Gertrude Emma Frisch

My maternal grandmother, Gertrude Emma Frisch.  I hardly knew her, she died of a stroke when I was four years old.  She was making a cake for my brother's birthday and fell over in our kitchen. My brother and sister and I were in the room over the kitchen and heard her fall.  The floor had a crack in it and we looked through that and could see her lying on the floor.

She came to live with us for her last year of life.  We made a small half bath in the "backroom", a large porch on the back of our house in Plainfield NJ.  My mother didn't talk too much about her or maybe she did to my brother and sister, or I was just too young to know what they were talking about.  I do know she was from England, married an Austrian who was a commercial artist who had a studio in New York. I don't know how they met, or where, but they were both "artists.  He the painter, she the pianist.

The only time I remember her playing the piano was when she came to live with us.  She had gnarly old fingers, the result of raising three boys and two girls back when labor-saving kitchen implements consisted of a sharp knife and a potato peeler.  Don't remember what she was playing but I remember she was reading music. Our piano was an old upright located in our dining room.  No idea how the piano got to reside in the dining room, but as a four-year-old that was just the way things were.  I think every house should have a piano, which makes the house a home. After she passed away we moved the piano onto the back porch where her bed used to be.

My mother would always say her mother went to the Julliard School of Music in New York City.  I learned later when I found the program for the recital that it was actually the Grand Conservatory of Music.  The recital took place in the late 1890s, she was probably 20 or 21 years old.  I searched the internet and found performances of the music she performed that day.  I especially liked the Etudes, Op 25. Nos. 7 and 8 by Chopin. The piece she authored, a trio for cello, violin, and piano is lost.

I don't think she ever performed professionally.  She got married and had five children.  Her father-in-law, my mother tells me, was a mean old man who called his grandchildren "The Welanetz brats". Life wore her out.  The pictures I have of her later in life show a thin woman in an old loose-fitting dress with tired sunken eyes.  The young, vibrant, determined, woman in the picture above, beaten down by the hard realities of a domineering husband and the responsibilities of motherhood in the early part of the last century.  But she loved her grandchildren, she played music for us and died on our kitchen floor making a cake for my brother's birthday.