Aunt Ruthie Died Today at 99

(So many of us have an Aunt Ruthie)

Dear Altes,

My Aunt Ruthie, either 98 or 99 depending on who was counting (my family even until the end lied about their age) died this week in one of those places that looks like a Hyatt for people who may or may not have had recent knee surgery.

She was the youngest of four, after Dolly, Sander, and my mother Sara.  She and my mother were the closest of the four siblings. By close I mean they talked frequently, though I’ve never been sure how much they revealed about their lives:  how much they knew and understood.  Still they loved one another, keepers of one another’s histories.

They were wildly different.  Ruthie became a biochemist.  She was Ivory Soap beautiful.  She had golden hair and bright blue eyes and dresses with white collars.  My mother looked like Bess Myerson. Her lips were always bright red, she had necklines and long legs and a mink coat before mink became taboo. She tap danced, chain-smoked, and read novels more or less constantly.   Ruthie married Dr. Bernard Greenberg, a serious epidemiologist, public health academic, a Successful Man.  My mother married Meyer Cohen, an Enzo Pinza lookalike who was rabbinic in his demeanor, rabbinic in his interests.  Even so he was a very good dancer.  He and my mother would often glide across the linoleum kitchen floor.

There’s so much I don’t know about any of their lives and of course it’s too late to ask. What I do know is this:  Shmuel Markovitz, who became Sam Marcks, a butcher, lived in Grand Forks North Dakota with my grandmother, Anna Sorocer a teenager when she married him.  She quickly had a baby daughter and then three more. There they were, Yiddish speaking Rumanian Jews in North Dakota. Whatever it means to make a life, they did. 

Dolly married a tennis player.  My grandmother made me cry with laughter explaining the one tennis game she saw. He stood there and hit the ball she said.  She couldn’t get over the whole idea.  Sander became Alex.  He and his friend opened some mysterious nightclubs in Montana and Wyoming.  He even had an affair with a Famous Singer for a while.  When Ruthie got into Yale graduate school my mother and grandmother moved to New Haven.  My mother, an excellent bridge player all her life, even in the end,  (after she became a widow she said it was easier to find a good sex partner than a good bridge partner) met a couple at a bridge game her first week in New Haven:  Maury and Florence Isaacs.   They offered her a job as an occasional washing machine model for Bendix, and an assistant to Maury.

Ruthie and Sara married the same year: 1946. Ruthie lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina where Bernie became a dean at UNC.  My father read all the time and ran Oscar Cohen’s clothing and shoe store on Main Street in Ansonia, Connecticut.  He had a good sense of humor, and wrote in the late 50’s he wrote a letter to the editor of the Evening Sentinel, the local paper, entitled How to Have a Good Life.

All four of them seemed happy.

But you never really know anyone else’s story.  Especially your mother’s, or your relatives either.

We at Alte are hoping you’ll tell us yours.

Happy Saturday May 8 from Larry and Jessica too.  

Yours Esther