Anna Nessy Perlberg was born in Czechoslovakia. Her mother, Julia Nessy, was an opera singer, and her entire family was devoted to the arts. Her father was Jewish, and when Hitler seized Prague in 1939 she and her two older brothers and their parents left their beloved city for New York.

Anna met her poet husband Mark when they both were students at Columbia. They were married in 1953, and a few years later Mark took a job with Time Magazine that sent him to its Chicago bureau. Anna found work in education and social work. Her last stint was as Director of Blind Service Association (a Chicago non-profit I cherish), and years after retiring she enrolled in one of the memoir-writing classes I lead. Here’s a story she read in class about her first years in Chicago.

by Anna Nessy Perlberg

Anna Nessy Perlberg reads from The House in Prague. Photo by: Diana Phillips, courtesy Lincoln Park Village

It was the middle fifties, and Mark and I had just moved to Chicago. My mother was with us for the holiday. The Czech conductor Rafael Kubelik was also in Chicago. He learned that mother was visiting us and so he came to visit her at our house.

He and mother had concertized together and although there was a difference in their ages — mother was quite a bit older than he — they were good friends.

When he arrived, they embraced and mother introduced Mark and me to him. Then they started to speak in Czech and to recall old times. Suddenly, Kubelik put his face in his hands, saying “It’s almost Christmas Eve, and I don’t have a vanocka.” Vanocka is the Czech version of the German stollen — a sweet cake-like bread, filled with almonds and raisins.

Kubelik looked so sad. Mark and I stared at him and then looked at each other. Simultaneously we had the same thought. After a minute or so, we excused ourselves, saying that we had an errand we’d almost forgotten, but that we’d be back.

We jumped in our car and drove to the Czech section of town on Cermak Street, a street, by the way, that was named after Anton Cermak, an immigrant from an area in Austria-Hungary that is now part of the Czech Republic. (Cermak was mayor of Chicago from 1931 until 1933, when he was at an appearance with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and died from an assassin’s bullet intended for the President-elect.)

in the 1950s there were three Czech bakeries on Cermak. The first one was all sold out of vanockas. Same for the second one. But the third had one left. When we told the Czech saleslady for whom our vanocka was intended, she wrapped it with special care and put a huge red ribbon around it.

Then back in the car and to our neighborhood. We were pretty sure that Kubelik had already left our house, but he had told Mother where he was staying. We drove to the Belden-Stratford Hotel, and told the people at the desk that we had a special delivery for Mr. Kubelik. They sent us up to his room.

Golden Alley Press published The House in Prague.

We knocked and when he opened the door, I said “Vesele Vanoce” (Merry Christmas) and we handed him the vanocka. He was surprised, then understood and hugged us both.

I think of it now, and like to remember that on that occasion Mark and I made someone special feel especially happy with a simple gift of a loaf of special Christmas bread.

The House in Prague, Anna Nessy Perlberg’s memoir of leaving Prague in 1939 and making a new Life in America, was Published this past summer. With immigration in the news, her story is very timely – her publisher, Golden Alley Press, says Anna’s book allows readers to “witness the family’s escape and voyage to Ellis Island and Anna’s struggle to become an American girl in a city teeming with immigrants and prejudice.”

We put the finishing touches on our trip to Scotland this past week, booking a hotel in Edinburgh. In truth, it’s as much a trip to England as Scotland. We’ll first be visiting with our friend Jim at his place in London, then up to his father’s in the North of England, which is how we began our honeymoon back in 1984. We’ll overnight there, breakfast with Jim’s father, and Jim will drive us to Newcastle, where we’ll take the train to Edinburgh.

But not before we have a Newcastle Brown Ale, which is exactly what we did when we embarked back in 1984. Remember, there was no craft beer here in the states, as impossible as that seems in an age when you get raspberry infused IPA with rare hops from an obscure valley in the Ruhr with just the right amount of citrus. I’m making that up, of course. Well, at least I think I am.

Burt Lancaster and Peter Riegert were the headliners. Others included Peter Capaldi (you know, the current Dr. Who).

Anyway, a Newcastle Brown Ale, to a person weaned on mass-brewed American beers, well, that was exotic. And delicious.

I don’t remember a lot of details about the trip—but certain vignettes stand out. The crescent-shaped streets of Edinburgh. Walking the Royal Mile to Edinburgh Castle. Stopping at a little shop where Beth bought a beautiful blue sweater of a type and quality that was, and maybe still is, exclusive to Scotland. Staying at a B&B called Mrs. McCreedy’s, and eating breakfast with her grown son, a comically sour man given to grousing about Americans and America.

Back then, Edinburgh was just the start of our trip. We rented a car in the city centre, I sat on the wrong side and shifted the manual transmission with the wrong hand, hopped a curb on a left turn that felt like a right turn, and we were off—without another traffic incident. Actually, a bicycle ran into us—or did we graze it?—in a traffic circle days later. No harm, no foul. Apart from that, we had to stop a lot for sheep.

I remember being struck by how American Pop Music was playing everywhere we went. “I just called to say I love you,” by Stevie Wonder, was ubiquitous. On the recommendation of someone, we can’t remember who, we made our way to a little village called Oban, where I had my first single-malt scotch. And at a little seaside church, we attended a service for the fishermen who were out on the sea, where prayers were said for their safe return. My lasting memory: The piano player was an ancient woman named Helen.

Helen was a good sport but her tempo was a bit slow for the pastor, who at one point during a hymn crouched down alongside the upright piano, pretended to turn a big imaginary crank, and shouted, “Can you speed it up a bit, Helen!” Imagine Scotty from Star Trek yelling about the engines and that completes the scene.

Mark Knopfler did the soundtrack, which is superb in its own right. Gerry Rafferty has a song on it, too.

I think our Oban experience is partly why to this day, “Local Hero,” a quirky and lovely little film about an American oilman who lands in a tiny Scottish seaside town and is charmed by the locals, is still among my all-time favorites.

And there was Inverness, where we stayed in a converted royal hunting lodge for one night, which happened to be the last night it was open for the season. We were the only guests, so we got royal treatment. We’d been sleeping in B&Bs and the floors of friends’ apartments: It was a luxurious way to end our time in Scotland. After dinner, Beth stayed upstairs in our room and took a hot bath. I headed downstairs where I learned from the staff how to play snooker, and was treated to their favorite local spirits.

There is one other thing about that trip—which I hadn’t thought about until I uploaded the photograph in last week’s post. I mentioned that we saw a lot of sheep on our trip. It was while looking at a flock of them that Beth first began to see spots. She asked me, in fact, whether they were funny kind of sheep that were supposed to look that way.

We didn’t know it then, but that was the beginning of the end of Beth’s vision. That was October and it was gone by the following July.

It struck me that when I think of our honeymoon, I never think: Beth could see back then! At least not until I looked at that photo of her feeding the gulls.

I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I think it’s neither. What I remember is what a grand time we had.

I expect it’ll be every bit as grand in January.

If you’ve followed our blog for a while, you know that Wanda Bridgeforth is a 95-year-old witty and talented writer who has attended the memoir writing class I lead in downtown Chicago for over a decade now. What you might not know about Wanda is that she is an immigrant: she was born in Canada.

You can link to the Beth’s Class blog to read Wanda’s essay about reconnecting with her biological mother 32 years later. The woman she has always affectionately called Mama is the woman who adopted Wanda as an infant and loved and raised her on Chicago’s South Side. Here’s a poem Wanda wrote about how Christmas was celebrated with her Mama long ago.

That’s Wanda from way back on her 90th. Photo courtesy Darlene Schweitzer.

Christmas Days

by Wanda Bridgeforth

“Thanksgiving is over and Christmas is nigh,”

Mama said with a twinkle in her eye.

“We have much to do,

There’s a job for each of you.”

Our thoughts went to Santa checking his list twice,

And Mama could tell him who had been nice.

Willie began to cry ‘cause he knew

After all, he’d been naughty a time or two.

Mama said, “The next thirty days are like Lent,

During them you’ll have time to repent.”

Daisy chains to make,

Pies, cakes and cookies to bake.

”We must clean every nook and cranny,

And have gifts for all, from baby to Granny.”

We’d get dressed

In our Sunday Best

And ride the bus to the store

Where tables of toys would cover the floor.

Santa will be there in his suit of bright red,

We’ll have our “pitcher took” with him in his sled.

After we give him our list

On the forehead we’ll be kissed,

And try to be good ‘til Christmas day

When Santa arrives in his big red sleigh.

A number of the writers in the memoir classes I lead are immigrants, and for the next couple weeks I’m planning to feature essays these wonderful writers wrote when I asked them to describe the role food plays in their holiday traditions.

Let’s start with Annelore. She was born in Germany and met her American-born husband Roy in the early 1960s, when both of them worked in a small town on the Czech border. “I was working as a medical lab tech and Roy was in a special division of the U.S. Army,” she told me, explaining that he maintained Radar equipment for listening in on Czech and Russian conversation along the border. “It was a unit of 20 engineers and linguists and very secret – you could say he was a spy.”

A depiction of Christkind, the Christmas angel.

The two of them married in Germany and relocated to his hometown in North Dakota in 1963, where they had three children. “Everybody knows that when we are far from home, when we are expatriated we tend to cling to tradition, to customs we are familiar with and that make us feel at home,” she wrote in an essay she titled Christmas Traditions. “Missing the wonderful winter Christmases from my childhood in Germany, I tried and tried to reconstruct them for my children year after year.”

Recreating her German Christmas traditions became even more challenging when Roy accepted an engineering position that required the family to spend the next couple decades relocating from country to country around the world. “It was not always easy to find the right ingredients to make it happen,” she wrote. “Live pine trees for example are sparse in deserts like Southern Patagonia or Egypt or in the tropical climate of the Caribbean.”

Listening to Annelore read her essay out loud in class made us all hungry. They started baking in late November, she said. Gingerbread. Stollen. Hazelnut cookies. Almond crescents. Cinnamon stars. Marzipan. “It was not always easy to bake in ‘third-world-ovens,’” she wrote.

For the children, the baking was all part of the anticipation for Christmas Eve. Depending on which country they were living in, it might start with a candlelight service at church. Wherever they were, friends were always invited to join them later for a small meal of Sauerkraut, sausages, steamed salmon, and dark bread. The Christmas tree usually was in the living room with the doors closed.

“Then, a tiny sound!” Annelore wrote. “The tinkling of a bell – Christkind must have come to put presents under the tree. “ She said Christkind comes in the guise of a small angel who slips through a window left open for that very purpose. Only then could they open the door to the sound of music and the sight of the beautiful tree. She described the large tray of cookies waiting in that room as well, and if they were living in a country where the weather outside was cold enough, the aroma of Gluehwein would fill the air. “For the adults this would be the time to settle into the spirit of Christmas, enjoying along with the children, presents, sweets, and music by candle light until late into the night,” she wrote. “Was there room for dessert? Never! But there was plenty of room for being grateful for friends, a delicious feast and of course, the tradition of celebrating together.”

Annelore’s classmate Sharon Kramer compiles essays by writers from the “Me, Myself and I” class I lead at the Chicago Cultural Center on the Beth’s Class blog, and you can read Annelore’s essay in its entirety there to find out how searching in Buenos Aires for a traditional goose almost left her serving fish for their feast one year.

That’s a whole lotta eyeballs there looking for a home. (photo by Chuck Gullett.)

Now, here’s a new one for you.

A waiter in Mississippi was fired for refusing to wear his fake eye at work. Discrimination? I dunno. But this story strikes close to home.

Eye surgeons did all they could to restore my vision when retinopathy set in thirty years ago. One of my eyes is still intact, but the other one shrunk so much from the trauma of all those surgeries that I can’t hold that eyelid open. I wear a prosthesis in that eye.

Jared Ellis, a married father of two children, lost an eye five years ago in an accident. He told a reporter at news station WREG in Mississippi that he wore a prosthetic eye for a while, but it was so uncomfortable that it gave him headaches. Eventually he decided not to wear it at all.

I still remember the first time an oclularist (that’s what specialists who make fake eyes are called) spread open the lids to my poor shrunken eye and plopped the prosthesis in. “Okay,” she said. I could hear her wiping her hands on a paper towel. “It’s in.”

Intellectually I knew all along that the prosthesis was not meant to improve my eyesight. It was meant to improve my looks. But it felt so much like the contact lenses I used to wear. For one split-second, I expected to open my eyes, look in a mirror and see what I looked like with this new eye. I was disappointed.

“It looks great!” the ocularist exclaimed with pride. I faked a smile. The eyepiece felt weird at first, as if, well, as if there was something in my eye. I’ve become used to it now. It only bothers me when dust or grit gets in there. If that happens, I take it out, clean it with regular hand soap and water, and plop it back in. I try not to do this in public restrooms, though!

Last month Ellis told reporters he didn’t wear a prosthetic eye or eye patch when he interviewed for the restaurant job or at any time he worked there. He said there’d been no mention of complaints from customers about him, and that he enjoyed his work.

A month into the job, however, a manager took Ellis aside and told him the restaurant owners wanted him either to wear a prosthetic or an eyepatch. Ellis quit on the spot.

As for me, of course it was crazy for me to ever think the fake eye would restore my vision. Not so crazy to think the fake eye would help restore my confidence. My fake eye is pretty realistic. It helps people feel more comfortable talking with me and listening to what I’m saying. With my fake eye in, it can appear I’m looking at people as they talk. They open themselves up, rather than pre-occupy themselves with my blindness. In turn, so do I.

So, what’s your guess? Which one is fake? (photo by Chuck Gullett)

Forgive the blind puns here, but it’s pretty interesting to look at this from two different points of view. I think this waiter’s customers might feel more comfortable and less pre-occupied with his missing eye if he wore a prosthesis, but Ellis says he’d like to use his restaurant experience to send a message to others in his shoes. “It’s about everybody who’s ever looked in the mirror or had somebody tell them there’s something wrong with the way they look,” he says in the WREG report. “There’s nothing wrong with you. You are beautiful. Don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise.”