Found in my grandmother Ana Brom’s notebooks tucked between instructions on dying wool and sketches for clothing designs are “notes to a little schmuck”, as she referred to herself.
Born Ann Doris Rosen in Brooklyn, New York in February 1930 to Jewish parents Clara Brom and Simon Rosen, she died on Vancouver Island, unknown to all but a few family members on the first day of the year 2000. Her death came after many years of agoraphobia and not leaving her house — she was isolated by my abusive step-grandfather who did not get her help until it was too late.
Her notebooks show that despite being so mentally and physically ill she was still working and making art and trying to figure out how/where to sell it until a few months before her death. If I had the resources I would love to see her work shown in New York City and Los Angeles as she had dreamed for so long. I do not want her to be forgotten.
I picture her as a 19 year old modelling nude in Greenwich Village while getting started as a seamstress, later as a single parent designing clothes in Hollywood for stars like Marlon Brando and Shirley Temple, in the early 1970s selling her hand stitched clothing designs on the street in Ibiza, Spain to earn enough to feed her small children and buy a sewing machine. Still making art after my Aunt Lizzie died of suicide and our family collapsed. All that just to die with her work unknown. She was such a talented little schmuck! I miss her eternally. So I recently bought the domain LittleSchmuck.com to maybe archive her work and the book I am slowly writing.
Good work little schmuck.
Collage of photocopied photos of my Nana, one of her and Lizzie; scraps of fabric and red thread torn during Rabbis for Ceasefire Yitzkor service; vintage Jewish stickers given to me by my oldest kiddo; pages of an old fiction book about Nazis; photocopies of my Nana’s handwritten notes 1998/99.
