William Tenn - My Mother Was a Witch

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My Mother Was a Witch

William Tenn

I spent most of my boyhood utterly convinced that my mother was a witch. No psychological trauma

was involved; instead, this belief made me feel like a thoroughly loved and protected child.

My memory begins in the ragged worst of Brooklyn's Brownsville—also known as East New

York—where I was surrounded by witches. Every adult woman I knew was one. Shawled conventions

of them buzzed and glowered constantly at our games from nearby "stoops." Whenever my playmates

swirled too boisterously close, the air turned black with angry magic: immense and complicated curses

were thrown.

"May you never live to grow up," was one of the simpler, cheerier incantations. "But if you do grow

up, may it be like a radish, with your head in the ground and your feet in the air." Another went: "May

you itch from head to foot with scabs that drive you crazy—but only after your fingernails have broken

off so you can't scratch."

These remarks were not directed at me; my mother's counter-magic was too widely feared, and I

myself had been schooled in every block and parry applicable to little boys. At bedtime, my mother spat

thrice, forcing the Powers with whom she was in constant familiar correspondence to reverse curses

aimed at me that day back on their authors' heads threefold, as many times as she had spit.

A witch in the family was indeed a rod and a staff of comfort.

My mother was a Yiddish witch, conducting her operations in that compote of German, Hebrew,

and Slavic. This was a serious handicap: she had been born a Jew-ish cockney and spoke little Yiddish

until she met my father, an ex-rabbinical stu-dent and fervent Socialist from Lithuania. Having bagged him

in London's East End on his way to America, she set herself with immediate, wifely devotion to unlearn

her useless English in place of what seemed to be the prevailing tongue of the New World.

While my father trained her to speak Yiddish fluently, he cannot have been of much help to her and

their first-born in that superstitious Brooklyn slum. He held science and sweet reason to be the hope of

the world; her casual, workaday necromancy horrified him. Nary a spell would he teach her: idioms,

literary phrases, and fine Yid-dish poetry, by all means, but no spells, absolutely no spells.

She needed them. A small boy, she noted, was a prime target for malice and envy, and her new

neighbors had at their disposal whole libraries of protective cantrips. Cantrips, at first, had she none. Her

rank on the block was determined by the potency of her invocations and her ability—when invoked

upon—to knock aside or deftly neutralize. But she sorely lacked a cursing tradition passed for

generations from mother to daughter; she alone had brought no such village lore to the United States

wrapped in the thick bedspreads and sewn into goosedown-stuffed pillows. My mother's only weapons

were imagination and ingenuity.

Fortunately her imagination and ingenuity never failed her—once she had got-ten the hang of the

thing. She was a quick study too, learning instruments of the occult as fast as she saw them used.

"Mach a feig!" she would whisper in the grocer's as a beaming housewife com-mented on my

health and good looks. Up came my fist, thumb protruding between forefinger and middle finger in the

ancient male gesture against the female evil eye. Feigs were my reserve equipment when alone: I could

make them at any cursers and continue playing in the serene confidence that all unpleasant wishes had

been safely pasteurized. If an errand took me past threatening witch faces in tenement door-ways, I shot

feigs left and right, all the way down the street.

Still, my mother's best would hardly have been worth its weight in used penta-grams if she had not

stood up worthily to Old Mrs. Mokkeh. Mokkeh was the lady's nickname (it is Yiddish for plague or

pestilence) and suggested the blood-chilling imprecations she could toss off with spectacular fluency.

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William Tenn - My Mother Was a Witch

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