Go back in time, to your childhood home. Picture the scenes, inhale the scents, and listen closely. What do you hear? 16 Recollections

Door of Opportunity

Elana Moskowitz

For many adults, the sounds of childhood invoke memories of whistling tea kettles, whispered lullabies, and the like. But for my siblings and me, it’s the hum of an electric garage door that takes us down memory lane.

Perhaps it was a structural quirk or a particularly powerful motor, but when the garage door buzzed across its metal track and descended with a thump, the sound projected through every room of our house. And that could only mean one thing: Daddy was home.

Even though my father was exhausted after a day of treating desperately sick patients, dinner was just the first stop on his itinerary. Shortly thereafter, the gentle vibrations of that garage door once again resonated to the upper floor of the house; Daddy was on his way to his daf yomi shiur.

Growing up in a small town offered my father scant opportunity for Torah study; the first time he was privileged to a formal Torah education was when he enrolled in YU. Nonetheless, when presented with the prospect of joining a daf yomi shiur in the early 1980s, my father unhesitatingly joined.

Never mind that in those early years, daf yomi wasn’t yet a brand, with masechta songs and grand hundred-thousand-strong siyumim.

Never mind that most of the shiur paticipants’ learning background outstripped his by decades.

Never mind any of that. Instead, for the next dozen or so years, at precisely 8:30 p.m., the garage door’s shuddering descent marked time in our house.

During the daf yomi era, my father left for work every morning before seven, the garage door’s tremor a gentle five-minute warning before my alarm. But in the early ’90s, that wakeup call recalibrated; the vibrating metal door now merged with early dawn.

My father found his concentration, diluted after a long day at the office, at its peak at sunrise. Why not replace the evening daf shiur with neitz and an early morning chaburah?

Never mind that he had effectively shaved two hours off his sleep quota.

Never mind that now he left before dawn and returned after dark.

Never mind any of that. The learning was better.

For the handful of years until I left home, the 5:30 a.m. garage door was a phantom buzzing in the brief space between my dreams.

From faraway Israel, the garage door wasn’t a presence in my married life. But during our visits, my children learned to anticipate Zeidy’s comings and goings from its telltale rattle. Except now only the true insomniacs among us were privy to its ascent; determined to squeeze in a few more precious minutes of learning, my father now left the house shortly after 4 a.m.

My father’s determination to learn is a value my siblings and I imbibed in our childhood home. And the gentle purring of an electric garage door is the voice of that determination.

Language of Love

Esther Shaindy Leshkowitz

When my mother would speak to her mother, their conversation was a combination of English and Hungarian, and the tempos of each language would meld together like a song, each with its own particular cadence.

Hungarian. It was always there in the background when I was growing up.

Friday, I’d go to my grandparents’ house to pick up kokosh cake and ikra, the creamy dip made with egg roe, and I’d hear my grandmother chatting with one of the great aunts in Hungarian. It was there at simchahs, together with the many layered dobos torte, and at Chanukah parties and Purim seudos, when we’d have szilvas gomboc, the prune-filled potato dumplings that were a pain to make and a joy to eat.

Shabbos afternoons we’d visit my grandparents, and Hungarian was the language of the adults. My cousins would be there too, and as we got older, we learned to sink into the couch, melt into the background, while Hungarian swirled around us.

Sometimes there was a story with such particular nuance that only Hungarian could precisely express it. I knew only to perk up at “a lanyom,” which meant my daughter, but my cousin Rochel knew enough to make out the bare bones of what they were saying. Mostly it was the same type of things people said in English, but in Hungarian, it took on an excitement, and humor, and I wished I understood it.

Those Shabbos afternoons stand out in my mind. Sometimes we’d eat sholeshudes together. Sometimes we’d migrate over to Nagymama’s home. This was my great-grandmother, who came to the US as a widow with nine children after the Holocaust. My great aunts would be there too, and the conversation was that Hungarian-English combination. There was much reminiscing of the war, and the time before and after.

Sometimes there’d be stories, other times they’d discuss the mundane, like how they managed Pesach cleaning back then. (All the furniture out in the courtyard.) One of my favorites was how Nagymama used to make cabbage strudel. She’d roll the dough out on her dining room table until it hung over the sides like a tablecloth.

Today when I hear snippets of Hungarian, I feel like I’m a kid again, and I miss my grandparents more than I did a moment before.

Sounds of Summer

Rivki Silver

It’s the white noise that I remember first. For 24 hours, the time it takes to drive from Des Moines to the outer banks of North Carolina, the the hum of the road whizzing by frames all our conversations.

It’s in the background as our voices shout out the letters of the alphabet when we spy them on billboards and road signs. It accompanies the electronic beeps and chirps of the simple handheld games we play. It lulls us to sleep as we try to find a comfortable position while still buckled into the backseat.

And then we arrive at our destination and fling the doors open, exchanging the noise of the pavement for the magnificent white noise of the ocean. The ebb and flow of the waves as they crash onto the sand then recede into the ocean is now the soundtrack of our summer.

Far above are the squawks of the seagulls, the sounds of a kite being whipped around on a windy day. There’s the constant chatter of families and children squealing with delight as the waves push them around, punctuated by mothers yelling for children to come out, come eat, come get another coat of sunscreen, come rest for a minute.

There are the splashes and the squelch of feet in the sand near shallow water and the cries of people running as quickly as possible from the dunes, where the sand is hot and dry, to reach the relief of the waves.

At night we fall asleep to the rhythmic whooshing of the tides, the sound of my childhood summers.