Finding Grandma Opposite Lincoln Center

Visits home to New York are always bittersweet because the family members once part of my life are no longer there. But the bronze portrait bust of operatic tenor Richard Tucker in a small triangular patch of green opposite Lincoln Center evokes comforting visions of my paternal grandmother -- and the story about her hiring him to sing the cantorial chants at Dad’s Bar Mitzvah in 1937. She paid him $300, not a small sum during the Great Depression.

Anna Wolinsky was the consummate doctor’s wife -- a woman with a sense of empowerment and also entitlement -- running every aspect of Grandpa’s medical practice on the Lower East and also his life. She operated in a world where appearances signified one’s station in life, and she would not have wanted anybody to think she had skimped on the Bar Mitzvah of her only child.

Loving but socially awkward, Grandpa counted on her to be the relationship-builder and master diplomat in all matters business and family related. Eminently pragmatic, she understood the lessons of quid pro quo, and had no qualms approaching one of Grandpa's patients for help -- the mother of another operatic tenor, Jan Peerce.

By 1937, Peerce was already a radio star -- five years into a soloist engagement with the Radio City Hall Music Company --but still four years away from his own debut at the Met singing Alfredo in Verdi’s La Traviata. I can only imagine Grandma pulling out all the stops, making it difficult for Peerce’s mother to say “no” to her proposal that he play the Bar Mitzvah gig.

No doubt they conducted their negotiations in Yiddish, the lingua franca of the neighborhood. Ultimately Grandma agreed to accept Jan Peerce’s brother-in-law, Richard Tucker. This was eight years before Tucker made his debut with the Met in Ponchielli’s La Gioconda, and I have to believe Grandma managed to claim victory, despite any feelings of defeat.

Grandma’s birthday is July 4 and this summer marks the 20th anniversary of her death. Each time I return to the city, I’m painfully aware that she and Grandpa are buried at a Jewish cemetery in Brooklyn whose name I wish I remembered.

If Grandma had any Richard Tucker recordings on vinyl, and I'm sure she did, they no longer exist. For reasons that relate more to the heart than the head, I was really happy to find a C.D. of Richard Tucker’s “Welcoming the Sabbath” in Border’s. This was a day or so after 9/11, and right before the start of the Jewish high holy days. Listening to him sing brings me closer to Grandma, and her indomitable spirit.