No matter what else anyone has to say about my grandmother, one thing is sure, she was always the topic of conversation. Her dynamic powerhouse personality and sometimes audacious and even outrageous acts have left us with an indelible memory of a women who made things happen.
At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, she went to Russia and managed to extricate to Israel, a brother who survived Auschwitz only to end up in poverty in Moscow.
Six months before the fall of Havana to Castro, she made numerous trips to Cuba to help a cousin get his equity to Miami (she literally smuggled his money out) so that he and his family could leave on a supposed weekend trip and never return to a country that would have certainly turned on him with the change of government.
A born meddler - sometimes for the good - she arranged for the marriage of an orphan and prepared a wedding in her own home. She tried in vain to marry off her own children but they foiled her plans and found mates of their own.
Clara lived with Jacob, her beloved husband for 50 years before his death in 1981. He had saved her life. It was on his trip back to the homeland of his parents in Vilna, Lithuania, that he met a beautiful 15 year old country girl living on a farm with her 8 siblings and her father. Her mother had been shot to death for disobeying a curfew as she ran into the street after her five year old daughter.
Jacob married Clara on The Lusitania which was sunk by a U-Boat in World War II. With the exception of one brother, her family perished in the Holocaust.
As a child bride in the United States and speaking only Yiddish, she started her family, guided the establishment of her own home and helped her family build their lives.
I think about her everyday.
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