Cambridge Seniors: Thelma Leaffer →

Hear Thelma Leaffer’s voice here.

At 83, Thelma Leaffer’s dark eyes light up when she tells stories. Her apple-cheeked face is framed by grey curls which just brush her shoulders. She lives in East Cambridge, in subsidized housing for older people, where she has lived for over a decade. When she lived a few floors below, she used to be close with her floor-mates, many of them immigrants from China. Residents were moved around, and then everyone was restricted to their rooms during the pandemic, so she’s not as familiar with her neighbors anymore. The consolation prize is that her new apartment on an upper floor commands a beautiful view west across Cambridge, and she especially likes catching the sunsets.  

Thelma is the daughter of a Ukrainian-American Jewish woman and a Russian-American Jewish man. She was born in New York City, the middle child between an older sister and younger brother. When Thelma was five, her father got a job with Sakorsky Aircraft, and the family relocated to Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Before joining Sakorsky Aircrat, Thelma’s father had quite a storied career. From his teens into his twenties, he was a professional speed-skater on ice. He also performed in a three-person Vaudeville group in New York along with an English couple. He and the other man would ride bicycles onstage and play basketball, while the woman acted as a referee. It was called “Bicycle Basketball.”

Thelma’s beloved Aeroflot (a Russian airline) poster

Thelma’s mother worked in sales, and as an officer in women’s organizations.

As a young woman, Thelma loved music and dancing. She studied the accordion for five years. Her father, having been onstage himself, bought a special white accordion for her which, she remembers, cost $500.00. Her accordion teacher, a professional straight from Italy, had connections in New York City. He finagled getting a recital for his students at the famed Carnegie Hall. When the lights went down in the house, Thelma remembers smilingly, “the light shone [directly] on my white accordion” in a sea of black ones.

Thelma would also play for her parents’ friends when they stayed at the house. Her repertoire consisted of a lot of Beethoven, some Italian music, and Russian folk songs like, “Ochi Chernye” (“Dark Eyes”).

Thelma went to George Washington University. Soon after graduating from college, in 1960, Thelma moved to New York City. She had been hired by Newsweek. They were hiring a number of college-educated women, whom they assigned menial tasks but also taught “editorial techniques.” Thelma was honing her Russian skills at the time, and would read Russian newspapers during her breaks. She also taught English as a Second Language, specializing in teaching Eastern European students.

She used to go over to the United Nations to catch glimpses of illustrious visitors. When Fidel Castro visited from Cuba in the early 1960s, she ducked under the rope and crept closer to him to catch what he looked like. She also met John F. Kennedy before he became President, and was awed by his humility as he thanked everyone one-by-one for coming to one of his speeches.

Thelma received her Masters in Linguistics and her PhD in Psycholinguistics and Cognitive Science from New York University.

She has lived in a number of places: Washington, D.C.; Maryland; Virginia; Connecticut; and New York. She worked as a consultant to government agencies including the National Institute on Aging. She lives in an apartment with a giant window overlooking the grounds. She often invited older people at the Institute to her apartment for coffee or lunch. She especially liked going to hear Dr. Anthony Fauci speak when he worked there.

Thelma moved to Cambridge to continue consulting, working at Synectics. Inc. and as a strategy consultant at Delta Square Associates. She also advised MIT and Fortune 500 companies on communication strategies, and taught at the MBA program at Rutgers University. For years, Thelma contributed stories to the Cambridge Chronicle.

Thelma and her friend, George.

In Cambridge, Thelma became fast friends with a man named George. Every Sunday, George, his friend Ed, and another friend would have brunch together at one of their apartments. Brunching on Sunday was “in” when Thelma lived in New York, and she liked carrying on the tradition. Thelma ended up marrying George’s friend, Ed. She also introduced George and his wife, who had a happy, decades-long marriage.

George died a year ago, and recently Thelma and George’s other friends joined at S and S restaurant in Inman Square to collectively remember him. In her portrait, Thelma is depicted holding up a picture of her beloved friend.

Cambridge Seniors: Juicy Hollis

Hear Juicy Hollis’ voice here.

When I first called Joycelyn Hollis (“Call me Juicy!”), I got her voicemail. Her voice, warm and a little husky, came on and wished the listener a day full of blessings. I knew we’d get along. I called her again and this time, sure I wasn’t a telemarketer, she answered the phone. After we’d established that she wanted to be profiled, we talked for almost half an hour right off the bat – about personal growth, owning your power, and not taking less than you deserve.

Entering Juicy’s home a week or two later, I encountered an avalanche of color, a lush oasis in the middle of east Cambridge. Every object, from the ceramic elephants and rabbits on the shelves, to each of her kitchen implements all in red, was chosen with the utmost care. Meditative music flowed from the sound system. A fan hummed in the corner. Juicy had built herself a sanctuary, and she welcomed me in.

Sculptures on Juicy’s shelves in her apartment’s entrance.

Juicy was born in the Deep South, a little outside Tuscaloosa, Alabama. She had to go to work to help out the family early in life, from about age six. Before school and during breaks, she and her siblings would help pick cotton, peaches, and whatever else was in season. The children owned shoes, but would only be allowed to wear them to church and school, so as to not wear them out quickly. But, she noted to me, the grass was always soft beneath her feet, so it wasn’t a problem. She misses the peaches of her childhood. The children helped earn money and, as a treat, were sometimes given pocket money to buy bought peanuts or soda.

When Juicy was twelve, her family moved up to Boston. It was a little tough at first: her accent made her stand out, and she also endured some bullying from her classmates at school. The Southern kindness and relaxed modes of talk that she’d grown up with were notably absent up here.

She started dating one of her classmates in high school, and got pregnant with her first child. She had a daughter — who’d become the only girl out of her six children — at age sixteen. She attended pregnancy school but a year after giving birth, the pressures of child-raising and school became too much, and she dropped out. She developed an alcohol addiction in her late teens.

Her living room

In her mid-twenties, she kicked the alcohol habit and didn’t have a single drink for sixteen years. During this time, she began what would become a decades-long pursuit of juggling multiple jobs at a time to support her children. “I don’t know what a welfare check looks like, because I’ve never received one,” she told me.

She worked as a bartender for years. She worked for John Hancock in Boston, climbing the ranks from receptionist to accountant, for over two decades. When they were bought by a larger company, she stayed on, expecting to continue her work, and when the next company let her go she missed out on the severance she would have gotten.

She also served as a home health aid for people suffering from Multiple Sclerosis, taking care of one particular patient for eighteen years. She worked in a psychiatric facility where schizophrenic patients were staying.

Her final job was with the Cambridge Housing Authority.

Not far from seventy, Juicy has the kind of looks and energy that result in offers of dates from strangers. For decades, she was the light of her workplaces, always bringing a smile and humor to whatever room she was in. Now, she wants to redirect some of that energy, finally, to herself.

She’s undergoing a kind of Renaissance, now that she’s freed from her 9-to-5s and nightshift jobs. She frequently joins senior outings around Cambridge and Boston, and wants to try her hand at working in addiction recovery centers. She has also had a lifelong interest in makeup, and might want to become a cosmetologist. With an expert eye for fashion and home decor, and as a huge enthusiast for thrifting, she’s also thought about opening up her own thrift store.

Regardless of what she does professionally, she’s savoring living life as a sober woman, enjoying the love and connection she has with her children and their families, and living every day to the fullest.

Cambridge Seniors: David Fitzgerald III

Hear David Fitzgerald III’s voice here.

David Fitzgerald III was one of two residents who came to my informational session, talking about my grant project in order to find volunteers, at Youville House, an assisted living facility near Harvard Square. Well — there was a third attendee, a retired German astrophysicist whose name, I learned, was Wolfgang, but he only attended because David encouraged him to stick around.

I got a sense of David within minutes of my arrival Youville House. “Eminently capable” would be my first descriptor. He is active, quick-witted, knowledgeable, and driven near constantly by a desire to make himself useful to those around him. He is muscularly built, with a pale, soft-featured face that can quickly toggle between pathos and a set jaw. His eyes are a pale blue. When I saw him, he tended to be wearing cargo pants, sneakers, button-down shirts, and a hefty protective cell phone case clipped to his belt, holding a cell phone that often dinged.

He showed me that he gets upwards of twenty-five scheduled alerts from his phone every day. (And here I thought that my three or four alerts a day to complete basic tasks were remarkable).

David was born in Philadelphia. His father was serving in World War II in Europe as a lawyer, and his mother had to handle his birth and first three years of life mostly by herself. The family lived in what he called the “armpit” of the Main Line. 

His mother’s side of the family ran a horse-riding academy called “Radner Ride.” They also ran boys’ and girls’ summer camps in the Poconos. David started attending the camp as a small child. He was first enrolled on the girls’ side of camp, and was the darling of everyone.

But at age eight, he was transferred to the boys’ camp. It was the early fifties, and being “homosexual” was viewed as a serious disorder. He was teased by the other boys, who could sense that he wasn’t like them. (He was also caught in flagrante delicto in a bunk with another one of the boys, which didn’t help).

One point of respite for David was a farm that his father bought in the countryside outside Philadelphia, having read the book Five Acres and Independence. David adored his time on that hundred-acre-plus property. When they first visited it, a large white oak tree had fallen across the driveway. They used that tree for firewood, as there was no heating. David dutifully mowed the fields, and he and his younger sister often slept on cots on the screened-in porch to the sound of peepers. Everyone used an outhouse (a two-seater, curiously). David and a friend built a boat from a catalogue. He also regularly went to a private club with a swimming pool nearby and made some friends there.

At Penn State, where David went to college, he helped produce classical and Rock ‘n’ Roll shows. He majored in Zoology mostly as a fluke, when he proved to be good at Genetics. He received a hefty scholarship to get a Masters in Zoology at the University of Delaware, but considered himself a lousy scientist. He dropped out of the program, and since the Vietnam War was going on, and as a Quaker he had filed for conscientious-objector status, he did two years of social work in lieu of military service.

He was affable and good at systems-oriented thinking, including computer programming, so he earned a job running the Registrar’s Office at the University of Delaware. He devised new ways of registering students using the IBM 401.

He also used his coding skills to help organize and place people for a community day that he founded and ran in Newark (pronounced like “New Arc of the Covenant,” David says drily) on the mall near the University of Delaware. He used a language called D-Base.

David was for a time a member of the Unitarian Universalists. In the summers, they ran two camps in Maine, one for families and one for gay people. There was a lot of mixing across camps. David ultimately felt he belonged more in the family group than the gay one, and ove his eighteen years of attending the camp, he became friendly with a woman named Judith and her two young sons. He decided to move north to live as a surrogate father to the boys and a semi-partner to Judith. He bought a beautiful house in Somerville. The two boys are now in their early fifties and live in the Boston area. He sees them during the holidays but not much more often than that. “I moved up here to be stepdad to them, and I think it was VERY important in their lives that I was around at that point. I don’t know that they’ll recognize the value of it until I’m dead. Then when I’m not around, they’ll begin to think more about what it was like.”

David had a partner for about a decade, but that relationship ended rather abruptly when David became ill for a time. For years, he pursued casual relationships with men after meeting them online. He moved to the Philippines for a time, initially in pursuit of one of these relationships, but once that was broken off he stayed. He became friendly with a family and has paid the tuition for private school for the two daughters. 

Gifts David has received from friends over the years.

David’s shelves are filled with gifts from old colleagues and friends.

Cambridge Seniors: Shiao Shen Yu

Hear Shiao Shen Yu’s voice here.

Shiao is a force. 

There’s no two ways about it. You’d have to be, to survive being one of the last of eight children born in the middle of Japan’s occupation of China. You’d have to be, to survive both that war and the ensuing Maoist Revolution in China. To escape to Taiwan. To earn a place in one of the nation’s most competitive schools, despite having mostly missed school yourself as a child of war; and to become peerlessly fluent in your second language.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Shiao reached out for an interview after seeing my poster in Youville House. When she greeted me at the entrance a few days later for our first interview, she giggled and offered me a tiny paper origami crane that she’d folded for me that morning. She’s an origami enthusiast, which, given her father’s history, makes sense.

Shiao was born in either 1939 or 1940, depending on who you ask. She was born at her father’s ancestral home. Her father was a brilliant architect, who was born Chinese and then educated from his early teen years onward in Japan, tagging along when his brother had gotten a scholarship from China to study abroad. Shiao’s father ended up being so talented that he matriculated into Japan’s most famous university, Tokyo University. 

Shiao’s mother was the only girl she knew of her own class who did not have her feet bound. (For centuries, upper-class girls would undergo painful torture, having their feet broken and bound to achieve what was called “lily feet,” which was a mark of femininity). When a servant had begun to bind her feet, her father threw the servant off and declared that he’d never let her feet be bound. Shiao’s mother was made fun of for her big feet, which were about a size 5 ½.

Because of Shiao’s father’s fluency in Japanese, the Japanese National Army tried to recruit him to serve them in the Second World War. He refused. A Japanese doctor took over the family home that Shiao’s father had had built.

Shiao drawing out a map of her and her parents’ birthplaces. “Pretty good, right? That’s because I’m a professional [teacher].”

When Shiao was about five years old, a new nanny named Wang Ma came into her life. (To this day, it makes Shiao tear up, speaking of Wang Ma). Shiao didn’t feel particularly wanted by her mother, who had to rear nine children. Wang Ma, having lost her husband, son, and daughter, in the Nanking (or Nanjing) Massacre, immediately swept Shiao up into care as a kind of surrogate daughter. Wang Ma had escaped rape by Japanese soldiers by pressing her face against a soldier’s sword and mutilating herself. Her late daughter was Shiao’s age, which doubtless helped determine their bond.

Shiao remembers hiding on the family property in the evenings sometimes, when Japanese soldiers would roam around looking for women to rape. Her maids and nannies were young, targets for sexual violence. One time a soldier, bayoneting a pile of hay where some members of the family were hiding, came so close to getting one of Shiao’s maids that the young woman felt it graze her ear. Miraculously, they all survived.

After the war, the strife didn’t end. Maoists were taking power in China, and Shiao’s family, owning land as they did, were targets.

Shiao demonstrates a Maoist dance she learned during her brief time in school in mainland China.

Shiao’s paternal grandfather was hanged. The family resolved to go to Taiwan at Shiao’s mother’s insistence. The family split up, each parent taking a few children. At first, Shiao’s father wasn’t able to secure passage on a ship leaving from Tsingtao. He “was a gentleman,” and didn’t shove other people hard enough to make it on the boat. The second time around, he managed to through. He advised his wife not to book first class tickets, but instead to book third class ones and to use the extra cash to hire strongmen who could insure that she and her children would be able to board.

During the voyage, Shiao’s mother never left her bed nor took off her heavy padded outfit, to Shiao’s confusion. But when they disembarked in Taiwan, her mother undressed out of her “long pants” in public. Shiao was mortified that her mother was underdressing, until she looked around and saw other women doing the same. They had all sewn precious metals and jewelry into the lining of their outfits – enough to start a new life.

Shiao’s mother claimed that she was born in 1939. Since rice portions were allocated by age, having a ten-year-old meant more rice. The family lived in poverty, many days not being able to afford meat or any side dishes.

Shiao had hardly attended school, but her older siblings saw that she was highly intelligent. They decided to have her take the entrance exams for a coveted spot at one of the high-ranking public schools. Her older siblings tutored her and she made it into the second-best school in Taiwan. She regularly placed in the top ranks of her class, but didn’t have a perfect score because she couldn’t participate in gym. She couldn’t run due to an illness earlier in childhood.

She made it into a top university, but her family couldn’t afford the fees. She underwent training to be a teacher, and completed her student teacher training, before re-attending the university as a regular student a few years later. Being three years older than her classmates, she found it awkward to socialize. When she was about twenty-four, she met a man who was about to leave for Libya to work as a doctor. She was eager to get out of her parents’ home, so she married him and took off for Libya.

His work took them to Canada next, where Shiao gave birth to two daughters. Her husband, who’d been born in mainland China and worshipped Mao Zedong, put up Mao’s portrait in their home and demanded the little girls bow to him. He wanted to return to mainland China. Shiao adamantly refused. That’s what he began to hit her. As she recounts: “I wouldn’t stand for it. I’m a strong woman.” So she filed for divorce, and he abandoned the family for China. He never communicated with them again.

At a dance one evening in Canada, she met a Swiss-German man. He became her second husband. He missed the mountains, so they decided to move down to Colorado. She started work as a bookkeeper, and was prized at work, saving her company tons of money in taxes. She also received her certification and began working as a teacher.

Despite being fluent in English – anyone who reads a page of her memoir or other writings can attest– she was often underestimated for her language abilities because of her accent. But she began taking writing classes. Her mother had wanted to be a writer, and had written some over the years. Shiao took up the mantle with enviable dedication. She achieved success as a contributor to local newspapers, writing on Chinese culture and history. She told me that her second husband couldn’t much take her notoreity, so they divorced. She has since published two books: Chinese Mosaic: Memoirs, Short Stories, Essays, and Columns, which is available for purchase online; and The Two Swordmasters and Two Women. 

Shiao took care of her own mother for about seven years at the end of her mother’s life. She was a dutiful daughter but keenly felt the strain of having to translate for her mother, who could not navigate life in English. Having tutored her two daughters from a young age, especially in Mathematics, Shiao sent both of them off to top universities. One daughter became a lawyer; the other, an academic.

Family photos: Shiao’s mother at left, and also in center photo surrounded by her laughing daughters. A young picture of Shiao (right).

Shiao went back to visit China a couple of times. In 2011, the Chinese government helped offer discount fares in honor of the centennial of the Xinhai Revolution ending the last imperial dynasty. Shiao and her sisters traveled together on a whirlwind tour.

These days she’s seizing life by the reins. In spring, 2022, she purchased an MBTA pass so she could cover as much of Boston as possible. She continues to write. She is also learning the piano, continuing with her origami, and loves to watch Chinese historical dramas she can find on YouTube. Much more of her story can be found in her book, Chinese Mosaic, copies of which are available to purchase at the exhibition at 34 JFK St..

Cambridge Seniors: Ana Mejia

My former landlord Cathy recommended her neighbor, Ana Mejia, as a subject for my project. When I phoned Ana to gauge her willingness to participate, within minutes she proved to be funny, lively and familiar. She’s petite, and sports a crown of curls that caught the morning sunlight as she crossed Dana Park to meet me for our first interview. We sat in dappled sunlight under the flowering trellis as we settled into our talk.

Hear Ana Mejia’s voice here.

Ana was born in the Dominican Republic, the oldest of five children born to well-off parents. Her father came from an illustrious family. There were four boys and two girls, but one of the two boys born succumbed as a toddler to meningitis. It was an unusual tragedy, Ana told me, in a family that had money.

Ana has a quick wit and smile. As her family’s matriarch, she is used to helping manage everybody with good humor and warmth. Within an hour of my meeting her, she was giving me the names of relatives of hers I should visit in Washington Heights (where her mother spent the later decades of her life), and in SoHo, next time I was back in my hometown. Less than two hours into our first interview, and I was touring her beautiful home, with walls painted the colors of the tropics, stuffed to the gills with books and art – her own, and many works she’s brought back from overseas.

Ana shows me a work-in-progress

She told me that in cultures like the Dominican Republic’s, being the eldest child means being a surrogate mother to the other children, with responsibilities taken on early and almost no moment to rest. She was assigned a variety of duties, from sweeping the house to watching and bathing her siblings. She couldn’t help but notice that if she’d been born a boy, she would have been “the man of the house,” living in relative luxury. By her early teens, she knew she totally objected to the different social roles for men and women. She watched as her father was allowed to dance with whomever he wanted at parties, but her mother had to sit out any dances during which her husband wasn’t available to dance with her. As Ana entered her teen years, she begged off from some of her chores when she could, citing schoolwork to do.

Her dad, a loving and steady presence, instilled in her a love of classical music. Sundays were for listening to operas from start to finish – Verdi, Puccini. To make sure she was paying attention, her father made her recite to him what was coming up in the next act from the liner notes. She despised it then, but is grateful now to be a lover of classical music.

Ana’s lush garden in the summer. In the winter, she moves much of it inside.

Ana remembers her father catching her playing baseball with the neighborhood boys as a girl. He didn’t often beat her, but when he caught her that day, “I got the beating of my life!”

Her father died of an illness when she was sixteen. The family was plunged into grief and disarray. Her mother had to wait two years for his life insurance to come through, and since she had never worked outside of the home in her life, it fell to Ana to help the family make ends meet. Ana worked in a lawyer’s office to ensure that her siblings would still be able to continue their education uninterrupted. But the commute into work was treacherous in a way she had little intimation of at the time. She had to cross a canal to get there, and she did that by riding in a boat that was sometimes far past its capacity, and by a man who was sometimes drunk. No one ever learned to swim on the islands, she told me. It was considered too dangerous. But you rarely notice the dangers around you at that age.

Sweet, discerning, and firm, with a slightly shy, distantly-appraising manner, she was scouted by the local chapter of the American Peace Corps to be a cultural instructor and liaison, serving for a few years. She ended up falling in love with an American Jewish boy who returned from the Dominican Republic to Cambridge to wrap up his studies at Harvard Law School, and in 1969, she came with him. They were the first-ever married couple between a Peace Corps volunteer and a local, and their marriage served was something of a watershed.

When her husband embarked on his law career, she moved with him to Rochester, New York. Her mom arrived from the Dominican Republic to join them, but she couldn’t bear the upstate New York winters or the lack of a community for long; she moved to Washington Heights, where there was a Hispanic population, and she spent the rest of her life there. While Ana’s husband made headway professionally, Ana did political work, establishing their house as a stopover point for political refugees from Chile escaping the Pinochet regime.

Ana pursued academic work, getting a fellowship to trace the lineage of her surname, Mejía, in Spain. She was paired with an older woman with whom she was expected to conduct frequent interviews. When Ana arrived, she quickly realized that the woman didn’t speak Spanish – only another Romance language, Galician. Still, it was a wonderful year abroad and Ana was able to trace the name of Mejía to a conquistador in the [sixteenth] century.

Ana moved to Cambridge, where she initially meant to pursue a career in Social Work. After a relatively brief stint, she shifted gears and received a Masters in Education. She taught History in Boston public schools for nearly three decades. Respect for education was one of the central tenets of her family of origin, and she carried on the legacy at public school and by establishing two other educational institutions. One was a Boston-based school intended to be used by students who’d been expelled from their own schools, and kids who’d served time in juvenile detention. 

Ana remarried in Boston, and she and her second husband, Gary, also established a school in the Dominican Republic. They often ship boxes of books and supplies to the school and visit whenever they can, although they’re shy of the fanfare they receive every time.

These days, Ana maintains a number of close family and neighborhood ties. Her older son moved to Boston to be close to her, and Ana is close with him and with her grandchildren. Her other son is doing well as a college girls’ soccer coach in upstate New York. She also nurtures a fantastically beautiful garden at her home. She’s constantly making things by hand, whether it’s macramé (she’s working on a macramé curtain for one of her sons), or hollowed-out painted gourds, or adding her touch to “found objects,” like this plant she brought back to the Dominican Republic. She tends to spend a month every winter in her home country.

She’s read all of the hundreds of books on her shelves, and is always devouring more. She also tends to her cats. She’s an avid collector of masks, and her home is adorned with too many to count – each seeming to have a soul of its own.

She also spends time with her much-beloved second husband. And she entertains wayward illustrators by welcoming them into her home and regaling them with stories.

Cambridge Seniors: Fukiko Cudhea

Hear Fukiko Cudhea’s voice here.

The first time Fukiko Cudhea and I met for an interview, she brought for me a bag of treats: a bottle of homemade iced tea and rice crackers. The next time, it was a slightly bigger bag, containing packets of houjicha – a type of Japanese tea – with instructions about how to steep it in a pitcher. Also, a huge slice of watermelon and almond-encrusted cookies. The time after that, the bounty had grown to include homemade onigiri (triangular packed rice wrapped in crispy seaweed), a sandwich, roasted rice green tea (genmaicha, my favorite), and homemade sesame cookies. For our final interview, she brought a big woven bag packed with a homemade sandwich; stir-fried soba noodles with veggies; a rice dish flecked with salmon; sesame cookies; and another bag of loose genmaicha tea.

Handmade onigiri by Fukiko. Inside were pickled plums (umeboshi). The garnish was shiso leaves from her own garden.

Fukiko was the only subject I met “out on the town.” (The rest I met through institutions and friends). Near Cambridge City Hall, one sunny Friday morning early in the summer, I came across two women talking. I was looking for subjects, and I thought the older of the two might fit the bill. She seemed like a Cambridge resident, and her English (if I wasn’t mistaken) still had traces of a Japanese accent. I lived in Japan on and off between the ages of 19 and 25, and though I’ve mostly given up on my habit of accosting Japanese strangers to make new friends, I haven’t entirely.

Luckily I didn’t entirely mortify myself – just the mortification inherent in speaking to strangers – because she was, as I’d guessed, Japanese, and is also a decades-long resident of central Cambridge. When I told her I was particularly interested in profiling older people, she said, “Oh, I guess you could tell I’m an older woman.” In Japanese, obaasan means “older woman” but the name is synonymous with being a grandmother. She was quick to clarify that she doesn’t have grandchildren yet. She lives with her only child, a 37-year-old son. When I asked about her last name, she explained that it was her husband’s, and is an old Irish name pronounced “Cuddy.”

When I told her I am an illustrator, she told me she used to have a keen interest in illustration, but these days her attention has fully turned to gardening. (One more food item she included in a couple of her gift baskets for me was fresh green shiso leaves from her garden).

Fukiko is petite, a bit below five feet in height. She has a sweet, watchful energy, and a boundless sense of generosity. She is very close with her mother-in-law, after having tragically lost her husband to cancer in the late 1980s. (Her husband’s family is from the Boston area).

Fukiko was born and raised in Okayama, a seaside city on the southern coast of Japan’s biggest island, Honshu. Okayama, Fukiko told me, is famous for its muscat grapes and its white peaches. She was the fourth of five children, and one of two girls. She was thick as thieves with her older sister, Hideko. Hideko went off to nursing school while Fukiko was still in high school, and the two sisters exchanged letters every single day while Hideko was across town. Hideko would drop her letter off at the family home, while Fukiko would put hers in the post. Fukiko says Hideko was endlessly sweet. Her sister would even say, “I’d die for you.”

(We conducted interviews in both English and Japanese, and these accounts include some translations).

Sadly, Hideko fell ill almost two decades ago. But Fukiko was devoted to her during her illness, visiting her in the hospital every single day to laugh and reminisce about their high school days.

Her father owned his own mechanics shop. He was extremely good at tinkering with mechanical things, and as Fukiko describes it, not so great with words (kuchibeta, “bad at the mouth” or “bad at speaking,” which was a new and poetic word for me). Her mother was a very skilled homemaker, doing Fukiko’s sewing homework for her in exchange for Fukiko’s washing the dishes. Fukiko was sent to an all-girls high school, less an academic institution and more a kind of training ground for brides in order to learn the skills necessary to get a high-status husband and run a household.

Fukiko wanted to go on to university after school. Her mother said it wasn’t suitable for her to be a 浪人 rōnin – which originally meant “masterless samurai” but now means an unattached period in one’s life – and she had connections at a local bank, so Fukiko started working there at age eighteen. She was by far the youngest person there. The next-oldest person was 23, but most of her coworkers were decades older than she.

She had a keen interest in writing, and there was a course associated with a novelist she admired, named Seiko Tanabe, in nearby Osaka. For a year she did a correspondence course and also attended classes there on the weekends. By Bullet Train (Shinkansen), she could make the round trip in one day. She remembers Tanabe saying: “Unless you have that urge that you absolutely have to write – an urge from the heart – it’s better to let it go.” Fukiko wrote short stories, with the names changed, about her experiences, and kept a journal for years, but didn’t feel that kind of dedication to it. (She jokingly noted that no one else from the course ever got famous, either).

In her early twenties, Fukiko knew she wanted to leave Okayama, either to go to Tokyo or to somewhere farther afield. In 1979, a girlfriend who was much more keen on English decided to attend the Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School in Boston, and asked if Fukiko wanted to come with her. Fukiko found an English course at Boston University. Her mother agreed to it but said, “You get one semester over there, then you come home!”

At Boston University, Fukiko studied English every day, but as she notes now, “I think it comes down to whether you just have that sense for language. If you’re interested from a young age. I don’t have that.”

She met her husband that year in Boston, and in 1980 they decided to get married. They had weddings in the Boston area and also in Japan. She was partial to the American wedding, because it was held at one of his family’s homes and felt much more personal and unique. At her wedding in Japan, the hotel staff brought her the wrong kind of kimono but there was no time to switch it out. And they caked her face in white makeup, geisha-like.

Fukiko and her husband at their wedding in Japan.

Soon after getting married, she and her husband bought an apartment in the North End. Then his work took them to Kanazawa, a historic city midway down the island of Honshu on the north side, sitting on the Sea of Japan. He got regular TV gigs there, thanks to his striking blue eyes and the near-total absence of Western foreigners in Kanazawa at the time. After Kanazawa, Fukiko and her husband moved to the United States and gave birth to a son. When he was nine months old, they moved to Kawasaki for her husband to begin his work programming English-Japanese electronic dictionaries at NEC.

Unfortunately, her husband fell ill with an illness that took many months for Japanese doctors to name, because it appears much more frequently in Caucasian men. Doctors didn’t recognize his symptoms, and told him he just had a cold. Eventually they found a doctor at a Tokyo hospital who correctly identified his symptoms as Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. He was treated at Yokohama Cancer Center. They decided to return to the States and have him treated at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. They tried everything possible, including a bone marrow transplant, but he died in 1990, at the impossible age of 35.

When I was expressing my sympathy to her, she insisted that her experience was difficult, but many people have it worse. I include an audio clip of Fukiko with the translation here:

“Of course, it was hard, but there are many people who’ve been through harder. Where are you starting from, and where are you coming from? Really, if you’re living in America, there are so many people who have it harder. You can’t really compare, can you? Yes, he was so young. But there’s really nothing you can do. Nothing you can do.”

Fukiko decided to stay on in the house they’d bought in Cambridge, on Harvard Street. She had a few Japanese girlfriends nearby. She raised their son in Cambridge. He later attended Carleton College and then Harvard for his Masters and PhD in Biostatistics.

Fukiko is still very close with her husband’s mother, with whom she’s traveled extensively. She’s also close with her husband’s brother, who lives nearby. She often travels to the family rustic home outside Boston, which, until a recent drought, boasted a beautiful lake.

Fukiko took a couple of illustration courses, having had a long-term interest. One was at Massachusetts College of Art. For one of her courses, the homework assignment following the first day of class was to go home and write a story about a llama. “I don’t know the first thing about llamas! What was I supposed to write?” Fukiko said. She dropped out of the course. The other course, she finished. But she sees gardening as a better creative outlet these days than writing or illustration.

Fukiko lost a beloved friend somewhat recently. Her portrait in this show is of her in a shirt given to her by her friend. And, being herself, she brought a bag full of homemade cookies to this exhibition’s opening for me to enjoy.

Cambridge Seniors: Ilse Heyman

Hear Ilse Heyman’s voice here.

Waiting in the lobby of the stately elderly care facility where Ilse Heyman lives, I read up on her again to prepare my questions. I knew two things: that she was approaching her 100th birthday, and that she is a survivor of the Holocaust. I’d read that the Dutch electronics company, Philips, had somehow been instrumental in saving Jewish people, including Ilse herself, during the Holocaust. Why had I heard of Oskar Schindler and not the Philips story?, I wondered.

As I was waiting for the appointed time to arrive, a petite woman who looked to be about seventy years old, if that, approached me.

“Are you Susan?” Her English retains the slightest trace of a German accent.

“Yes! You must be Ilse?”

“Yes. Shall we go up?” she said amiably, and took off at a brisk pace for her apartment.

As I followed her, a memory suddenly returned to me: when I was a teenager, my work had placed in an art and poetry contest that sought work about the Holocaust. At the prize ceremony, I’d met a number of survivors, many of them in their eighties. I never imagined I’d be meeting any other survivors again in my lifetime, and never expected the honor of having a one-on-one interview. I was humbled to the core to be sitting across from Ilse, and tried not to let myself be overrun by it. She met our conversation with grace, quick humor, and an easygoing desire to be “game” whenever I made half a joke.

Ilse Heyman has a to-the-point-ness that I appreciate in people. Her grandfather, whose picture she showed me and whose kind features she shares, had advised her uncle: “Make friends everywhere you go.”

Ilse’s grandparents

That has been one of the keys for her life’s blossoming after the horrors of the war. She told me that if she hadn’t had that cluster of friends in the camps with her, she would not have survived. One friendship that has delighted her of late is with an undergraduate at Brown named Aliza. Ilse also made many friends while working at the Harvard Square-based Window Shop, which sat on Brattle Street and was run largely by German and Austrian refugees during and after World War II. She worked there until it closed in 1972.

Ilse is svelte and petite, with delicate features: limpid eyes whose color seems to shift – green or blue or light brown – with the light, and a full mouth and fine brow. Before I turned the tape on, we talked so she could get a sense of me, and we fell into a near-immediate rapport. We talked about the Shoah Project, founded by Steven Spielberg, which collects accounts from Holocaust survivors (three thousand, to date). We talked: about elderly care and assistive robots, which we both agreed can’t replace human labor; and about the perilousness of Cambridge sidewalks with their loose bricks, easy to trip on.

Then we turned on the tape.

Ilse was born in Cologne, Germany, to a merchant father and a homemaker mother. Her brother arrived a few years after her. The family lived in the nicest neighborhood in Cologne (Köln) Germany for many years before relocating to Amsterdam when things started going sideways in Germany. Ilse’s father initially believed Germany was “too cultured” for Hitler to persist in power, but after he heard the first anti-Semitic speech, he and Ilse’s mother decided they must leave the country. Ilse’s mother’s brother had a wife with connections in Boston, and Ilse’s father urged them to leave the country for America. Ilse’s uncle eventually relocated to Brookline with his wife. 

Ilse’s father had to reconfigure his import business once the family relocated. Holland raised tariffs on its imports. Ilse’s father decided to try his hand at selling goods in Sweden to avoid the new stiff tariffs. Traveling to and from Sweden necessitated going through Germany, however. Ilse recalls that after his absolutely harrowing trip back across Germany by train, he wrapped his family in his arms upon his return with such total relief that she’ll never forget it.

Knowledge of the family’s financial state personally came to Ilse when her mother took her to buy new shoes. Ilse asked for a second pair and her mother said it was impossible; there wasn’t the money for it “this month.” Ilse took that news in and quietly stopped asking for expensive things. The one exception was when her father let her go to a classical concert by the Amsterdam orchestra, because she was only one of two of her entire class going, and he acknowledged it was for her  true love of the music.

Ilse lost her entire family to the Holocaust. That she was saved is a miracle. A man who worked at Philips convinced a commander at a labor camp to employ Jewish people, who, he argued, “learn quickly,” to put together radio tubes. One hundred Jewish women, with Ilse among their ranks, were selected and trained. At first, Ilse could only make a few radio tubes a day, but then she could make tens. Philips provided “their” laborers with a serving of a hearty vegetable stew every day, thus helping them avoid the starvation the other prisoners faced. In 1944, Ilse’s group was transferred to Auschwitz. She and her friends didn’t know until after they’d left what they’d escaped from.

After the war, Ilse and her group moved to Gothenberg, Sweden. She and her friends finally talked, in a gush and only amongst themselves, about everything they’d been through. She recalls one time, sitting with her friends from the camps, a “well-fed” Swede nearby looking over at their table again and again. Finally, the Swede, who like everyone else had seen the newspapers, asked hesitatingly: “...Was it terrible?” 

Ilse and her friends erupted into laughter at the absurd question. “Yes, very,” they finally managed to answer.

And then, Ilse said, many of them never spoke of it again – including to their own children. Ilse had been unsure of where to live after the war, but then realized that her father had told her and her brother to seek out their uncle. Ilse’s family in Boston arranged the immigration paperwork for her, and she left for the States.

Although some of her cohort never talked about the war with their children, a friend of Ilse’s recently realized that he was related to one of their families. He put the three sons of a late survivor in touch with Ilse. As soon as they learned of Ilse’s existence, they came straight to Boston to hear from her what had happened. Their mother had been caught hiding out during the war and been brought to the camps. Ilse has a friendship – or a surrogate motherhood of sorts – with the three “young men” – who are in their sixties or so.

I asked Ilse if anything about modern America reminded her of what she’d been through. She said that, before arriving here, she had no idea how white Americans treated Black Americans and Native Americans – the violence of it. It seemed to be a well-hidden secret abroad, and was a shock to encounter. In terms of current events, she said that the events in Ukraine remind her of families broken apart during the war. She also said that Trump’s rise has reminded her of Hitler’s, and that it’s not a certainty he won’t get elected again.

Ilse spent many years visiting schools and sharing her story. During one of her visits, a child asked how she ever learned to smile again after the war. 

She thought for a bit.

“You learn to,” she said.