My maternal grandparents met, married and had their first two children in Bialystock, Russia at the turn of the 20th century. They survived the pogroms (race riots promulgated against Jews) in 1906, hidden by Christian neighbors and fled to the United States with their babies in 1906…yes, immigrants. My grandfather had been a prosperous watch maker, traveling to Warsaw to buy and sell his goods. My grandmother had a maid in the old country.

They made their way to Toledo, OH where my grandfather opened Stein Jewelers at 612 Adams St in downtown Toledo. They had two more children, my mother being the youngest, born in 1913 and the family prospered.

My mother was smothered by her older sisters, and lacked self-confidence. After trying to be a dancer in New York City in 1935, she came home and became the book keeper in her father’s store, the spinster daughter. World War II broke out and she went to Detroit, living with her oldest sister and worked for the USO. There she met and married my father shortly after the war. They had my brother two years later and me, five years after that, when both were 39 years old. I am the youngest grandchild by far and my grandparents doted on me.

My grandfather would play bingo to win me a stuffed animal. I still have “Spotty”, the favorite gift from the menagerie he gave me through the years. We would drive from Detroit to Toledo and play gin rummy. He would deliberately lose so he could give me the spare change from his pocket. He wrote the following note on paper from a score pad after one of our matches. It is one of the few relics I have from him.

Grandpa seemed old, even when I was born. He was always a little overweight, traditional Jewish cooking was laden with fat and exercise was certainly not part of my grandfather’s vocabulary.

It was the summer of 1964, my first summer at the National Music Camp in northern Michigan, when I received the letter from my mother telling me that my grandfather had passed, from a heart attack, at the age of 86. He had already been buried by the time the letter arrived. I was 11 years old and away from the support of my family. I had never lost anyone I loved before and didn’t know how to mourn or what to do. I turned to my camp family – the girls in my cabin.

That first summer, in Junior Girls, I was particularly close to Debby Bornstein and Glorianne Martz. Debby was a Conservative Jew, more religious than I. Glor was a Roman Catholic who attended parochial school. I have always been interested in comparative religions, so delighted when she showed me her beautiful missal and her silver and crystal rosary, a gift from the nuns. They were given special permission to sit up with me after Taps (the bugle call that signals “lights out”) and comfort me. Debby let me wear her gold Jewish star around my neck that night. Glor lent me her beautiful rosary. I only knew she held each bead and said a prayer on it.

I sat up all night saying the Shema on that rosary…”Hear oh Israel, the Lord, Our God, the Lord is One”. It is called the watch-word of the Jewish faith; it declares the “one-nes” of God, the basis of monotheism. A person is supposed to have it on their lips as they die. I somehow knew the Almighty would understand what I was doing and I drew comfort in saying this prayer on the beautiful crystal beads for my beloved grandfather.

As I grew older, my relationship with my religion became more complex, but my deep love and respect for my grandfather never faded. He came to this country to seek religious freedom and tolerance. I think of him every time I exercise my civic duty and vote. Many is the time, when I pull the curtain behind me in the voting booth, that I shed a few tears, thinking of the patriarch of my family, the immigrant who came to this promised land where he worked hard and found great opportunity. I always think of Zalman Stein, spared from the pogroms, who prospered in this melting pot. He was a Zionist, but loved this country too. I will weep again on this Election Day, to think about what has become of his American dream.

"Welcome to the American Dream, old man. Not so fast…"
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Growing up in a neighborhood in Detroit full of kids, Halloween was a big deal. My dad would carve the pumpkin in the scrub sink in the basement. We also lived a few blocks from two large cemeteries, so it really was spooky. We ran in packs from house to house, holding our breath. Houses were decorated to the max. We collected money for UNICEF, sorted our candy and brought what we didn’t want to eat to school the next day, to be given away to hospitals.

Detroit was somewhat notorious for unlawful doings on the night before Halloween called Devil’s Night. Unruly miscreants would come by and throw eggs, toilet paper or worse on your property. So we tried to behave and not incur anyone’s wrath throughout the year.

An aunt brought me a kimono from a visit to Japan when I was 8 or 9 and that was my favorite costume for years. I even wore it in an Intermediate camp production of Mikado when I was 12 and it was my cover-up for years of modeling for life-drawing classes. I still have it.

The feature photo was taken my senior year in high school at a choir Halloween party that I hosted at my house. The costume was one of my mother’s dance costumes from her days as a dancer. She danced a “nautch” dance in it when she was 12. I’m 16 in that photo and went on to wear it on other Halloweens throughout the years. I still have the costume, though it is now about 90 years old and very fragile.

The children are grown and gone from my neighborhood now. Last year we had one trick-or-treater. Even the Boston College students can’t be bothered to come around. I haven’t carved a pumpkin in years, don’t even bother to buy little ones for my stoop anymore. The joy seems to have gone out of it all.

Both our mothers believed in miracles.
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As workers, we used what tools we had easily at our disposal to save: IRAs. But other than that, we enjoyed being DINKs (dual income, no kids). We didn’t have children until we’d been married 11 years. At that time, we set up a college fund and started to set aside serious money each month. My father also gave each child stock when they were born. We opened brokerage accounts for each and let dividends grow. My father died when our second child was 8 months old, then I inherited some money and stock, which I also saved. We inherited more when my mother died in 2010.

I retired with the birth of our second child; my husband was a management consultant, working hard, earning good money. He hit the jackpot when he went to work for Andersen Consulting (not Arthur Andersen, this was the consulting off-shoot of that company). There was confusion in the marketplace as well as difficulty between the two entities and AC split from AA, IPOed and went public, becoming Accenture. My husband was a partner, had significant amount of stock, which was worth a large sum of money.

After the IPO, partners past the age of 50 (Dan turned 51 the next year) were encouraged to retire. Their stock would unlock at an accelerated rate if they did. So he did retire, more than 14 years ago. He interviewed several of the large New York investment banks at the time to see who should manage our rather large portfolio. We have always been active at our alma mater, Brandeis, and one idea he had was to set up a Charitable Remainder UniTrust. We would give a chunk of the stock to Brandeis (a non-profit), get a large tax-deduction for it. The stock is sold and invested. We derive income for the rest of our lives, but Brandeis gets the principle when we die. It seemed like a win-win, though usually these sorts of trusts are established by people much older than we were at the time.

As Dan interviewed prospective money managers, having someone on the team who knew about CRUTs (as they are known) became important. Our lawyer would draw up the trust, but someone needed to be familiar with the concept and have ideas about how to manage the money (we retained control over money management).

These were still the go-go years in investing in New York, and we were wined and dined…taken to nice steak houses, tickets to Broadway shows, Red Sox-Yankee games. I confess, it was fun. A brother team from Lehman Brothers came highly recommended from someone Dan trusted at Accenture and they provided access to a lawyer from their firm with knowledge of CRUTs. We were sold. Papers were signed, money and stock transferred to their accounts. One of the brothers was the front guy and very personable. He would call and we would have long chats, then he’d ask to talk to Dan and say, “Let’s put your money to work!”

We invested in all sorts of stuff…real estate funds (wasn’t that what Lehman Brothers was pushing?) One fund that our guy pushed (and thank goodness was oversubscribed), was run by the “smartest guy he knew”. In February, 2008, we were still buying Lehman Brothers stock. Our portfolio grew and we were having too much fun to notice that credit was tightening and the stock market was falling.

We were on Martha’s Vineyard on Sept. 15, 2008 and watched in horror as Lehman Brothers collapsed and with it, a good deal of our wealth. We got a call from one of the brothers. They had left and were already at Deutsche Bank. Could they meet with us to sign our assets to the new brokerage firm and stay with them. Four days later we sat at our kitchen table in Newton and did just that, but it was too late to stop the bleeding. Too much of our wealth was tied up in proprietary funds that couldn’t be moved. We watched them lose value like the air coming out of a balloon, helpless to do anything. We didn’t hit rock bottom until March, 2009. We lost 45% of our net worth.

We hunkered down, rented the Vineyard house for a season. The college money was elsewhere, homes and cars fully paid for. My husband went into a severe depression. I don’t know if he will ever recover, though our finances did improve. Money that was was invested in Lehman Brothers proprietary stuff just evaporated. We did take what remained away from the brothers and to an entirely different investment firm, not in New York City. We are much more conservative in our investing strategy now, and pay closer attention.

Some years later, I sat with close friends at breakfast on Martha’s Vineyard. One had a relative who worked with the brothers. She confided she was horrified when she heard they were our investment managers. They had the reputation for being “cowboys”, using risky investment strategies with others’ money, just charming guys who pushed hard to churn accounts and make big commisions for themselves. But she didn’t think it was her place to warn us about them. Oh gracious, if friends won’t warn you, who will? No more cowboys for us!

"...one band, one club, and one gig."
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I don’t remember a time when I couldn’t read music. I must have learned at about the same time I learned to read words, around three years old. It has always been a part of my life. I took piano lessons and then oboe lessons, but the thing I always liked the best was singing. My family sang all the time. Campfire classics, Broadway musicals, Tom Lehrer political satire songs. At holidays or other family gatherings, we would all gather around the piano and sing out of the numerous songbooks we had. If you didn’t know the words, or the tune, no matter, you could just read it over the pianist’s shoulder. Whenever we went on a long car trip, we never played the radio, we sang. And we harmonized. My sisters and I had to take turns singing the harmonies, because we all thought it was more fun than the melody, but SOMEBODY had to sing the melody or else the harmonies wouldn’t sound good.

So it was only natural that I wanted to sing in any chorus or choir that was available. First at National Music Camp, later at my high school. When I arrived at college I sang in the Freshman Chorus (with John Zussman). Then, at the end of freshman year, I auditioned for the highly selective Radcliffe Choral Society. Up until that time I had always sung soprano, but I somehow learned that there was an abundance of sopranos and they were short on altos, so I promptly became an alto. Much more fun anyway, because sopranos generally just sing the melody, and altos get to do interesting harmonies. (Classic choir joke: What is the definition of an alto? A female singer who can read music!) I made some of my best college friends in Choral Society, and we still sing together at reunions.

The summer after sophomore year, the Choral Society, along with our male counterpart, the Harvard Glee Club, had the incredible opportunity to sing at Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. We were going to perform two different pieces, in different concerts, and we worked on the music all spring, in addition to everything we needed to learn for our spring concerts. We were doing Chichester Psalms, by Leonard Bernstein, under the direction of Seiji Ozawa, a 34-year-old wunderkind whose name was on everyone’s lips at the time. And we were also doing Mahler’s Second Symphony, under the direction of . . . OMG . . . Leonard Bernstein himself!

Our two concerts were on Friday July 3rd and Sunday July 5th. We had a week at Tanglewood before the performances to rehearse, and to enjoy the wonderful ambiance. It was heavenly. And more than one romance began that week between Glee men and Choral women. One Tanglewood couple actually stayed together for the rest of college and ended up getting married. For the rest of us, it was more transient, but still pretty magical. And the music was incredible! I had not liked the Mahler very much when we were learning it in Cambridge, but once we started rehearsing it with Bernstein it became enthralling. And the performances of both pieces were electrifying.

I continued to sing for the rest of my time in Cambridge. Choral Society was my anchor in those crazy times, along with the Lowell House Opera Society (I sang in the chorus of several operas, I hasten to add — I am not an operatic soloist). After I moved to California I sang with the Masterworks Chorale and the Sacramento Symphony Chorus. I have performed with many wonderful conductors, but nobody who was quite as exciting as Ozawa and Bernstein. I feel very lucky to have had that Tanglewood experience.

Currently I am singing only with my synagogue choir, which is rewarding in a different way. There is no applause, but the congregants are deeply moved by our music, as are the choir members. And the other altos in the choir have become some of my dearest friends. Tonight and tomorrow, for Yom Kippur, we will be singing at five different services, one tonight, and four throughout the day tomorrow. I mostly don’t believe in God, but the music transports me to another place that feels very close to divine.