Dora Schulner’s Last Notebook

Dora Schulner was a memoirist at her core, with a very large personality. Though much of her output was fiction, like her novel Esther and a number of folktales, these were all grounded in her own life and experiences. Her first book, Azoy hot es pasirt (This is How it Happened), published in 1942, received an award from YIVO, launching her career as a Yiddish author. The book recounts her experience of struggle and survival during the rise of Communism, her work running a home for unwed mothers in Kiev while her own children were living in an orphanage, and her eventual, reluctant journey to the United States through Warsaw in 1924. Her second book, Miltshin, published in 1946, was a collection of short stories, poems, folktales, a play, and further autobiographical accounts of her emigration from Radomyshl’ to Chicago. In 1949, she published her not-so-subtly autobiographical novel Esther. Her publishing streak slowed after this until 1956, when she published Geshtaltn, a collection of short stories, more autobiography, poems, and aphorisms dedicated to her husband and family. The following year, her husband Henry died in Chicago at the age of 73 and she moved to Los Angeles to live near three of her children.

Dora had four children, Helen, Harry, Max, and Belle; all but Max lived in Los Angeles. Helen, my grandmother, was the eldest. Like Dora, she was quite gregarious. A naturalist and vegetarian until the day she died, Helen lived an independent life on the fringe of normative postwar American society. After the near-constant instability of her early years in Ukraine, she developed a wild and defiant personality. As a young adult, she worked very hard to remove her accent and become a part of the English-speaking world. In the early 1940s, she moved to Los Angeles, where my mother was born and raised. My grandmother owned a health food candy store in Echo Park and kept the company of the beat poets, artists, and proto-hippies of Big Sur, including artist and poet Emil White, cult leader Allan Noonan, and health guru Gyspy Boots. Her relationship with her mother was strained; though they were very close and shared a love of literature and art, their combined intensity could be explosive at times, and they fought often.

In 1963, while living in Los Angeles, Dora published her final book, Perzenlikhkaytn in yidishn lebn (Personalities in Yiddish Life), a collection of essays and character sketches of the various writers and friends who had influenced her over the course of her life. The end of the book features a letter in English to Helen from Emil White, recalling a Dora Schulner reading he attended around 1942. Helen was not in attendance, though she sent a telegram which was read aloud.

The dates of the blue notebook preserved in Helen’s papers overlap exactly with the publishing of Perzenlikhkaytn in yidishn lebn and Dora’s last few years in Los Angeles, with entries dated to August 28, 1962, December 31, 1963, February 18 and March 19, 1964. The undated entries likely begin earlier, including a brief eulogy to her late husband written upside down at the beginning (or end) of the book:

Indeed, this is an appropriate beginning for the notebook. In subsequent entries, she worries about her own health and the health of her loved ones.

What compels me most about the notebook is not just what Dora says, but all that is missing. In her introduction to Perzenlikhkaytn in yidishn lebn, dated 1961, she expresses some of the discontents about life in Los Angeles that perhaps lay behind her cryptic notebook entries:

On the next page of Perzenlikhkaytn, Dora shares an anecdote about an acquaintance calling on the phone to urgently ask her why she wears such wide brimmed hats. She quotes her friend Yoni Rosenfeld, who said that when there are two dogs lying together outdoors, one always barks at a nearby person because people belong indoors. She considers the lives of other people, their peculiarities, and that there is so much strangeness between them.

In contrast to this volubility, an undated aphorism near the middle of the blue notebook reads like a token of Dora’s unrest:

As a private note to herself, it’s like a prayer —a secret to put into the wall. Before and after this entry, Dora ripped out four pages. Maybe they contained more such secrets, or maybe she simply used them as notepaper. The notebook is also riddled with mysterious names and reminders. In the cover are two unexplained notes, “גאָגאָל גאָגאָל” and “הערעל פֿלין”. One page in the middle of the book has just one name: “מיילע באַביטש”. Several pages later there is a calculation of a bill from February with no year given that comes to a total of 70 dollars.

The longest entry is on August 28, 1962. It is also the only entry written in pen:

The book she refers to must be Perzenlikhkaytn in yidishn lebn, which would be published a year later. Her trip to Chicago likely involved a reading, and she may have visited her son Max and his family there as well. The first paragraph of the introduction to Perzenlikhkaytn sets the tone for Dora’s own mental landscape around this time:

But in fact, these were the last years of her life. In her entry on December 31, 1963, only a few years later, Dora is convinced that she will die soon:

In the notebook entry dated February 1964 Dora continues to express concern for her own health and her children:

In the last entry, dated March 19, 1964, roughly one month before her death on May 12 at age 73, Dora wrote:

Helen was absent when Dora died. This remained a regret for her years later. Helen herself would live well into her nineties.

The blue notebook is ultimately a bittersweet document. It represents the private thoughts and prayers of someone who lived her life in public. For me, it is a precious and strange artifact of family history, at once shedding light on my great-grandmother’s final years and puzzlingly incomplete.