Knitting divides opinion. On one side are those for whom it is traumatic. First, the very look of a knitting pattern, in which a suave and fancy-sweatered man introduces two pages of impenetrable mathematical code; the fiddliness of casting on; the reluctance of the needles to co-operate; the panic of a dropped stitch, the aborted rescue, the unravelling; and then the indescribable sadness of the finished object, whatever it was meant to be, tight, shapeless and useless.
For others, though, it is a delightful symbol of slow living, best practised in a Scandinavian hut glowing with hygge, with thick needles and thicker yarn, to make designs as intricate as snowflakes. It can also be fished from a bag whenever calmness is called for, in queues or at airports, or when frustrated. With a piece of knitting on the go, there is no dead or unprofitable time. Every moment can be devoted to progress and satisfaction.
Rose Girone was definitely in the latter camp. She loved knitting from childhood, when an aunt in Hamburg first put the needles in her hands, to when, at 110, she was given nice new needles and a ball of red wool for her birthday. By then it was tricky for her to do the slip-knot for casting on, but she managed a few stitches all the same. Until she was 105 she had been teaching at the Knitting Place in Port Washington, New York; until she was 102 she had kept briskly clicking away; and in her 90s she had thought nothing of crawling on the floor to pin out still-damp knitted pieces into the shape of a jumper or a dress. When people brought her pictures from Vogue and wanted the same, she might stay up all night with her measure and graph paper, doing the maths. Quite simply, she could not imagine a life without knitting.
Yet plenty had occurred in hers to disrupt a knitter’s calm. In 1938 she endured Kristallnacht in Breslau, when everything Jewish in the city was smashed or set on fire. Soon afterwards, the Nazis arrested her husband Julius and sent him to Buchenwald; she was spared because she was hugely pregnant with her first and only child. With luck and ingenuity, her relations obtained Chinese exit visas that allowed her, her baby Reha and even Julius to escape to Shanghai, one of the few open ports that still accepted Jews. By 1941, though, the Japanese took over Shanghai and set up a mile-square ghetto for the city’s 20,000 Jewish refugees. She and her family saw out the war there, before seeking refuge in America in 1947. There, her life had to start again from scratch.
She did not forget her knitting, though. No other career had appealed to her anyway, and after marrying Julius (an arranged marriage, but he was plump and prosperous, in the shipping business) she was happy to be a Hausfrau. Soon enough there was little Reha to knit for, chunky little items that could wrap her from the breeze on the deck of a ship. Reha was not the name Rose had wanted; it was the one she disliked least on Hitler’s list of permissible names for Jewish babies. But she did not believe in fretting over foolishness, or small things. She did not complain about the money and jewellery they had been made to leave behind, nor about their place in the Japanese ghetto, in a tiny room that had once been a bathroom under a staircase in a block of flats. True, there was only a single bed for the three of them, ticklish with cockroaches and bed-bugs, where rats ran over them as they slept. But, as she kept reminding the family, weren’t they lucky? They were together, and out of Europe.
She had also, luckily, found work. A man she met persuaded her to show her knitwear to an elegant boutique in Shanghai, which took her on. So many orders came in that she recruited Chinese women to a workshop to help her, acting out any parts of the patterns they did not understand. Julius meanwhile traded the few things they had brought with them, trinkets and linens, and went hunting, bringing back pheasant and quail full of buckshot. He could not make much money, though, and she could. She was soon providing knits for the most fashionable folk in Shanghai, all while living under the stairs. When they finally left, and could take only $10 with them, she folded eight $10 bills very, very small and stitched them over with yarn, to make buttons on one of her sweaters. That way, they took $80 out.
Her time in America showed similar ingenuity. After two weeks she applied for a job, even though she hardly spoke English (let alone knitting English, with its swatches and blockings and bloomings), and got it. After she divorced Julius for not pulling his weight, and she and Reha were scrimping in furnished rooms, by sheer luck she met a man who owned a resort in the Adirondacks, where the rich of the north-east went on holiday. He set her up with a stall in the hotel lobby, and soon she was opening her own business in Queens. It expanded to Rose’s Knitting Studio in Forest Hills, which ran for years before, in 1980, she sold it. By then she had long met and married Jack Girone, her perfect partner.
She did not stop teaching knitting, though, and her classes were among the most sought-after in New York. As a teacher she was kind, telling novices to have a coffee in Dunkin’ Donuts rather than watch as she ripped their efforts undone. After all, she had known her own disasters, including a batch of white sweaters in Shanghai which she tried to dry too fast, and singed in the oven.
Her instructions for life remained the same. Anything you could fix with money was not a problem. Nothing was so very bad that something good couldn’t come of it. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Her recipe for longevity was good children (you had to be lucky with that. She had the best child in the world), and lots of dark chocolate. Most important, though, was always to have a plan. Don’t wake up and say, “What am I going to do today?”
She definitely had a plan. Sometimes as she snoozed in very old age her daughter would hear her muttering in German, eins, zwei, drei, vier. She was counting stitches again. ■