Times of transformation

My bubby came from a small town near Odessa on the Black Sea. She always described Odessa as a beautiful city especially in contrast to New York where she lived for the first 10 years or so after she came, a young girl of 16, to find her fortune in the new world. She met my zayda in Brooklyn in Prospect Park. They had a small business, a grocery store as I recall, in New York before they moved to Trenton, NJ and opened up soda factory and then a liquor store. If only my zayda had bought the franchise for Pepsi instead of near beer, we would all be millionaires today, or so we grew up believing. Like many immigrant families we were unflinchingly optimistic. Good luck might come to us as it had to so many others no more deserving than we were. But we were always instructed to work hard and never depend on luck or other external forces. You can pray to do well on your exam, my mother would say, but you better give god a little help. We lived with my bubby and zayda for the first two years of my life, while my father was trying to proselytize and convert the troops into communists, above the soda factory along with my mother's two sisters and for awhile with their husbands. When we finally moved to our own house it was only 10 minutes away. Hardly a day passed that I didn't see my bubby and zayda and my bubby didn't impart to me some lessons about the ways of the world that I dutifully internalized and tried to apply to life as I experienced it growing up in an Italian Catholic neighborhood in America.