Some of the following may not be accurate, but all of it is true.
My maternal grandmother Esther was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Russia over 120 years ago. Her parents held traditional view about girls. Esther did not.
She was the first in a long line of women in my family who would not be told what women could do or what they could not do.
Against her father’s wishes, she left home to study in Germany where she met my grandfather. He was studying dentistry in Heidleberg.
They fell in love. They married. They came to America and became tobacco farmers in Connecticut.
They had five children. Among the four girls was my mother Helen.
Esther did not believe a woman’s place was in the home. She had no particular interest in domestic skills. It was a gift she passed on to my mother. Neither were particularly good cooks, although Esther could make knishes filled with potato, kasha or pieces of brisket that I loved as a child.
And butter cookies with a little jelly in the center.
When our family moved to L.A. we lived for a while with my grandparents in the Jewish neighborhood of City Terrace in East Los Angeles. To a nine year old it seemed as if all the neighbors knew Esther and all seemed to be members of The Arbeter Ring, The Workmen’s Circle, which was then a Yiddish language socialist organization.
Esther lived a long life. She died in 1975 at the age of 92.
My mother, Helen, died young. In 1977 at the age of 62 her heart gave out after