Nonfiction: Helena Writes 80 On the grandeur of generations past

Helena Writes 80 July 2025 text and Center logo over an original Helena watercolor painting of an open art book beside a jar of wildflowers
Date Posted:
7/23/2025

Helena Clare Pittman, one of the Center’s most dedicated teachers, has written, painted, and taught her entire life. In her monthly Helena Writes series, she shares a lifetime of wisdom, one pearl at a time.

In her 80th post, Helena reconnects with her parents through a visit with a beloved cousin and aunt. Enjoy!

 

Oberfurst Street

1.

My father’s father—I never met him—my grandfather Joseph Prezant, who knew English and changed his name to Steinberg on Ellis Island to protect his family from bearing a name that sounded like “prison,” visited the Oberfursts regularly. All my father’s family did. My father was the one with the car, maybe his Model T Ford, or the black ’49 Dodge, or was it a Buick I remember parked in front of our house in Brooklyn before the ’52 Dodge? Crowded together in that car, unseatbelted, were my father, his brother, my Uncle Leo, their father, and Dave Richter and his boys, Stanley and Lenny. Bumping along Old Route 17, long before the highway was built, Joe Steinberg is sitting in the back of the car poking my father’s shoulder. 

“Spid it up,” he’s saying. “Spid it up!” That man was stuck in a string factory on the lower East Side all week, longing to swim in the lake, a lake now hidden under the peculiarity of a seedy motel, tumbling downhill under Lake Street, full of beer cans and litter, but still making its way to the headwaters of Mongaup Pond and then to Lake Superior, miles from Liberty. Stanley Richter told me that. Another piece to the puzzle I fit together, writing by writing. 

 

2.

Scared of elevators, I walked the stairs to the eighth floor and rang the bell on the door of 8D, my cousin Stanley’s apartment on the upper east side of Manhattan. Rene opened the door. I love Rene and revere my cousin, Stanley. 

Behind Rene, a tall, statuesque woman with a halo of soft red hair, certainly in her 80s, if not her early 90s, rises from a deep red velvet Victorian couch. She stands straight, presenting as a queen might. This is Aunt Helen Oberfurst.

Stanley and Rene’s building is grandly designed, built at the end of the 19th Century.  Their apartment is beautiful, elegantly decorated with art, antique China, Chinese carvings, old English etchings, three tall dark wood bookshelves, books read and read and read. The figure of Aunt Helen belongs in such a place.

These three people, Stanley, Rene and Aunt Helen, are not people who could be aloof amidst such elegant life trappings. Such is not the character of their lives. The apartment overlooking West End Avenue and the Hudson River is the expression of aesthetic intelligence, genuine sophistication of mind. We in this room are the children of immigrants, people who, like most immigrants, came to this country with the clothes on their backs. The darkness our recent ancestors fled is the shadow the beauty of life makes its home in.

Stanley, my father’s nephew, a tall, handsome, and genuine man, cries easily. Rene is the daughter of ten generations of rabbis. A thousand people came to honor her father at his burial in Israel.

Celebrities live in this building on West 76th Street, people with servants. Stanley’s mother married a bootlegger after Dave Richter, Stanley’s father, died. Dave Richter—I know him by the reverence in my parents’ voices, their demeanor when they speak his name. 

 

3.

Aunt Helen Oberfurst might be on stage. A Klimpt painting. She might sing an aria, hands clasped, perhaps “Visi D’arte,” from Tosca. But no. Instead, this familiar of my parents—my cultured, intelligent, long-gone parents—crosses the room to greet me. She smiles, then, in slow motion, extends her hand and says: “You look like your mother.” I could have knelt to kiss her velvet, sculpted, low-heeled pumps.

I feel comfortable here with Stanley and Rene, and now with this vivid, finely turned-out woman. She is a bridge to the world through which my mother and father moved. I am mesmerized, transported; a curtain has risen revealing some golden light—the light of my own history.

 

4.

I don’t know where Aunt Helen lived, but in summer, she lived in upstate New York, in what is now my town, the town of Liberty. She lived on Oberfurst Street, yes, named after Aunt Helen’s family, though now the street sign reads Oberfest Street, a name cut loose from its history, but contemporary with this era we now find ourselves in, the era of spectacle. The name, Oberfurst, is archived in the skies, in the satellites that speak to my GPS—along with, I pray, other elements of our best history, waiting to descend once more, to be embraced again—it is Oberfurst, not Oberfest, that comes up on my GPS, “make a left onto Oberfurst Street at the first roundabout riding west on State Route 52.”   

Aunt Helen and her husband, my cousin, Mr. Oberfurst, whose first name I somehow never learned, or can’t now recall, lived with their children on Oberfurst Street. Aunt Helen was Dave Richter’s cousin, I think, when I try to make this jigsaw puzzle whole. Cousin Mr. Oberfurst will have to remain a blank. I never met him, of course, but also never heard a word spoken of him. So I have no image of him at all. I was aware of Aunt Helen because Stanley talked about her. He loved Aunt Helen.  

But Dave Richter, the man I knew through my parents’ voices and the faded sepia images in the black construction paper photo album with its lick-the-glue corners, Dave, my father’s sister, Aunt Laulie’s, first husband, is clear to me. “There’s Dave…” my mother. “Dave Richter….” My father. My father touching the curled and cracking photo of Stanley’s father, reading it like Braille. Dave Richter is handsome in the understated way of that generation of Europeans. My father rested his pointer finger on the edge of that photo with such gentleness that it pierced me with the wonder of that man I could only feel and imagine. By their voices, I knew that he possessed character rare in a human being. But of course, there it was again in Stanley.

The house Aunt Helen grew up in was the only house on Oberfurst Street. On the land where her gardens grew with flowers, the house shadowed in great, tall trees, on that piece of land now stands a rent-a room-for-the-day motel, a gas station, a convenience store, and that misspelled street sign. Liberty’s long-ago houses existed in a time of country grandness not two miles from where I now live. The people who tend that odd grocery counter inside the convenience store must have their thoughts and gossip about the odd day-renters that spend an hour or an hour and a half in the rooms of that rundown motel. People with no knowledge of the first generations, the Indigenous people who lived their lives where their counter stands, a people whose character is so far out of memory now. And then the Oberfursts, an order of people who came later, before the present time. The land has forgotten the elegance of the Oberfursts, and their contemporaries, summer people migrating from a stifling, coughing New York City. Those times seem utterly lost to the people selling cigarettes and candy and God knows what, lost to all of us except for the writers, writing to remember, putting the puzzle together piece by piece.  

I glimpsed it in the grace of that Klimpt beauty who extended her hand to me. I experienced the memory of a time, and the woman’s generosity, bringing to me again my mother. I was drawn again into the Court of Oberfurst, Prezant, Bailenson, Ducker, and the remembrance of the grandeur I saw, many times, shining in my parents’ eyes. 

My sister’s and my generation seems an aberration of forgetful entitlement next to the people who moved in that golden world, born in the darkness of the Europe they managed to flee, grasping for dear life the light of that culture, that was not, after all, extinguished. The shadow was hidden with all of their generation, Aunt Helen’s, Stanley’s, Rene’s, and my parents’. It seems clear to me now: it was the quality of the burning light of survival that cast its dark origin onto my generation, nevertheless.

“You look like your mother,” says Aunt Helen. Her beautiful, warm hand and tapered fingers hold my nubby artist’s hand, so like my father’s.

 

Who are the relatives you remember most, and what memories come with picturing them in your mind? What did you think of Helena’s latest column? Share with us in the comments.

Related reading: Helena Writes

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