearly all the time, but he never laid a hand on us. He was, for the most part, a peaceful drunk. He was also a loner and never listened to the radio or had a social life. He suffered from having a wife ten years his junior, with more exuberance and spunk and desire for fun than his hardworking life could ever allow or contain. He would eat, sleep, work, and occasionally sit at the dining table reading the Jewish paper.

I saw his kind face as soon as he walked up to the gate outside the pool. He often rubbed his long, arthritic legs while he walked, his green eyes wrinkled in a sweet smile, his long Jewish nose and bald head shining red in the sun. At six feet tall he rose above most others in the pool area. His big hands clutched a brown paper bag full of rolls. He always brought home rolls, always asked if we wanted something to eat, as if he was back in the concentration camp, finally able to slip bits of food to the skeletal children he had, in reality, been forced to watch die of starvation.

When he came through that iron gate, every bit of my happiness and newfound confidence evaporated. I knew he was drunk by the way he walked, his toes stubbing the ground, his steps short and sliding. It took my breath away, and I didn’t want my friends to see him.

“Leiala,” he called out, loud and slow, his voice full of alcohol and fatherly love, the -la at the end of my name exaggerating his affection.

I could hear a rush of blood in my ears. Panic. I wanted to run.

“Leiala?” he shouted again, and to me it seemed the pool grew silent, the splashing dimmed, and folks stopped what they were doing to find out whom this drunk man called for.

“Leiala!” he called with relief, having seen me across the pool.

I grabbed my little brother and my towel and, hunching over, ran toward him, hoping none of my friends had seen him. But the four of them just sat there on the edge of the pool, staring. I grabbed my father’s arm and practically drug him from the pool area.

“My Leiala,” he said slowly, his bloodshot eyes tearing up, as if he had found me after years of searching. “I just wanted to say hello.”

I hope he couldn’t see it at the time, but I didn’t want him around. He worked all night and slept during the day. His drinking was an embarrassment to me — I didn’t want to be different anymore. I wanted to be just like my friends with their normal families, their normal fathers who worked normal jobs and didn’t carry bags of rolls wherever they went. We took the elevator up to the apartment, and I felt so alone. So different.

My little brother and I got him into bed.

“Are you hungry?” my father asked again, trying to sit up, his voice slurred and his eyes watery.

“Go to sleep, Papa,” I begged him, turning out his light.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“Next!” the school nurse shouted from behind the curtain.

I walked slowly around to the other side.

“Lean forward,” she said, running two of her fingers down the sides of my spine.

“Stand up straight,” she said, doing the same thing again.

“Next!” she shouted, pushing me away.

The following day my mother was called into school.

“Lily has scoliosis,” they told her. “Curvature of the spine. Here’s the information for a specialist she’ll need to go to.”

At first when I found out about it, I didn’t know what to think. Scoliosis? Sounded serious enough. But as I discovered more about it, the life slipped out of me — wasn’t it enough that our entire apartment building knew that my father was a drunk? That my mother stayed out late at night with her “friends”? Hadn’t God given me enough hardships? Now there was yet another way I would be different.

We traveled to Manhattan, to the Hospital of Special Surgeries. They had a wing dedicated to the treatment of scoliosis. We walked down the long hall and through the door to the waiting room. I couldn’t believe what I saw.

Children everywhere, some unable to walk, disfigured by their curving spines. I specifically remember a little boy whose back was so bent over by the disease that he could only shuffle around on his hands and knees. What would become of me? Would I end up an old lady in a wheelchair, crippled by my own back?

“Lily Fishman?” the nurse called out, and my mother and I stood and walked into the examination room. I was sweating. My mother was nervous. They took some x-rays, and then the doctor came in.

“You are still in the early stages of scoliosis,” he said quietly. “We are going to create a back brace for you that will keep your back growing straight. You must wear it all the time, okay?”

I nodded slowly, my eyes wide open. I would do anything not to end up like the people in the waiting room.

Two weeks later we took the train to Manhattan again, and I saw the crippling effects of the disease and swore I would do anything to keep my body from ending up that way.

Then I saw the back brace.

A heavy iron contraption with horizontal slats across the top, the brace laced down the front like a corset and was very tight and uncomfortable. I tried it on and some of the metal pieces dug into my back. I found it hard to take deep breaths.

“You need to wear this throughout your formative years,” the doctor said again, probably sensing my distaste with the metal cage. “Probably until you’re 18. If you wear it all the time, your back will grow straighter and you might even avoid surgery.”

Then the doctor looked at my mother. “Bring her in every six months for measurements and tests. We’ll monitor her progress.”

For those first few days I was home, the image of those poor children bent over with untreated scoliosis was enough to get me to strap that brace on. At first, I tried buying my clothes in larger sizes, hoping that would disguise the brace. I would stand by the mirror and adjust my dress or my shirt, trying to get it to cover the little bit that stuck out the top. I was so tall and thin that I thought I could hide it.

But once in class things went bad, as I had expected them to. If I bent over, the vertical braces stuck out through my neckline and the back of my shirt. A few days into it I was bending over my desk, doing some class work, when one of the boys behind me laughed.

“Hey, it’s the Hunchback of Notre Dame!”

With that one sentence, my determination to wear the contraption and fight off the effects of scoliosis crumbled. I felt so imperfect, so broken, and I carried that feeling around for the rest of my life. It would become difficult for me to let myself be defined by that deformity.

Not only that, but I was just starting to like boys, beginning to hope they would find me attractive, and I did not need a metal birdcage strapped to my body under clothes that didn’t fit. The prospect of living in a wheelchair, or even undergoing a painful surgery, was too far in the future. So I hid the back brace deep in my closet under my clothes so that Mother wouldn’t find it and make me wear it to school.

On those days when the inside of the apartment felt like a trap, my friends and I met in the stairwell. We sat there on the cool concrete, talking about school and boys and music, and when an adult would pass by our voices collapsed to a whisper, or silence. Sometimes one of the girls would sneak a cigarette from her parents and we would take tiny sips of the smoke, trying to look like the movie stars, trying not to cough.

“Who is smoking out there?” someone shouted, and we scampered around trying to rid ourselves of the smell.

Then, “Time for dinner, Lily.”

I knew it must be around 5:00 or 5:30; we ate dinner every night at the same time. Mother never missed it. She loved her routines, and our days passed in a gentle wave of schedules.

I said goodbye to my friends and walked back into the apartment, pulling the heavy door closed behind me. Wednesday night: that meant veal cutlets. Every night of the week Mother made a particular dish: chicken, lamb chops, beef liver, and so on. She mixed up the sides, but the mains were almost always the same on their night. She was a great cook. We loved to eat her food.

We sat down, and father was there that night, a rarity. Almost always at work or sleeping in preparation for his night shift, he wasn’t a regular fixture at our evening meals. But that night he was there. He sat quietly, casting small looks of longing and love at my mother. Sometimes I wonder why he didn’t fight harder for her. He was so in love with my mother — why didn’t he react to her increasing absences with a determination to win her over? Maybe he thought he never would. Whatever he thought, I never saw him attempt to get her to love him the way he loved her. He just seemed to drink more and more.

He mumbled while he ate, little anecdotes or jokes. But if you didn’t catch it the first time, he just went on eating.

My father would have drunk liquor from a slop bucket, but one thing he did his entire life was to try to observe the Jewish dietary laws. He always ate kosher. Among other things, that meant you never had milk at a meal with meat, and you never ate pork. The food had to be blessed by a rabbi, and all the meat came from animals killed in a prescribed way by kosher butchers.

Mother, however, was not as strict, and sometimes her kosher diet fluctuated along with her grocery budget. As I went to the kitchen that night with my empty plate, I saw the meat package on the counter. Pork chops. Not veal cutlets. I sighed and threw the butcher paper in the trash so father wouldn’t see it.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I sat quietly in the synagogue. We prayed many times on the tenth day of the festival of Yom Kippur. It was the Day of Atonement, when all of our sins were paid for. We stood and repeated the words of the rabbi. Then we sat down and prayed the liturgical, Hebrew prayers. In between prayers, when the rabbi’s voice was silent, the air felt holy and alive.

In the afternoon we walked to a park that was close to our apartment. My brother and I went slowly behind my parents. I wondered about them. I wondered about their past, if they were happy. My father always seemed subdued and brooding, while my mother had this constrained feeling about her, like a bird with clipped wings.

Some nights my mother disappeared and ran off with her friends. Sometimes when I came home I found her whispering into the phone in the bathroom. She quickly hung up when she noticed me. Sometimes I answered the phone late at night but the person would just hang up. Sometimes Mother stopped to speak with people on the street, complete strangers.

Occasionally my father came home early from work to find out that she was away — her absence brought about a rare show of emotion, and he fumed around the house, bumping into things and threatening to break furniture. My brother and I tried to calm him, tried to assure him that she would be back soon. Usually we managed to usher him to his bedroom and under the blankets, and soon he fell asleep.

Yet in spite of those angry nights, my father still worshiped the ground she walked on. You could see it in his eyes when he watched her from the table while reading his paper. There was pride there that she was his wife, and there was adoration. But they were separated by over ten years and had been married under a veil of haste and convenience, so there was little relationship there.

But still we had the peaceful days of Yom Kippur, and we stopped beside a stream running through the park. The wind blew my dress against my legs. My father’s prayer shawl fluttered in the breeze, the tassels dancing. He turned his trouser pockets inside out and threw everything into the water, as was the Jewish custom of that holiday, and all the bits of lint and crumbs from the rolls he always carried washed away. It was symbolic, throwing off all that was old, starting fresh.

I watched as those pieces of old things caught in the current. Some of the breadcrumbs sank to the bottom while the lint was carried away, bouncing on top of the small ripples like water bugs. Then the debris floated out of the park, vanishing around the bend.

We all followed suit, emptying our pockets, watching our sins float away. My mother became glassy-eyed and reflective. I wondered what she was thinking about, or who she was thinking of. Now that I’m older, sometimes I wonder what past sins she envisioned were floating out of her life.

It was the Day of Atonement, the day that all of our sins from the previous year were washed away.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“Where’s your mother?” my father asked us.

Hymie and I stared at the floor. Outside we could hear the city traffic moving slowly along the street. The city always felt so alive, even at night when everything was dark and waiting.

“I don’t know,” I mumbled. And I didn’t know where she was. But my brother and I both knew what was coming.

On that night he stormed into the bathroom and slammed the door. The apartment rattled. Hymie and I sat down on the couch, hoping that would be the end of it. The plastic cover my mother kept on the sofa squeaked underneath us. Then suddenly my father was coming out of the bathroom, drunk and wobbling from side to side, vanishing into their bedroom and slamming the door once again, like a child throwing a tantrum.

It wasn’t long before he walked quickly into the dining room and sat at the table. He pulled a pack of cigarettes out and began smoking furiously, his eyes staring straight in front of him, A haze filled the room and still he continued smoking, going through one pack and starting another. That’s when the coughing started. I thought he would cough his head off.

Then, still coughing, he fled into the kitchen and started throwing dishes out of the kitchen cabinet. Some of them hit the floor and just bounced toward us. Others shattered into a hundred pieces, each small shard sharp as a knife. That’s when Hymie and I started shouting.

“Stop it!”

“Dad, please!”

He picked up one of the dining room chairs and shuffled clumsily over to one of the windows. I could hear the traffic four stories beneath us clearly as he wrenched the window up. He picked up the chair and started throwing it out, but my brother and I ran over to him.

“No! You can’t do that! Stop!”

I don’t know how we did it, but we convinced him not to throw the chair. He put it down and sat in it for a moment, putting his hands on his head, broken shards of china under his feet. We didn’t know if he would start screaming again, or weeping, or just sit there for the rest of the night staring at the floor and the broken pieces.

When he finally disappeared back into his room and went to bed, the house felt empty and sad. Hymie and I would pick up the china, then go back to the room that we shared, he in his bed and me in mine. It was late, and the sun had set a long time ago behind the high rises. I would lie in bed and wonder when Mother would get home. I wondered where she was and what she was doing out there.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I was 13 years old when I came home one day and found three suitcases in the living room flanked by a few packed boxes, bulging with stuff. The apartment door closed slowly behind me, and I stood there, not moving, seeing the suitcases but wondering if I was in the right apartment.

Everything else looked like our place — when you walked in the first thing you saw was the dining room table with the chandelier above and the six empty chairs. Straight ahead you could see the living room with lots of natural light spilling in through the windows. On the right-hand side of the living room was an off-white colored couch with gold embroidery and that plastic cover to keep us kids from getting it dirty. There was a table in the corner with a lamp on it and a couple of off-white chairs with the same gold embroidery. The blue shag carpet had a plastic runner where we walked. The coffee table sat against the left-hand wall and held the television. It wasn’t a warm living room — we weren’t allowed to eat in there, and Mom was so particular about us keeping our feet off the couch and not messing stuff up that we spent most of our time in our room.

But the suitcases were out of place.

Mom came toward me from the kitchen.

“Why are you packing?” I asked her, a strange feeling gathering in my stomach when I saw her face. She looked determined, and scared.

“Come sit down,” she said, and I followed her into the living room still holding my bag from school. I sat down on the plastic couch.

Hymie was standing there, too, little Hymie only seven years old and as confused as I was.

“We’re leaving your father,” she said, her voice unwavering.

“Where are we going?” I asked, my breath coming fast and short.

“We’re moving to California, with Felix.”

“California? Felix? Who’s Felix? I’m not leaving,” I said, panic rising inside of me.

“You’ll go if I want you to go,” she said, taking the same tone she always took with me when I was being rebellious or stubborn.

“I’m not leaving my father!” I screamed.

I dropped my bag and ran out, dodging the dining room table and slipping through the door, into the hall. I escaped down those four flights of stairs, tears streaming down my face, the sound of my crying echoing through the stairwell.

Soon after my fight with Mother I was in the street outside our building. It was four in the afternoon, and I didn’t know where to go, so I just ran and cried, and when I got tired I slowed to a walk, staring at the cracks in the sidewalk. I couldn’t stop thinking of my father, always drinking, always working. Always upset about Mother. What would he do without us? Would he still carry that bag of rolls around, giving them to strange children if we weren’t there to take them? Would he still sit at the dining room table reading the newspaper?

Could he live without us? Who would be there to keep him from throwing chairs out the window?

I ended up at my girlfriend Goldie’s house, trying to hide the tears. I didn’t say much, and it felt good not to be at home, trying to forget those three suitcases, those already-packed boxes. Two or three hours later I decided I had to go home. I couldn’t circle the block forever, or move in with Goldie. But I was determined not to leave my father.

The elevator ride seemed to take forever, like walking to your own execution. I didn’t want to see my mother again. I was scared. But when I opened the door, the suitcases and boxes were gone. Mother raced across the room and hugged me, squeezed me tightly against her.

“Oh, I am so glad to see you,” she whispered. “I was so worried, Lily!”

“Mother,” I began, but she interrupted me.

“I wanted to kill you!” she said. “But I thought you were never coming back. I thought you were never coming back. I didn’t realize it meant that much to you.”

I could feel my mother’s heart beating through her blouse.

“We won’t go,” she said quietly, whispering into my hair. “We won’t go.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“Baruch Atah Adonai,” my father began, the prayer filling his voice with an ancient holiness.

We held on to those traditions as if we were holding to life itself. It hadn’t been very long before that Hitler and the Nazis had tried to destroy our heritage, and I think that made anyone of Jewish ancestry determined to preserve this way of life. Even those of us who didn’t understand what those traditions meant, or know the God they pointed to, were bound together by that common resistance against extinction, the desire to survive.

My father repeated the traditional prayers. My brother asked the questions. We ate hard-boiled eggs and matzoh and bitter herbs in remembrance of the deliverance of the Hebrews from bondage in Egypt, and my father hid a piece of matzoh someplace in the house and whoever found it would get a dollar.

“Why is this night different from other nights?” my brother Hymie asked.

I remember the years when he was first old enough to ask the questions. His large eyes reflected the light, and the air in the dining room was as still as the air inside a temple. The dishes shone, and the glasses of red wine gave the room a solemn feel. Everything about life seemed good, then, when we were together as a family, living out our traditions.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

In the days that followed I finally got the nerve to ask my father to stop drinking, and he agreed. I wrote up a small contract on lined notebook paper, and he signed it.

I happened to find this slip of paper as I went back through my old things. Unfortunately, he didn’t follow through on the promise, but I remember how excited and hopeful I felt when I watched him sign the lined paper and date it, 1962.

But nothing changed.

CHAPTER FOUR

I was 16 years old and I laid my hair across the ironing board. Gloria flattened a cloth diaper over it, then ran the hot iron slowly back and forth. I closed my eyes, imagining the straightest hair possible. I pictured Mary Travers from Peter, Paul, and Mary, and I smiled. In high school we all wanted to be her.

Lying there, my eyes closed, the heat radiating from the iron, I also thought of that last visit to the doctor, trying to sit up very straight in a thin hospital gown while the doctor reviewed my record.

“You’re full-grown now,” he said to me. “Your bones are not going to grow anymore, so your scoliosis is probably not going to get any worse. The curvature is something you can live with.”

“But my shoulder blade still sticks out a little,” I mumbled.

“Just let your hair grow long and cover it up,” he said matter-of-factly, and that’s exactly what I did.

When it was Gloria’s turn, I stood slowly and ran my fingers through my straightened hair, reached back and felt to where it lay over my shoulder blades. Gloria settled into a position so that her hair was on the ironing board. I looked at that bush of curls and shook my head at the impossible task ahead, then tried to lay the cloth diaper flat. She closed her eyes and I went to work.

Those high school years were so intense. One moment Gloria and I would be shopping downtown, my brother Hymie tagging along for the ice cream treats. The next day we’d be talking with our other friends in the apartment building, or arguing with them. Then we’d be making out with our boyfriends in my room on a warm summer day, my father asleep and my mother out grocery shopping. (Gloria’s parents watched too closely for anything like that to happen in her apartment.)

Mother encouraged me in the arts from an early age — whether it was the ballet lessons I took at age 5 or the voice lessons at age 12. This love of music and acting was in my blood, too — Mother loved to sing along with the records she put on, and sometimes, while we were watching television, she would get up and dance to the music that came on.

Hymie and I would always protest.

“Mom, what are you doing? Sit down!”

She would laugh and keep dancing, and we would roll our eyes, squirm uncomfortably on the plastic sofa covers. If Gloria was there she would laugh and laugh.

In high school I tried out for anything musical. Christopher Columbus High School had an a capella choir called the Melody Singers, and I became a member. We sang at school functions and rehearsed twice a week. Soon I was addicted to the feelings that came along with performing.

When I sang I felt like my soul was escaping my body, and that’s what I wanted — escape. I wanted out of that body that kept letting me down with its blemishes and its scoliosis and its imperfections. Tension in the house between my parents never ceased, and my father continued to drink. My mother continued to run around. At home, I felt the constant pressure to make everything work, to negotiate a tenuous peace between everyone. I went out of my way to arrange happiness for everyone around me. Everyone that is, except myself.

Soon I realized that acting gave me the same opportunity for escape that singing did. I took the lead in all the school plays: Oklahoma and The Glass Menagerie. It was a new, exciting life, and I went after it.

I remember many times, after the shows were over and the audience was going wild, I felt so important and loved. I scanned the crowd and usually found my mother, beaming with pride, clapping and smiling. I knew she would love nothing better than for me to go into the Jewish theater in New York City — I spoke Yiddish and could act and sing. Why not? I wanted to make her happy.

But my father never came with her. My very first boyfriend, Ronnie Nahoum, had just gotten his driver’s license and would sometimes bring her to my shows if she needed a ride.

My senior year finally ended. Being popular at school, doing the things I loved to do with my mother’s enthusiastic backing — it was one of the best times of my life. In my graduating class of 600 I won the theater arts award. The caption with my senior yearbook photo said that I was planning on attending Hunter College and becoming an actress, and as I came to the end of high school I felt that I could accomplish anything that I wanted. Forget the scoliosis and the alcoholic father. Forget my parents' deteriorating marriage. I was confident and ready for anything.

But all the action would slow when I found myself in bed at night, the darkness pressing on my eyes. Hymie’s slow breathing sounded quietly from the bed across the room. The train click-clacked through the city, and through my window I heard the traffic ease along. I loved the city with its comforting sounds. I loved how it wrapped around me.

I could feel the big world pulling on me. I knew the life I lived in the apartment with my family would not be enough for very much longer. I rolled over and closed my eyes, listening to the city, smiling to myself.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at my trunk, packed and ready to go. High school had ended only a few weeks before, and I stood on the edge of this huge chasm of opportunity — sometimes it took my breath away. My parents agreed to pay my way through a summer course at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, which in those days was known for its acting program. George Kennedy and Jack Klugman had graduated there, and in the coming years many of the Hill Street Blues cast would come from that school. In the fall I planned to attend Queens College in New York and major in theater arts. It seemed like the perfect next step after all of my previous acting experience in high school — the fact that I had been accepted into these programs gave me a measure of confidence that I could do it and that I was on the right path.

The taxicab picked me up in front of our building, and as I sat in the seat waiting to pull away I couldn’t help but stare. Nearly every night of my life that I could remember had been spent in that building. The swimming pool was there in the empty space between two apartment complexes, and for a moment I remembered my father stumbling in through the gate, drunk and looking for me. I looked away, at the empty lot across the street. As the cab pulled away I resisted the urge to look back through the rear window, instead staring straight ahead, watching as each of the city blocks moved toward me.

The cab arrived in Times Square, where I boarded a bus for Pittsburgh. It all felt so grown up and exciting and full of promise. Was there any goal I couldn’t accomplish? Was there any dream that would not come true? But should I forget who I really was, there was always my packed lunch to remind me: a brown paper bag with a tuna sandwich on a Kaiser roll with a dill pickle, a bottle of juice, and a Hershey bar. Carrying it was a little embarrassing, so I hid it in my shoulder bag.

The bus groaned and pulled away, navigating the streets like an elephant. We traveled west, out of the city, and it wasn’t long before the high-rises were replaced by vast, empty fields and forests stretching out over rolling hills. The bus picked up speed, and the Pennsylvania countryside flew by in a blur.

When I wasn’t dozing or staring out the window, I was surveying the other passengers and creating lives for them. The older couple was headed to a far-off small town to visit their grown kids. They couldn’t wait to see their grandchildren. A pair of young lovers was traveling for pure adventure, having no idea where they might end up. See that woman sitting by herself? She was on a cross-country journey to see an old flame. Others were on their way to funerals, or weddings, or reunions. And mine was the most exciting journey of all.

Finally the bus wheezed to a stop in the center of Pittsburgh. I felt at home there calling a cab and loading all my things into the trunk then once again riding through the city. We drove down bustling Forbes Avenue onto the Carnegie campus and stopped in front of a large, brick dorm: Margaret Morrison Hall. My home for the summer.

I hauled my trunk and bag upstairs to my room and pushed open the door. There were two small beds in the main area, and the bathroom had one mirror above the sink. There were two chests of drawers, one on each side of the room, and a window in the center that overlooked a busy side street. I picked a bed, a side of the room, and began transferring my clothes from my trunk into the drawers. Then my roommate walked in.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

She was tall and thin and very pretty, with long, dark hair. She carried herself very straight and sure, and the look on her face was part sophisticated, part aloof.

“Hi,” I said, only because I had to. We were roommates, after all, and would have to speak to one another occasionally, but I couldn’t imagine having fun with someone like her. She was so different from my high school friends, so grown-up and professional looking.

“Hello,” she said. “I’m Maria Neumann. I’m here from Manhattan.”

“I’m Lily,” I said. “Lily Fishman.” But inside I was thinking, Oh my God, how can I room with this girl? I should have guessed she was from Manhattan with that perfect look and that straight hair and those appropriately disinterested eyes. Girls from the Bronx did not mix well with girls from Manhattan. We were in-your-face and direct — they were completely cool and unapproachable.

We chatted while we put our clothes away. Her parents had show business backgrounds, and her knowledge of all the important people and places intimidated me. I couldn’t help but feel disappointed that I didn’t have a roommate more like me, but on the other hand it was just for a few weeks and then I’d be busy making new friends at college. I sighed and pushed my empty trunk into the corner.

We settled into our daily schedule of classes and acting workshops, and in between sessions I found myself talking to Maria more and more.

“I just want to act,” she would say with a sigh, and even though our backgrounds were diverse, that common longing began to unite us. She told me about the lessons she took on Saturdays at Manhattan’s “Neighborhood Playhouse,” a theater that had churned out Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, among others. She would tell me about the things she learned there, and I listened, taking it all in.

Outside of our school, a cultural revolution was in full force: the civil rights movement was at its height as Martin Luther King Jr. was preaching civil disobedience and the Black Panthers were promoting black power. The hippy culture petitioned for peace and love, and protests against the Vienam War appeared on nearly every campus.

Perhaps nothing mirrored these movements more than the music sweeping the country: Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, and Joan Baez. The harmonic duo of Simon and Garfunkel were singing about Bleecker Street and the Sound of Silence. If you were young and had a radio, you were listening to either this new brand of powerful music or to the news bulletins barking out the latest changes taking place: protests and sit-ins and Vietnam casualties.

Maria was one of several students who brought guitars to Pittsburgh, and some of us sat around in our rooms and dorm lobbies and stairwells playing music and singing these new songs and talking about our world, balancing on the edge of a revolution. Sometimes Maria would break out something she had written, and I would sit there listening. Then, spontaneously, I would harmonize with her. We both loved how we sounded, our voices ringing out through the stairwell or the dorm rooms. When we finished a song we would both sit there, not saying a word, letting the sound of our singing trail off into silence.

My weeks at the Carnegie Institute went by too fast. Before I knew it I was back on the bus, rumbling through the Pennsylvania countryside. Then we coasted through the New Jersey suburbs and the New York City skyline rose up out of the horizon. Every Simon and Garfunkel song I knew about New York danced through my mind. I pressed my forehead against the glass and smiled.

As soon as I got back to New York City, I hit the street, looking for a good guitar. I visited every instrument store I could find, eventually settling on a beautiful little Favilla with nylon strings for $100. I practiced chords, and for a time all that I wanted to do was play my guitar. In my room, in the stairwell, at the park — in those days you could find me just by listening for the sound of strumming.

Maria and I stayed in touch after returning to New York. We would meet downtown and talk about music and school and the future. My old life, my life in high school and with Gloria, wasn’t receding, but my new life with Maria and my dreams of music and acting were merging with it. It seemed everything was evolving, changing: the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, whose sound affected the way everyone viewed folk music, had helped Bob Dylan commit the heresy of playing electrically amplified folk rock. The Byrds were also moving forward, and the genres were melding together before our eyes.

Just like my life.

“Hello?”

“Lily, it’s me, Gloria.”

“Hey, Gloria. What are you doing?”

“Come with me to Montreal.” Her voice was giddy.

“What?”

“Come with me to Montreal, Lily,” she said again, laughing. “I’m going to visit my grandparents.”

“I don’t know if my mom will be okay with that.”

“Well, my mom wants you to go with me,” Gloria protested. “She doesn’t want me to go alone. You have to come. Imagine it! Just me and you in Montreal with all those French boys!”

I laughed out loud. It did sound like fun.

“Aren’t your grandparents kind of, well, old?”

“Who, Bubby and Zadey?” Gloria said. “We’ll behave at the house, but we’ve got the whole city at our fingertips!”

That night Gloria’s mother called my mother, and we got the okay.

A couple days later we packed and boarded the bus. The ride took six or seven hours. When we arrived in the city everything felt exciting and foreign. Everyone spoke French and almost all the signs were in French and I wondered what it would be like to travel through Europe. Gloria and I took a cab to her grandparents' house, and everything was exactly as I had imagined: quiet and peaceful and slightly dull. But when we got out on our own, in the city, the whole world opened up for us.

One day we walked the streets together. The late summer sun beat down on the sidewalks and the cars raced by us.

“Are you ready for this fall?” Gloria asked me. “Are you ready for college?”

“I can’t wait,” I said, taking everything in around me. “I really can’t wait. It’s going to be so exciting.”

“I know,” she said. “Did you get your paperwork back from Queen’s College yet?”

I nodded. During the summer I had changed my mind, deciding instead to attend Queen’s College in New York City. It seemed more of a fit for me after my summer experience in Pittsburgh.

Just as we were starting to chatter about the autumn that was only a few weeks away, two motorcycles roared to a stop along the curb beside us. Each was driven by a cute college boy, and they smiled at us and waved us over. Gloria and I looked at each other, our eyes huge. Then we walked over to the curb.

“Where are you guys going?” I asked coyly.

But the two boys just looked back and forth at each other and shrugged. Then one of them starting speaking in French. Gloria and I both groaned. We couldn’t even talk with them! Yet once again they motioned for us to get on the back of their motorcycles, sliding forward to make room. We hesitated for a moment. Was it safe? Where would they take us?

But then, without discussing it, we both climbed on.

Her driver moved out into traffic first, dodging a car and quickly getting up to speed. It didn’t take long for me and my French-speaking boy to catch up. The wind blew my long hair all over the place, and in front of me Gloria’s curly locks flew up behind her. My bell-bottom jeans flapped wildly against my legs. Under my sandals the gravel raced by. I leaned forward and held on tight as we drew up alongside Gloria and her driver.

“Let me off!” I could see Gloria screaming, but either the boy couldn’t hear her or he was ignoring her, because both of our motorcycles only went faster. I could see Gloria close her eyes and bite into the guy’s jacket. I couldn’t stop laughing, and the wind blew into my eyes and made my breaths come in guarded gasps.

The longer the ride went on, the more worried I got. Why did we do this? We could end up anywhere.

But then, as suddenly as it began, it was over. They pulled to a quick stop along the curb in front of Gloria’s grandparents' house, right where they had picked us up. We climbed gingerly off the bikes and the boys yelled something at us in French, both of them laughing. Then they zoomed off. Gloria and I sat down on the sidewalk and put our heads back, the sun shining warm on our closed eyes. We were still catching our breath from the excitement. I could still feel the motorcycle humming on the inside of my legs.

The rest of the summer would race away with us, much the same way those boys did on that Montreal day. During August of 1965 the Watts Riots began in Los Angeles and news bulletins about the Vietnam War seared into our minds.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The Beatles performed the first stadium rock concert in New York City, and it seemed like the biggest thing ever — somehow Maria got tickets through her mom. We took the bus to Shea Stadium and found our seats, way up in the bleachers. The Beatles looked like tiny ants. All I remember is screaming the entire time, at the top of my lungs.

Late that night we got on the bus, exhausted and barely able to keep our eyes open. Maria spent the night at my house, but we could barely speak from losing our voices at the concert.

From that point on, I was a Beatle-maniac. I bought all their albums and t-shirts and dreamed of meeting them in person, perhaps having a love affair with John Lennon or Paul McCartney (I went back and forth regarding that on a weekly basis). I dressed like them and learned every song.

It was a monumental time in the musical history of our nation, and I was somehow a part of it.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I walked toward the bus station through the winter morning, pulling the scarf up higher over my mouth and trying to draw deeper into my winter coat. The cold air made my face tingle, and I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to stay warm. The streets were freezing and hard, yet somehow the cold made everything feel alive. This was the city in the winter.

Finally I climbed into the first of three buses I had to take to get to college, and the warm air melted me. I leaned my head against the cold glass window, the heat bursting out from under the seat. Soon the bus rolled out on to the street and, just as I was about to doze off, it arrived at my stop, so I pried myself out of the warmth and stood in the freezing cold again, waiting. The next bus came, and the whole process was repeated.

That entire first semester I took all the classes I really wanted to take, none of the required general education courses, just acting courses and theater courses on technique and improvisation. They could not teach me enough — I wanted to learn it all. Class after class, hour after hour, and I loved it, breathed it in, consumed it. On the bus, I imagined that I was on stage. At home, I locked the door to my room and pretended I was on a Broadway stage.

Then came the end of the day and the cold waiting, the warm buses, all the way home again. Some of the time, most of the time, I would get home after dark, take the elevator up to my parents' apartment, go into my room, and look out on the city lighting up the snow-covered sidewalks. The cold went right to my bones, but I loved every minute of it.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

At the end of my first semester in college, my brother Hymie and I boarded the subway and took a one-hour journey into Manhattan, through the snow. It was Christmas Eve, and when we came up from under the streets the city was alive with the holidays: there were Christmas trees and lights everywhere, bells were ringing and Christmas music burst out through every door.

It was the first time we had ever celebrated Christmas.

When we arrived at Maria’s house everything was bright and smelled incredible: spices and cider and red wine. The house was full of people, all there for Christmas Eve dinner, and loud voices seemed to come from every room, voices full of happiness and friendship. Loud music played from somewhere in the house and everyone had a cocktail in one hand and an hors d’oeuvres in the other. Hymie’s eyes opened wide, as if his sense of sight just couldn’t take it all in.

Maria’s cheeks were flushed from the warmth and the party, and her parents welcomed us. Her mother walked from room to room, elegant, the perfect hostess, and her father was appropriately removed from the entertaining, chatting intellectually with the other men. Neither of them seemed very religious, but they were Catholic and filled their house with all the traditional decorations. Mistletoe hung from a doorway and there was a Santa Claus in every room. The Christmas tree reached to the ceiling and was covered with tinsel and lights and ornaments.

Then came the meal, with everyone gathered around their huge table. Turkey, ham, all the trimmings, shimmering wine, and then Christmas cookies and spiced cakes for dessert. By the end I was so full I didn’t think I would be able to move.

Hymie and I stayed overnight, each of us placed in a plush bed with warm comforters. I fell asleep so filled with Christmas that I nearly believed in Santa Claus. When we woke up on Christmas morning I could smell cinnamon rolls baking in the oven, and the aroma of fresh coffee sifting through the house. We exchanged our gifts with Maria and her parents.

When I close my eyes and think about that morning, I can still smell it. Whenever I think of Christmas, I think of that day.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

For a moment I looked through the open classroom window — a spring day fell down through the buildings and bright sunlight bounced off the budding trees. Spring in the city lets people breathe again — everyone is relieved to be outside and feeling the air on their skin. Cars cruise the avenues, windows rolled down. Just as I began to daydream, the professor’s voice caught my attention and I remembered I was in class, sitting front and center.

I adjusted in my seat, pulled my miniskirt down, but it didn’t help to cover my legs. I leaned forward and stared into my professor’s eyes, intent, wanting him to know that I cared about French more than any of his other students. Even though I probably didn’t. For the most part, I only cared that he saw me — I couldn’t stop thinking about him: at night, during the day, on the bus, walking to my classes. Maria and Gloria probably got tired of hearing me talk about him.

He was gorgeous, and I was young and in love and he spoke French.

He paid me a lot of attention, this European-looking, first-year teacher. He was 22 or 23 years old, medium height, with jet black hair. He had olive skin and dark eyes, and I wanted him to look at me, just me, so I flirted shamelessly. But he was courteous and a good teacher and while I imagined that he occasionally sent me a special look, I suppose he was mostly professional and appropriate.

Then, as the semester reached its end, he started to respond. Soon he was flirting back with me, making little comments that teachers probably shouldn’t make, talking to me after class. On the last day of the semester I gave him my phone number on a slip of paper.

“Now that I’m not your student anymore, you can call me, right?” I asked.

He just smiled.

“I’ll give you a call,” he said.

Every night I waited, waited, waited for him to call.

“Mom, any messages for me?” I would ask when I came into the apartment late.

Nothing.

Then, two weeks after school ended, he called.

“Hi, Lily,” he said, and just the sound of his voice doubled my heart rate. “You want to go to a party with me?”

All the excitement building up made me want to scream, but I very politely said “Yes, of course,” and got the details from him. All week I imagined the romantic relationship we would have, the way we would look at each other, what it would be like to kiss him, to be close to him. I imagined this relationship developing into something serious, something worthwhile.

He picked me up, and we went to this party that some friends of his were having in Queens, not far from the school. We were having a good time, dancing and drinking. The music was loud and it was a typical party in the 1960s — lots of joints making the rounds, lots of beer and whisky and clouded conversations that felt cosmopolitan and important.

But this professor of mine just kept drinking shot after shot until his eyes were glazed and his words stumbled over each other.

“Come dance with me,” he blurted out.

My knees felt weak, but I stood up and walked with him. The music beat against my skin and pounded inside my head. The lights seemed brighter, and I could hear voices in the shadows talking and laughing and having fun. Cool night air rushed in through windows left barely open.

We slid out on to the dance floor, but he looked confused, head cocked to the side, and suddenly he was throwing up all over the dance floor, right there beside me. For a moment I was a teenager again on a hot summer day and my father was stumbling into the community swimming pool, shouting my name in his drunken voice.

“My Leiala! Where are you? My little Leiala?”

And I wanted to cry and punch this French professor in the face because in his drunkenness he had taken this whole fantasy I had crafted, this whole idea of what my life would be like with him, and he shattered it. He took the feeling I had of being grown-up and dashed it to pieces, and replaced it with the same old feelings of childish embarrassment and being forced to help people out of difficult situations they had gotten themselves into. All of the beautiful nights out, the suave restaurants, the romantic walks, everything I had hoped for suddenly closed in and vanished like a movie screen going black.

I looked around the crowded party for a friend I knew, someone I had recognized earlier in the evening.

“Can you give me a ride home tonight?” I asked them, trying not to let the tears of humiliation fall.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

During that summer after my first year in college, Maria and I continued our Actor’s Guild lessons, and part of it was apprenticing to an off-broadway production. We spent long nights together, rehearsing, going over all these new acting techniques, and studying. We both decided to audition for bit parts in a Greek play, Antigone, at the Sheridan Square Playhouse. Maybe this would lead to our big break. Maybe we would meet a director that would pick us out from the crowd. At the least, it would look good on a résumé.

We both tried out, and I got a part, but it was all bittersweet because Maria didn’t. For the first time, I would be on my own, but it was important for me. I wanted to prove I had the guts to do it, to go out in the acting world and succeed on my own.

I don’t think I was that good in my little part, speaking with the chorus, but it made me feel important because I was able to make friends with some of the other actors. Riding the subway from the Bronx to Greenwich Village on Fridays and Saturdays, dressed in my wide-leg bellbottom jeans, Jesus sandals, and flower-child shirt, I felt like I had what it would take. I could really do it.

I would hop off the subway train and emerge into the world, my hair ironed, briefcase in hand, headed to my off-broadway gig. Carrying that script felt prestigious. I, a Jewish kid from the Bronx, had made it that close to Broadway.

What couldn’t I do?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“Mom, you should come up and see Maria and me. We’ve got parts in Oklahoma!”

Maria and I both went to summer stock at Woodstock, about 80 miles north of the city, and worked backstage: we built sets, did bit parts, and experienced the backstage chaos and processes that can turn a normal play into a great performance. It was mostly all behindthe-scenes type stuff, but we loved the environment and being away from the city on our own.

I made friends with all the actors, and there was this little Italian place where we would go eat when we could scrape together enough money. One night we sat there eating when I noticed someone resembling Bob Dylan. I just kept looking at him over and over. Then I realized — it was him! It was Bob Dylan! I freaked out. But I was far too nervous to go over and ask him for his autograph, so I just sat there fidgeting at my table, wishing I had the nerve.

Mother eventually came up to see us act. It was so important to me that she was proud of what I was doing. I just wanted to make her happy, and whenever I saw her smiling and clapping in the audience I felt like I was doing something important. Something worthwhile.

I still have a photograph from those days of Maria and I leaning close together in our gingham dresses. I was feeling so good about myself in those days, happy with who I was and who I was becoming. When I got home from Woodstock, my father was still working nights and drinking, my mother still running around with her own friends. But family life was beginning to fade as my own identity began to develop, like one of those Polaroid pictures coming into view.

Even with all the things going on in 1966, I don’t think I realized I was in the middle of some kind of cultural or musical revolution. There are things about our lives that we cannot see properly without the perspective of years, decades even. The only things I knew for sure had to do with how much I loved music and acting, how much I loved my life in the city and my wonderful friends, Maria and Gloria.

Maria and I would walk through the Village in 1966, just wandering through the park and hearing a little jam session here, a jam session there. I would go through the park with my guitar in a gig bag, feeling so in touch with life. Maria and I would sit down under a tree and start playing, and before we knew it a small group had gathered around us, singing along to the songs they knew, just listening with their eyes closed to the ones they didn’t know. This was life in Greenwich Village in 1966 — peaceful and musical and fantastic.

Like a fairy tale.

I can still feel the air. I can hear the breeze rustling the branches in between songs, I can still feel the way my heart would jump a little when a few new strangers would sit down to listen to us sing. The guys’ beards were long and bushy and the girls’ hair straight and even. I wasn’t famous at all, and neither was Maria, but that’s what the park was about — you could be listening to a nobody with a great voice, or you could be listening to Judy Collins or Steve Crider or Sam Bush. Richard Greene or Gene Yellin.

The Village wasn’t as pretty back then as it is now — there were still a lot of shops, but it was rough around the edges. Yet it was a place for anybody who wanted to sing or play their guitar, harmonica, banjo, anything. It was a summertime sort of place, and we’d stay there until the sun went down, then head to a bar or a coffee shop to listen some more.

I don’t remember the first time it happened, but Maria and I started getting calls from people who heard us singing in the Village, asking us to perform at parties or open nights at their bars and shops. It was a gradual transition, but it would lead to bigger things, both professionally and personally.

Things I couldn’t even imagine.

CHAPTER FIVE

Maria and I looked at each other, nodded our heads, and started playing. We leaned forward on the sofa, and our voices combined and swirled in the air, sounding out through the small flat. Just the thought of singing with Maria back then makes me want to close my eyes and start humming. We really had something special.

The talking at the party began to quiet as everyone turned and watched us. Some people leaned against the wall, holding their drinks and snacks; others sat down on the other sofas and chairs, or crosslegged on the floor. The environment was very relaxed, and we felt completely at home. We had been performing together for over a year at that point, starting in the isolated stairwells of Carnegie Mellon, then for our friends, then in front of impromptu crowds in the Village. Now there were people calling us, asking if we would sing at their parties or bars.

We played long into the night, and sometimes the crowd listened the entire time. At other times they mingled and talked quietly, but it didn’t bother us. We were so focused on our music. We’d go from song to song, some popular favorites, others that we had written. As the night came to a close we began putting our guitars away, feeling tired and exhilarated.

Many times, at the end of those parties, folks came up to us, wanting to talk or find out more about our music or ask us to play for them somewhere. Sometimes another musician would sit down beside us and we’d talk shop — those were my favorite conversations, discussing music and songwriting and the sounds of other bands.

I suppose we weren’t that surprised when this small man approached — he had dark hair and was very charismatic.

“Hi! Maria? Lily? Nice to meet you. I’m Stu Crane.”

We both smiled and shook his hand.

“I think you’ve got something going on here, a very interesting sound. You both just sound so beautiful.”

We smiled again. He was very nice, and he had this aura of excitement about him that, for a moment, made you believe everything he said was possible.

“Do you know Jay and the Americans? We’ve had some radio hits. A great band. Anyway, I’m their manager.”

I looked at Maria. We had heard Jay and the Americans on the radio.

“I think I might be able to get you an audition with Columbia Records,” the man continued.

As soon as he said Columbia Records, this voice of reason came into my head. It seemed almost silly, that this man might think that Columbia Records would be interested in us. It all felt like a harmless joke — after all, Dylan recorded with Columbia Records. Bob Dylan. THE Bob Dylan.

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “We’d love to.”

As he walked away with our phone numbers, Maria and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes. I guess both of us felt excited to talk to someone like that, but we couldn’t imagine it was possible. I figured he was just an excitable little man blowing smoke, or flirting with us. There we were, two young girls who didn’t have a clue about what we were doing. Neither of us gave that conversation a second thought — we figured we’d never hear from him again.

About a week later, though, he did call, and he gave us the phone number for an entertainment attorney. She had written some of her own songs and knew the industry well. She felt our image had potential, with Simon and Garfunkel popularizing the folk scene and people really going for the harmonizing duet sound. She worked with some major acts and got us an appointment for an audition with John Hammond at Columbia Records.

Suddenly it was real.

John Hammond had discovered Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, Bob Dylan, and Joni Mitchell. Now it would be us playing for him, Lily and Maria. We just about freaked out.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I spent two or three hours picking out something to wear, my hands shaking. Everything I put on felt funny or uncomfortable, or looked weird, and we had to look the perfect part. I took some time out from choosing a wardrobe to iron my hair, and eventually I chose a short skirt with a loose top and boots. I was living in two places those days, sometimes with my parents and sometimes with Maria, so a lot of my stuff was divided up between houses.

When I met up with Maria I thought she looked just gorgeous — she wore a dress, too, with a jacket, and her long, dark hair was straight, hanging down her back. She had such a nice figure, and her deep-set, dark eyes were striking. We both wore long, beaded necklaces, and I had my Star of David around my neck, something I had worn for years. I guess maybe I wore it for luck.

“Are you ready?” she asked me.

I nodded, the biggest smile on my face, the most enormous butterflies in my stomach nearly lifting me off the ground.

We got on to the subway at Maria’s parents’ apartment to ride the 23 blocks to West 57th Street, where the Columbia offices and recording studios were located. When we walked up in front of that massive building, we had to stop for a moment — I was out of breath and nervous beyond belief. Neither one of us knew what to expect. Would we play in a recording studio or an office or on a stage somewhere? How many people would be there — 3, 10, 15? Who would be there? I was very nervous about somehow being embarrassed or humiliated by these professionals. Would they laugh when they heard us, apologize, insist it was some kind of mistake? We stood there outside the building, just killing time.

Maria looked over at me. “Are you ready to go in, Lily?”

I nodded, took a deep breath, and then we went inside.

One of the women from the front desk escorted us to a side office and led us to two chairs on one side of the room. We pulled our guitars out and started tuning them, not really saying anything. I don’t know what Maria was thinking, but I was trying to decide what songs would be best for us to play. Then we sat there, waiting, whispering to one another.

A group of men came in and they all sat down. One of the gentlemen spoke up. “Thanks for coming, girls. Can you play something for us?”

I have no idea what we sang. I only remember that my mouth was so dry I couldn’t believe words were coming out. The strings vanished from under my fingers — all feeling was completely gone. Numb. It was as if I were somewhere outside of my body, watching these two 19-year-old girls auditioning for Columbia Records, and I couldn’t believe they had the nerve to do it. And I couldn’t believe they were us.

There was nothing between us and the businessmen, just our voices and the sound of our guitars. No microphones or speakers. And they all sat there very politely, very quietly, just listening — I don’t remember if they moved at all to the music, or what their faces looked like as we played. I was in another time and place. I was there, yet I wasn’t there.

As we packed up our things, the gentlemen spoke in hushed tones. At some point one of them spoke up.

“We definitely like your sound and would like to make an album with you. We’re offering a $10,000 advance that you can use for recording, and you can do your own songs.”

I wanted to scream, but I didn’t. We knew that Stu would handle all the details. I don’t even remember saying anything, but I know that somehow we got our things together and walked out of that office. How did I walk? My legs were weak, and I could barely breathe. When we got out on to 57th street we just looked at each other in disbelief, then started jumping up and down and going crazy. We had a recording contract. We would have our own album. Would we be the next big thing? Would Lily and Maria become a household name?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I think in those days I found a lot of value in throwing myself into things — it helped give me an identity and avoid the unpleasant parts of my life, like my father’s problems with alcohol, my insecurities regarding my scoliosis, or my parents' relationship. When something came along that I could throw all of my energy into, I did it wholeheartedly, without reservation. That was how I escaped: in high school it was acting; then, in college, it became playing music with Maria. Later it would be other things.

I could tell the recording process was going to take a lot of time and energy, and I just couldn’t imagine myself going into it with everything I had if I was still riding three buses to college and back every day of the week. It didn’t seem possible. The only option I could see was dropping out of Queen’s, but at first I couldn’t gather the courage to tell Mother, even though I knew that was the decision I was making.

For a few days I walked around, pinching myself, unable to believe this recording contract was real, unable to face Mother with the news. I felt so conflicted — one moment I was on a complete high, thinking about the contract, but the next moment I would plunge into these miniature bouts with depression, scared to death of telling mother I was dropping out of college.

One night I decided the time had come.

She was lying in her bed, in that little bedroom off of the kitchen. My father was still at work, and there really wasn’t any point in going around Mother on this one anyway — she would find out one way or the other, and I was pretty sure I would have to face her wrath in either case. So I eased open their accordion door and peeked inside.

“Mom,” I said, standing in the doorway. “We’ve got to talk about something. And I don’t want you to say anything until you hear me out.”

She sat up in bed and looked me straight in the eye, which intimidated me way more than those executives in the Columbia Records office.

I started again, reluctantly. “This record contract is a big, really big, deal, and I want to be able to go for it. The recording could take weeks, even months, and when it comes out we might have to go on tour. I want to take a leave of absence from college.”

“No,” she said, interrupting me. “If you leave now, you’ll never go back. You’ll never finish your education.”

I knew that for her to interrupt me she must be upset. I looked at her sitting there, and I already knew what I was going to do, and it hurt me to see that no matter what I said we would be at odds about it. I was old enough to make my own decisions, but I so desperately wanted her blessing. I wanted her to see what a big deal this was.

But inside she was still a little Jewish girl who hadn’t gone past the fifth grade, and she wanted so much more for her children. She wanted us to get ahead, to progress, and she knew that getting an education played a huge part in that. They could take away your livelihood, they could take away your liberty — she had seen all of these things happen. But they could never take away what you learned. Those things were embedded in your mind forever.

“But, Mom, I will go back! I know what I’m doing! You don’t understand what a big opportunity this is — this is one in a million! People dream about getting chances like this for their whole lives and it never happens. Maria and I, we’ve got it, right here in our hands! I want to make the most of it. Please, Mom, try to understand.”

“It’s not bigger than an education,” she said from there in her bed, her voice even and unyielding. “You’d be making a big, big mistake. The biggest mistake of your life.”

I could feel the tears pushing up into my eyes.

“Well, I have to try it. I just have to.”

I walked out of the bedroom crying and torn between what I knew I had to do and what I knew my mother desperately wanted. I stopped in the kitchen. I knew what I was going to do and didn’t want to drag it out any further, so I turned around and stood back in the doorway again.

“Well, I’m sorry, Mom. I just have to do this. I have to try.”

The next day I filed for a leave of absence from Queens College. Mother and I didn’t talk for a long time, and the tension in the house was thick. I probably stayed at Maria’s house more often in those days, especially once the recording started. I felt sad that Mother couldn’t come around to my way of thinking, but I still knew it was the right thing to do.

I guess Mother was right in one respect — I never did go back to Queen’s. But it was an opportunity for a life-changing experience, and I took it. After all, my dad was doing his own thing, and Mom was, too. Everyone in our family lived their own life. Even Hymie seemed to fly under my radar — soon he’d be on his own at college. There seemed to be so little holding us together.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Maria and I began selecting songs and working up arrangements in the spring and summer of 1967. An 18-year-old guitar player from Indiana named Steve Kreider helped us arrange and rehearse songs and worked up guitar parts. At first we practiced in Maria’s living room, then in an old loft near Chambers Street that was a crash pad for a Texas band. It seemed like every waking moment was spent practicing — our lives were consumed with making music, our music, and I couldn’t imagine trying to do school at the same time.

Our practice times leading up to recording in the studio were so intense that Maria beat her leg black and blue with the tambourine. We wanted to be ready.

Finally the recording began. Walking into the studio, with its huge recording console and professional microphones and headsets, felt like an out-of-body experience. Our producer was Gary Sherman — he had arranged music for the Drifters and produced Freddie Scott. Our engineer was Roy Halee — he engineered Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” as well as everything that Simon and Garfunkel and the Byrds had done.

Sometimes we would sing the same song over and over and over again. When we would finish a song, or part of a song, we’d look up, hoping it was good enough.

“Let’s try that one more time, girls,” they’d say, and we’d start over.

We worked on that album for three months, two to three days a week. It didn’t take Maria and I long to find out that, even though we were doing our own material, the album wasn’t going to sound anything like what we had expected. And we were too young and inexperienced to jump in and say, “Wait, this isn’t what we want,” or, “Hold on, we don’t like how that sounds.” Are you kidding? We were 19, maybe 20 by then, and we were working with professionals. We trusted them to create the right product.

It would be our biggest mistake.

Our strength, prior to the recording, was in our harmonies. That’s what caught people’s attention in the park or at the parties we played — the combination of our voices somehow created this unique sound, something that made people stop and listen. Our harmonies were pure and clean and crisp, something special, especially when it was just our guitars and us.

That’s one reason Maria’s parents thought Columbia Records, and especially John Hammond, would be the perfect fit for us. He had recorded Dylan’s pining tones and included only his guitar and harmonica — a powerful combination, especially in its simplicity. But Gary thought we needed orchestration, and lots of it, adding string arrangements and rock effects.

We didn’t like the first playbacks and re-recorded some of it, but it didn’t get much closer to what we liked or expected. Lots of people around us complained that the album was overproduced and needed less of Gary’s production and more of just our voices and guitars. We started out as a folk duo, but the album sounded more like folk rock, even acid rock. I’m not even sure what you would call it — you’d have to hear it for yourself.

I guess everyone always has different opinions about how any album is put together. Even the name drew some controversial discussions — we had chosen Lily and Maria, and even though it had a nice sound to it, Maria’s parents made it clear they would have preferred Maria and Lily.

But the album was finally finished, and it was time to promote it. Columbia Records released the first single, “Everybody Knows,” and we all waited to see what would happen next.

We worked hard promoting the album, playing wherever we could. Most of our nights, especially on the weekends, were booked. We started playing gigs in the Village at places like the Village Cafe, and even auditioned at the Bitter End for the chance to play some shows on the college circuit. We met Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys there — soon they would be opening for bands like the Doors, and later that year they released a single that would launch Linda’s career.

We didn’t go on tour, but we did earn a few college gigs from the Bitter End audition, and when our single took off in Cleveland we went there and did a live television show.

Meanwhile, we kept pushing our sound around New York City. We visited the Upper East side apartment of Tonight Show band leader Skitch Henderson a few times — there was a studio on one floor at a party attended by Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme. I remember playing in dresses we had made especially for that occasion.

All of this was going on in the larger context of America in the ’60s, yet somehow Maria and I managed to avoid the drug scene. If there was anything we did in excess, it was devouring Haagen-Daas rum raisin ice cream on Maria’s couch after a long night of playing. Don’t get me wrong, we smoked marijuana from time to time, and drank on occasion, but neither of us ever got swept away by it.

Very little about those years feels real to me — it happened fast, and we were so young that it felt like a game, a huge party, and we were just along for the ride. The parties, the fans, the music — all of it came in a whirlwind. Yet with all we were doing, none of it ever translated financially. We never saw a dime of the $10,000 advance from the label — that all went straight into the costs of recording, which had mounted for no good reason. That meant Maria and I were both living off of our parents’ money, and that couldn’t last forever.

We both decided that while the album was being distributed we should get part-time jobs. Soon, both of us were working at Bellevue hospital, handling files, arranging records, taking the occasional phone call. It wasn’t the glorious rock star life we had hoped for, but there was something nice about earning my own money, working my way through life at a job I didn’t necessarily like while still working hard on our music.

Maria decided to move into her own place, a little walk-up on Avenue A in the East Village. Her parents had moved to Los Angeles, where her mother was teaching ballet at UCLA. Maria didn’t want to move — we both wanted to see what would happen with our album. We both believed so much in what we were doing that we would do anything to pursue it, whether that meant dropping out of college or moving out on our own.

I still lived with my parents, but I stayed with Maria a lot. The apartment was basically one room with a bed behind a partition and a toilet in a little closet. The bathtub sat right in the middle of the room, and there was an old gas heater that had to be turned off at night so the gas fumes wouldn’t overcome you. We’d wake up on those cold winter mornings to a fine layer of ice on the inside of the windows.

It felt like we were playing house. I sat at the window and watched all the commotion in the Village, and in that same room we had the kitchen table, the bathtub, and the bed! The bathtub was one of those old claw foot bathtubs with a curtain that hung from the ceiling on a runner, and you could pull it around the tub for privacy. We fixed that place up with anything we could find on the street: old armchairs or throwaway rugs and lamps, and eventually it became this getaway, a perfect little flat. I preferred it to my own house, in a way.

There were only two things we didn’t like about the place. One was carrying the groceries, or anything really, up all those flights of steps. I could have done without all those steps. The second thing was an old lady downstairs, a self-appointed concierge, who screamed at Maria whenever she brought a guy into the building.

After a few months, Maria decided she wanted a place farther uptown. We talked about me possibly moving in with her, and I decided I would. It was a huge decision for me to move out of my mom and dad’s house, but Maria and I spent a lot of time together. And if we lived together, we could play our music nonstop.

We got a small, 10th-floor apartment on 84th between Riverside and Columbus. The living room and bedroom were one area, but there was a small kitchen and bathroom that were separate. The main area was large enough that we could put two couches on either side of the room, one of which opened up into a bed, and during the day we would use both of them as couches. But the thing I remember most about that apartment was the rocking chair.

Maria had always had a rocking chair, wherever she lived, and she had this habit of rocking. She would sit there, rocking back and forth, back and forth, holding a cigarette, thinking about a song. She called it conkling, rocking back and forth like Ray Charles, and when I saw her doing it I knew she was thinking up some fantastic song or new theory to share with the world.

I can still picture her with her eyes closed, slowly smoking a cigarette, her whole body swaying front and back.

That was where we were living when, in the cold early months of 1968, we were booked into a legendary little spot in Greenwich Village called Gerde’s Folk City. What happened in that tiny club would change my life.

CHAPTER SIX

Maria and I had just finished a Monday night show at Gerde’s, a small coffeehouse on 4th Street that had promoted folk music since the late 1950s. Their Monday nights started off as amateur nights, but after spawning folk legends like Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton, Judy Collins, and Arlo Guthrie, the place became a big hangout and was seen as an important launching point for the careers of folk musicians.

Anyway, Maria and I were cleaning up in the dressing room with barely enough room to turn around. It smelled damp and moldy and wreaked of old cigarette smoke and dill pickles, yet something about the bustle and environment of those changing rooms made me feel like I had really made it. Bob Dylan had probably smoked cigarettes in that room, and that turned what would normally be a sour odor into the smell of hope and success.

Through the door I could hear the band we were sharing the bill with: the Greenbriar Boys. They picked away on their bluegrass banjos, and the guitar twanged in a way it wouldn’t for us folk singers. I didn’t understand their kind of music, but the skill it took to interweave and play the way they did blew both Maria and I away. Folk music came from the English ballads, and seemed to carry a weight and depth to it that sometimes made me ache. But bluegrass music was primal and authentic — everything that needed to be said was right there for everyone to see. It fascinated me.

Maria and I came up out of the dressing room into the main area of Gerde’s — it was a small, eccentric place with a tiny stage. The whole bar probably couldn’t hold one hundred people. We grabbed a table and ordered the tuna fish sandwiches on rye bread (they had the best rye bread in the world) with dill pickles, and I got a Brandy Alexander. I felt so liberated in that place, having a drink, smelling the cigarette smoke and the freedom, people coming up and telling us how much they enjoyed the show.

“What’s the banjo player’s name?” I asked someone.

“Joe Isaacs.”

“Joe,” I said to myself. He was adorable.

After the show Maria and I hung around, and we ended up talking to the Greenbriar Boys. We got to meet some of the members of the band — Frank Wakefield was the leader, a vocalist and mandolin player. Their lead guitar player was called Buck. He asked me out later, but I turned him down — I was kind of stuck on Joe.

Joe was 21 years old, just a Kentucky hillbilly all the way, with jetblack hair and dark eyes and one of those Kentucky accents that caught me off guard. I really loved the way he talked. He was Mr. Personality on the stage, just bouncing around, and he was charismatic off stage, too, friendly with everyone and flirting nonstop. Frank would often introduce Joe as “Joe Isaacs, the only Jewboy in the group,” and that got my attention right away. I assumed that with the last name of Isaacs he must be Jewish — when I found out he wasn’t, it only made me want to date him more.

“Hey, Lily,” Joe asked me one night after the show. “You want to have dinner sometime?”

Then one night, down in that dark, musty-smelling dressing room, he came to talk. I asked him where he was from. He asked me about New York. We moved closer, and he flirted with me. Before he left we had kissed, and I thought I might just fly up those steps.

We started going out a lot. I was infatuated with him right away. He came up to our apartment now and then — from the beginning our relationship was passionate. He was romantic, and I loved being in his arms. He never seemed afraid of anything, and I felt safe with him.

“Will you marry me, Lily?” he asked playfully one day.

I laughed it off, but his playful self-confidence disarmed me. I knew it was going to be an intense relationship. I couldn’t picture how things would ever work out between a Jewish girl from the Bronx and a bluegrass singer from Kentucky, but that didn’t stop my mind from trying to figure it out.

Soon we were together every day. But then, seemingly out of nowhere, the Greenbriar Boys' six-week engagement at Gerde’s came to an end, and Joe went back to Ohio where he was living at the time.

“Don’t worry, Lily,” he said with that trademark smile. “I’ll come back and visit you as soon as I can.”

I wondered if he would, or if that was just as off the cuff as his proposal. But as soon as he was gone, there was one thing that I knew — I was very deeply involved with Joe emotionally, and there would be no forgetting him. What had started as flirtation and enchantment had quickly moved to abandoning myself to that great physical attraction — I was young and hormonal and foolish, and things like consequences bore no weight in the way I thought.

There was nothing at all rational about it — when Joe was in the city, everything was light and airy and fun, but as soon as he left the balloon was deflated. I spent my evenings at home, waiting for him to call. Depression pushed in around the edges of my mind. New York by itself just wasn’t enough anymore.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I picked up a few more odd jobs like the one I had at Bellevue Hospital, trying to make a little money, and my days gathered pace and a certain routine. I took the bus across the city to my various jobs, my eyes occasionally heavy from the previous night’s show. I wouldn’t be surprised if my mother walked around the house those days with that “I told you so” look in her eyes — the album wasn’t really taking off, and now I wasn’t in school, just working part-time jobs and playing a few gigs here and there.

But if she did have that look in her eyes, I didn’t notice. I just sat around, either at my apartment or at my parents’ house, waiting for the phone to ring.

Finally, a few weeks later, Joe called.

“Hey, Lily,” he said, and the sound of his voice was so fresh. No one I knew had that accent, so when I heard him talk it was instant flashback to the times we had together in the city.

“Hey, Joe. Where’ve you been?”

“Oh, just here and there. I’m coming to the city for a visit next week. Can you pick me up?”

I didn’t drive at the time, so I took a cab out and picked him up, and everything was the same again, as if he had never left New York. The more time we spent together, the more I realized there was no one like him — a southern hillbilly, comfortable in his own skin and a self-taught mechanic and musician. Most of our conversations revolved around his background and what it was like growing up in Kentucky.

He stayed with Maria and me for a week in that cramped little apartment, and it was the time of my life. We fell into our old habits of talking late into the night, making out, and doing things around town. I didn’t want him to leave. But he did.

Joe flew back to Ohio, and we kept in touch by phone pretty often. About this time I had to move out of the apartment with Maria and back in with my parents. I didn’t have the money to stay on my own, and my parents couldn’t afford to support me. I kept working my part-time jobs and stayed with Maria in Manhattan when we had shows.

But my focus was changing — I cared less and less about our album, and more and more about my conversations with Joe. I lived for the next call or hints that he’d drop about coming to visit again. Then, out of the blue, he stopped calling. No word, no reason, just silence. My subway ride home from work was filled with questions about whether or not he had called, and when I got into my parents’ apartment I asked the same thing.

“Anyone call?”

Week after week went by without any word. Sometimes I would just sit, on the bus or at work or backstage, crying my eyes out, not able to function because of that weight of rejection. The weeks turned into months, and I could tell mother worried about me. I worried about myself. But there was nothing I could do to get out of that downward spiral.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“Joe? Joe, is this you?”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s me. What’s up, Lily? How are you?”

I had to sit down. I don’t know why I kept trying to get in touch with him all those months, why I didn’t just give up. I guess I just couldn’t believe that all those good times we had in the Village were for nothing, especially after he came and visited and we had such a good time.

“What’s up? How am I? Joe, we haven’t spoken in months! Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick about you! What’s wrong? Why don’t you call me anymore?”

Just silence. Then he finally told me — there was someone else. I could feel myself falling into this bottomless pit.

“Lily? I have to go. I’m glad to hear from you.”

Perhaps that phone call allowed me to hit bottom, to reach a point where I could take inventory of my existence and start again. I got busy with life, writing songs and playing gigs with Maria, working longer hours at the hospital. I tried to fill my life with activities, anything that would help me not to think about him, if even for just a few minutes at a time.

Then, just as I began to settle back into life, Joe started calling again.

“Hey, Lily, it’s Joe.”

“Hi, Joe,” I said, trying not to go back to how I had felt before, but an old ache couldn’t help but rise to the surface. “What are you doing?”

“I just wanted to say hi. How are you?”

“Oh, I’m doing okay, I guess. How are things in Ohio?”

Joe grew quiet for a moment.

“That’s kind of why I’m calling. Things aren’t working out for me here. I can understand if you don’t want anything to do with me. But I wanted to let you know I’m coming back to New York, regardless. I really liked it there, and I want to play music.”

And again I let him back in — not quickly at first, but the red flags were coming down. I was so attracted to him and what he brought to my life that I was willing to overlook these other issues. Since he was coming to New York whether or not I wanted him to made it easier for me to spend time with him. We talked things over and eventually decided to pick up where we’d left off.

Then he was back in New York and it felt like nothing had ever changed. Joe got an apartment in the Village with some friends he’d met on his earlier visits — one of them was Charlie Blake, a bluegrass musician, and the two of them put together a band and began singing around town. He also got a job working in a leather factory, just to pay the bills.

Those six months in New York, when Joe came back, were some of the best in our time together. The city felt more alive than ever, and we would roam the streets listening to new bands and fresh sounds. In the evenings, if Maria and I or Joe weren’t at a show, we’d hang out in Maria’s apartment playing music and harmonizing. The three of us sounded really good together, and we enjoyed each other’s company.

Joe taught us all the old bluegrass favorites — he was a walking encyclopedia of the genre, having sung lead and played guitar for Ralph Stanley before teaming up with Frank Wakefield. When he picked at the banjo Maria and I would try to watch his fingers and learn the rhythms, but mostly we were mesmerized.

I learned so much about him during that time. He had a mind for anything mechanical, more than anyone I had ever met: he was great with his hands and had learned to take apart a car engine and put it back together when he was five or six years old. He could play any number of instruments.

And all of this he had learned back in the holler where he grew up in Kentucky, and the more I learned about that remote place, the more it took on some sort of fantastical trait. I could hardly believe he was the youngest of 17 children, or that he grew up in a log cabin his father built in the woods, with an outhouse and wood stoves and no electricity or running water. It sounded to me like some third-world country the Peace Corps might send you to. He promised to take me there someday.

As I saw him adjusting to life in the big city, a maternal part of me came out. I wanted to help, to give him some of the skills we took for granted. I guess I thought I could make him more of a city slicker — that I could help him become what I wanted him to be, instead of letting him be who he really was.

I taught him about riding on the subway and explained why you couldn’t be friendly with everyone you saw. I showed him how to be wary in different circumstances on the streets of New York. His generosity and bravery would have him walking the Harlem streets at night, talking to anyone that crossed his path, and his accent was a dead giveaway to his innocence and naiveté.

Just as I thought I was changing him, he was changing me. When he talked about his parents and extended family in Kentucky, I felt a longing rise up in me for this kind of community, the kind of family feeling I just didn’t get with my parents. When he talked about hog killing and making lye soap and bathing in the creek and riding a horse, hoeing corn, or gathering tobacco, I became very enamored with that backwoods life.

“We have a kerosene lantern in the living room,” he told me, “that glows off the cabin beams, and a wood stove to cook on — the smell of wood smoke is always lingering about the house.”

My fascination with the mountain folks and their way of life fostered this seed of an idea in me — I began to see those beautiful faraway places in a different way. I began to fantasize about going south, educating the children and Kentucky folk about life outside the mountains, helping them follow in Joe’s footsteps and make their way in the big world. I suddenly thought I might have a lot to offer.

As Joe and I grew closer, Maria and I began to pull apart. Maria liked Joe, but she definitely had her concerns about how stormy our relationship was. Joe and I loved each other fiercely, but that passion could just as easily swing into angry, tearful scenes. Maria knew Joe didn’t have a mean streak, but she sometimes commented on how much he drank.

I found out later that Maria had also commented on our relationship to a friend.

“I know she is gone,” Maria said of me. “And I know there is nothing I can say or do. It’s just her fate.”

It didn’t help that Maria’s and my recording career was going nowhere. Maria always seemed slightly bothered by how quickly we got our first deal. I think she would have preferred to slog away for years, singing in little cafes, developing our musical sound. But we hit it big, perhaps too fast, after writing a few songs and singing in front of the right people and suddenly we were on Dylan’s label. And just as suddenly we were stalled.

Then there were some strange rumors that there were Mafia connections among some of the people helping us along, and Maria became downright terrified. It was like we were on the edge of this precipice, looking over into a part of the city with which we’d rather not get involved.

“Lily,” she said one day. “We’re not making a lot of money for anybody yet. We haven’t got any hits. Columbia still has an option on a second album and they’re not beating the door down — let’s just vanish and get out of this.”

We decided to abort the record deal and split up. Perhaps we’d get together later on (which, like my returning to school, never happened). Maria moved to Los Angeles with her parents, and I settled in with mine. All of this would have been devastating for me if I didn’t have Joe to lean on and put my hope in. It was another shift for me, another thing to take up my energy.

A relationship with Joe seemed the answer to everything back then. He had the musical interest and talent of Maria, but the masculinity and attractiveness I was looking for in a man. Even though we had a rocky courtship, we moved ahead into what I thought could quite possibly be the perfect relationship.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

There was an engagement ring on my finger before I knew it, although there was no official proposal. Everything just happened naturally, and I took it as it came, falling more and more in love with Joe. I didn’t care about a wedding or where we would live or any of that practical stuff. All I cared about was living with Joe for the rest of my life.

Meanwhile, my musical career was on hold. After Maria left town I stopped playing gigs or writing much material. But Joe’s music was moving. He recorded an album for Decca Records, and among his stellar sidemen were fiddler Richard Greene, guitarist Gene Yellin, bassist Kevin Smith, Fred Bartenstein, and Frank Wakefield on mandolin. Somehow, though, Joe became moody and depressed in New York.

I tried to imagine what it would have been like for me, far from my family and the only home I’d known, being thrown into a completely different lifestyle. I thought I could relate with how he felt. He started drinking even more than usual and grumbling about New York, occasionally talking about how much he wanted to move back to Ohio or Kentucky.

Knowing what I know now, I sometimes wonder if Joe’s restlessness wasn’t the result of some internal conflict. His father was a preacher, solidly opinionated about the Bible and how a believer should live. Joe had never dedicated his life to Christianity, and he was certainly no saint, but he believed much of what his father preached. His drinking and the music he played went against everything his father taught.

I think this feeling of miserable conviction drew him in some strange way back to his roots. My family’s Jewishness was cultural and had little effect on how I lived my life — there were some traditions and beliefs I felt were important, but for the most part it didn’t impact my day-to-day choices. This wasn’t the case for Joe, where his father’s teachings demanded a certain lifestyle. Occasionally, this difference in how we viewed the world would cause arguments — I don’t know, maybe we should have seen this as a warning sign about our being together, but we were in love and it didn’t really matter to us at the time.

Soon he had a chance to go back to his roots.

“Lily, something’s come up,” he told me. “My friend Larry Sparks is forming his own group back in Ohio. We’ll be the Lonesome Ramblers.”

I felt okay with it. After all, I had a ring on my finger and could see how unhappy Joe was in New York. So late in 1969 he moved back to Ohio where the new group would be headquartered.

A few weeks passed, and Joe called with the invitation I had been waiting for. “Why don’t you come out and visit?” he asked. “I’ll show you where I live and take you down to the holler in Kentucky where I g re w up.”

I was really excited — apart from visits to the resorts in Pennsylvania, my time at Carnegie Melon, and that short trip to Montreal with Gloria, I hadn’t traveled outside of New York. I took a week’s worth of vacation from my job at the hospital and arranged a flight to Lexington to meet up with Joe.

One problem, though: I had never been in an airplane before, and the thought of leaving the ground petrified me. I didn’t sleep at all on the night leading up to my departure, and when I kissed my parents goodbye as I got into the cab, I thought I’d probably never see them again — not because I wouldn’t come back if I could, but because I thought I probably wouldn’t survive the flight.

I boarded my plane in LaGuardia, more nervous than I had ever felt playing a gig or even auditioning in front of those men at Columbia Records. My hands shook when I held out my ticket for the attendant to take. I sat down in the middle of three seats – on one side of me was an 80-year-old Spanish woman in the United States for the first time, and she barely knew three words of English. To the other side was a 9-year-old girl flying alone for the first time, and she looked just about as nervous as I felt. She was flying out to see her grandparents.

Then, miracle of all miracles, that huge plane lifted off the ground and began to soar. We rose up and flew over the countryside, leaving the city behind.

Before I knew it we were flying over Pennsylvania, almost the same path I had taken on that bus to Pittsburgh only a few years before. How many things had changed since then! I had gone from a high school kid full of hope and determination to a recorded artist playing gigs all over New York City, to a young woman in love, flying across the country to see the man I was engaged to.

With every shimmy and shake of that plane, I thought we were going down. But it’s in my nature to be a protector, so I started focusing on making the little girl beside me comfortable. We played little games and became friends, laughing and joking. I dug some of my high school Spanish from the recesses of my mind so that I could have at least a basic conversation with the Spanish lady. She was so brave to come to this country without knowing the language.

From then on I didn’t even think about the flight until I felt that slightest of drops, and the plane began its descent. It dawned on me that when I tried to help others, I forgot about myself and my problems seemed a lot smaller.

Joe met me at the airport, and we hugged and kissed and I was so happy to see him. Seeing him there with his dark hair and relaxed smile I fell more and more in love with him. I realized that no matter how much I loved the city, I would leave it in a second if it meant spending my life with Joe.

As we drove away from the Lexington airport, I was amazed at the majestic surroundings. Those East Kentucky hills rose up and up into the clouds, and everything was so green and lush. Here was a place that seemed far removed from the turmoil and cultural changes going on in the rest of the country. The university protests and Vietnam War and racial strife felt a million miles away while we drove the back country highways.

I’ll never forget the huge yards of those rural houses, stretching up to the base of the hills. Clotheslines hung from house to tree with colorful garments flapping in the breeze that swept through the valleys. The gardens looked like something out of Eden, with barefoot children chasing their dogs and cats around the houses. It was peaceful — a mountain version of Little House on the Prairie.

There was no traffic, and I sat right up against Joe. I felt part of something unique and wonderful — I was this city-born hippie wearing a flower-child blouse and bell-bottom jeans, my straight hair halfway down my back, and beside me sat this handsome and talented backwoods banjo picker. Joe’s arm was around me, and the smell of leaves and grass and fields flooded in through the open car windows. I smoked a cigarette, and he drank a beer. Perfection.

Soon the roads wound up into the mountains toward Berea, the town closest to where he grew up. Small tractors raised clouds of dust in the fields, and women with babies in their arms were picking vegetables from their gardens. The animals, mostly cattle or pigs or horses, ate slowly or rested in the shade.

Soon Joe was telling me who lived in each house, how many kids they had, and how their kids had married this particular neighbor’s kids.

“See those houses with the smoke coming out the chimney?” he asked.

I nodded — seemed strange for a fireplace to be going on a summer day.

“That’s how you know they are cooking on wood stoves.”

For a girl like me, who had spent 99 percent of her life in the city in an apartment or at college or at bars in the Village, this was a fairyland.

Some of the farmers, if they were close to the road, would wave at us as we passed, and Joe kept his arm out the window so he could raise his hand in greeting.

“Hey there, Joe,” some of them would call out as we drove slowly past.

People seemed much friendlier than in New York. The warmth of those southern mountain folks just pulled me right in.

His parents lived outside a little community called Red Lick, and even though I didn’t think it was possible for things to get more backwoods than what I was seeing, they did. The road gradually went from humming blacktop to a gravel that spit rocks up on the underside of the car, to dirt roads full of deep gullies. At one point we actually drove through a creek for about a quarter mile, then up the mountain on another dirt road. The isolation of where we were somehow made me feel safe and far away from all my troubles.

Soon we were on another small dirt road and the branches and tall grass alongside reached up into the window, scraping the side of the car as we drove. A few times I thought we were going to end up in the ditch, but Joe would turn the car at the last moment. At other times we had to go up a steep hill and he’d gun the engine without even being able to see the top of the small ridge, but we’d fire up over the top and just keep going. I was nervous and scared and let him know it, but he just laughed and drove a little faster. Joe knew those roads as well as anyone, having memorized every turn or low-hanging branch or outcropping rock.

Eventually, after a few hours, we pulled up to a log cabin, parked in the barn, then walked up to the house. Around us there were twofoot high corn stalks and a tobacco field where the leaves were sprouting up out of the dirt. I could hear hogs snorting (and I could smell them), and just past the hog lot was a huge barn where they dried their tobacco in the late fall.

Then we got to the gate, held closed with a horseshoe latch. We walked through and approached the house and I felt like I was going back in time — the dirt path, the log cabin, the wood smoke easing up out of the chimney. Everything took me back a hundred years or more.

“Now this place doesn’t have electricity,” Joe said with a straight face, but I could tell a punch line was coming. “But it does have running water.”

He pointed to the little creeks running on both sides of the house, and we both laughed.

There was something so earthy and genuine about this way of life, and it amazed me that people could live their lives in a place like this, so far removed from the rest of the world, and raise their families. It was all so beautiful and fascinating.

“I hope they’ll like me, Joe,” I said, feeling nervous about meeting his parents.

He just smiled and put his arm around me.

I felt very bashful, but as we said our hellos and made small talk about my journey and their valley, I was completely taken by their humility and simplicity. His mother was shy, holding back at first, but his father asked all kinds of questions about me and my background. They were genuine and curious in a nice sort of way. Soon I felt right at home, comfortable around them, because I knew they accepted me without reservation.

We walked around to the back porch and stepped into the kitchen — there were two wood stoves, one on either side, and an old sink with two wash basins. They would bring water in from rain barrels right outside the kitchen window, heat it on the stove, and then pour it into a big aluminum container to wash dishes. Rainwater was used for bathing, too, and their drinking water came from a well.

There was a large picnic-style table that seated 12 people easily, and another that seated 6 or so. Yellow wallpaper blended in with the throw rugs in brown and tan and green. The floor was a linoleum, very modest.

In the living room, an old grandfather clock hung on the wall, the pendulum slowly swinging, and it chimed out the hours in a way that made you think it had been there since the beginning of time. Two kerosene lanterns sat on a white doily on top of a beautiful old wooden chest under the window, and an enormous black Bible sat on a chest of drawers.

The wooden slats moaned under my feet. There was a potbellied stove for heating in the winter, and more throw rugs covered the wooden floor. Everything had its place and was tidy and clean. Off to one side was a little bedroom where Joe’s mom and dad slept, and up at the top of an open set of stairs were two big bedrooms on the second floor. The entire roof was tin.

Did I remember the city while I was there? Did I wonder what my parents would have thought of a house like that, a place like the holler? I don’t think I did. Everything about my life outside of that valley suddenly seemed like a dream, and as I feel asleep that night the only thing that seemed real was the rain pinging down on the tin roof, or the lightning flashing bright white through the trees.

In fact, the storm got so bad on that first night that I was up and down and restless in my bed. The lightning got louder and louder and the rain came down in sheets of sound — I was sure the roof was going to collapse in on all of us, and that lightning would strike the house and burn it to the ground on top of our heads.

I slept in the downstairs bedroom with Bessie, Joe’s mother, and she must have heard me getting up and down and pacing around. I couldn’t sleep. I was terrified.

“Lily,” she whispered from her bed on the other side of the room. “The storm is pretty bad tonight. You can sleep in my bed with me if you’d li ke.”

Like a little girl (and very unlike the sophisticated, city musician I thought I had become), I quickly took her up on the offer and slipped in beside her.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I woke up the next morning, and a shadow of light was creeping in through the forest. At first I wasn’t sure what woke me up, but when I moved around in the bed I realized Bessie was already up, and then I smelled the most incredible smell — fresh bacon frying on the stove. I didn’t get up for a few minutes, just stayed there listening to the crackle of the bacon, the singing of the birds outside. The floorboards started creaking. Folks were waking up.

I made my way toward the main area of the cabin and stood in the doorway for a moment. Bessie was busy in the kitchen, making a breakfast of fresh eggs from their chickens outside, fresh ham from one of their hogs, fresh milk from their cow. When I ate that breakfast I thought it was the first real meal I had ever eaten. It was certainly the first time I had ever had gravy — all of my kosher upbringing never even entered my mind.

I would steal glances at Joe and think over and over again how handsome he was, how lucky he was to have grown up in this environment, with this close-knit family. Sometimes he would catch my eye and smile at me, or wink, and it filled me up with all kinds of warmth and good feelings.

The rest of that week was a lesson in backwoods farm life, and I soaked it all in. Bessie was wonderful to me, so accepting and lovely and never treated me any different from her own children, except in the way she explained everything to me step by step. I started following her around, and she talked softly, helping me understand everything she did.

I washed the breakfast dishes in a tin pan with heated rainwater while she made lye soap out of pig fat on the wood-burning stove. It had a greasy feel to it, and they used that soap to bathe and wash their clothes.

Later in the morning we went out to the garden and picked tomatoes and cucumbers and green beans, and the whole time I couldn’t stop thinking how crazy this was, that a New York City girl from the Bronx was on her knees in this garden in the middle of the Kentucky backwoods, picking vegetables. I chewed the green beans, feeling their texture for the first time. And suddenly I had this respect for farmers, for people who grew their own food and lived on it and didn’t go to grocery stores but took care of themselves. I was amazed.

In the afternoon I helped churn the butter. The cream was kept in a big jar overnight, near the stove, so that it got a little warm. We would shake that jar back and forth and back and forth until little clumps of butter formed in the milk. We pulled out the butter and Bessie washed it and put it in tubs in the cellar so it would harden. It makes me hungry, the thought of slathering that fresh butter on cornbread made from freshly ground corn.

That evening we sat down for dinner and I couldn’t believe that it could get any better than breakfast, but it did: fresh green beans with a piece of pork fat, a pot of pinto beans, potatoes with homemade butter, a piece of tenderloin or canned beef. This was food that I tasted for the first time in my life.

I kept the same routine for the rest of the week: up at 5:00 for a fresh breakfast, then gardening or making butter or cornbread, then an afternoon of chores and work around the house, a huge meal in the evening, and finally bed at 9:00, when I didn’t think I could move another inch.

Some evenings neighbors would swing by for dinner, and Joe’s parents were fine with it. Everyone in the neighborhood knew that their house was always open. This blew my mind, that you would work so hard and then just give away this amazing food to whoever came knocking, but this was the culture of Kentucky. This was how they lived.

At some point that week I had a dream about moving to Kentucky and helping change the lives of the people who lived there. In my dream I was a schoolteacher and helped educate the kids who couldn’t go to school; I was a mentor to the adults who wanted to expand their horizons. For the rest of the week, I couldn’t stop thinking about that dream, and I started thinking of ways I could improve life for them.

I didn’t see that it was just an idealistic dream that for the most part they didn’t want to be changed, that they enjoyed their lives and their community just as it was. Maybe I was trying to dream up an identity that would place me in that setting, with Joe. Maybe it was just another example of me trying to come up with a mission on which to focus my life so I wouldn’t have to address the areas of my own life that made me unhappy.

I was searching for something, but at that point I was fairly certain that marrying Joe and being with him would solve all of my problems, assuage all the unhappiness just below the surface. For the next few months, I traveled back and forth from New York City to Joe in Kentucky.

I became two different people: Lily from the Village, the musician and flower child; and Lily from backwoods Kentucky, canning vegetables and waking up at 5:00 a.m. to help with breakfast. I lived in that tension, taking all that I could from both worlds.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Joe was going back and forth between Ohio and Kentucky a lot. During one of my visits, he went off with Larry Sparks to do a show at one of the local bars and left me with Larry’s wife.

“But why can’t I go with you, Joe? I want to see you guys play. It would be fun.”

“These bars aren’t like your Village clubs, Lily. These places are rough, no place for a city girl like you,” he said, trying to charm me with one of his smiles.

I pouted though, turned away when he tried to kiss me goodnight. He just shrugged, laughed, and walked out.

“See you girls in the morning,” he said.

All night I sat around feeling glum, picturing him picking away on his banjo and having a great time while I sat there in that quiet little house having polite conversation.

“I think I’m going to go to that bar,” I told Larry’s wife.

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Lily.”

I stewed, getting annoyed with her for not going with me, or at least encouraging me to go. I decided I would go anyway — forget all these people trying to tell me what to do! But showing up at this strange bar, knowing Joe didn’t want me there, made me real nervous, so I went out and bought a pint of vodka and drank about half of it. By the time I got a cab and arrived at the bar, I was smashed.

It was one of those little country bars, just like what you’d see on the Dukes of Hazard. Inside it was pretty dark, and it took my eyes a little while to adjust. It must have been pretty late when I got there, because no one was playing music anymore but there were still a lot of people talking and milling around. I scanned the crowd. That’s when I saw Joe. He was dancing with this little blonde-haired girl.

I had never hurt anyone before in my life, at least not physically. But something rose up in me that I had never felt, and I wanted to punch someone. I walked straight over to the two of them and pulled her away from him, my eyes staring hard at her. Then I grabbed Joe by the collar before turning back to the girl.

“You’d better sit down if you know what’s good for you,” I told that girl. I think she could tell I wasn’t messing around. Maybe she walked off, I’m not sure, but at that point I turned to Joe and told him off with every foul word I knew. It was a big scene. I ripped off my engagement ring and threw it on the floor, stomping back out of the bar. The next morning I made flight arrangements and returned to New York, crying the entire way, convinced I never wanted to see him again.

Two weeks later I got a phone call at my parents' house from Joe.

“There was nothing going on,” he told me. “It was innocent, just somebody I was dancing with. Honest Lily, it was nothing.”

Somehow I let him talk me back. Weeks passed, and I decided to ignore what had happened. I took responsibility for it, convincing myself that in a fit of drunken jealousy I had overreacted. Besides, New York began to mean less and less to me without Joe there, and the thought of moving to Kentucky filled me with excitement and a sense of purpose. My parents didn’t say much to me about Joe during those days — I think they knew I was way too headstrong to be talked out of my love for him.

We decided to get married that coming May.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

May 28, 1970, was the beginning of a new decade and a new life for me. I was Lily Fishman, but on that day I became Lily Isaacs. Joe and I were married in the Madison County Courthouse in Richmond, Kentucky. His brother Herman was the best man and his sister Faye was my maid-of-honor. The ceremony was nothing like what I had always imagined my wedding would be, but Joe and I were happy.

My parents weren’t there. We decided to have two ceremonies, since Joe’s family couldn’t make the trip to New York and I couldn’t imagine my parents walking around a Kentucky holler. So the wedding was there in Kentucky, and Joe’s parents had a reception for us at their cabin.

The meal was what I had come to expect from Bessie, and there was even a beautiful wedding cake. We ate and laughed and when I stepped outside I could hear the hogs and the chickens and for a moment I was yet again overwhelmed by how my life was going in this direction I had never expected. Inside I could hear the family talking and singing and feasting and I felt comfortable with the decision I had made to leave New York.

But, when I went back inside, there was always this nagging fear that things wouldn’t turn out as happy as I would like. We came from such different backgrounds, and each of us had a lot of baggage. It concerned me. On our wedding night another worry cropped up: Joe’s drinking, and by the time we got to Faye’s house he was drunk. I was a little tipsy myself, but it wasn’t what I had in mind for a wedding night.

We didn’t have any money for a big honeymoon trip, so Joe’s sister, Martha and her husband, Eugene, offered us their house in Ohio for the weekend, since they would be gone. They were really nice about it, stocking their fridge for us and even leaving some T-bone steaks, but I didn’t have my driver’s license so I felt kind of stranded, and there was a lot of drinking going on. It wasn’t my ideal honeymoon. Things weren’t off to the best start.

That next week I flew to New York to get ready for the big reception my family was throwing for us in the Bronx. Joe drove up later with his sister Martha and her husband. Mother welcomed me with open arms when I arrived at the apartment, and we started making the final preparations.

Why was I so eager to leave New York? What was it about me that so easily walked away from everything I had worked so hard to achieve? I grew up there, had all kinds of opportunities to play music or get involved in the theater, and had even signed a record deal there. I think I was missing out on some kind of connection, some sense of family, and Joe’s family and culture were so accepting of me, and drew me in so quickly.

My parents weren’t thrilled about my choice to leave, but they put on a good face that weekend for the reception. I think they were worried that I would walk away from everything — not just the city, but their values and family and culture. They weren’t crazy about my decision to marry Joe; after all, he wasn’t Jewish, and he had been married before. They would have preferred a Jewish professional who would keep me in the city and give me a better life than the one they had lived. But after dropping a few hints, I guess they picked up on the fact that I wasn’t changing my mind, and they wished me well.

My mother let my father know, in no uncertain terms, that he was not to drink at the reception. These little exchanges between the two of them always made me cringe, and stirred up all those old memories of my father’s drinking and how it affected me as a child. I tried to stay out of it.

But during the reception I saw Joe slip my father a few drinks. Part of me wanted to yell at him, tell him to stop, but another part of me was happy to see him bonding with one of my parents, so I let it go. The two of them actually became great friends over the years. Perhaps it all began there at the reception.

My friends and family had none of the reservations my parents had, seeing only a happy couple, two musicians so obviously in love, and they lavished us with wonderful gifts. They celebrated with us, toasted us, and wished us well. Joe and I were caught up in the atmosphere of love and support. It seemed an appropriate send off — I knew it was the end of my life in New York, and I was fine with that.

When we left the city I could tell my parents were still worried that I was walking away from my Jewish heritage, that I would forget everything. I can understand that, especially after all that they had been through to preserve their way of life. But I didn’t want them to worry. I thought everything would be fine.

I had no intention of walking away from Judaism.

Dad's Buchenwald Concentration Camp release papers, 1945.

In Poland, pre-World War II. Left to right: Mom, Mendel, my Grandmother Lea, and Aunt Zlotta.

Mom pregnant with me, 1947.

Aunt Esther, Mom, Aunt Beatrice, Aunt Basha.

Around 1952. Left to right, front row: Sammy, me, Lenny, Hy, Pearl. L-R Back Row: Aunt Basha, Aunt Esther, Mom.

Lenny, Pearl, me and Sammy

Me, age 6.

Me - 12 years old.

Cousin Sammy and me, 1953.

My 5th grade school photo.

Dad, me, Mom and Hy at my Sweet 16 party, 1963.

Dad and Mom at my Sweet 16 party.

Hy and me at my Sweet 16 party.

Off Broadway show "Antigone" - I'm seated 4th from the right on floor.

Performing in "Oklahoma" at the Woodstock Playhouse. Maria is 3rd from left, I'm the far right.

Lily & Maria album cover, 1967.

Lily & Maria Columbia LP cover.

Maria and I writing for our album.

Maria and I performing at Gerde's Folk City, 1967.

Lily & Maria photo shoots (I'm on the right).

Pictures from my acting portfolio.

My first guitar; I'm 17 years old.

My high school graduation picture in 1965.

Dad blessing the bread at my wedding, 1970.

Our wedding day: May 28, 1970.

Joe's parent's home in McKee, KY.

Joe's Parents: Godfrey and Bessie Isaacs.

Joe holding our first born, Benjie, 1972.

Dad sleeping; he worked very hard to provide for us.

Left to right: Sonya, Grandpa Godfrey, Benjie, Becky and Grandma Bessie, 1976.

Benjie, age 3.

Becky, age 6.

Sonya, age 7.

Clockwise from top: Becky, Ben, Mom and Sonya.

Mom's 87th birthday.

My first back surgery in halo traction with my brother Hy, 1983

Learning how to walk again after my first back surgery.

Second back surgery. My dear friends Tom and Janice Roach at far right.

Carnegie Hall 2001 - Bill Gaither introducing Mom.

"The Isaacs" - present day. Left to right: Sonya, Ben, Becky, Lily seated.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I looked at the clock — 2:00 a.m. My eyes were heavy, but I stayed awake waiting for Joe to get back from his show. After we got married, I started a job as a secretary there in Ohio, and Joe was playing five or six nights a week, mostly in a place called the Old Crow Bar in Middletown, Ohio, a tiny little town about ten miles away from our house. Joe still didn’t want me in the bars so I stayed home, reluctantly. I felt a growing resentment toward him, that he was out playing music and having fun and I was home. When he got home I could tell he had been drinking, and I started to worry that maybe he was doing some other things he shouldn’t be doing. All of my insecurities consumed my mind.

I remember one night in particular. Usually he got home around 2:00 a.m., but on that night two came and went and no Joe. Then 3:00 a.m. Then 4:00 a.m. I started to toss and turn, getting up out of bed and pacing around the room. He had never been out that late before. Finally I got so worried that I called his sister Alice.

“Hello?” she said, her voice groggy yet anxious — a 4:00 a.m. voice.

“Alice? It’s me, Lily.”

“Lily! What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

“Joe’s not home. I think he might have been in a car accident or something. He’s never out past two.”

Alice was a very committed Christian, a prayer warrior, and I respected her. When I told her I was worried her voice took on a soothing tone, and she really calmed me down.

“Let’s say a prayer, Lily.”

“Okay,” I said, kind of caught off guard. I guess I expected her to wake her husband and go out looking for Joe, or something along those lines. But when she suggested we pray it seemed the right thing to do, even though I had very little belief in God at the time.

She said the most wonderful prayer, asking that Joe would be safe and get home soon and that I would feel peace. As we were praying I heard the key slip into the lock. Joe was home.

This prayer thing really works, I thought to myself.

I had never experienced anything like that before. I had never even considered going directly to God with my problems or requests — the Judaism that I knew always involved going through the rabbi. There wasn’t anything one on one about going to God, or at least there never had been for me. Yet during that phone call with Alice I heard her, almost out of nowhere, start a dialogue with God, the God of the universe.

That prayer may have brought Joe back, but I began to doubt if any prayer in the world could bring our relationship off the rocks. The late nights, the lonely evenings, the fact that I didn’t know anyone and was young and ready to start a family of my own: all of these things started weighing on me. But I kept working my day jobs, just getting by.

A few weeks later, an argument between Joe and I took me past the tipping point. So I packed my bags and got ready to head back to New York. I can return to music, I reasoned with myself, and I’m sure Mom and Dad would be happy to have me home. I slammed each article of clothing into the suitcase. Or I could pursue acting. That’s what I’ll do, I thought to myself. I’ll track down all my old contacts and become an actress, make it on Broadway.

There were three different times that I packed my bags for New York, but each incident ended the same way — with me unpacking them. Going back to the city wasn’t what I wanted to do. I wanted to make my marriage work. I wanted to have a family. I was still in love with Joe and didn’t want to leave him.

So I stayed, and very little changed. Except that I landed a job I loved doing secretarial work for a place called Mulford’s Greenhouse in Lebanon, Ohio, where we lived. I still hadn’t found what I was looking for, wasn’t even sure what I was looking for, but that job gave me something to look forward to every day. The people were nice, and I felt good about what I did and I was appreciated.

That was enough, for the time being.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

All of this happened in the first few months of our marriage. Sometimes I can hardly believe that Joe came home every night, with the life he was living, or that I didn’t leave for the city. But we did make it, and there were still good times, plenty of them, and we were still in love, just trying to find our way.

It was 1970, and Christmas was approaching, our first Christmas together as a married couple. I decorated the house as best I could on limited funds. I didn’t have any experience decorating for Christmas, having never celebrated it in my house growing up, but somehow it felt like a Christmas holiday. I can’t remember if we had gotten any snow yet, but everything felt like Christmas, and I walked around the house humming to myself.

On December 22, Joe got back from playing at one of his shows. We had just fallen asleep when the phone rang, and Joe answered it.

“Hello?”

He sat down, asked a few questions very quietly, then hung up the phone. He looked devastated.

“What?” I asked, walking over and sitting beside him. “What’s wrong?”

“It was the sheriff ’s office,” he said, and I could tell he was fighting back emotion. “Delmer’s dead.”

At first that was all he could get out.

“What?” This feeling of shock spread through my body.

“Delmer’s dead,” he said again, his voice shaking. “I have to go identify the body and pick up his stuff.”

Delmer, Joe’s brother, was 27 years old at the time, four years older than Joe. His car had slid off a rainy road, and Joe, along with the entire family, was devastated. I had never experienced anything like that before in my life. I knew Delmer and his wife and kids. How could this have happened to them? During the next 24 hours, all of their brothers and sisters and relatives poured in from Indiana and Kentucky for the funeral — I had never seen anything like it.

I hadn’t been inside a church before, let alone attended a funeral. The place was packed, standing room only. The preaching and singing was so full of emotion, and I found myself being drawn into the feelings of love and community that everyone had for Delmer and for each other. There was this atmosphere of commonality — whatever anyone possessed was shared by everyone, and what was lost was also lost by everyone. I thought that, no matter what happened, in that environment it was impossible to be alone.

The service ended with all of Joe’s aunts and uncles standing around the casket singing.

I will meet you in the morning at the end of the way

On the streets of that city of gold

Where we all can be together and be happy always

While the years and the ages shall roll.

Delmer’s funeral gave me my first glimpse of Christian love and togetherness. It had a huge impact on my life.

Later, Joe’s sisters wanted to go to the church where Delmer and his wife had attended — they wanted the family to get together one more time before they separated and went back to their homes. In spite of the feeling of community at the funeral, I didn’t really want to go to another service — it was emotionally and mentally exhausting, and I thought I’d rather just stay home. Joe didn’t want to go either.

But Alice, Joe’s sister who had prayed with me for his return on that early morning, appealed to both of us. “C’mon, Lily. If you’ll go I’ll buy you a steak dinner afterward.”

What’s it going to hurt? I thought to myself. Joe was having trouble holding it together — he was so distraught over Delmer’s passing. Maybe it would help him to attend church with the family.

So we went. The church was called Shawhan Road Pentecostal, and it was nothing more than a converted garage attached to someone’s house. We drove down a country road, about six miles from where Joe and I lived. At first, when we got out of the car, I couldn’t even figure out where the church was.

Once inside, I looked around. It didn’t look anything like the synagogue I had gone to as a child, although it did have wooden pews and a tiny pulpit. About 100 people could fit into that garage, and by the time Joe and I got there the place was packed, which was fine with us. We nestled into a seat in the back row, content to just take it all in, put in our time, and leave.

Delmer’s widow sat at the front with their little children, and I felt so sad for her. But she was surrounded by family members, many of them sitting close and looking after the kids. The stage was empty for a moment, and I wondered who would be speaking. Then someone from the crowd got up and walked to the front and began singing another song I hadn’t heard before, one about heaven.

Even though I didn’t believe in heaven, the words brought something alive in me. The sound of the voices, the sense that everyone was striving through life together: all of these things combined to make me wonder, What if it’s true?

It didn’t take long before everyone joined in and sang through every verse. I didn’t know the song, but the words were soothing at a very deep level. As soon as that hymn ended, someone else walked up and started singing, and the crowd joined in every time. During the singing, different people would go up front and give Delmer’s widow a hug, lift the children up and kiss their cheeks. Even in the midst of the congregation people put their arms around one another and wept on each other’s shoulders.

The singing went on for about 30 minutes and ended naturally, without an announcement or anything. After that, various folks would take turns standing up at their seat and talk about God, how good He had been to them and what He meant in their lives. It didn’t seem out of place, even in the midst of such sadness — in fact, it made perfect sense to me, but I wasn’t sure why.

That’s not to say I wasn’t uncomfortable, especially when they would talk about their lives in a very personal way. I felt kind of ashamed to be listening, like I wasn’t one of them. Would they want me hearing all of these things if they knew I wasn’t a Christian?

There was also this name that kept coming up in the songs and the testimonies: Jesus. I didn’t believe in Him and had been taught my whole life not to believe in Him. There was something about hearing that name that, at first, made me cringe and feel uncomfortable, but as the service went on this feeling of awkwardness began to be transformed by the togetherness and the singing and the bonds between the people in that little garage.

The service started drawing toward its conclusion, and still no one had preached or lectured. It wasn’t what I had expected from a church service. Then the pastor, Dewey Hisel, an older man with a silver guitar, walked up to the front.

“Anybody who wants to can just come on down front and pray, if you’d like. We’re going to leave this place open for anyone who needs it.”

A flood of people walked toward the front. Joe got down on his knees to pray. Before I knew it, I was weeping, and I couldn’t stop — I was overwhelmed by emotion. Maybe it was because of Delmer’s death, or maybe it was because I was homesick.

At that moment I knew I wanted to be part of that community, but I didn’t know what to do about it. I didn’t know what to say, or how to pray to God. I didn’t know enough to say, “God, save me,” because I didn’t know I was lost. I didn’t say, “God, forgive me,” because I didn’t know anything about sin. But I just knelt there and cried and cried.

I do believe that on that day God looked into my heart and saw my willingness, my openness to him. I think at that moment, in that little church, all the longings and confusion and emptiness surfaced and was swept aside. I cried my way to salvation. I didn’t know what had happened, but I knew I would never be the same.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Delmer’s death gave Joe and I a chance to start over, and we both took that opportunity. Joe stopped drinking, and we spent evenings together. I remembered how it had been to walk the city streets with him and laugh together in Maria’s apartment. I felt like the woman he had fallen in love with in Gerde’s Folk City in the Village.

But as far as Christianity went, I knew nothing. My heart had needed a change, needed something, and I found it that night in the church — now it was time to learn more about what I had experienced. I didn’t have a lot of trouble believing in God, even though I had often thought of myself as an atheist. Deep down I had always believed in a supernatural power, probably due to my Jewish upbringing, so it wasn’t much of a leap to believe in a Christian God.

Dealing with Jesus, though, was another matter. I could say the word “God.” I could say “Lord.” But Jesus? Just thinking of that name brought images of my parents into my mind, shaking their fingers at me, rebuking me. It had been their greatest worry when I left New York for, in their words, “the backwoods country,” that I would leave my Jewish roots, and suddenly it had come about. Their worst fear had happened.

Yet, as I read more and more about Jesus, some of this confusion began to melt away. When Joe and I sat and read the New Testament, one thing that impressed me early on was the simple fact that Jesus was Jewish, like me. He attended synagogue, just like I had when I was growing up. He was taught the same Scriptures I had been taught.

But while reading the Scriptures seemed to simplify my understanding of Christ, some of the things about church complicated it. Because I knew so little about Christianity, it became easy for me to get caught up in the surface-level expectations of the church we attended. For example, there was a strict dress code, and it was pretty clear that if you didn’t adhere to it you weren’t living “the holiness life”: women were expected not to cut their hair or wear makeup, and pants were definitely not allowed. I did my best to follow all of the rules.

In spite of these rules, there were deeper, more meaningful changes that took place in our lives. Our marriage calmed down, and we weren’t fighting all the time. I felt peace. And being in the church gave me such a sense of belonging, unlike anything I had ever experienced before. Joe was a completely different person — he gave up playing in the bars, quit Larry Sparks’ band, and got a job as a logger, cutting timber and selling logs to local paper mills.

My Christian education continued during our occasional visits to Joe’s family in Kentucky — his father was a sort of community pastor. Folks would come by car or horse or wagon, at all hours of the day or night, just to ask him to pray for them. Family members of those who died came to Joe’s father, and he made the coffin, preached the funeral, and never charged a dime. On Friday or Saturday nights, the neighbors gathered in their house for prayer meetings, their voices crying out to God long into the night.

Joe’s father Godfrey’s strong beliefs are what led him into the mountains in the first place — when the Social Security system was instituted in the 1930s, workers had to take government-issued numbers. For young Godfrey Isaacs, this was too much like the Mark of the Beast discussed in Revelation for his liking, so he went off into the mountains and farmed.

Someone in the family told me a story about how one night when Joe was a kid, Godfrey went outside to pray and reflect on God — that particular night the Northern Lights were in full display, and Mr. Isaacs was sure God was coming back, so he ran inside and told everyone to come out.

“The Lord is coming back!” he shouted.

To his dismay, when he entered the cabin he found his boys playing cards and his girls curling their hair, neither of which were allowed in the Isaacs home. Joe said there were cards and bobby pins flying everywhere in the scramble to get presentable and get outside in time to see God return. They wept and prayed and cried for hours, but it turned out that wasn’t the night.

I tried hard to conform to their standards, but Joe found it even more difficult, seeing that his father didn’t allow musical instruments in church services. Joe loved music — it was literally part of his soul, and he would have long arguments with his father about playing music for God. Sometimes Joe would walk away from his father in frustration, giving in to that way of thinking.

“I guess I’ll never play that instrument again,” he would say of his guitar.

But he’d always pick it up again, something I was happy about.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I sat in the living room of our little apartment one night, putting the dishes away after supper. Joe walked toward the front door, putting on his jacket.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“My friends are going out. I’m going with them,” he said.

I stopped in my tracks.

“What?”

“I said, I’m going out with my friends. We haven’t gone out for a while.”

“Where are you going?”

“Just out.”

His friends had enticed him to go, and it upset me. All of the hope, all of the peace that had found a spot in me since Delmer’s passing vanished like the mist in a breeze. I was worried about his friends influencing him.

“Why? What do you want to go getting into that stuff for? Things have been so good, Joe! Don’t do it. Don’t start that up again.”

He just turned and walked out the door.

I was devastated, and I could feel this thick haze of depression settling in over me. I sat there for a long time, willing him to walk back in that door, apologize, and say how wrong he had been, but he didn’t. At some point I remembered it was a church night, but for a while I didn’t want to see anyone else. I guess I just wanted to wallow in my own sorrow.

But then a feeling grew inside of me, this insistent voice saying, “You’ve got to go to church. Church is where you need to be tonight.” So I got my things together and headed out.

Sitting in that little church, I began to sob. So much had changed for the better during those months. I had found something that gave me hope and peace, but now it was all falling apart because Joe was going out and maybe drinking again. A realization hit me: even if Joe went back to his old lifestyle, I couldn’t let myself go back. I couldn’t return to the fear and anger from before. I decided to do it for me and try to live this Christian life, with or without Joe.

As I sat in the church worried about our marriage and our future, I began to feel confused about some of the legalistic areas that I hadn’t conformed to. One of those areas was shaving my legs. During Joe’s upbringing he was taught a woman should look the way God created them: natural, without artificial changes. This included not shaving her legs. To be honest, shaving my legs wasn’t something I had even thought of — it was just something I had always done, since I was 14.

On that night, feeling confused and overwhelmed by religion and all of these rules, I made a bargain with God. “God, if you bring Joe back and he stops drinking then I won’t shave my legs again.”

I thought that maybe Joe’s drinking was a punishment to me for not following all the right rules, and I hoped that if I got in line then maybe God would change Joe’s heart. It was such a childish way to think, but I was still new to these ideas, and I thought that’s how it worked.

Joe was drunk when he came home that night, but the next night he went to church with me and apologized for the mistake he made. I felt like the vow I had made was what brought him back, so I followed through with my end of the deal. I didn’t shave my legs for 12 years, and it was a huge sacrifice for me. Even though in hindsight it seems kind of silly, I believe God honored the sincerity in my heart regarding that vow.

From that point on, Joe and I entered the best years of our married lives, both of us staying on track, making good choices, treating each other with love and respect. But it was also during this time that my parents found out about my new life, my decision to follow Jesus, and their reaction would bring me a lot of pain.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“Lenny!” I said, walking out the front door to greet my cousin.

“Hi Lily,” he said, getting out of his car and giving me a hug.

“It’s so good to see you. How are you? How are your parents?”

Lenny was on his way to California to study acupuncture. He was open-minded and intelligent, and I had always liked him. He came inside and we talked for a long time.

“I’ve found this cool little church,” I told him. “Would you come to a service with me?”

He was up for just about anything, so he came along, just sat there quietly, taking everything in. After church we had a great day hanging out, but that afternoon he hit the road again. I didn’t think too much about it until my mom called me at work about a week later.

“Aunt Esther called me,” she said almost immediately, and I could tell she was upset. “We didn’t raise you like this. If you’re going to believe in this Jesus and completely throw your whole culture and background away, and betray your people, then we don’t want you to come home again.”

“Mom!” I said, trying to interrupt.

“You don’t have a family,” she continued, not letting me get another word in. “Your father would rather see you out in the street or buried in your grave than to be such a reproach as this to your family.”

I started crying right there in Mulford’s Greenhouse, trying to cover my eyes and not sniffle too loud, but I couldn’t help it. This was not how I wanted them to find out — I wanted to tell them how my life had changed, how everything was so much better, how much joy and peace and hope my new way of life brought me.

But as my mother continued on her tirade, I couldn’t help but think back over my life and theirs. My mind was a whirlwind. I thought of the years they had spent in a concentration camp, how hard my father had worked to give us a good life in America.

I thought of my father slipping money under my pillow when he’d leave to work all night in the bakery.

I thought of my mother lifting me up and twirling me around when I was a little girl, or how she came to all my shows and plays when I was in high school.

I thought of my father, now suffering terribly from his arthritis, hobbling down the city streets, clutching his bag of rolls.

This family that I loved, my mother and father who had survived so much, the people for whom I wanted to preserve my Judaism because of what they had gone through, were forsaking me because I accepted Jesus and wanted to follow His teachings. I felt alone, like an outcast, like I would never belong anywhere again. I wouldn’t have hurt my family for one million dollars, yet here I was, in a situation where I was hurting them but couldn’t change course.

I felt the crossroads in front of me. Did I believe enough to watch my family walk away from me? Couldn’t I just tell my mom that I was confused? Could I leave this new faith?

I couldn’t.

“Mother, I love you so much. I love Dad so much. But I don’t want to lose what I’ve found. God is filling my heart — without Him I am too empty.”

We didn’t talk much longer. She hung up, and I wept.

In the next few days and weeks, the sadness was still there, but that solid peace kept coming back, a peace that I could not understand but that filled my whole being. Up until that conversation with my mother that day, I had always prayed using the words “Lord” or “God.” But because of my Jewish heritage I still struggled to say the name Jesus. Yet, after confessing my newfound faith to my mother, I could go into church and say Jesus without any hesitation, as if something had been freed up inside of me. It was as if He was the only person I had left in the world.

Whenever I called my mother after that, she always led with the same question: “Are you still going to that church?”

And when I told her yes, she would grow cold and distant. But I still called and filled them in on my life, still told them I loved them so much. Eventually, a few months later, I visited them and everything went fine except when the conversation turned to my new life — then we would argue and everyone would cry or get upset.

It was okay, though, because I knew the only thing I could do was show them love and hope they would see the change in me.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Our musical career began unplanned, unheralded. At first we sang at our church, and Joe taught me all the old bluegrass favorites he grew up with. The new songs he wrote began taking on Christian themes, and sometimes he’d throw those in at church, too, playing his guitar at the services on Tuesday, Saturday, and Sunday nights.

Evenings at our church were informal gatherings with lots of different people getting up to lead songs as they felt moved, and we loved the chance to share our music. Soon visitors approached us after the service and asked if we’d come and sing at their church. Before we knew it we were traveling all over the area, singing at churches.

Our house also became a stopping point for local musicians, and it seemed someone was always playing music in the house. We asked one of them, a terrific mandolin player named Leroy Ramsey, to join us at some of our gigs, and he started traveling with us. We were inspired by southern gospel groups like the Singing Cookes and the Marshall Family, but Joe always led us toward the bluegrass sound.

But things were about to change.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The fall of 1971 marked the beginning of one of the most beautiful parts of my life: I would be a mother. I got pregnant. A part of me that I hadn’t known about woke up; something deep inside of me stirred at the realization that a new life grew inside of me. I had experienced an awakening when I found Jesus, and the news that I was pregnant seemed a continuation of this new life experience.

The news excited Joe and I because by then our marriage was stable, we were involved in our church, and we both wanted a family. To be honest, I had never thought about being a mother, but I loved the idea of carrying Joe’s child. Doctors didn’t do regular ultrasounds then, so I couldn’t find out if the little one was a boy or a girl, but I couldn’t have cared less. I was just so happy.

I was also a bit on edge — coffee, which I loved, began making me sick. Soon everything made me sick. I was nauseous all the time, barely able to keep any food or drink down. But somehow I gained 30 pounds pretty fast and started having the oddest cravings, like wanting to eat paper and loving the smell of Ajax (I finally tasted it one day, put a little on my finger and licked it . . . which cured me pretty quick of that craving). My body was changing rapidly, and I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

The further along I got, the more I felt the pressure of one particular concern: how would my mother and father respond to this baby now that I was a Christian? Would they change their course and welcome us back? Or would even this little child face rejection by his or her Jewish grandparents?

Life went on, though. Joe and I worked a lot of hours and only played music a little on the weekends. We decided that if we wanted to make some money from our music we would need to cut an album to sell on our mini-tours to local churches.

So Joe, Leroy, and I rehearsed an album’s worth of material and bought time in a studio in Hamilton at Pinetree Records. It was owned by an old preacher named Merle Jones. You might think that making an album would feel like old hat to Joe who had an album on Decca Records, or after my experience with Columbia Records, but to be honest, we were both thrilled and nervous and couldn’t wait to have the final product.

But the recording process crept along at an unbearable pace: we recorded onto a two-track machine, everything live to tape. Many times we’d get to the end of the song and someone would forget the words or hit a bad note and we’d have to start from scratch. Sometimes we’d work on one song for hours.

Those days were long. It wasn’t unusual for us to start recording at 10:00 a.m. and go until 2:00 the next morning. Throw in my pregnancy and the fact that both Joe and I were still working full-time, and some mornings I could barely pry myself out of bed.

When that process was finally finished we took some photos to a graphic artist and had 500 copies pressed up under the title “Live It Every Day.” I think they cost us a dollar or two each, and we sold them out of the back of our car for five dollars.

It was an inauspicious entry into the world of southern-gospelbluegrass music, but we were proud of what we had put together.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I don’t know if I thought about it at the time, but I went through that whole pregnancy without my mom, and it makes me kind of sad now when I see what a wonderful experience it has been, living alongside my daughters as they bring their own children into the world. But even though it was just Joe and I, we really enjoyed that time. It was exciting, like a gateway into a new era of our life, and we entered it together.

On July 25, 1972, around three in the afternoon, I went into the hospital with pretty heavy contractions, but delivery didn’t begin until after 11:00 p.m. I got a spinal block to ease the pain I was in, and before midnight I was holding a little boy in my arms. Joe and I hadn’t picked out a name yet, so on the birth certificate he was simply listed as Male. Joe wanted to name the baby after him, James Joseph, but I wanted a more Jewish-sounding name, and there was already a Joe Jr. in the family.

I looked down at his little face, so perfect and wrinkled and alive, and we named him Benjamin Joseph. It was a similar name to one of my father’s brothers, Berrell, and would be in keeping with the Jewish tradition of naming children after deceased relatives. I hoped Benjamin would be a bridge back to peace with my family.

Things didn’t work out that way, though. In fact, it didn’t take long for Ben’s birth to bring about another blow-up between my parents and I. In Judaism, boys are circumcised when they are eight days old — it’s a symbol of God’s covenant with Abraham, spelled out in Genesis 17, and the ceremony is called a bris, which a rabbi performs in your home.

But Joe and his family didn’t believe in conforming to the Jewish ceremonial traditions. A few days after Ben was born, it came up. I was in the hospital when I took mother’s call.

“Lily! How are you? How is Benjamin?” my mother asked.

“We’re both doing great, Mother. Everyone okay up there?”

“Yes, yes, fine.”

Then her voice took on an inquisitive tone. “Your father is wondering about the bris?”

I guess I just didn't want to fight with them, so I tried to dodge the question.

“I don’t know, Mom, Joe and I aren’t sure what we’re going to do.”

I guarantee you that wasn’t the answer she wanted to hear. “If you’re not going to follow the Jewish tradition,” she said, her voice picking up steam, “we don’t even care about seeing him!”

I wept and wept in that hospital room — those family disagreements took such an emotional toll on me. I felt sad that my first child, their first American-born grandchild, could mean so little to them that the excitement surrounding his birth would be smashed by this rock of tradition. Sometimes I wondered if my decision to follow Jesus was worth all of the family heartache. But every time, when I remembered the foundation of peace and hope that came along with it, I knew it was.

A few days after I got back from the hospital I still felt pretty sad about the whole thing, so I went to church one night for some spiritual encouragement. I sat there, holding Ben close, happy to have him there with me, wishing my family would accept us. I couldn’t believe, even though I had a son, no one from my own family was there with me to be proud of him or give him love.

In the middle of the service a woman walked right up to the front. Her tiny skirt barely covered anything, and she wore knee-high pantyhose. She began dancing around, bumping into people and shouting. I hadn’t been a Christian very long, but the stories about Jesus encountering demon-possessed people came into my mind. I didn’t understand it very well, but I wondered if there was some kind of spirit in that lady, making her act that way.

A group of women huddled around her and started praying, their voices rising up over her shouts. She started screaming, but didn’t try to run, just stood there at the front of that packed little church shouting her lungs out. And there I sat in the back, holding on tight to Ben. Something was wrong.

Suddenly I remembered the story in the Bible where Jesus cast demons out of a man. When they left the man they looked for some other place to dwell, and eventually inhabited a herd of pigs. I got so scared that the spirit in that woman would leave her and enter into my baby — I don’t know why I thought that might happen, but I just started praying so hard over him. Suddenly, the sweetest peace enveloped me, and I felt closer to God than I ever had before. Shielding baby Benjie, praying over him so intently; it was a moment so powerful that I didn’t even understand it fully at the time.

When I looked up, the lady was lying quietly on the floor. The room was quiet, hushed. I looked down at Benjie and held him tightly, wondering what had come over me that made me pray like that. Such is the power of the Holy Spirit.

It wasn’t until later that I realized he was eight days old when this happened, the normal age of circumcision for a Jewish boy, when the community comes together to celebrate the bris. It seemed a special blessing that I had been able to pray over him on that particular day, almost as if God was blessing him even though we didn’t go through with the tradition.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I was in and out of a haze, sweating, then freezing cold, under the blankets, then kicking them off and moaning. I was lying in bed with Ben and somehow through the mist of sickness I knew that Ben was sick, too, terribly sick. Joe would check our temperature — “104,” he mumbled after taking Ben’s temperature, shaking the thermometer.

Still, we didn’t go to the doctor. Joe’s parents had never been to the doctor and never took medicine — they believed that going to a doctor exhibited a tremendous lack of faith in God, so we waited it out. But things just kept getting worse.

I remember crying through my fever, through the chills, praying that God wouldn’t take Ben from me, begging God to heal him. We heard through the grapevine that it was the London flu, and people were dying from it.

Ben slept in my arms, flushed. He felt like a little hot water bottle — his skin was just burning up. I was in and out, and when I woke up at one point, still holding Ben, I saw Joe’s parents there praying for us. I couldn’t tell if I was dreaming or if they were really there. I found out that they were visiting for a few days.

Later, little Ben sat in my weak arms, and as I looked into his face I saw his eyes roll back. He started convulsing.

“Please, Joe,” I whispered, not even knowing exactly what it was I was asking for. Joe called the hospital.

“Get him in a cold bath,” the nurse said.

We filled our kitchen sink with water and lowered him in. He cried, but he was so weak that his screams didn’t even get that loud. We fed him two bottles of cold water. Finally, his fever broke.

From that point on we kept liquid Tylenol hidden away so Joe’s parents wouldn’t see it. Soon even Joe went to the doctor when he needed to. This led to more fights with his parents, more disagreements. We decided at that point we were going to live our own Christian lives the way that seemed right to us, and not try to please everyone else.

There seemed to be such a gap between us and both sets of our parents, so many miles of misunderstanding. I guess it swept the country in those days, the differences between the generations. Our parents had fought the war to end all wars, experienced a shrinking world. They didn’t know what to do when their own children went to war, or became hippies, or marched for peace and integration. They didn’t know what to do when the opportunity, for which they came to the United States, ended up changing their kids, and their grandkids, leading them off in different directions, threatening to dilute their culture and their heritage.

I think it was confusing for everyone, a difficult time to navigate.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

When Ben was 18 months old, I became deathly ill again and had flu-like symptoms for three days in a row. It was bad. I spent most of my time in bed, or in the bathroom, and poor little Ben didn’t know what was going on with me. Joe tried to take care of me as best he could, but he was working full time. Eventually I went to the doctor.

He did some blood work and discovered I was pregnant! Joe and I were excited — we had already decided we wanted to have more than one child. I couldn’t believe our family was growing so quickly. Little Ben would have a brother or sister!

But I didn’t seem to have normal morning sickness: my eyes and skin held a yellowish tint, my fever wasn’t going anywhere and I still felt very weak.

“I think there’s something else going on,” the doctor said, insisting on more time to examine me.

After additional blood tests I was diagnosed with infectious hepatitis. It sounded scary to me, but I had no idea what it was.

“There’s no cure,” the doctor said quietly. “It pretty much has to run its course. But we are very concerned about your unborn baby. There are no tests that we can do this early on to see if the baby has contracted it, but your husband and son will need a vaccination. And we’ll have to monitor you closely.”

Now that I think back on those days, I realize that I must have gotten it from the first farm we lived on in Waynesville, Ohio, when I drank unclear water out of a cistern. The farmers let us live there for free as long as Joe did the chores: milked the cows, fed the pigs, that kind of stuff. There was also a septic tank there that sometimes overflowed, so it must have been from that or from our close contact with all the animals.

However I got it, I was very sick and didn’t get much better during those first six months of pregnancy. Ben was only 18 months old. Because none of our parents lived close by, Joe and I hired help almost every day, and he missed a lot of work when the sitter couldn’t come. Eventually one of his nieces came to help us take care of Ben, and I was in bed for nearly two months straight.

This whole time I worried so much about the child still inside of me. The doctor told me that the baby could be born with heart problems or possibly even brain damage due to the high levels of the disease in my system. I didn’t know if we were having a boy or a girl, but I prayed hard for that little one every night.

Folks from our church came to visit with me a few times a week, and when I could muster the strength to make it into church, I would. At the end of the service I’d stand in the prayer line, feeling faint and nauseous, desperately pleading with God to touch that child and keep them from getting the disease.

I carried full term, and the last three months got a little better. I felt stronger, and I could even take care of Ben. Then, on July 22, 1974, Joe left for work, just like any other day, but I called him back home. The baby was on the way.

I felt so much fear about number two’s arrival: would the birth be more challenging than my first one had been? What if the hepatitis caused complications we hadn’t yet seen? I just wanted the whole thing to be over so that I could hold my precious little child and know that everything was okay.

It would end up being the easiest birth of my three children — much easier than Ben had been. This little one popped right out!

“It’s a girl!” the nurse announced, and tears immediately filled my eyes.

“Is she okay?” I asked the doctor, watching as the nurses looked her over.

Sonya weighed 8 pounds 9 ounces and was as pink as could be. She was named after mom’s sister Zlotta. I was still sick so I couldn’t feed her. We started her on formula, but she got severe diarrhea — turns out she was allergic to the formula. We tried another brand of formula, but with the same results. For two weeks we were worried about whether or not she was getting the proper nutrition. The doctor suggested we try homogenized milk and give her vitamins in liquid form to supplement what she wasn’t getting. Finally, that worked.

Even though those first few months were difficult, I was so excited that she was okay. We even kept her in the room with us for a few months.

All of my prayers were answered — she was healthy and showed none of the ill effects hepatitis could have inflicted on her. Joe and I settled into a new life with our two children. Every so often I looked around at that little family and couldn’t believe how much God had blessed me. Beautiful and healthy, a little boy and a little girl.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

When Sonya was about four months old I started getting sick again, the same symptoms from hepatitis — nausea, throwing up, fever. It was starting to feel like I was going to be sick for the rest of my life. I was sure hepatitis had returned, and I just couldn’t imagine dealing with that again, plus taking care of my two little babies. Immediately I went to the doctor.

“You’ve got to do some blood work,” I said, dreading what they would say. “I think it might be hepatitis again.”

But I had no idea.

They ran a battery of tests, and when he came into the room to talk about the results, he had a smile on his face. “This might be good news, and it might be bad news,” he said.

“What?” I asked. I felt confused.

“Well, first let me ask you, do you have a good washer and dryer?”

Now I was very confused.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because you’re pregnant again.”

I was in complete shock. My mouth dropped open and I didn’t know what to say. Sonya was only four months old, Ben barely two years old. I was just getting back my strength from childbirth, recovering from my first bout with hepatitis and suddenly I was pregnant again. It took my breath away. I stopped at a Frisch’s Big Boy and ordered a hamburger, onion rings, and a milkshake in the drive-thru. Then I sat there and cried all over my food. I didn’t think my body or mind could take it.

Finally, I called Joe and gave him the news.

I carried our third child full term and had to wear tight surgical pantyhose (Joe had to help me put them on!) to fight off the varicose veins that formed due to having three babies so close together. The pregnancy wasn’t easy because my body was tired. Chasing two little ones around the house while a third grew inside of me was no easy task. I hated wearing those hose, and my back seemed to grow weaker with each pregnancy.

Plus, I kept gaining more and more weigh. I just didn’t have the time in between kids to lose what I had put on. I already felt conscious of my scoliosis, so the extra weight didn’t help my self-concept. I couldn’t imagine how I was going to get through those nine months.

Labor was longer, too, but I was overjoyed when Rebecca Marcel entered the world August 2, 1975. She was named after my mom’s brother Mendel.

Joe and I decided to call it quits with three kids. After three so close together, and my scoliosis acting up, and that fight with hepatitis, I just couldn’t imagine getting pregnant again.

Joe picked me up at the hospital — one of his nieces came along to help us — and I remember scooping Sonya up in the front seat. She was one year old.

“Sonya,” I said, “you are going to have to be the big sister and help me.”

She just looked back into my eyes and smiled.

Life with three — I get sentimental thinking about it now, but at the time it was hard. Very hard. I took them everywhere with me, those three kids, all of them three years old and younger. Joe worked all the time, trying to support us, and we were going to church a lot on the weekends and singing. Becky was usually right there on my hip while we sang.

One night, while the kids were still very young, we sang at a country church in Kentucky. The windows were wide open in the church because it was so hot. One minute I told the kids to sit down, and the next minute they were gone! It wasn’t long, though, before I spotted Ben sitting in the front seat.

But where were the girls?

Then I saw them. Sonya was riding on Becky’s back down the middle aisle of the church, the biggest smile on her face. Those were the times we had.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

During all those years, we traveled in an old van — Joe built a bunk in the back for the kids, and we stored all the equipment underneath it. We covered many miles in that thing, and the kids had a lot of dreams in that bunk. It was hard when they were little, but that was our life, and I wouldn’t change it for the world.

One of the fun things about being a parent is seeing how different each of your children becomes. Ben always wanted to roughhouse, but Sonya was the opposite — sometimes she was so quiet I’d have to go look for her. Becky was the one pulling the pots and pans out and beating on them like drums.

When my father died in 1979, I had to leave the kids with my sister-in-law, Martha. Well, one night Becky was crying and Ben was upset because we hardly ever left them — they were so used to traveling with us wherever we went. So Sonya, five years old at the time, rocked Becky to sleep and held Ben. She always had that mothering spirit.

Then there was Joe — throw him into the mix with these three kids and sometimes it just got plain crazy. He loved showing them new instruments and singing with them and especially playing tricks on them. One time when we lived at the house in Morrow he discovered that he could hear the kids digging through the heat register for some change, even though they were in a different room. So he bent down close to the vent and growled like a monster.

I was in the kitchen washing dishes and heard all this commotion — I thought someone had gotten hurt. Those kids jumped over the couch and ran as fast as they could into the bathroom, trying to get away from whatever was in that vent as quickly as possible! By the time I got to the bathroom, Joe was doubled over laughing, and the kids had practically climbed up on top of him, they were so scared. He had to show them what he had done, just so they would believe him.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I pushed the grocery cart slowly through the store, every once in a while double-checking for the $20 bill I had in my pocket. It was all the money we had, and I had to make sure the grocery bill stayed under that amount. Joe had recently had his appendix taken out. He would be in the hospital for ten days and out of work for three months. It was almost Christmas.

I had all three of my children with me. Becky was a year old and in a baby carrier inside the cart. Sonya sat on top, in the cart’s seat, playing with the food items I put inside. Ben climbed around underneath — I guess he would have been about four.

The list was too big for $20, and it seemed like everything was necessary. I had that empty feeling inside, and I was worried I wouldn’t have enough money. At the very bottom of my list was a luxury item: Duncan Hines chocolate cake mix with a can of chocolate frosting.

“Could you subtotal everything else, first?” I asked the cashier, holding the mix back.

She totaled up all of the items.

“Nineteen dollars and seventy-five cents,” she said.

Oh well, I thought. It’s not that we need cake.

“Thanks. Could you have someone put this back on the shelf?”

She took the mix and put it under the counter. I gave her the $20 and she gave me my change, which I put very carefully in my pocket.

That night our whole family went to a revival meeting at a church about ten miles away. When we came back out to the car and opened the doors I couldn’t believe my eyes — someone had bought us two full bags of groceries, and the Duncan Hines chocolate cake mix frosting was right on top. No one knew that I had to put that cake mix back.

God so often isn’t only faithful with our needs, but also with our wants.

In 1984 I had the opportunity to fulfill a lifelong dream of mine: travel to Israel. For every Jewish person, this type of trip holds a very special significance. The only problem? I needed to come up with $700.

I remember the day I walked out the driveway to get the mail, wondering how in the world I would make $700. It seemed like an unbelievable amount of money, especially back then. I so badly wanted to make that trip, to see the land where my ancestors had lived, to walk the streets Jesus had walked, but it seemed like such a monumental amount of money. I started giving up on the idea of going.

I opened the mailbox and pulled a few envelopes out. One had my name handwritten on the outside with no return address. I opened it and found a small card. Inside the card were seven crisp $100 bills. I stood there at the end of the lane, leaned against the mailbox and cried my eyes out.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Life went on. Joe worked full time, and I became a full-time mom, surrounded by diapers and bottles and laughter and tears. In the midst of all this living, having children, and working, and trying to make enough money to get by, going to church and visiting with Joe’s family, our music career (if you could call it that at the time) continued to creep forward. We put out a few albums and just kept traveling from church to church, singing our hearts out, selling albums from the back of our van. All three of the children got caught up in the music — I don’t know if any of them had the chance not to.

“If you want to get kids to play an instrument, leave one lying around the house,” Joe always said, and that’s exactly what he did. There was always a banjo on the bed, a mandolin on the sofa, and a guitar in the corner of the room. The kids, as soon as they could crawl around and grab on to things, started fooling with them, plucking on the strings and smiling at the sounds. We didn’t have a television until 1983, when Ben was 11, and the instruments were some of the best entertainment in the house.

From early on, we could tell they had talent. Ben played the bass by the time he was eight, Becky learned piano from her cousins, and Sonya was always plucking on Joe’s mandolin. By the age of seven she could play really well. And, without any coaching, all three of them could harmonize. If Becky or Ben started singing lead, Sonya automatically fell into the tenor, and the other would find the third part without Joe or me showing them.

We encouraged them as much as we could, inviting them on stage with the band when we played at churches or in concerts. They had more names than we knew what to do with: “The Gospel Chipmunks” or “The Kosher Hillbillies” or “The Briarhopper Hebrews.” They sang “Someone Will Love Me in Heaven” on our “Lord Light My Way” album when they were nine, seven, and six, and they did an entire album as “The Isaacs Trio” a year or so later.

I guess this was the first sign of the Isaacs.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

One day we were on our way to a weekend of singing — it was just Joe and the three kids and I in the van. The kids were bored, and it was a long drive. Sonya found a matchbook, got curious, and wondered if she could start a tissue on fire. Obviously the tissue lit right up, she panicked, and dropped the match on to the box of tissues, which quickly caught fire.

Sonya screamed at about the same time that I smelled the smoke. Joe veered off the road and stopped. Ben, trying to get out of the way, tangled with some fishing gear still in the van from a previous trip and ended up with a fish hook in his foot.

Joe put the fire out and then nursed Ben’s foot, removing the hook. What a hectic trip! Joe and I scolded the kids and before we knew it, we pulled back on the road again, the smell of smoke mingling with the silence of children who had just gotten into trouble.

It seemed there was always something going on with these kids. When Ben was around 12, Joe bought him a mini-motorcycle, and he was allowed to ride it in front of the house on the street. Suddenly one of the neighbor boys was knocking on the door to our house, screaming that Ben had wrecked.

Well, I grabbed the girls and drove to the end of the road and there was Ben, his leg gashed open. We had to run into the hospital where he ended up getting eight stitches.

These family emergencies seemed to be a weekly occurence. One day Ben grabbed Becky’s baby doll and ran through the house with it. She chased him, fell and hit her mouth on the end table in our bedroom, and busted her lip open.

Another trip to the hospital.

Then there was the day our kids were playing basketball in the neighbor’s yard. There was a fence separating their yard from the next one over, where a large dog constantly walked back and forth in a dog pen, staring at the kids while they ran free. Someone knocked the ball over the fence and into the pen. Becky convinced Sonya to climb into the dog’s pen to get the ball — Becky said she would distract it. Sonya, being the bravest, climbed the fence and jumped down to get the ball. Unfortunately she landed on a piece of sheet metal and gashed her leg open.

When I looked out the window Becky was carrying Sonya on her back to the house. They were always taking care of each other. We drove to the emergency room and the doctor got ready to put stitches in her leg.

“Now,” the doctor said, “if you close your eyes and count from one to ten, you won’t feel a thing.”

Sonya looked up at him and asked a question. “Would it be just the same if I prayed?”

CHAPTER NINE

I looked at the nameplate on the door at the hospital in Cincinnati: Dr. Alfred Khan III. I had been having terrible back pains for months, and a friend from church knew someone who had come to that particular doctor for advice. I took a deep breath and walked inside.

“I have to tell you, Mrs. Isaacs,” he said after my first examination. “I can’t believe you have let your back get this bad. The scoliosis you were born with is getting worse. The pain you are living with must be intense.”

“It’s terrible,” I admitted. “But when I was eighteen the doctor released me to live my life normally. He said it wouldn’t get any worse.”

“Well,” the doctor said, “it has gotten worse. The curvature of your spine is severe. The S-curve is such that, if you don’t do something about it, your rib cage could eventually crush your heart and lungs.”

“Why? What caused it to get this bad?”

“Carrying three babies probably had some effect. You said you spent years cleaning houses — that kind of work, bending over, moving furniture, running a vacuum for long hours, all of those things could aggravate your condition. I don’t see that you have much choice. You need to have this surgery.”

I thought back to when I had cleaned houses with my friends Brenda and Janice. We had worked two days a week and got through two houses each day, usually in ritzy neighborhoods near Dayton, Ohio. We each made about $20 per day, and nine times out of ten we’d spend the money at garage sales before we got home.

I smiled when I thought back to the crazy spots we got ourselves into, from being questioned by police to being held hostage in a small bathroom by a large dog. Those had been fun times. But it had been hard work for long hours with lots of lifting and bending over and not a lot of rest. I wondered how much of a factor cleaning those houses was in my current back situation.

“But, doctor,” I argued, “I don’t have time for surgery or rest! I’m 35 years old. I have three children and they are 11, 9, and 8. It’s all I can do to keep up with them! I’m playing music with my husband all the time — we have concerts lined up. I can’t be in bed for months at a time!”

“You don’t have a choice,” he said. “Those things will have to take care of themselves.”

I didn’t want to have the surgery done, but I just couldn’t live with the pain any longer. Part of the decision-making process involved Joe and I going into the hospital and watching a detailed video about what they would do to me. My heart nearly stopped as I watched the surgeries. I found myself holding my breath as the surgeon made the incision. When I saw how much it involved, fear washed over me.

The thought of being in the hospital for a month overwhelmed me, and the two surgeries looked gruesome and painful. I also knew I’d have to leave my kids, something I never did. Who would watch them for that length of time? My family was all in New York City, and Joe’s brothers and sisters all had big families of their own. But I knew I had no choice. I had to have the surgery.

We got through it with the help of two elderly women who lived down the street, sisters named Helen and Hazel. They offered to come watch the children during the day and on the few nights that Joe had to stay with me in the hospital. Sometimes, before the surgery, I felt so much anxiety about leaving the children that I couldn’t quite catch my breath, but with Helen and Hazel there, I knew everything would be under control.

The first surgery took place on January 25, 1983. They removed nine discs from my spine. They took out a rib and a piece of my hip to freeze and use in the next operation. When the world slowly came back into focus it greeted me with the most excruciating pain I had ever felt. I was flat on my back in halo traction meant to stretch my spine for two full weeks. I couldn’t even turn myself over.

A nurse came into my room and raised me to 45 degrees so that I could eat, and even through the medication streaks of pain shot through my body. Then they would slowly lower me back down. A few days after the surgery they put me in a wheelchair for a few hours a day, and the halo held my head in place.

I dreaded the next step but was so anxious to get it over with. Just as I started to recover, it was back into surgery for the second round — they fused the nine vertebrae using bone from my rib and hip in place of the discs they had removed. They braided two 14-inch stainless steel rods around my spine to give the backbone more strength. Six hours later, my back was straight.

I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling. It felt like someone had put me down on red-hot bricks, which now burned through my skin and into my back. A breathing tube snaked down my throat. Pain and despair made me ache. I blinked and tried to look around the room without moving my head. I drifted back to sleep.

When I woke up there was no one around me. I was in the recovery room and I needed help, but I couldn’t speak. And I couldn’t move. All I could see was the clock on the wall in front of me, and I passed in and out of consciousness. Each time I came to, I wanted to yell, but I couldn’t. Inside I wept, but I couldn’t cry out loud. The clock just kept ticking, and the pain just kept getting worse and all that I wanted to do was feel the touch of someone’s hand. But no one was there. Just the sound of the ticking clock.

Then I woke up again, and they must have let Joe in because he stood there beside me, his eyes full of concern. I tried to speak but the breathing tube choked back my words, and I was too tired to fight it. Then I was unconscious again. The only time I wasn’t in excruciating pain was in my sleep.

“When will this pain go away?” I asked a nurse with my hoarse voice, as soon as I could speak.

“You’ll feel better each day,” she said, smoothing my blankets and writing some notes on a clipboard.

This was not encouraging.

I counted down the minutes between my shots of morphine, every four hours.

Visitors came and went in this strange dream called recovery. Joe was there most of the time. My brother came. Folks from church visited. But their faces were lost in a haze of pain and medication, and I couldn’t stay awake long enough to remember exactly who I spoke with.

“So thirsty,” I murmured to a nurse coming in to check on me.

She nodded, a look of sympathy on her face.

“You won’t be allowed to drink again until your stomach makes some noise. You were under anesthesia long enough that your bowels shut down — drinking anything before your body is functioning properly would be very dangerous.”

The IV provided fluid for my body, but my mouth and throat felt so dry. The nurses put Vaseline on my lips and put ice in a plastic glove to cool my mouth, but I ached with thirst. I dreamed about 7-Up, that cold, clear, bubbly liquid, and in my sleep I felt it trickling down my throat. But then I woke up and it was all Vaseline and ice bags. I was dying for a 7-Up.

Lying there on my back, I had a lot of time to think over my life. Sometimes I couldn’t believe where I had ended up — somehow this Jewish girl from the Bronx had gone from singing folk music in New York City’s Greenwich Village to having a family and singing a hybrid of southern gospel and bluegrass music in Ohio.

But it wasn’t just my external circumstances that had changed — somehow, in that small country church, I had found God. Or He had found me. Either way, I wasn’t the same Lily from the Bronx. Little did I know that, even with all of the different twists my life had taken up to that point, I could never have imagined what the next ten years would bring.

Every single morning in that hospital a nurse came into my room. Every single morning I asked her the same thing: “Can I have something to drink today?”

“Not yet. We’ll have to wait for the doctor.”

Then the doctor came in.

“Can I drink anything yet?”

The doctor examined me and I’d wait for the okay. “Maybe tomorrow, Mrs. Isaacs. But not today. Not yet.”

A few days later I asked the same question. “Is today the day?”

She looked at my chart. “Well, Mrs. Isaacs, I think we might be able to get you a cup of tea.”

I just about jumped out of bed with excitement. I took little tiny sips of that tea and made it last. The feeling of the liquid slowly running over my tongue and down into my throat was heavenly. Later we found out the doctor had not released me to drink yet, but I didn’t care. It would have been worth any consequence.

Early the next day I was cleared by the doctor, and I drank my first 7-Up. Nothing has ever tasted as good.

As I became more and more aware of what was going on, and as my physical pain diminished, I became emotionally distressed during each of my examinations. They should have made me happy, as each one showed I was progressing nicely, but I couldn’t help but feel painfully embarrassed by the fact that I hadn’t shaved my legs for so long. Every time the nurses lifted my covers to see how the feeling in my legs was progressing, I turned red with shame and wanted to cry. Then they would examine my back and ribs and see that I also hadn’t shaved under my arms.

I doubted the wisdom of the bartering I had done with God, promising not to shave if Joe came back on that night over ten years before. I knew I had made a vow, but I was doubting my commitment. I felt humiliated, but stayed true to my promise.

Anyway, soon it was time to learn to walk with my new back. It didn’t bend very well, and there was metal all through it, but it was straight. I couldn’t wait to heal completely, to walk upright. I couldn’t wait to wear normal clothes again, and not the baggy ones I gravitated toward because they hid the curve in my spine.

One step at a time. One new exercise, and then another. I moved forward, and I thought I could see the light at the end of the tunnel of my recovery. But as I learned to walk, first with the help of others, then slowly by myself, another medical challenge was right around the corner, one that would threaten not only my physical well-being but my life.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

One day, a few weeks after I got home, I was sitting in a chair while a friend of mine, Nina, cleaned the house. She came over a lot while the kids were at school and talked to me while she did the chores that I couldn’t do while I was still recovering from back surgery.

“Lily,” Nina said reluctantly, as if she didn’t want to say what she was about to say. “Oh, never mind.” She turned away and was about to switch on the vacuum.

“What is it?” I asked.

She looked at me, worry in her eyes. “I found a knot in my breast,” she whispered. “I don’t know what it is and I’m really scared.”

It wasn’t like Nina to be that way. She was normally very happy and carefree.

“I’m sure it’s nothing, Nina,” I said, trying to reassure her. “But if you’re worried about it, maybe you should go see a doctor.”

“I don’t have insurance. What if they tell me I need surgery? It would ruin me, Lily. I just don’t have the money.”

“Let me see where it is,” I asked, and she placed my finger on the bottom left side of her breast. I could definitely feel a knot. I tried not to show my alarm. Instinctively, I put my hand on my own breast, in the same spot. I had a knot there, too.

“See, I’ve got one, too. Don’t worry about it,” I told her. “It’s probably something all women have, maybe a gland or something that’s supposed to be there.”

We didn’t talk much about it after that. At first, since we both had the same knot in the same place, I think we both felt relieved. But as the day continued, and the more I thought about it on my own, the more concerned I got. I had always had so many other physical problems that self-examinations had been the last thing I had thought to do.

But what was that lump?

Later that night I tried to sleep but instead I tossed and turned, thinking about that lump in my breast. I had conversations in my mind, one moment reassuring myself that Nina had the same knot and it must be okay, but the next moment a feeling a panic rose inside of me that it might be something much, much worse.

Finally I rolled over and nudged Joe. “Joe, are you awake?”

“Hmmm, what, Lily?”

“Are you awake?”

“Yeah. Yeah. What is it?”

“Feel this,” I said. “I’ve never noticed it before.”

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” he said.

“Nina has one, too, in the same place.”

“Well there you go, Lily. Probably just a woman thing. There’s nothing to worry about. I’m sure you’re just overreacting.”

I pulled the covers up and tried to settle in and go back to sleep, but his words did not comfort me. I kept feeling the lump, each time hoping that it would be gone. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t going anywhere. All night I kept waking up and wondering, and I even dreamed about it.

The next morning, Friday morning, I decided the best thing to do to ease my mind was to call my gynecologist, Dr. Goodman. I made an appointment for Monday and spent all weekend in my back brace, sitting around the house, nervously checking to see if the lump was still there. On Monday, Joe took me to the doctor.

I gingerly got out of the car, my back brace holding me straight, and we made our way into the office. Dr. Goodman examined me and after many “hmmms” and wrinkled brows he went out of the room. He came back in with a slip of paper.

“It’s a visible knot,” he said, “and, besides that, I’m not sure what it is. This is the address for a surgeon who can do a needle biopsy.”

Another doctor? I thought to myself. Is all of this really necessary?

But we didn’t have any choice, so we drove to the next doctor.

The surgeon who examined me there was a woman. She came in and helped me lay down because I was still in my back brace.

“I’m going to place a needle in the lump and try to take out some of the fluid,” she explained. “If it’s just a fluid-filled cyst, then we should be able to drain some of it out and there will be nothing else to worry ab out.”

I lay quietly as she inserted the needle. It hurt so bad that I wanted to scream, but I just bit my lip.

Please, dear God, let there be some fluid.

But after two attempts, nothing. No fluid came out.

She recommended another surgeon who would be able to do a biopsy on the lump, but for that I’d have to go into the hospital. By this time I worried that the stitches from my back surgery would pull out — it seemed I was on and off examination tables all the time at this point. I decided to call Dr. Khan, the one who had performed my back surgery, to get his advice.

He was direct and unwavering. “Lily, you need to get this checked out. There’s a great doctor in Cincinnati you should see. His name is Dr. Hasle, and he works at the same hospital that I do. This is probably nothing to worry about, but you need to make sure.”

I was a basket case the entire drive to Cinncinati. This would be the third doctor that day! My mind just kept circling back to the word “cancer,” and nothing I did made me feel any better. I could barely speak. Joe tried to comfort me, but I felt myself nearing panic.

When we got to Dr. Hasle’s office, he really put me at ease. “More than likely,” he said, “it’s just a cyst. We’ll do a biopsy to determine if it’s cancerous, but they’re usually benign, so please don’t worry yourself about it. You’ll most likely have plenty of time to recover from your back surgery and then we can remove it.”

He was so nice, and had such a sense of peace about him, that for the first time in days I began to believe it would just be benign — just like Nina’s turned out to be — and they could take it out after I was fully recovered from my back surgery. That sounded simple enough. We stopped at a Chinese restaurant on the way home, and I felt myself beginning to relax.

It’s no big deal, I told myself. Nothing will come of it.

Back at the house, I decided it was time to start doing some small things on my own. On Friday evening I mustered up the energy to put together dinner, something I hadn’t done since my surgery. But it had to be simple, so I made one of the kids’ favorites: fish sticks and tater tots, something I could just throw on a tray and slide into the oven. The kids and Joe all helped. One of them took the box out of the freezer while another turned on the stove. We bustled around the kitchen, all five of us, and there was life there. And hope.

As the wonderful smell of dinner in the oven started spreading through the house, I found my spirits rising. Fish sticks and latkes came to mind — fish sticks had been my nickname in high school, and the tater tots reminded me of latkes (potato pancakes), one of my favorite dishes we ate during Hannukah when I was a kid. For a moment I sensed the way my entire life had come together and led to that moment. My past and my present blended in a beautiful image of life. I knew everything was going to be okay.

We were having a great time, all laughing together while we set the table. I think all of us felt that the worst was behind us — I was getting better and we could spend more time together as a family, just the five of us without people in and out helping us all the time.

At about 6:00 p.m., just as I pulled dinner out of the oven and put it on the stovetop to cool, the phone rang. “Hello?” I said.

“Lily, this is Dr. Hasle.”

My heart sank. All of the good feelings I had built up during the evening just melted away at the sound of his voice. I knew something was wrong. “Your biopsy came back. I have to tell you this: there were malignant cells in the tumor. We’re going to have to do surgery as soon as possible — can you come in first thing Monday morning?”

A tremor started somewhere inside my soul and made its way out. Soon I trembled like a tree in a storm. I felt delirious, like I might be dreaming, and Joe had to snatch the phone from my hand before it fell to the floor. Somewhere far away I heard Joe talking quietly with Dr. Hasle. They made an appointment for me for Monday, only a weekend away.

I sat down somewhere, and a slide show of my life ran through my mind in a matter of moments: playing as a child in that Bronx apartment, acting in those high school plays, my time with Maria in the Village, marrying Joe at the courthouse. Then I saw the birth of each of my children — my precious children!

Just as I thought about them, they gathered around me, small and concerned, knowing something was wrong. Their little hands were on my knees and my shoulders. They hugged me, their eyes wondering: why is Mommy crying?

How could I leave them? How could God ask me to leave them?

As the sun set that evening I felt like a final darkness was closing in on my life, as if there was no way that sun would ever rise again. I couldn’t imagine going back under anesthesia, through another round of surgeries, another painful awakening, another painful recuperation. Cancer! It sounded like a curse word in my head, a death sentence, a word I couldn’t even say without feeling anger and fear. Cancer!

I was only 35 years old. Why me? I had three sweet children I adored. They needed me. I had tried to be a good mother, a good wife, a good citizen. A good Christian. God, why would You let this happen to me? What if they opened me up and found cancer all through my body . . . who would look after Joe and the kids?

Because of the operation and the stiff back brace, I hadn’t been on my knees for weeks. I knew now was the time to get there. I went into my bedroom and clumsily got down on my knees, but the brace made it too difficult, so I fell forward on my face and just lay there, my arms stretched out, my legs reaching back under the bed. I felt like I was nothing, just a small speck in the great universe.

I prayed on the floor of that room, laying on my face, for what felt like hours and hours.

For the first portion of that time my mind focused on one thing: survival. I wasn’t afraid to die and I wasn’t afraid to meet God, but I was afraid for my children and what would happen to them without their mother. I didn’t want to lose my family.

But then, in the far reaches of my prayers, a subtle thought began taking shape. What if, for some reason, God needed to take me? Was I willing to go? My prayers shifted away from all-out survival mode and took on more of a submissive tone.

“Lord, You know that I want to serve You the rest of my life. But give me the strength to accept whatever plan You have. Whatever plan. If You will, God, spare me so that I can raise my children. But help me accept what You have in store.”

That evening leading into night passed slowly, painfully. Joe and the kids couldn’t do anything to help me, and none of us were hungry after that phone call, so the food stayed on the oven and got cold. I never did eat anything that night.

But while I prayed, the house filled up with church friends and Joe’s family. They came and they prayed with us. We felt such intense support. God was there with us that night, and He came in the form of our church community.

As the weekend passed, slower than I wanted, quicker than I would have liked, a curious movement took place inside of me. I began to feel better, encouraged. I knew there were many people praying for me, and I felt more than ever that God’s Spirit was inside of me, giving me strength. Ever since I committed my life to Jesus, I knew I had a connection with a supernatural God, something I never experienced as a kid. This connection felt stronger than ever, and it gave me a sense of hope that no matter what happened, everything would end well. I suddenly felt like God was my best friend, and He was protecting me.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“Lily?”

“Yes, this is Lily,” I said into the phone.

“This is Dorothy,” she said. “How are you doing?”

It was Dorothy Lamb, our pastor’s wife. She was a rock in our church with the gift of prophecy. She was a wonderful woman.

“I’m doing okay,” I said quietly. “I’m still worried, but it’s not as bad as last night.”

“Lily, I’m praying for you today. I’m going to take a drive out in the country and just pray for you all day until God tells me what is going on with this cancer.”

Just knowing that filled me with a new sense of peace and hope. Later that day she called me back.

“Lily, I drove and drove today, just waiting for God to tell me something about you.”

“Did He tell you anything?” I asked. I respected her a lot and believed if she was praying for me then nothing could go wrong.

“There is a Holy Seal.”

“What?”

“That’s it. God told me there is a Holy Seal. I’m going to keep praying for you, Lily.”

After I hung up, I thought about what she had said. “A Holy Seal.” I assumed that she meant the Spirit of God was going to comfort me that the Lord would be the seal that would be all around my situation and protect me, at least from fear, if not from the cancer itself.

On Sunday night we went to our church for services. I felt better all the time, believing that the diagnosis must be wrong, the cancer was benign, and everything would be okay. I sat up front and, as people sang and shared, God’s peace surrounded me. I thought that might be the seal that Dorothy had told me about.

Then a friend of mine, Ruby Dalton (Dorothy’s sister), got up from where she was sitting, walked over in front of me, and just started talking, real loud, so the entire group in the church could hear her.

“Sister Lily, I just have to tell you that God gave me a vision.”

Everyone grew silent and listened to what she had to say.

“I saw you standing at a pulpit with all three of your children, and they were all taller than you.”

I was so happy to hear it that I started weeping, just holding my hands over my face. I so badly wanted that to come to pass.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Monday finally came.

“Hi, Lily,” Dr. Hasle said as he came into the room where Joe and I waited. “As I mentioned over the phone, the biopsy has shown a malignancy. But we’re going to do a freeze biopsy anyway, and at that point we’ll know more about it. It’s a surgical procedure, and we’ll have to put you under with anesthesia.”

“Okay,” I said nervously, holding Joe’s hand.

“There’s one other thing you’ll have to think about, and decide on before the procedure begins.”

“What’s that?” Joe asked.

“Which direction do you want to go if this test confirms that the cells are malignant? You have two options. The first is a lumpectomy followed by chemotherapy. The other is a radical mastectomy.”

“That means . . .” I said, but my voice trailed off.

“That’s right,” he said quietly. “Removing the entire breast.”

“The odds of removing all the cancer by just removing the lump are not as good as if we remove the entire breast,” he continued. “And then there’s the long period of radiation and chemo you’ll have to undergo.”

Joe and I looked at each other.

“What do you think?” I asked him.

Joe looked at Dr. Hasle. “What do you recommend?”

“I would recommend the mastectomy. It’s entirely possible that we could remove the lump, Lily could go through the chemo, and then if the cancer is still not gone she would have to have the mastectomy anyway. And by then the cancer could spread farther, especially if any of the lymph nodes show malignancy.”

I didn’t have to think very long. “I have three kids,” I said quietly. “I want to live. If that means living with one breast, then that’s that.”

I looked at Joe again, and he nodded.

“Okay,” the doctor said. “It might not come to that, but it’s best to make that decision before surgery begins.”

Even after being presented with the options, I still felt so much faith that the cyst was going to be benign. God could do that. He could make the previous tests invalid, right? We went back into the hospital Tuesday night, and I didn’t even pack anything extra — I just knew they’d go in Wednesday morning, remove a benign cyst, and send me on my way the same day. I felt so much hope.

Just after the surgery began, and while I was under anesthesia, Dr. Hasle went out to have a word with Joe.

“Hello, Mr. Isaacs.”

“Doctor,” Joe said, looking up at him expectantly.

“The tumor is malignant, and it’s about the size of a fifty cent piece. It’s probably been in there a couple of years, and it needs to come out right away.”

“Okay,” Joe said.

“Because your wife is only 35 years old we feel the best thing to do is a radical mastectomy. That way we don’t take any chances of it spreading.”

Joe reconfirmed our permission to have the mastectomy done, and the doctor turned to go back into surgery. But then he paused. “It’s the oddest thing,” he told Joe. “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a tumor like this one. There’s a crust around it, like an eggshell, that’s encasing it, which means it almost certainly hasn’t spread. It’s almost like it has a seal around it.”

It was “The Holy Seal” Sister Dorothy had told me about.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Slowly I came up into the light of my recovery room. I felt dazed, not sure of where I was at first, but once I realized my surgery was over, the first thing I did was reach for my breast. I was still out of it but could only feel a very thick bandage under the covers and was vaguely reassured that they hadn’t removed it.

The longer I lay there, though, the more I realized that what I felt was just a thick layer of dressing and gauze, and I couldn’t be sure whether or not my breast was still there. I lay there quietly for a little while, wanting to know, not wanting to know. The faith I had felt before the surgery was on the verge of crumbling.

Finally a nurse came into the room. She bustled around, preparing things for me, checking my charts. Finally I mustered up the courage to ask her. “Did they have to take my breast?” I whispered.

Her eyes filled with pity, like a parent looking at their injured child, and before she even said it I knew. “Yes,” she said, nodding her head sadly and hugging her clipboard. “Yes, they did.”

This huge wall of faith and confidence that had slowly built up since my hours-long prayer vigil collapsed, and I cried. I kept crying all day through any conversations I had, through any meals I ate, and even, I think, while I slept. I just couldn’t stop crying. I didn’t even let them open the shades in my room — I didn’t want to see myself, and I certainly didn’t want anyone else to see me. I just wanted to sit there in the dark and be sad and somehow wish it were all a dream that hadn’t happened.

Later in the day the doctor came in. “We got all the cancer,” he said, but I just kept crying. My spirits were dashed, my faith confused. I felt like God had walked away from me and rejected me. In my naive thinking, I believed that real Christians didn’t go through things like that.

Some friends of ours from a church in Kentucky came to visit me. They brought me two dozen roses, absolutely beautiful flowers, and the scent filled the room. They were bursting with life. But I didn’t even want to look at them — I was crying, pouting, because I felt like God had dropped me. I felt relieved that the cancer was gone but devastated by the cost to get there. I couldn’t face looking at myself in the mirror.

The next day they told me my lymph nodes were clear. The fact that the tumor had been sealed had kept it from spreading.

There had been a Holy Seal.

The cancer was gone.

Yet I still felt defeated and devastated.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

My first glimpse of my new self didn’t help how I felt. After they removed the bandages and the nurses left the room, I limped over and stood in front of the mirror. Pulling back my hospital gown hurt me, but not in a physical way. It was an emotional tearing that I felt.

There it was: a four-inch scar across my chest. My breast was gone, replaced by a jagged line of red, sensitive flesh. All I could do was weep at my disfigurement. I felt unattractive, as if half of my femininity had been removed in that surgery and this body they had left behind wasn’t man or woman.

On Friday a stylishly dressed, beautiful woman floated into my room. She was in her forties, and something about her made my hospital room feel brighter, fresher.

“Hi,” she said. “Lily? I’m here from the American Cancer Society. How are you doing?”

I told her I was doing okay, not great. I told her they got all the cancer, so that was a relief. I told her they had to take one of my breasts. My voice got caught in my throat, just talking about it, and instinctively I moved to hide myself.

“I had breast cancer,” she said, putting her hand on my arm. “There is life after cancer, Lily. I had a mastectomy, too.”

I couldn’t believe it. Looking at her, you would have thought she was the most confident, beautiful, assertive woman there was. And she, like me, only had one breast. Unbelievable.

“You can still be a woman and go on with your life,” she said, explaining to me all the different options when it came to wearing prosthetics, or having reconstructive surgery. “No one outside your family and friends ever has to know,” she said.

She told me stories of going to work and forgetting to wear her prosthesis, and I laughed. Laughed! I hadn’t done that for weeks, maybe months, but there was something in her voice, in her demeanor, that lifted my spirits.

Yet it was a temporary happiness.

“I have to get through this. This is just part of my journey,” I told myself over and over again, but sometimes it just didn’t make sense. I fought to stay strong — reading the Bible helped, focusing on what the Disciples had gone through. I gradually began to realize that being a Christian didn’t mean I was exempt from all the things that we experience simply because we’re human: sickness, trials, and, someday, death. But I could let these experiences make me stronger. It took me months to rebuild my faith, but with God’s help I did.

Finding a comfort level with my new body took much longer. I had lived a life of self-consciousness because of scoliosis, always wearing baggy clothes to hide my curving back. Then, just when that was taken care of, I lost a breast, and my confidence went with it.

Doctors fitted me for a prosthesis and I wore it for five years. During that time I never even let Joe see me without it on — I felt so embarrassed of my naked body. The only time I took it off was to take a shower. I even slept in it.

“Why are you embarrassed around me? You know it’s crazy. I’m your husband, and you’re as beautiful as you ever were.” He was so supportive all the time, but I still felt awkward around him, so on the fifth anniversary of being cancer free, I had breast-reconstruction surgery.

Those two surgeries were spaced out over six weeks. In the first stage, they implanted a balloon in my breast cavity and started filling it with saline. Each week they added a little more fluid, and it gradually stretched my skin. Then, after six weeks, the second surgery was done. That’s when they inserted the actual implant.

I hated to go into surgery again, but it was worth it. I finally felt whole again.

So many things changed after my battle with cancer. One of them was my attitude toward storms. I had always been afraid, but after winning my fight with cancer I realized that there were too many things out of my control for me to worry about storms. For all of those years I had been petrified of storms, yet one had raged inside of my body and I never knew it! Suddenly, after cancer, storms didn’t scare me anymore. In fact, I enjoy listening to the thunder and watching the lightning flash.

The other thing that changed was my attitude toward God, and all the bartering I had done with Him through the years. I realized that not shaving my legs had nothing to do with Joe coming back to me that night, and that it was silly for me to try to do all these things so that God would love me more, or accept me.

One day I took it up with Joe.

“I feel like I’ve been disfigured all my life because of my back problem,” I said, “and now my breast is gone. It really bothers me that I don’t shave my legs. I made a really silly vow to God and I feel like He’s releasing me.”

Joe just shook his head. “I didn’t know you made that vow. Go ahead and shave — it’s not a big deal.”

It was a new start. When he said that I really examined my heart. All those years, all the embarrassment during exams and surgeries, and it really didn’t matter. I do believe that God saw my willingness and my commitment to Him, and for me that justified everything I felt during those years.

CHAPTER TEN

My back surgery and fight with breast cancer took place in 1983. As I regained my strength and the family traveled again, it felt like a second life started for me. I was alive. My children were healthy and happy, and I would get to see them grow up.

For the next seven or eight years our music just kept growing. My health stabilized, and the kids did well with school. Our lives actually started to feel normal! We went from recording our own albums, to having a producer, to having a label. Our venues got bigger, not in leaps and bounds, but slowly, steadily. We were playing in larger churches, farther away from home, and selling more albums.

Soon the kids stepped up and our band was exactly what the name implied: the Isaacs. We’ve had the pleasure of working with some of the finest musicians and singers in the world during the span of our career, but at that particular time, around 1988, it was just the five of us: Becky played guitar and sang while Sonya played the mandolin and led many of the songs. Joe sang and played guitar and banjo, and was also our emcee. Ben played the bass, and I was a vocalist. We traveled together, lived together and played together — it was a lot of together! But we created our own sound, and the kids grew in their knowledge of music and performance.

Because we began traveling farther, and overnight, we felt the need to get something that we could sleep in and have some more space. We took a leap of faith and bought our first bus — we were comfortable doing that because Joe was such a good mechanic. We had a friend in Crossville, Tennessee, that had a 1960 GMC bus for sale. It was old but in decent shape, so we bought it for $8,500. We used the money we made on weekends to pay the loan on the bus.

Soon after we bought it, the transmission went out, and I have vivid memories of that old bus sprawled out in pieces on our driveway in Morrow — Joe tore the motor and transmission apart and spent many hours working on it. Ben, 15 or 16 at the time, helped out a lot. That’s where he got his schooling on being a mechanic.

It was back-breaking work, and I felt sorry for Joe because he already had back trouble, but we couldn’t afford to take it to a big garage, so Joe did the best he could to find parts and do the work. He and Ben put in a lot of hours. I don’t know how they did it, but in about a month they had it running in perfect shape.

The inside of the bus was a little rough, so we bought an old couch and a chair, and Joe fixed the bunks the way we needed them. We ended up with six bunks, three high on each side. The back room was a wide-open space where we put a wire from one side to the other and hung all of our clothes. Joe glued a mirror on the wall so we could do our hair. That particular bus had no toilet, so Joe put a porta-potty in the back for emergencies.

We used a cooler to store our drinks and lunchmeat. The air conditioner only worked about half the time, so the windows usually stayed open. That was also the bus in which Ben learned to drive. When Joe slept, I sat on the buddy chair beside Ben while he drove. I was so worried that he would fall asleep. He kept telling me to go to bed, but I still sat there (usually falling asleep myself).

The first long trip we took in that bus after it was ready was to somewhere in Virginia. We were so excited that we had our bus! That night we pulled off at a rest area, opened the windows, and slept in it for the first time. We thought we had finally arrived.

For the next 25 years we went through a few more buses. Our next bus was a 1970 MCI, which again had to be completely redone (Joe and Ben were the masterminds in that again); then we bought a 1992 Prevost; then a 2002 Prevost. We never had a bathroom in our bus until we bought the 1992 Prevost. I have many memories of the porta-potties and empty jugs of water. How things change.

We went from a car to a station wagon, from the station wagon to a van, then pulled the trailer behind the van, and finally went through four buses, all in the last 35 years. It was a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, lots of hard work and long trips, to get from that first car to the bus we have now.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The first national recording company that paid attention to us was the Eddie Crook Company. We recorded three albums with Morningstar Records in Nashville. Then we moved on to Horizon Records.

In those days, we loaded up our family and all our equipment into the bus and drove to Asheville, North Carolina, to do our recordings with Horizon Records. We headed south through Cincinnati and over the river into Kentucky. Soon the road rose and fell, running along rolling hills covered in the greenest grass. Then we’d pass into Tennessee, and the mountains crept up around us.

It would take us about eight hours to get to Ashville, and it seemed like we were heading down that way more and more. As our band became known on a regional level, we started playing more shows in the south — Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Alabama. Nearly every weekend we traveled south, and when we’d pass that exit for Knoxville we’d be about halfway to wherever we were going.

We’d been in Ohio for a long time, and there were some divisive issues going on in our church, issues that led us to leave. Many of the ties we had to Ohio were dissolving. Becky was a junior in high school and dating John (he lived in Virginia); Sonya was a senior in high school; Ben was in his first year of college. We felt like we were ready for a change, and we wanted to move before the kids put down roots by getting married. It seemed like the right time.

So we made a family decision to leave Ohio. Poor Becky — she was in her junior year and would have to finish one year in a new school. But moving to Tennessee would mean she was a lot closer to John, so there was at least one positive for her. She still to this day says it was cruel to make her move during her senior year, and I kind of agree.

We befriended a family on one of our many trips south: the Overtons. They lived in LaFollette, Tennessee. They called us and said there was a beautiful place for sale in their town, on three acres of land. We stopped to look at it on one of our trips and to us it seemed huge! My girls had always shared a room, but here everyone would have their own space. There was even a long, flat lane where we could park the bus.

We traveled a lot on weekends and couldn’t attend the auction of the house, so Mr. Overton agreed to represent us and put the bid in on the home. We had a certain limit on what we were able to spend, and we couldn’t go any higher. Luckily, on the day of the auction it was storming, so not too many people showed up. Because Mr. Overton was a well-respected businessman, I think the other people figured they couldn’t outbid him. We were in Alabama when we heard that our offer was accepted, and we were so excited about the opportunity. That spring we started moving little by little, with the goal of being down there for good in the summer after Sonya graduated.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“Mom, check out this song,” Sonya said. We had recently bought the house in LaFollette, and she and Ben had been in the middle of one of those back-and-forth trips to Morrow to help finish the move.

It hasn’t been a bed of roses since I started on my way

And Lord you know I’m not complaining

There’s just something I should say

For I’ve reached desperation and I’ve stumbled since my start

I’ve grown weary through the years

Now I’m crying bitter tears from the depths of my heart

As I sat there listening to two of my kids sing their hearts out to the tune of a song they had just written, I started crying. “My God,” I said, “how did you know that was in my heart? That has to go on the album.”

“From the Depths of My Heart” was a last-minute addition to our 1992 album, Live In Atlanta, and it became a #1 hit. It was #1 for three months in a row in 1992 in Singing News Magazine; it won Song of the Year from Gospel Voice magazine; and that year Sonya won the Horizon Award from the Singing News Awards.

As the kids became more accomplished musicians, they began experimenting with their own sounds and trying to play more contemporary stuff. This was great for them, and they started finding their own musical identity, writing a lot of original material and adding new chord progressions and harmonies that were not traditional bluegrass melodies. I loved the creativity they exhibited, and I was proud to see them develop.

It was an exciting time in the life of the Isaacs.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

In 2001, thanks to our friends Bill and Gloria Gaither, I found myself back in New York City. The buildings rose up like mountains on either side of me. Blaring horns and screeching tires and slamming doors. Vendors shouted. The never-ending sound of a million shoes walking along the sidewalk, a million soles. I walked back inside, back into the place I had always dreamed of playing music: Carnegie Hall.

I remembered how it felt when Maria and I were in the city, together, but other than the small audience at Columbia Records, we had never played anywhere nearly as important. Our best had been reserved for the grassy lawns of the Village, or Gerdie’s, or the next party. Yet here I was in New York City, nearly 40 years later, getting ready to play at Carnegie Hall.

At one point during that day, when the sound checks were over and a few of the sound guys wandered the hall preparing for the concert, I walked slowly up on to the stage and sat in one of the chairs. I stared up at the ornate ceiling, the balconies, the endless spread of theater chairs folded up, waiting for bodies to fill them. I thought of how far I had come, of how far my parents had traveled to get to that city.

And I wept.

My entire life moved through my mind like a movie: I envisioned my father, gone by that time, and my mother, still in the same apartment. I thought about Maria and Joe and all the other friends I had made in the city. I remembered the plays, the musicals, the gigs, the jobs, the schooling, and then eventually leaving for Ohio and my life with Joe. So many memories.

The Carnegie Hall show had been scheduled for quite some time, and in the interim 9/11 had taken place. The city was still reeling from that atrocity, and it felt quieter than I remembered it being. But it was a Gaither show, and Bill, the legendary songwriter and producer, decided that in light of those events we should do more of a patriotic tribute to the firefighters and policemen and emergency workers of the city. It would be an emotional night for everyone.

Bill also had one other idea for the concert.

“Lily,” Bill asked, “do you think your mom would come out on stage if you asked her to, just so we could introduce her?”

I thought about that for a moment. “I’m not sure, but I’ll ask her.”

So I gave her a call. “Mom, I want you to take a cab to Carnegie Hall, you and Irving,” I said. Irving was my stepfather. “I want you to come and visit with everyone. Just get dressed up, because I want you to meet everybody.”

I didn’t even tell her that Bill wanted her to come on stage, because I didn’t want her to get nervous and not come. She had enough hurdles to cross when it came to my concerts without something else scaring her away.

So that day, after my time sitting on the stage and just thinking about my life, my mom and Irving came early and had dinner with the performers backstage. Everyone had heard about her story, so they were making a big deal about her being there, coming up and introducing themselves and asking her questions. And they were all so kind to her. Of course, she loved the attention.

Before the show started I decided to ask her. “Mom, when we’re out there singing, would you care to come out and just let me introduce you to everyone there?”

“Yes, that will be fine.”

“Okay, well, I’ll have my friend come and get you while we’re singing and he’ll bring you out.”

Ben, Sonya, and Becky sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" that night and their voices filled up that auditorium. I don’t think I could have been more proud, and in the moments of silence between verses I scanned the crowd, watching those faces transfixed at the sound of my children’s voices. Their eyes looked up, like people hungry for hope.

Then came the point when Bill Gaither set up my mother’s appearance. “We’ve got a special guest here tonight. This is Lily’s mother, Faye Fishman Blauschild.”

I was standing there beside her as Bill introduced her to the crowd as an 82-year-old Holocaust survivor.

“Mom, is there anything you’d like to say to everyone?” I asked her, not really knowing what to expect. I kind of caught her off guard. But mom has always been a natural, the life of the party, and it didn’t take her more than a moment to turn to the crowd and say in her thick Polish accent: “Well, I am proud to be an American now.”

When she said that the crowd went wild. They gave my little “Yiddish Mama” the longest standing ovation of the night, and chills just covered my entire body. There were people from all branches of the military, the police department, firefighters, and emergency responders: all of them stood up with the rest of the crowd and clapped for her.

Tears welled up in my eyes — there was a woman who survived one of the worst times in the world, and she had never been recognized for anything, ever. She had come to this country with nothing but her husband, a tiny daughter, and the clothes on her back. She had passed under the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, stood in line at Ellis Island, and been given a new name.

Now, this city was honoring her.

She stood, beaming. It felt like the whole world said so much to her in that moment: how sorry they were that she had to experience the Holocaust, how happy they were that she could be there, how sad they were that she had lost so much, and how proud they were of the strength she had shown.

I, too, was proud, but all I could do was smile and cry and shake my head.

That night I walked her and Irving out to get a cab. The air was cool, and for some reason I remembered all the old Jewish customs we had celebrated when I was a kid. I remembered going with her and my father and my brother to see the rabbi, or walking through the park and throwing our sins into the stream. I remembered the red glass of shimmering wine, and my brother reciting out the questions.

I walked behind her, now taller than her, looking over her head. We hailed a cab and I opened the door, took her hand, and helped her inside. I said a few words to her and her driver, then closed the door and watched the yellow cab disappear into the streaming lights of Manhattan traffic. I stood there for a while after the car vanished, just taking in the city.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Our popularity continued to grow, and soon we had an international audience. The Gaithers also continued to invite us to more of their shows, so when they approached us about joining them at a concert in Israel, we couldn’t say yes fast enough. We’d been to Israel several times during the years, but this would be different. We would be performing!

I have to say, the Gaithers have given us such an amazing platform. We are so grateful for the opportunity they gave us to share what we do with so many people. They first invited us to one of their shows in 1992, and since then we’ve been all over the United States and all over the world, singing alongside them. It’s been a huge honor.

In the summer of 2004, we flew to Israel with the Gaithers for a concert in Jerusalem. During rehearsal I got the same feeling as I did at Carnegie Hall — this was my homeland, among the Jewish people. Stone walls, thousands of years old, rose up all around us, and a breeze blew in from the cobalt blue sky. If anything ever felt like heaven, this was it.

I have cousins who live in Israel so I invited them to come to the show — my mom’s sister’s kids, and I had only seen them a couple of times before.

“We’re coming to perform at David’s citadel in Jerusalem,” I told them, “and I’d like you to come to the show.”

Of course I was a little nervous about this, hoping they wouldn’t up and leave in the middle of the show if our Christian message offended their Jewish sensibilities. But they were really excited about coming — some of my dad’s family even said they would be there.

These family members all arrived early and came to the hotel where we were staying. We visited with them for a little, and it was fun telling each other stories about family members we had never heard of. But I was even more nervous after I saw them and became really scared they would leave since we were going to sing so many songs about Jesus.

We did a Hebrew song that night — “Hallelujah.” The rehearsal was good, in spite of the jet lag and everything else, but when the show came it started getting dark, and the lights came up all around us. Israeli dancers moved on the rooftop. When we started singing “Hallelujah,” and the audience stood up and swayed back and forth with the words, it was just amazing. I felt as though I was born for that moment in time.

This is my Jewish homeland, I thought, and here I am with my children, my heritage, even some of my extended Jewish family, singing a Hebrew folk song that’s going to be on television all around the world.

The show went very late, until well after midnight, and my family stayed for the entire thing.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Mom came down and visited with me for Christmas in 2009. Becky and John still lived in the house beside us. Ben was happily married, and Sonya’s wedding was only a few days behind us. It seemed like everyone in my family was happy and doing well. Moving on.

So for that week between Christmas and New Year’s, Mom and I just hung out. It’s the one time of year when we don’t book concerts. The two of us drank coffee and ate a lot of our favorite nosh, dark chocolate. We talked for hours and I spent quality time taking care of her. She was 90 years old at the time, and not too much came easy for her anymore, whether it was preparing breakfast in the morning and getting ready for the day or falling asleep at night.

But I enjoyed just being with her. Just having her there with me in my big, empty house. We had our miniature spats, our disagreements, but she is my mother, and there is a bond between us that is hard to explain.

When her visit came to its end, I flew her back to New York City. For the hundredth time I looked down on the busy-ness and the buildings and the people going here and there like ants disturbed. The tiny matchbox cars. The drab coldness of a new year.

I got her back to her apartment building, and we took the elevator up to her floor, the old familiar landing, the old familiar door. I used to sneak cigarettes in that stairwell, I thought to myself, smiling. Gloria and I used to get into all kinds of trouble in this quiet apartment. I helped mom unpack and get settled, made sure the place warmed up for her, made sure she had food for the next few days.

The next day I went back to the airport by myself. I got in a plane and flew into the New Year — 2010.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Three months later. My brother and I sat in that very same apartment with my mother. Her caretaker had recently died after a fight with cancer, and we didn’t think my mother could live there on her own anymore. So we sat on her plastic-covered sofa, and I marveled at how the apartment smelled the same way it always had.

“No, Mom,” my brother said. “We’re not trying to take away your independence. You would love it in a senior community. You could make new friends and be a part of a Jewish group again. You can’t even leave your apartment anymore! And it’s really not safe for you here, alone. What if someone breaks in? What if you hurt yourself and can’t call for help?”

We gave her the choice of Tennessee or the West Coast, and she chose a community in San Francisco close to my brother. So in about a month my brother met me at her apartment again and we packed her up and he flew with her to California. All she took was her clothing and a few personal items. We knew we had to give up the apartment at that point, so I talked to the superintendent, and he said we could clean it out the following month.

Sonya, her husband, Jimmy, and I flew up one final time to clean out the apartment. Our friends, Bill and Debbie Becker, met us there. The five of us started packing everything into boxes for Goodwill. We gave away a lot of her furniture. We cleaned and dusted and vacuumed.

And memories bombarded me at every turn. We carried out the little kitchen chairs, the very same chairs Gloria and I had sat in while watching my mother dance around the room. They were the very same chairs Maria and I had sat in, plotting our musical careers. The very same chairs where I had sat, desperately waiting for a call from Joe when we had first met.

Then into the bedroom that Hymie and I had shared for so many years. I remembered laying there at night, pretending to sleep while my father looked in on us before going to work the night shift. His chin had always felt so sandpapery rough on my face when he gave me a goodbye kiss. If I closed my eyes, the traffic didn’t sound all that different from my childhood.

We looked through my mother’s papers and photos, and I stared at those memories. I had been so hurt by my parents’ difficult relationship. Our existence as a family had felt so tenuous. I remembered how Dad would wake up during the day and go cough in the bathroom until I was sure his lungs were going to fall out. I thought about how he used to sit at the table and read his Yiddish paper.

In my mother’s closet we discovered that she had so many shoes that she hadn’t been able to take them all with her. I was shocked at how organized she was: her shoes were all in a rack and her clothes were separated by season. It reminded me of how fashionable she had been, how concerned about her looks. I smiled, thinking about how spirited she had always been. I imagined her in the relocation camps after the war, free and growing healthier every day. I imagined what she must have looked like when she married my dad.

In another closet we found 30 boxes of Kleenex piled up. Ten boxes of sugar. Innumerable containers of cotton balls. Tears trickled down my cheeks as I looked through these things she had stockpiled. Was she so lonely and restless that she needed a reason to get out of the house, even if it was just an hour trip to the store to buy a “much-needed” box of tissues? Or was it that 70 years and thousands of miles away from that barbed wire she would always be a Holocaust survivor, saving things for a day when she might need them?

We left a few large pieces of furniture that we couldn’t take with us. The super said he would get them to the local thrift store for us. I kept three or four items, and our friends drove the rest of the boxes in a moving truck back to Tennessee.

It was a sad day. My mom was still living, but this move closed the door on a huge part of my life, a time I would never be able to visit again. I relived a lot of the loneliness I had felt as a child. For a moment, I was young Lily again, wishing my hair could cover my crooked back, excited about the next school musical, and wondering if my father would ever stop drinking.

I walked out through the door, carrying a few small keepsakes. I locked the door and handed the key to the super. I cried out loud that day, took a deep breath, and forced myself to walk. One step in front of the other.

I left that beautiful old apartment, dripping as it did with memories. I walked down the stairs and the echoes of my footsteps drifted up the stairwell behind me.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

But I feel hope these days, and not the old despair that came with trying to be the buffer between so many people. I’m realizing now that God does not need me to take on the cares of the world — my own will suffice. Our band, our life together as a family, our future — it’s all in His hands.

As the plane tilted back and rose up from among those buildings, I looked out the window and watched the city streets turn into rolling hills, then disappear under the clouds. I started thinking about how God knows the future, even when we can’t bear to think about it. I pictured my parents traveling in cattle cars from Poland to Germany, on their way to be exterminated. Yet somehow they survived to tell their story.

Then my brother and I were born. And my life branched out and I got married and had three wonderful, talented children. Would anyone have believed this kind of a future was possible if they had seen my mother standing in a line of Jews walking toward a gas chamber just before her friend pulled her aside? Would anyone have thought a future was possible if they would have been there to watch my father bleeding on the ground in a concentration camp, the guard poised to strike again?

Yet there was always hope. Tyrants tried to destroy as many lives as possible. They tried to snuff out our existence, my existence, yet God’s divine plan marched on. That’s what I felt the most that day, flying home from New York. There is always hope.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Life goes on, you know? You settle into a routine and the days turn to weeks, which turn to months, which turn to years, and before you know it, a few decades have passed. It’s amazing, and sometimes it’s sad, but it can also be very healing, that passing of time.

Joe and I were divorced in 1998. I guess in some ways it's a similar feeling to closing the door on Mom's emptied apartment. You take the good memories, the cherished moments, and you leave the rest behind. Divorce is never easy, and after 28 years of marriage you realize how much you've shared in life. We have three amazing kids and six wonderful grandchildren together. I know I may never understand it all — but I know it was meant for us to be together for however long God's plan intended.

For the next 13 years I stayed in Lafollette, Tennessee, and found a new normalcy as a single woman again. Becky, John, and the kids lived right next to me, and I enjoyed the daily after-school visits from my grandkids Levi and Jakobi. Still, though, a part of my heart was missing. Sonya and Ben had moved to Nashville years prior and were raising families there that I didn't get to see as often as I wanted. Ben and Mindy's kids, Jacob, Cameron, and Kyra, were all very active in their schools and in extracurricular activities. I missed so many ephemeral events — ballgames, school plays, choir concerts, dance recitals, and so much more that a Grandma just needed to see but couldn't, living over three hours away.

Then in 2011, Sonya gave birth to her first baby, my sweet little grandson Ayden. He was growing up so quickly, and I missed him every day I didn't see him. I cherished our holiday times when we were all together and longed for us to live close to each other again. So much of our work was in Nashville — the recording studio, the Grand Ole Opry, industry awards shows, and business meetings, and even the holistic clinic Becky frequented for her autoimmune disease — all were there near their homes. So many days after mid-week Nashville runs, on top of weekend travels, I just wished that we could move there. But what good would it have been to leave one set of grandkids for another? My heart was torn. So, I prayed. A lot.

One day around Halloween in 2011, Becky and John came over for supper. John, who had been teaching at a school there for 6 years, had decided to leave due to some administrative changes. The last thing that I ever expected to come of his mouth that night did — "I think we should consider moving to Nashville." My heart was overjoyed! Could it be that at long last I would be in the same town with all my kids again? My wheels were spinning. I got a little nauseous thinking about the closets stuffed with 20 years of boxes that would have to be sorted through. I got a little sad thinking about the day we moved into that house, as an excited family of five, and now I, alone, would be moving out, and then I had to laugh a little thinking about my pattern of moving every 20 years or so. Let's see, the first 20 years in New York City, then 17 in Ohio, then 20 more in East Tennessee . . . I think 20 years in Nashville will make me the prime age for my final southern snowbird flight to Miami. You never know.

By February of 2012, our houses were on the market. It seemed like poor timing, putting two houses on the market in February. After all, who would buy a house in the winter? Didn’t most people choose to move in the summertime?

Thankfully, it turns out people do move in late winter! During the second week of March, we got a call from the realtor. Two different families, unrelated, not knowing each other, had each made an offer on our houses. The first family that looked at my house bought it. I would move to Nashville the last weekend in May, and Becky and John were there by the second weekend in June.

When I signed the papers, in that moment I did think back with nostalgia on the many years spent in the house, yet I had no regrets. I went through so much there and it was time to go forward with this change, with a new phase in my life, with God leading the way as always. I was excited in one way but kind of scared, you know, that I wouldn’t be doing everything the right way, but it gave me such a feeling of liberation, looking forward to new experiences and memories. I did dread the thought of all that packing! It seemed like such a feat to accomplish on an already busy schedule.

To make moving even more difficult, I had developed a quartersized ulcer on my ankle caused from varicose veins that I had had for years. I was in so much pain with my foot that I had to wear wraps and take pain medication just to function. I had already been to vascular surgeons and knew that if it didn't heal on its own it would require surgery down the line. I had to elevate my foot a lot, and wasn't able to do some of the most simple tasks. Maybe it's ironic how some pain distracts you from other pain. I had to let my family go through most of the boxes for me; some that would've hurt much deeper than any physical wound. Sometimes you don't have a choice but to move on and let the past be.

The kids all laughed about how I was wimping out on all the hard work, just sitting there being the bossy supervisor, so high on pain meds that I didn't remember the last thing I saw. They packed up my life and unpacked it in my new, much smaller home in Nashville. I'll admit it was nice having them do all my dirty work, but I still can't find half my house! Over the last two years, my health restored, I started tearing into those undisturbed boxes that made the trip with me. I just had so much stuff, over 60 years worth, and I wanted to take my time going through it all, item by item.

The first box I opened contained two sweaters I’d knitted while still at home with my parents. I remembered learning to knit, sitting in front of the TV on the couch waiting for Joe’s phone calls. It seemed a little more productive than just twiddling my thumbs and it helped ease the anxiety of those forever long nights when he just couldn't call. Wow! I thought. I kept these through all the moves and all the changes in my life. Underneath the sweaters were three cassette tapes recorded in our little unfinished basement when we lived in Morrow. Sonya, no more than seven at the time, was the announcer and played the piano, while Ben, nine, and Becky, six, would join her in singing and interviewing. In perfect three-part harmony they recorded their very own radio show concert! One recording was a thank you gift for my mom, who had sent them the money for their piano. “The Star Spangled Banner” and “You Are My Sunshine” rang out at the top of their little lungs.

It's amazing to look back on their natural talent beginning at such young ages. At that time we were already singing locally on weekends in churches. My prayer was always that God would use us to be able to make a difference in the world with our music. Holding those cassette tapes, as I thought back on those early days, I had to pause to thank God for granting us the desires of our hearts. None of us could have ever dreamed this big.

In one box marked "kids' keepsakes" I found little hand-medown dresses I'd made for the girls when times were hard, and a housecoat and rain jacket Ben wore when he was just a toddler. There were love letters, old Lincoln log toys, and their report cards, which I kept mainly for the purpose of saving my grandkids’ hides if one of them ever got a bad grade. There were things the kids had made when they were young too — an essay Sonya had written called "Why I Love America" that won her a $100 savings bond; some beautiful sconces Becky had made in her all-boy-plus-one ninth-grade wood shop class; some well-designed drawings Ben had drafted in his favorite architectural class. It made me so proud looking back on their uniqueness and individual skills, and I wondered what they might have chosen as a career if they hadn't grown up on the road. I guess what they say about music is true — if it's in your blood you just can't be fulfilled doing anything else.

Opening the next box labeled "handle with care" was like opening a vault packed with painful emotions. There were my back x-rays taken when they discovered I had scoliosis, and the post-op x-rays showing the huge screws and pins going through my spine. There was that hot, itchy prosthesis I wore for so many years after my mastectomy. There was the Bible given to Joe and me when were first married, and the gently worn wedding album from that blissful day in that other life we were beginning together. What do you do with those kinds of memoirs? You don't need to display them anymore, but you just can't bear to throw them away. I suppose you do what I did. Just find another unvisited bottom drawer or unreachable top shelf to store them in until the next time you rediscover them while looking for your misplaced birth certificate.

I created a box for Joe that day, too; a box for things I knew he would want. There were some old records he had collected and some souvenirs from our travels abroad. There were some Polaroid pictures of him with the kids, old photos of his parents, and several we'd kept of his brother Delmer, who had been killed in that tragic car crash so many years before. I gave each one a good long look before putting them in Joe's pile. Would we have ever gone to church that first night if Delmer hadn't died? Was that the only way for us to embrace the fragility of life and surrender to our call of duty? I prefer to believe that this was one of those times when God made something beautiful out of something otherwise intended for evil. Whatever the reason, I just had to thank God again for Delmer, and that through his untimely death, for the first time ever, I found life.

Yes, life, but not without consequence. There underneath those items were some of my most cherished savings. Pictures from Europe of my sunken-faced father and my barely twenties mother taken shortly after their liberation from the Holocaust; pictures of me as a little girl, oblivious then to the challenges my parents had overcome, standing next to my curly haired little brother Hy, smiling. We were their hope and future, and I couldn't help thinking as tears rolled down my face, how old my young mother looked standing there with us in front of that Bronx apartment. Maybe it was then that I first felt the need to protect them all — the need to save and treasure everything of theirs that I could get my hands on.

In another box labeled "Breakable," I found a ziploc bag with the scarf I had knit for my father that he wore to work nearly every day. I pressed that scarf to my face and breathed in as deeply as I could — the strange but familiar scent of Camel cigarette smoke woven perfectly into the aroma of a fresh-baked loaf of bread. It was Daddy. It was a thread back in time that took me to that little apartment where the sound of his voice calling me "Mamila" or "little mother" reminded me of just how much I wanted to make his life better. I took one more deep smell and put it back in the baggie. I hope it always smells this good.

In another baggie was his teflin and talis, the ceremonial Jewish garments he wore to pray from time to time. Mom had given it to me after Dad passed away, and I'd kept it with the little prayer Bible he used at the synagogue. I wonder what he prayed for. He seemed so content with so little. Maybe he prayed to just stay that way. To them, the life we had was a dream compared to where they had come from. I thought of that when I opened the next little box taped shut with the Yiddish word "Bahnkes" written on it. Inside was what looked like a set of upside-down whiskey glasses, used in a European remedy known as fire cupping. I remembered years ago Dad told me this was how they used to treat body pain with heat. Before electric blankets, or heating pads, they would use a hot candle and heat the inside of these little glasses. When they were warm enough, they would lay five or six of them on the area of pain where the heat could be absorbed into the skin. Dad brought them over from Europe, and somehow they hadn't even gotten cracked. I love these little glasses, knowing that in a small way, even if only temporarily, they took away some of his pain. I only wish they could have done that for his mind.

Just one more unpacking project before taking a break. I was tired and emotionally drained and it was getting late. But it was like a movie that you can't stop watching, no matter how sad the plot at times. Just let me go through this drawer before I go to bed, I thought. It had been stuck for years, and rather than try to force it open, I just let it be. Now it was free and I could finally get inside. My discovery was the reason I believe with all my heart that I couldn't finish this book until now. There it was, my diary dated 1960-, buried under piles of old papers and documents. I couldn't believe it! I had forgotten all about it. I began looking through the entries, remembering each time I held the pen that allowed me to pour my feelings out onto every page. My teenage self had been so intense, so fiery. I found the page where I had asked my father to stop drinking. I found the page where I was so mad at my mom for wanting to leave. The raw, honest emotion in those moments blew me away. Being able to share those actual pages with you as I have in this book has been the icing on the cake for me. Reading it, I felt sorta like Ralphie in The Christmas Story; a little embarrassed, a little goofy, but mostly just thankful for the life I had to write about.

I lay in bed that night and for hours read those private, familiar pages. "Lenore," or "Lenny," as I affectionately called my diary, was my very best friend. The only one who really knew me . . . my thoughts, my insecurities, my dreams, my fears, my frustrations, all of me. I didn't know how to pray then. I didn't know who to talk to. My entries were so sporadic, spanning a three-year period as if the only time I needed Lenny was to share a highlight or a desperate moment in my life. I was trying to find myself. Perhaps in continuation of my parents’ necessary history of changing our family name — Feigle to Faye, Usher to Oscar, Fiszman to Fishman — I was destined to evolve into who I am, too. I was born Lea. My citizenship papers called me Lillian. My school records were Lillie, and that's how Lenny knew me, too. My stage name was Lile´. Now I am just Lily.

For the first time ever, revisiting Lenny, I saw myself from the outside. I saw myself for who I truly am. I realized that I regretted not having asked my father more questions about his life. I realized that my anger toward my mother for so many years should have been compassion because she only wanted to live and have back the life she lost.

I realized that I've always tried to fix my world, and somehow broke myself in the process.

Now I know that changing your name, your address, your hair color, or your wardrobe doesn't change the fabric of who you are. Writing this book has been therapy for me, a spilling of my life into the open, a revealing of secrets, an admission of who I am. I feel like I know myself now, Lily Fishman Isaacs, in a way I never did before.

POSTSCRIPT

It's an amazing story of how a Jewish girl from the Bronx, New York, became the matriarch of a bluegrass gospel family from Tennessee," Sonya, my middle daughter, says with a laugh as she introduces me nightly from the stage. And she's right. Look at me, an immigrant babyboomer, a cancer-survivor, a 60-something divorcee, a Jewish believer. It is quite amazing. I get to do what I love the most with the ones I love the most, and every weekend when I get on that bus with my children and grandchildren I thank God for the light of truth that has led my path all these years. I thank God for blessing my family and me with the talent and platform to share my story and to tell others about the love of God and salvation through Jesus, Yeshua, my Messiah.

I thank God for my little Jewish Mamila. She is 94 years young and lives near my brother, Hy, in Novato, California. Although her physical health is holding up okay, she has been suffering from progressing dementia for several years. It's been hard to watch her decline mentally, but I'm glad there are some things she doesn't have to remember anymore. Hy and Sue visit Mom nearly every day at the assisted living home and take care of so many of her daily needs. Being so far away, I don't know what I would do without them. Hy has worked hard to establish his successful landscaping business, and he and Sue are wonderful parents to my niece and nephew, Alice and Nathan. I visit them as often as I can, and every time I have to leave to come home, my heart sinks, because I never know if it's the last time I'll see Mom again. I miss my West Coast family and wish we could all be together more.

Instead, here I am, 2,343 miles away, settling into my lovely new subdivision in middle Tennessee. I get to babysit Ayden at least one day a week while Sonya and her husband, Jimmy, write songs. There's no better feeling in the world than snuggling with my little "Munchkin" on the couch, watching Power Rangers and playing monster trucks. He likes to come to Meemaw's because he shares my affinity for chocolate and knows I'll sneak him an ice cream sandwich every time . . . shhhh . . . just our little secret. Jimmy has had a very successful country music writing career and has penned five #1 songs, including the song "I'm Gonna Love You Through It" that he, Sonya, and a friend, Ben Hayslip, wrote in 2011 about my experience with breast cancer. Country superstar Martina McBride recorded it, and even asked me to be in her music video. Team Martina, a foundation that was started because of the song, still helps cancer patients all over the world. I am honored that my 30-year-old story of struggle and survival has inspired such a beautiful song and is helping heal so many hearts today.

Becky is also an accomplished songwriter and she, Ben, and Sonya are called upon often to sing background vocals on various music stars' projects, including Reba, Dolly Parton, Vince Gill, Merle Haggard, and Trace Adkins, to name a few. I must say, though, I'm most proud of the parents they have become. I still get to see Jakobi and Levi almost every day despite the two-mile distance now from my house to theirs. It's hard to believe they're already teenagers, and Levi, who's a budding singer and musician, is going into college. Jakobi, the sweet, shy one in the family, is our athlete. Her name is a derivative of Jakabovitz, my mother's maiden name, and her life is a constant reminder that our heritage lives on. Becky's husband, John, travels with a successful bluegrass band called The Boxcars and also enjoys evangelizing in different states. When he's out of town, we have slumber parties, Becky, the kids, and I, and it's like it used to be in LaFollette again. We love to go shopping together, too, all of us girls, and I especially love it when my beautiful step-grandaughter, Madeleine, Jimmy's 15-yearold, joins us!

I get to see Ben, his wife, Mindy, and their kids mostly when we all meet for dinner or I have them over for a home-cooked meal. They only live about 20 minutes from me and stay busy shuttling all three of their teenagers to all the activities they are involved in. Ben spends hours each week in the studio and has become a successful record producer, producing popular artists like the Oak Ridge Boys, the Gaither Vocal Band, and many others. Mindy is a beautiful, sweet, strong woman who loves to make people hate her . . . she is a personal trainer, and physically puts us all to shame. Jacob, their oldest, is wise beyond his years and has excelled in boy scouts and ROTC. Cameron, the middle daughter, loves to sing and play guitar, and aspires to be an entertainer like her dad. Kyra, the youngest, has chosen dance as her art form, and she and Cameron both could be supermodels. I am as proud of my grandchildren as any grandma would be and am thankful to share the same town with them now.

When I'm not enjoying family downtime, I stay busy managing the Isaacs. I spend hours handling our financial affairs, working on scheduling, and talking to promoters to ensure successful concert events. I correspond with our booking agent daily and advance our dates each week before we leave town every weekend. I feel lucky because I'm the first to know when the really big career-changing things happen. And occasionally they do. I recall one particular fall Monday afternoon. I had just finished my favorite New Yorkish lunch of tuna bagels and kosher pickles and had just sat back down at my desk when my phone rang. "Hey, Jeff," I answered happily; not only is he our booking agent, but he has become one of my dearest friends.

"Hi Lily,” he replied, "I just got a call from San Antonio, Texas.

It was John Hagee's church calling to see if the Isaacs are available to come to Cornerstone's annual concert called 'A Night To Honor Israel' next month. Governor Mike Huckabee is the main speaker, and they'd like for you all to sing a few songs right before he speaks."

"Jeff, this is amazing! Are we free?" I asked anxiously.

"Weeelll," he explained, "not really, but we'll check to see if the church you're already booked at will reschedule. Cornerstone will arrange for seven of you to fly down that Sunday morning on a private jet if we can work it out."

It seemed like a long shot. I had heard about this special night in San Antonio. In addition to their thousands of church attendees, Pastor Hagee invites hundreds of people whose focus is to honor and help Israeli communities. He flies representatives in from dozens of Israeli organizations, hosts them for an incredible weekend, and on this special evening, divides millions of dollars among them to support their local businesses and charities. His efforts reflect his heart of love for the Jewish nation and his desire to rebuild their trust in the Christian community. We just had to go! "Lord," I prayed, "please let this happen. They are my people. I want to be there so badly — to sing to these men and women who represent the elite group dedicated to rebuilding our Jewish homeland Israel. Please, Jesus. Amen."

A few hours passed by, and finally Jeff was calling again. "Good news, Lily! The church we had scheduled was more than happy to move the date, so it looks like you're going to San Antonio next month!"

The weeks flew by, and before we knew it, we were crammed into that little seven-seater jet flying to Israel, I mean Texas. The night was even more amazing than I could've ever dreamed. When it was our turn to sing, Pastor Matt Haggee introduced us and shared that my parents were Holocaust survivors. There we stood, on the beautiful red-carpeted Cornerstone Church stage looking out over 5,000 people waving blue and white star of David flags, smiling, waiting for the next opportunity to show their Israeli honorees how much they were loved. I couldn’t hold back the tears. I thought back over all the persecution the Jewish people had been through, everything my parents had been through. I pictured my mother’s friend pulling her from the line going into the gas chamber. I envisioned my father getting hit over the head with a brick, his life hanging in the balance. I imagined what it must have been like for them to be liberated. Over to the right of the stage was a section of very Orthodox Jews, wearing their plain black clothing and their yarmulkas. I thought over the years of my life, how all I ever wanted to do was live on a kibbutz in Israel and dedicate my life to my new homeland. And there I was now, singing in front of an Orthodox Jewish audience. I know they didn't believe in Jesus as Messiah, but I could feel a kindredship because of all our ancestors had been through. It felt as if I had come full circle.

Both of the songs we performed that night, "Shalom My Home," one my daughters had written, and the popular Israeli Hebrew song "Hallelujah," were the same songs we'd performed for the Gaither Jerusalem taping a few years before. I felt that same satisfying feeling, like I was right in the middle of God's will for my life. Like the day I was born, God looked into the future and saw me standing here singing.

I thought about another Hebrew song I often sing in concert taken from Psalms 133:1 that says perfectly, "Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!" To dwell together in unity means all people. When we gather together in unity we're immoveable, we're unshakeable. There were people from all walks of life, different denominations, and different religions, people from across the world watching this particular service in honor of Israel. I was hoping that we would make a lasting impression on our Jewish audience and maybe more doors would open where we could perhaps perform in similar situations like this.

We've been able to minister worldwide, but mostly to non-Jewish people. So my dream has always been to sing to the Jewish people. My own people. Singing those songs that night was so heartwarming to me, and I cherished the opportunity. I meant every word I sang, and I'm sure the emotion in my voice showed how proud and humbled I was to be standing there. We felt that we'd been received well and were relieved by the warm round of applause when we finished. I still can’t believe that day actually happened. I am thankful our legacy. And my children felt it too — they grew up with such a great respect for their heritage, and I am so grateful for that. We were all in that moment together, and it was more special than words can describe. Standing on that stage, I saw myself as a little girl again — there on our little apartment fire escape, with the world as my audience, singing my heart out. It's a long way from the corner of Waring Avenue and Bronx Park East to San Antonio, Texas. I closed my eyes, and for one brief instant I could see how everything in my life had led me to that moment.

Thank you, God. It’s been a beautiful journey. What's next?

HEARTFELT THANKS TO . . .

Shawn Smucker: Thank you for helping me write my story. Thanks for all the hours of writing and re-writing all the chapters again and again. You have such a gift, and you somehow were able to capture my voice in such a special way throughout this book. I appreciate you and the many hours you've spent working with me. You are truly an artist!

Rob Simbeck: Rob, what can I say! You were the first person to actually listen to me; the first writer to capture my feelings and my story. Without your diligent research, I wouldn't know so many facts about my history. Thank you for believing in me and my story. We have shared so many hours together digging deep inside my soul, exposing the secrets of my heart . . . it was therapeutic for me and I love and appreciate you.

Bill and Gloria Gaither: Both of you have been a gift to my entire family. Gloria, thank you for encouraging me to write my life's story. I respect your creative writing ability more than you could ever know!

You have been a protective driving force throughout this whole experience. You've guided me through this emotional process and never gave up on me! You are a blessing to me, and I praise God for putting you in my life! Bill, you have been a mentor to my family and me. We have learned so much from being around you, both personally and professionally. It's hard to believe that we've all worked together for over 20 years now! Here's praying we have another 20 years together. You will outrun us all!!! I respect and honor you for being the man you are. I'm grateful for you.

Barry Jennings, Paul Sizelove, Bill Carter, and all the folks at Gaither Music Group: Thank you for believing in our family. We are blessed to be a part of such a great organization!

Tim Dudley and New Leaf Publishing: Thank you for believing in and publishing this book. All of you have been amazing to work with. I'm looking forward to the years ahead of us.

Andy Andrews, Joe Bonsall (this book wouldn't be possible without you!), Larry Gatlin, Terry Bradshaw, Rod Parsley, Ricky Skaggs, and Sharon White: Thank you for taking time out of your hectic schedules to review and endorse my book. I am honored to call all of you my friends.

Ed and Jeff Harper and the Harper Agency: Thanks for taking care of us for over 22 years and booking us all over the world! We appreciate you and value your friendship. Jeff . . . Thanks for being my BFF!!

Mike Vaden and Vicki Bracey: Thank you for helping me and my family in business!! Your professional guidance has saved me many times, and you've certainly taken a big burden off of me. More than that, thanks for being part of our family.

Auntie Anne and Jonas Beiler: Thanks, dear friends, this book would not have come into fruition without you. I love you and appreciate you.

Bill and Debbie Becker: My Old Groupies! LOL. I love you both! You're FAMILY!

Dave and Nancy Rogers: For being a blessing to us and our ministry.

Rick and Connie Coleman: My PEEPS and BFFs. Love you so much!

Roxanne Ricks: My beautiful friend. You're a blessing to all who know you.

Lisa Hildreth: Thank you for being with us from the very beginning! You are so much a part of who are. Thanks for all the hard work. You're the best!

Pam and Deon Unthank and Absolutely Gospel Music: for all the P&R work and your dedication to gospel music.

Dr. Fred and Deanna Hurst: I don't know what I'd do without you, Doc! My dear friend. Love you both.

Tamara Mariea and Internal Balance: Thanks for keeping us healthy! This clinic has changed our lives. Tamara, you are a godly woman and an inspiration to all who know you.

SPECIAL THANKS TO THESE FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES WHO ARE PRICELESS TO ME . . .

All our former Isaacs musicians & staff

Zak Shumate, Mark Capps, & Valencia Houston — our busmates

All the artists we share the stage with

Pastors Rod & Joni Parsley and World Harvest Church

Pastors Delmus and Rose Bruce and the Stanfield Church of God

Pastors Maury and Gail Davis and Cornerstone Nashville Church

Pastors Joseph and Yolanda Morgan and Celebration of Life Church

Pastors John, Matt, & Diana Hagee & Cornerstone Church

Pastors Tommy & Tara Bates & Community Family Church

Stubbs Mill Road Pentecostal Church

Brenda & Woody Horn and family

Emory, Dorothy, & Denver Lamb

Tom & Janice Roach

Diane, Bobby, & Rachel Bowman

Dee & Mary Hill

Governor Mike Huckabee

Judy Nelon Group

Jimmy & Amanda Sites

Mitchell Mosley

Julia Roy & boys

Andie Glass

Les Butler & Salem Publishing

Lang & Linda Davis

June McTaggart & family

Johnnie Yeary

Celeste Winstead

Gina Brisco

Deana Surles Warren

Rhonda Thompson

Jeff & Karen Foster

Tim & Nancy Dillman

Joey Bowman

Tom and Nancy Waller

Mary Ella and Gene Phelps

Kathy and Steve Hannah

Sharon Gregg

Gerald Russell

Peggy and Karen Haymon

Mike and Dawn Johnson

Shelly Jones

Lee Steffen

Pete Fisher & the Grand Ole Opry Staff

Roberta Croteau

Roger and Betty Holmes

Martina McBride & Team Martina

Gloria Feldman

Maria Ramas

Ronnie Nahoum

Danny Blauschild

Martha and Eugene Boggs

Alice Coffman

Morrow Elementary and Little Miami HS staff

Dr. Alfred Kahn

Dr. Robert Hasle

Dr. Wayne & Judy Rhear

Tim & Judy Moxley

Dr. Steve & Judy Lynn

Michael Bianchi & World Vision

Bruce Phillips

Tom McGalliard

Edie, Krystal, Brian, & Sophie Lawing

Tim Surrett & family

Homecoming Magazine

Singing News Magazine

CCM Powersource Magazine

The Gospel Voice