Jerome Robbins: Family, Culture and Ancestry Part V

His mother's side of the family represented an ideal of conventional family ties that would remain absent in Robbins' life. Aaron and Ida Rips had raised seven children. Lena had five sisters, Anna, Mary, Jean, Gertrude and Francis, and a brother, Jacob, the eldest, who died of appendicitis in 1926, leaving behind a wife and two children. A second brother was said to have died in infancy back in Minsk. The three eldest sisters, Anna, Lena and Mary, and their brothers had been born in Russia. All of the sisters married and raised families of their own. None of them ever divorced (though two were widowed and remarried). Together, they were an aggressive, formidable matriarchal force. Their tight-knit stability and mutual support were later a source of pride and fascination shared by all of their children, including Jerry. Like their parents during hard times, they took in less fortunate family members and loaned them money, with generosity felt as an obligation. They celebrated holidays together and had seder at each other's homes-though they also marked Christmas with an exchange of gifts, perhaps feeling that doing so would help them assimilate into the non-Jewish world.
    Jerry's cousin, Bob Silverman, pointed out one area where the sisters may have been lacking. "None of them had a sense of humor....You can't say any one of them was witty or verbal. They were all very middle-class Jewish women, busy raising their families, living extremely conventional lives, as the second-generation children often had to do."
    Of the six sisters, Lena was the dominant one. She ruled the roost in her own household and usually prevailed over the others with her strong will and practical intelligence. Sonia suggested that her mother played the role of family martiarch "very much like Ida Rips," and remembered that "in our culture, women had to be strong." According to Silverman, who later became a successful composer and publisher, "Jerry often talked about writing a book or play about the six sisters....Lena was the man in the family. She wore the pants, she made the decisions. When some decision had to be made and the sisters got together, that would have been Lena organizing things like that. When the family got together, it was often at Lena and Harry's place out in Jersey. They had the largest apartment, and they were seemingly making a bit more than the rest of us during those years."