Monday, January 1, 2024

My Wife's Fabulous Aunt Florence, Tante Faiga

 The Torah tells us specifically in Genesis 24 that marriage involves leaving your mother and father and cleaving to each other. But cleave it or not, at the same time they leave the nest, the couple marries into each other’s family. Like it or not, the newly married now have siblings, aunts, uncles and sundry other in-laws that unlike outlaws, are not always wanted.

My wife Annette and I both came from very small families that were largely matriarchal, both our fathers having died before we even met. Upon marrying, we each “inherited” a sibling, a mother, and a bevy of aunts, uncles and cousins. In this exchange, we both were winners although I would say unquestionably I won the largest jackpot. That was when I was first introduced to the incomparable Florence Epstein Lesser, my wife’s aunt. When she passed away recently at age 101 (although she would argue heatedly that she was only 99), her family, me included, felt a profound loss. 

What was so extraordinary about this woman whom we called Tante Faiga? For one thing, although she was the descendant of renown rabbis as well as the famous Epstein/Rivlin family, pioneers in the land of Israel in the early 1800’s, my wife’s aunt grew up in abject poverty in a cold water flat in Chicago during the height of the depression. My parents and aunts and uncles were also immigrants or the children of immigrants. I have described in earlier writings how difficult it was for my mother and aunts to grow up on a farm in the Jewish colony of Edenbridge in Saskatchewan, Canada. They had to endure frigid cold weather or intense heat, depending on the season; and getting to school was a several miles trek. But at least they had education, Jewish culture, family and daily food and sustenance to help them survive. 

Florence had a father who was a brilliant scholar but who was essentially preoccupied and away from his family for most of her formative years. As the youngest child in an essentially single parent family of three children, Florence spent many days and nights hungry and cold. But from an early age she demonstrated the will and grit to rise above the challenges of her life. As one of her sons said in his eulogy, “she was very determined in her life to achieve success in her goals. She wanted very much to rise out of her hardships and to raise a family who would not experience, as a child or young adult, the poverty she experienced.” 

Rather than receive encouragement from her family, Florence was pressed to find a job and/or a husband and to forget about going to school. But Florence showed a drive to succeed that would not be blocked by what others thought. So stealthily she enrolled and subsequently graduated from IIT, the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1944, one of the few women in her class. Her next goal was to become a doctor and to marry someone she loved, not some pious scholar picked out for her by the family or a matchmaker.

As the pictures show, Florence was an exceedingly beautiful young blond woman with striking movie star features. Fate played a role when a handsome young pre-med student from Brooklyn came to Chicago to go to Chicago Medical School. Howard Lesser had earned straight A’s and a Phi Beta Kappa key from NYU, but he was not allowed entry into NYU Medical School because of a Jewish quota. Luckily, this act of antisemitism had a happy ending.

Legend has it that Howard and Florence met on a train one afternoon, and there was mutual attraction from the start. Both had to overcome resistance from their families of origin. True, Howard was Jewish; but to Florence’s family of rabbis and scholars, this unobservant and uneducated man was not kosher! Howard, an only child of a physician and a woman who had been raised in a wealthy debutante lifestyle, was marrying a poor girl below his class, the Lessers thought.

But love conquers all, and they were married in what would be a happy union blending their disparate styles and personalities. Howard was more serious, a consummate physician and a man set in his ways. Florence had a more joie de vivre, a love of new experiences and meeting new people. But together they loved travelling extensively all around the world. They went on numerous safaris to Africa where Howard used his skill in photography to capture photos that grace my office and our apartment. They loved going to concerts at Lincoln Center and were long-time subscribers.

Florence and Howard had two sons, Steven and Robert (Yossi), both of whom grew up to be doctors like their father. Because she was too poor to go to medical school, Florence concentrated on being a wife and mother although she also worked at times as a travel agent and as a biology teacher.

It was obvious from an early age that my wife Annette was precious to Florence. Her sons have said she loved Annette as the daughter that she never had. Tante Faiga was always there for Annette whenever she needed her. In her own family, my wife was like Rodney Dangerfield. She got no respect. Her father, who made a living as a mohel (one who performs circumcisions) wanted a boy, and he reportedly hung up the phone when he was told this he was a she. When Annette was a toddler, her parents placed her in an orphanage nursery in Chicago so they could concentrate on her sister’s medical issues. Tante Faiga found out and rescued her, she forced Annette’s parents to take her out. Another time her parents arranged to have a photograph taken of her sister, but they didn’t want to pay for Annette to be photographed. She was four years old. Her aunt found out and came over and did her hair and made sure that the photographer stayed and took her picture which she has to this day thanks to her aunt. From Tante Faiga, my wife always got love and respect.

Throughout Annette’s life, it has been her aunt who has introduced her to the beauty and glory of such cultural events as the Philharmonic Orchestra, the Metropolitan Opera and the wonderful museums in New York. Annette learned style in art, clothes, entertaining, and housekeeping from her aunt’s examples and from the times they would go shopping together. When Annette still lived in Chicago and her aunt and uncle had settled in Brooklyn, my wife visited her aunt in New York in the summer. Florence made sure to take Annette to the beach, and my wife developed a love of beaches and waters. After that when Annette moved to New York for college and then to settle into married life with me, there were many times that my wife and her aunt went together to the beach in Bell Harbor. Florence loved listening to the waves in the water as Annette does, although the former was an excellent swimmer, and the latter never learned to swim!

How do I fit into this picture? Well, anything Annette did was fine as far as Florence was concerned. But when it came time for her gorgeous niece to look for a serious relationship, I imagine she expected her to choose a chic, good looking future doctor with a strong Jewish background, someone like our future son-in-law, Dr. Yosef  Kilimnick! But Annette chose me, even though I was none of those things. How can I be a physician if I hated hospitals and the sight of blood? And I was colorblind to boot. Of course, that meant that I wore clothes that didn’t match, and I had no fashion sense and no definite career path.

Frankly, I was intimidated by Annette’s elegant and well-to-do aunt and uncle, and I thought they would never like or accept me. When I was invited to meet them for the first time, I wanted to impress them with a special gift. So, I went out and bought them a waffle iron. You heard me right; I bought them a frigging waffle iron. I don’t know what prompted me to make such a purchase unless subconsciously I wanted to show them that Annette and I were not going to “waffle” in our choices.

In the end, the box with the waffle iron was still unopened when her sons cleaned out her house almost 60 years later. But Howard and especially Florence did open their hearts to me over the years, especially when we raised our children whom they came to cherish like their own grandchildren. When I saw the usual stern and stolid Uncle Howard shed tears of joy at my daughter’s bat mitzvah, I knew I had finally won him over. I felt that Florence became a fan of mine even earlier, and I always enjoyed and felt welcome at her annual Thanksgiving parties. I got to see close-up how she never waffled in her values and how she impressed on her sons, on Annette, and even on me her ironclad determination that you can succeed in anything you set your heart to do.

Above all, she loved the Jewish people, and she loved the land of Israel. Although she was not fully observant, her sons remember that every Friday night, she lit Shabbat candles. Every Passover when they were young, she shlepped her boys to Chicago or to Uncle Jacob in Syracuse. When Steven, who now lives in Israel, was 5 and his family was in Germany where Howard was an army doctor, Florence took him for a tour of the concentration camp Dachau. When Yossi was 10 and Steven was 13, she took them to Israel. She wanted to etch into their minds the Importance of Israel as a place to ensure the safety of Jews from the enemies that arise in every generation.

Florence was always someone who accepted people and encouraged them. She was even doing this in the last years of her life in the nursing home. She never protested when her sons became religious or earlier when they went through a period of rebelliousness. She only wanted them to become educated, to go to college, and to fulfill their own dreams. After Howard passed away, she enjoyed spending Sabbath and holidays with Yossi and Carol or with me and my wife.

Florence and Annette loved visiting places that I don’t think Howard would have ventured to see had he been alive. On one of the last trips to Israel that we took as a family, Florence and Annette told everyone they were going to a day spa. Instead, they went to see Petra. We are talking about one of the great ancient cities that lies half hidden in the wind-blown landscape in southern Jordan. You heard right, two Jewish women traveled alone to Jordan! Nothing untoward happened because as usual, Tanta Faiga had everything carefully orchestrated and knew what to do in a pinch (and they had a few near emergencies). Nonetheless, it was one of my wife’s peak experiences.

.Back on the home front, we spent countless Sabbaths, high holidays, and Passovers together; we always had a fun time. While she was the epitome of elegance, she was also very down to earth and was comfortable in our mostly relaxed, informal home atmosphere. We loved talking to her about anything because she was so well read and versed in so many things. She always gave unconditional love, but she could grill us like a prosecuting attorney if she didn’t agree with what we were saying. To my wife, she was the ideal Jewish female role model, committed to family, to education, to Israel, and to preserving traditions, along with being part of modern secular society.

The past five years she experienced continual decline in her mental capacity. The family was no longer able to ensure that she was safe and well fed at home, even with round the clock aides. The last two years of her life she spent in Gurwin Assisted-Living, specifically, the Memory unit. The staff was wonderful, and she had company every day with all the other residents. Even when she was in the nursing home, she would often sing Yerushalayim shel Zahav (Jerusalem of gold) and other Israeli songs that she still remembered.


In so many ways, Annette attests that she has become the person she is today not so much from what she was taught in school, but what she caught from being around her aunt. I agree and it has been an honor to be able to cleave to her for so, so many years. We are glad our children and grandchildren have been blessed by contact with this incomparable matriarch.




Tuesday, September 12, 2023

My Grandmother Fannie, a True Lamedvavnik

There is an old Jewish legend that every generation has 36 saints, lamedvavnikim as they are called in Hebrew, on whose piety the fate of the world depends. These 36 individuals, who normally prefer to remain hidden, are fonts of lovingkindness, pouring compassion on the world and using the gifts and talents they were given by God to raise up those around them.

I was lucky enough in my lifetime to meet one of these wholehearted persons, namely, my maternal grandmother Fannie Nosofsky. I was around 13 years of age when she passed away, so I got an all too brief chance to know her because she and my grandfather lived with us for several years. I have written that she would be my unanimous first ballot choice for Grandmother Hall of Fame because she was the kindest and most patient person I ever met. I knew little of her background other than the fact that she raised three daughters and worked side-by-side with her husband on their farm in Canada. I knew she could bake and cook and sew and she always did so with love and a warm smile. The house would fill with the smell of yeast and cinnamon when she baked challah, kneading and braiding it with artful hands. I felt protected and cherished as she looked at me and all her grandchildren with warm eyes full of wonder and love. The fact that all of her daughters grew up to be such strong, independent women was a testament to Bubbe Fannie's resolute but gentle nature. I found in her a living model of the capacity to keep choosing to put love whenever and wherever she could.

 I always regretted that I didn't learn from my mother more about my maternal grandmother, the person who was the biggest influence in her life and in the life of her sisters. I never learned her maiden name or where she came from or whether she had siblings. I didn't know how she came to meet my grandfather or what life was like for them in Saskatchewan, Canada.

 This past year my prayers have been answered. I have been a fan of the genealogy site 23&Me and occasionally the site Ancestry.com. They helped me discover in the past things about my father's side of the family that I didn’t know. This year I got two unexpected messages from two remarkable women whose DNA showed they were related to me. One was Sharleen Penner in Canada and the other was Emma Popek in California.

 From both women I learned that my grandmother’s maiden name was Ostrovsky (Ostraiwsky). From Emma who is a second or third cousin, I learned that I have relatives in California, in Switzerland, and Israel. I have already met Emma twice on her semiannual trips to Lincoln Center in New York (she is a big opera buff). She is a Ph.D. environmental technical manager with over 30 years of experience in environmental data collection for United States government agencies and private sector clients. Despite our different backgrounds and interests, Emma and I had instant rapport; we schmoozed easily as if we were long lost cousins, which is in fact what we are! She gave me a copy of a family tree of her branch of the family along with a book in Russian about the history of the Ostrovsky family.

 It seems that the Ostrovsky family came from a town in the Ukraine called Gorodok near Vitebsk. Emma’s father Zalman was a son of Moshe Krivoy and Emma Ostrovsky from Gorodok. Life was treacherous for Jews in the Ukraine at the end of the 19th century. This area was under Russian rule; and after the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, for which Jews were wrongly blamed by many, there was a wave of ‘pogroms’ or state sanctioned violent attacks against the Jews. In 1882, Alexander III instigated the infamous “May Laws” expelling Jews from many areas where they had previously been allowed and encouraging and even instigating pogroms. Quotas on the number who could receive higher education, or work in certain professions, as well as additional residence restrictions, were imposed on Jews. This antisemitism marked the beginning of the great wave of Jewish emigration from the empire. Emma’s branch of the family escaped pogroms, repressive governments, and narrow shtetl life and made it to Europe, America and Israel.  She remembers her father telling her that cousins of his emigrated to Canada.

 From Sharleen I learned more about the Canadian emigrants because my grandmother and her great grandmother were sisters! There were four or maybe five Ostrovsky sisters and two brothers, and Fannie was apparently the youngest child, born in 1891 or 1893. The youngest Ostrovsky sisters, Sarah and Fannie, apparently decided to follow the oldest sister Jenny, who was married to Joe Cramer, to find a better life elsewhere. This was around 1908, a few years after the Canadian Department of Immigration had issued pamphlets offering 160 acres of virgin land for $10. The price would be subsidized by the Jewish Colonization Association, founded by the philanthropist Baron de Hirsch. There were other Jewish farm colonies that sprung up in Saskatchewan in the last decades of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century. But the offer to be one’s own master and to get 160 acres for the low sum of $10 drew groups of Jewish men from Lithuania and South Africa. So, too, the younger Ostrofsky sisters immigrated from Lithuania to marry young Jewish men starting a new life working on farms in a settlement called Edenbridge which meant Jewish Bridge. Somehow the young people wound up on a ship bound for northwest Canada. In 1910, Fannie married Abram Nosofsky and Sarah married Max Solomon.

I have not met Sharleen in person, although we have had a lively exchange of emails. Her great grandparents Jenny and Joe had a daughter Anne who married Ben Freedman. Their son Teddy and his wife Margaret were Sharlene’s parents. The Freedman family was part of the Edenbridge Colony. Sharlene’s brothers still live and farm in the district, close to the synagogue. In 2012, the Freedman Farm, which was established in 1912, received the ‘Century Family Farm’ award. Her dad, older brother and other ancestors are buried in the Jewish cemetery. Sharlene studied at the Saskatchewan Institute of Applied Science and Technology, and she still lives in the same section of Canada.

 Life wasn’t easy on the undeveloped expanse of coniferous trees known in northern Canada as “the bush,” and many early pioneers perished from disease and starvation. These were not men and woman who had owned land or been farmers before. Edenbridge was a living example of the courage, enterprise, and adaptability of the Jews. Canada received them with a warm heart and frozen arms (temperatures reached 50 degrees below zero in winter). At its peak in the 1920’s, this farming community numbered 50 families, flourishing despite the hardships of climate, geography, foxes, bears, grasshoppers, the 1918 flu pandemic, and the depression. With their own hands, they cleared their lands, acre by acre. Horses and modern equipment came later, as did livestock and fowl.

 The settlers worked in cooperative fashion to build log shacks and stables for each other, held together with clay and covered with whitewash. They built their beds from spare logs, and the mattresses were made from old potato sacks filled with straw. They did all this with their own resources. The first winters were dreadful. Nobody had prepared them for the dramatic snowfalls, the thunderstorms, and Arctic gales. Their clothing was thin, and their shoes leaked. They would stuff them with straw and wrap them in old sacking. They fashioned clothes from buffalo skins and heated their homes with forest cuttings. The smoke from their fires was not just in the winter, but in summer served to drive away mosquitoes the size of elephants.

 The children from an early age had to attend the country school, and this meant walking 3 miles on rough terrain. But these were people who valued education, culture, and their religion. They built a synagogue, a cemetery, a community hall, a post office, a library with Jewish and English books, and had one and sometimes two teachers instructing Hebrew and Yiddish classes. The synagogue still exists today as the oldest standing shul in all of Saskatchewan. The Jewish Colonization Association provided initial financing for the Edenbridge Jewish Co-operative Credit Union. Edenbridge had a dramatic society, and apparently my grandmother had a reputation as a successful amateur actress. She was also said to be a wonderful gourmet cook, and she mastered the art of milking cows and making her own milk products – cream, butter, and cheese. She raised a garden, cooked, and canned her own original recipes. I also discovered that she liked to write stories and may even have written a book!

In the cities where most Jews emigrated, the men would go out to work and women would stay home and be full-time mothers and housewives. On the farm in Canada, Bubbe Fannie had to pitch in and help with farm chores, especially since there were no sons. Chores could start at 3:30 a.m. If a cow was pregnant, Avram and Fannie had to be on maternity watch and prepared to help a cow give birth. As crop farmers, if they had a major drought, they might have little or no income that year. According to a financial statement for 1916 that I uncovered, my grandfather’s homestead cultivated 40 acres that raised a crop that year of 230 bushels of wheat, 275 bushels of oats, 20 bushels of potatoes, and 25 tons of hay. He had 1 horse, 6 cows, 100 poultry, and 8 head of young stock. His crops that year earned $795. He also sold secondhand clothes from his farmhouse, and he was an interpreter for the courts in Melfort, Prince Albert and Edenbridge.

 My grandparents maintained their farm until the early 1950’s, and then moved first to Winnipeg and later to Madison to stay with us. I remember visiting their farm when I was under 10. How can people live like this, I thought. How could they cope with no heat or running water? And the outhouse? Ugh!

 The Bubbe Fannie whom I remembered later in her life was the epitome of softness and gentleness. The history I learned from Sharleen suggests my grandmother had a steely toughness as suggested by her standing with a hand on her hip in the picture above with her niece Anne, daughter of her sister Jenny. My grandfather and grandmother are on the left side, and Sharleen’s grandmother Anne and her husband on the right. The other lady is Anne’s daughter Sylvia, with her children Sandra and Judy. There’s a sense of pioneer energy brimming beneath Fannie’s modest demeanor. She was a valiant, indomitable woman, who forged ahead in harsh circumstances.

 There is a movie out starring Helen Mirren about another Jewish woman, Golda Meir (nee Golda Mabovitch) born around the same time in Czarist Ukraine as my grandmother. As a little girl, Golda came to America and grew up in Milwaukee, close to where my father’s family had settled. She emigrated to Palestine in 1921 and became a central figure in Israeli politics. When the state of Israel was founded in 1948, Golda signed the Declaration of Independence and was a member of the Knesset. She was Israel's first and only female head of government from 1969-1974, the first female head of government in the Middle East, and the fourth elected female head of government or state in the world. 

 There is a similarity between the "Iron Lady of Israel” and my grandmother. They could both be viewed as quintessential Jewish Bubbes, but they were in fact really tough and astute operatives.  They vibrated at a specific frequency, which I would call a superior Life Force. I have often told my male clients that we are making a big mistake if we think we are the stronger sex. Contrary to cultural assumptions that boys are stronger and sturdier, basic biological weaknesses are built into the male of our species. These frailties leave them more vulnerable than girls to life’s hazards, including environmental pollutants.

 I have come to love and respect my Bubbe Fannie even more. I did not expect to see such strength, determination, and resilience in a mild mannered woman. My grandmother was a true pioneer, defying societal norms of her time. Her example encourages everyone in my family, especially the women, to push past limitations, accept challenges, and embrace their potential. She is even more a luminary in my eyes, a true lamedvavnik.