My mother was born in 1907 in the shtetl of Zashkov in the Pale of Settlement in the Ukraine.  She was one of four children. Her father was a shohet and her grandfather a torah scribe, so they were a family with high religious status.  In 1911 they emigrated to the United States because my grandfather, though ultra orthodox, was concerned because his daughters could not get a good education in Zashkov. 

They ultimately settled in Strawberry Mansion in North Philadelphia, where he continued as a shohet with his own chicken killing business.  The Strawberry Mansion in which my mother grew up was an Eastern European Jewish enclave, with Yiddish the major language and Orthodox Judaism the religion of choice.  The family was poor; my mother did not have a doll until she was 12 years old.  The children helped in the chicken business. Fairmount Park was their playground and the public library their destination of choice.  My mother was completely bilingual; Yiddish was the only language spoken in their home. My grandparents, though they lived til their 80’s, never learned English and though they physically left Eastern Europe, they took the culture and the dress of the shtetl with them. They could not help my mother acclimatize to a secular environment, but her older sister Ida was her mentor in this respect. 

My mother graduated from Girls High in 1925 and from the University of Pennsylvania in 1929. She helped support herself at Penn by tutoring rich girls from the Main Line in math. She still remembers going to their homes to tutor and not knowing what a napkin ring was or which fork to use.  In October of 1929, my grandfather saw lines of people outside the banks. He thought they were depositing money, and went home and took all the money he had saved and rushed to the bank and deposited it. He lost it all since it was the beginning of the great depression and the banks failed. My mother thought she would have to drop out of college and help support the family, but Penn gave her a scholarship and encouraged her to stay in school and she did so and graduated.

After graduation as a math major, she taught math and science in East Stroudsberg, PA, the first time she had ever been away from home, and later returned to Philadelphia as a substitute teacher.  In 1938 she met my father, who had just emigrated from Latvia. He was working as a delivery boy in his uncle’s pharmacy because no one would accept a foreign medical school graduate unless he repeated his residency in an American institution. My mother and he married, and she wrote hundreds of letters to hospitals all over the east coast asking them to accept him as a resident in psychiatry. Only one answered, a hospital run by French nuns in New Brunswick, NJ. Since he spoke fluent French, they gave him a residency. By then, my mother was pregnant with me and working as a case worker, walking up and down tenement stairs to help her clients.  

My father’s family was in Latvia and he suspected what was happening to them. He enlisted in the US army, and was sent all over the United States to work in mental hospitals, eventually ending up in Montana. My mother and I joined him there. She had never been so far away from home, and it was a difficult adjustment for her since we lived in an attic and she was totally unfamiliar with military culture.  However, she learned to adjust but was happy when the war ended and we returned to Philadelphia. My father began work in a VA hospital in New Jersey, and we eventually moved to a small apartment in Plainfield. My father began his own practice, and for 48 years my mother became his business manager. She and my father had a wonderful marriage and a real division of labor. He treated his patients and decided the great political and social issues of the day. She cooked, cleaned, did his typing, paid the bills, and was his secretary and receptionist. She was the solid ground that allowed him to pursue his career without being bothered by the trivia of daily life.  She was very proud of and identified with his accomplishments, always minimizing her own considerable intelligence and capability but without her, he could not have been as successful as he was. They were happily married for 58 years until he died in 1996. They moved to Martin’s Run in 1990 and made many good friends and were very happy here.

 My mother highly valued intellectual development. Even when she moved permanently to the nursing home and could no longer see well, she looked forward to daily visits from her good friend Elsie who read her the newspaper headlines and discussed what was happening n the world with her. At a time when women were not encouraged to pursue PhD’s, she was my cheering squad and never doubted that I would do it. She liked to write poetry and short stories and when she was younger, played the piano well. 

 She was not a joiner of organizations. Her strongest value and her greatest joy was her family.  She was a wonderful daughter and sister, taking care of her parents in old age and was the peacemaker in a strong-willed group of siblings.  She was always there for all of them. She was utterly devoted to my father. When he developed Alzheimer’s and lost his vision, she was his eyes and ears and she took care of him until the end.  She was also a devoted mother, even putting up with my musical tastes during my adolescence although they were far from hers. She even grew to appreciate Elvis Presley and early rock and roll (or at least she said she did). 

She was also a fantastic grandmother. Her grandchildren were the joy of her life. When they could not stand us any more, they always went for support and affirmation to their grandmother, who put up with adolescent behavior with humor, gave them love and support, and never criticized them or said no.  They returned her affection. Whenever we visited her, even if we had seen her the previous day, she always started conversations with “so what have you heard from the children?” She delighted in her four great-grandchildren. When we saw her the day before she died, we told her what they were doing, their accomplishments, and the cute things they said and for the first time in several weeks, we saw her smile.

 She lived a long and happy life.  We knew that at 96 years of age she would not live forever and that one day she would depart this earth, we hoped in a peaceful sleep. It is a real tragedy for her and for us that she died due to injuries sustained from a fire caused by the heater in her room in the Care Center and that she suffered so for seven weeks.  The Chester Crozer Regional Burn Center made heroic efforts to keep her alive, but her body could not withstand the trauma of smoke-damaged lungs.  We will always remember her kindness, her caring, her intelligence, and yes, her feistiness. Zikhrona Livrakha. May her memory be a blessing.