Pish In Die Hosen – From Guest Blogger Sara Fryd

Today’s guest blog is from my cousin Sara Fryd.  She was born in Tashket, Uzbekistan while the Old Man and his sisters were on the run from the Nazi’s in 1944.  Sara has been kind enough to send in this little anecdote about Aron babysitting, a tableau I would have loved to have seen.

The Core Belief

 

It’s easy to love people who love you back.  Who are good, kind, and remember your birthday.  Loving someone who is a pain in the ass is much harder, and yet, somehow much more memorable and educational.  Humans seem to need everything to be exceedingly problematic to learn anything, and I am no exception.  Neither was Aron. 

 

Aron was Nusha’s (my Mother’s) youngest sibling and we were raised together till I was almost six.  We were Jewish refugees living in difficult circumstances outside Munich in 1948.  His challenge wasn’t necessarily that he was a Holocaust survivor, Aron would have been a problem child even if he had been born in Des Moines.  He had that  “j’ne sais quois” quality of intelligence, Dean Martin good looks, and the ability to charm anyone he wanted to.  The operative word here is “wanted,” but those stories will have to wait for another 4 a.m. morning. 

 

He took crap from no one!  Certainly not one three year old girl with a big Polish Ghetto Litvak accented Yiddish/German mouth who knew as many languages as she was old.  Thanks to a liberated Father, she had her own Hebrew Rabbi tutor at two.  Learning Yiddish on purpose to figure out what the grown-ups were saying was a piece of cake (has to be the Zola Chutzpah genes we are so known for).

 

Nusha liked nicknames and everyone’s had a little twang of some sort.  She called him “Aronchik” – the Romania, Russian, Polish, German, French, Yiddish (all languages she was fluent in) version of Aron.  She also made him take care of me.  Eighteen year old males don’t much like babysitting their bratty nieces, even if they are adorably cute with blond curly locks.

 

So here I am toilet trained, needing to go to the bathroom, pulling on his trouser leg.

“Aronchik,” I cried.  “Ich daf gehen pishen.”  (Aron, I have to go pee.) 

“Pish in dien hosen,” my uncle responded.  (Pee in your trousers.)

“Pish auf sich,” I answered.  (Pee on yourself.)

 

Great practice for succeeding in law school, don’t you think?