This month my mother would have celebrated her 104th birthday. Remembering her after her passing 13 years ago brought back a flood of recollections.
If you walked into my mother’s bedroom at any given point over the last half-century, the first thing you’d notice was the structural engineering marvel on her nightstand. She always had a precarious tower of books waiting to be read. That bedside stack is still one of the first things I picture when I think of her—right alongside her passion for literature, her keen appetite for politics, and her decidedly liberal views (which she was never shy about sharing if the evening news got her going).
For a long time, of course, I suffered from the classic delusion of every child: I assumed my mother had essentially materialized on earth the day I was born, fully formed as “Mom.”
Then I looked at her high school yearbook.
There she is, listed in all her teenage glory, living on the Grand Concourse. Her classmates—who clearly spotted something in her early—predicted that she would one day “design the dresses you have long desired,” noting her artistic talent and plans for art school. Looking at that page stopped me in my tracks. Before she was making sure my brother and I did our homework, she was a Bronx teenager with an artist’s eye, a sketchbook, and big plans of her own.
She grew up an only child in the years just before World War II, right as those gorgeous Art Deco apartment buildings were rising along the Grand Concourse and a shiny new subway line made it a straight shot down to Manhattan’s Garment District. I love picturing her then—walking home from school past that new brickwork, turning over an idea in her head for a dress she couldn’t wait to draw. And while she didn’t end up a Seventh Avenue couturier, she had a real genius for people. The friends she made on those Bronx blocks stayed in her orbit for decades. Mom collected circles of friends at every stage of her life, and she never let go of the people who knew her when she was still her mother’s daughter on the Grand Concourse.
You could see that same fierce loyalty in how she treated her older relatives—especially her mother, Charlotte, whom we all called Nan. After Nan was widowed, Mom didn’t just look after her; she folded her right into the center of our household and gave her a major role in raising our family. Growing up with a grandmother right there in the mix was one of the great gifts of my childhood. It’s only in hindsight, as an adult, that I realize how much grace—and how much room—my mother intentionally made so that relationship could flourish.
Mom married my father in the Bronx in 1944, and they were a true team from the start. In all my years growing up under their roof, I never once heard them have a sustained argument. (If they had disagreements, they must have conducted them in Morse code after we went to bed.) Everything they did was built around putting my brother and me first.
And she fed us. Oh, she fed us. She was a remarkable cook whose kitchen was a masterclass in cultural multitasking. She moved effortlessly between traditional Jewish culinary creations and the finest American and Italian classics—whipping up meals that my friends and family enjoyed around our table for years. You didn’t need an invitation; if you walked through our door, you were getting fed, and it was going to be exceptional.
Nowhere was her quiet toughness clearer than when I went off to medical school. While I had my head buried in anatomy textbooks and hospital rotations—blissfully consumed with learning how to become a doctor—Mom quietly went back to work to help pay the tuition bills. At the time, I was too busy surviving med school to fully grasp the weight of what she had taken on. It took me years to look back and realize: I got the M.D., but she did a lot of the heavy lifting to get me across the stage.
Even late in life, she refused to sit still. After Dad died, when her whole world had shifted on its axis, she didn’t retreat. Instead, she put on a badge and started volunteering at Boca Regional Hospital—stepping into a brand-new chapter at an age when most people are understandably done trying new things.
When my own sons were growing up and playing sports, their grandmother was their chief evangelist. Whenever I was sweating out typical parental worries, she would reassure us, with absolute certainty, that the boys were going to grow up to be “successful and kind.” She was right again.
As a young father, I remember how comforting it was to hear the first part of that prediction. Now that I’m a grandfather myself, I find I spend a lot more time dwelling on the second word. Kind.
When I think back to the space she carved out for Nan in our home, the lifelong Bronx friendships she tended so carefully, the legendary spreads she cooked for every family gathering, and the quiet sacrifices she made for us—I don’t have to wonder where that word, “kind” came from. I grew up watching it in action.
Happy birthday, Mom, and love always.