Mill Brook House News

Introducing Mill Brook House and millbrookhousenews.com!

Kathe and Steve at home with Rocky, Pepper and over a dozen home-grown pumpkins!

Mill Brook House, vacation spot and part-time rental, is now our permanent home!  Nellie Fox, the fierce shiba inu, is no longer with us and neither is lovable Sandy, champion mouser, whom we acquired soon after Nellie’s passing.  Rocky, once half of the Sandy-Rocky show, continues to enjoy the great outdoors as does Pepper, our mini-Australian sheepdog.  In 2016, they were joined by baby Max, another yellow tabby.  (Sadly, Max left us prematurely, and we adopted baby Taz in 2023.)

Mill Brook House, first renovated (2004-2006) to accommodate vacationers, has, more recently, undergone renovations to make our permanent residence possible.  We have extended the loft over our attached, two-part garage, built a staircase to the attic and a large new closet on what was once a spacious landing, completed a new guest room with its own closet (a rare commodity in this house), constructed a massive bookcase in the living room where we once tucked a trundle bed, further improved the downstairs bathroom, ditched the 1920's kitchen sink, and turned the downstairs bedroom into a glorified pantry.  To the swimming-pool-turned-garden from 2004, we added a second garden when Hurricane Irene made re-landscaping necessary, and in 2015 we built a third garden dedicated to gladioli and vegetables.  We have also launched a daylily business (see millbrookhousedaylilies.com). 

Millbrookhousenews.com will continue to offer insights and information on Western Massachusetts, occasional film and relevant book reviews, our photographs of the area, including wildlife, landscapes, and landmarks, and personal essays.  Recipes have been spun off onto their own blog, millbrookhouserecipes.com.  For more of Steve's photographs, see sternbachphoto.com. We hope that you will enjoy all four blogs!  You can comment right on the blogs or email us at [email protected].  

Mill Brook House, summer 2013

 

Io Capitano

In a year of good films, Io Capitano [I Captain] stands out as both incredibly moving and well-crafted.  It is the story of two teenaged cousins who leave their home in Senegal, hoping for a better life in Europe.  Their dreams are big, but their ignorance and naiveté are way bigger.  Italy is their intended destination, but first they must get to Tripoli in Northern Africa.  They encounter unspeakable horrors on the way, and we, the audience, keep wondering if they will succeed in their ambitions or be crushed.  What judgment will the film render on their decision to leave against their mothers’ protestations and the advice of far wiser minds?  But this is not where this brilliant script and amazing acting takes us.  Conned into piloting a rickety boat filled to over capacity with other refugees, the boy Seydou shouts at the helicopter hoving over their craft off the coast of Sicily “I’m the captain!  I saved everyone!  No one died!”

            No one died.  This is the outstanding achievement.  Seydou has retained his humanity in the face of unbearable inhumanity.  Thinking back we should have seen this coming: Seydou turning back to help a woman dying in the desert, his refusal to leave Tripoli without his cousin Moussa.  And he in turn benefits from the kindness of others.  An older man, a skilled laborer, temporarily “adopts” him, saving his life; a refugee physician treats Moussa’s wounded leg and helps Seydou to procure black market drugs for his cousin.

            Our expectation that the film produce a resolution regarding the boys’ ambitions are, of course, justified.  This is a journey film, a road movie, a buddy film, a quest narrative, a literary form as old as Western literature itself.  And part of the boys’ dream is realized: they reach Europe.  But whether they will find a better life, whether the harrowing journey was worth it, these questions are never answered, and we are left instead with the understanding that how one journeys is as important as the goal: “I saved everyone; no one died!”

 

 

Perfect Days: A Wenders/Ozu Mash-up

Wim Wenders’ first narrative feature to be nominated for an Academy Award, Perfect Days is beautifully shot and perfectly edited but is not the perfect film some have dubbed it as it often feels flat in its repetitiveness, too much like Groundhog Day.  Despite the benign satisfaction that protagonist Hirayama, so named for the many Hirayamas in Ozu’s films, takes in his daily routine, he is an elderly version of the lonely, isolated, alienated young men who can relate to children but are terrified of women that populate Wenders’ early films.  Wenders, in fact, includes deliberate references to those films.  Like Bruno in Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit, 1976), Hirayama reads Faulkner, and on his last trip to his local bookstore, he purchases a novel by Patricia Highsmith, whose Ripley’s Game was adapted by Wenders to become The American Friend (Der amerikanische Freund, 1977).  (The bookstore which Hirayama visits repeatedly may itself be a nod to Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Café Lumière [2003], another less than inspiring attempt to channel Ozu.) 

Hirayama photographs routinely with a now-archaic, small, point-and-shoot film camera, heir to Philip’s exploration of all manner of photography in Alice in the Cities (Alice in den Städten, 1974), and he listens to rock music from the 1960s and 70s like all of Wenders’ characters from that era.  Hirayama’s music comes from his large collection of cassette tapes, another throwback to the 20^th century, while the diegetic rock music in the early films generally came from the radio.

Perfect Days ends almost exactly as Kings of the Road does.  A close-up of Hirayama driving his van, while Nina Simone’s rendition of Feeling Good (which originated in the 1964 musical The Roar of the Greasepaint—the Smell of the Crowd) blares on the sound track, echoes Kings, which ends with a close-up of Bruno driving while Roger Miller’s 1964 ballad King of the Road plays.  The “protagonist” in both sixties ballads is an outsider who sings of life apart from the constraints of society.  The only difference in these two final sequences is that the shot of Hirayama is severely frontal while that of Bruno is lateral.  The severity in the framing and cutting in Perfect Daysmay be another homage to Ozu, but it also reflects the severity of the life choices Hirayama has made.

Unlike Wenders’ early films, which were road movies—messy, energetic and pressing forward, despite having little in the way of plot—Perfect Days has a cyclical structure, intended, perhaps, to evoke Ozu, but also in keeping with the fact that Hirayama, as an older man, has settled on his life choices and adopted a routine that varies little from day to day.

The protagonists in Wenders’ early films struggle against history, American hegemony, and bourgeois conformity, but similar struggles, primarily against the salaryman life expected of middle class Japanese men, are in Hirayama’s past.  He has broken with his family.  We are told his father stopped speaking to him—reminiscent of the confrontation between Robert and his father in Kings—and now the father has dementia, but Hirayama still refuses to visit him.  This refusal, along with the visit from his niece and sister, are the only indications that Hirayama is still processing the alienation that drove him to become a toilet cleaner.  Otherwise, his life is composed of set routines that seem to please him but which render the film rather dull.  Perfect Days attempts to capture a kind of Zen stasis, the mu that Ozu so treasured, but mu, often translated as nothingness, indicates a nothingness that is the gateway to sublimity.  The nothingness in Perfect Days—despite brief interludes of pathos, charm and humor—seems mostly to be just nothingness.

 

 

Maple Sugaring Along the Mohawk Trail

When nights are cold and daytime temperatures rise above freezing, sap starts to run, and buckets hang from maple trees all over rural New England.  Visitors, eager for some diversion between ski season and summer, flock to sugarhouses to watch the evaporation process, buy maple products, and eat at sugarhouse restaurants.

Colonists first learned about the sweetness of maple sap from Native Americans, who collected it from V-shaped slashes they made on the trunks of maple trees, and the newcomers subsequently developed their own techniques for tapping trees and reducing the sap to syrup or sugar.  When England forbid trade with the West Indies in 1765, colonists looked to maple sugar to fill their sweet needs.

In earlier times, farmers with a substantial "sugar bush" set up sugar camps in the woods, and the whole family would move to the camp to help with the labor-intensive process of gathering and boiling sap.  So originated the one-week "winter vacation" still observed every February by New England schools, a custom non-natives find bizarre--who wants their kids home in February when they can't go outside to play?   What began as time off from school to work at a sugar camp is, today, an opportunity to visit a modern-day sugarhouse.

During the Civil War, cane sugar became scarce once again, and maple sugar, supplied to the troops and used at home, was considered the "patriotic" alternative to sugar produced in the South.  Metal buckets with lids, such as you see here, were developed to aid in collecting sap, and the development of the tin can in these years allowed syrup to be preserved, shipped, and used year round.

Today large sugaring operations use less quaint, time-saving tubing to collect sap, but small producers still use sap buckets, and many larger operations use buckets to collect sap from outlying trees.  A single farmer may tap the trees on many properties, paying his neighbors for sap in gallons of finished syrup.  The ratio of sap to syrup is 40:1--forty gallons of sap to one gallon of syrup.  To be tapped, trees need to be 10 inches in diameter, which means they need to be c. 40 years old.  Each tap hole will yield about 10 gallons of sap, which will reduce to 1 quart of syrup.

Maple syrup comes in four different grades, named by color: golden, amber, dark, and very dark.  The darker the color, the stronger the flavor.  Which is best depends on one's personal taste.  Each has the same proportion of maple to water, and the producer has no control over which grade each boil will produce, but darker syrup tends to come later in the season.  In addition to syrup, producers usually offer maple sugar, often made into candies, and maple cream.  A favorite at Western Massachusetts' many fall fairs is fried dough smeared with maple cream.   

In the 1960's, three Franklin County sugarhouses, Gray's in Ashfield, Davenport's and Gould's in Shelburne, began offering maple-syrup-laced breakfasts during the sugar season, an early foray into the now popular "agri-tourism."

Of the three, only Davenport Maple Farm, up Little Mohawk Rd. off Route 2, still offers breakfast during the sugar season. (See Sugarshack Restaurants in Western Massachusetts.)  Gould's has ceased all operations for the present.

Gould's Sugarhouse

The evaporator at rest

Gould's evaporator in action

Monitoring the syrup

 

While Canada, mainly Quebec, produces 80% of the world's maple syrup and Vermont leads the U.S. with around 1 million gallons, Massachusetts, ninth in the nation, produces about 60,000 gallons, worth 5-6 million dollars, and interest in this local industry is growing.  Eighty percent of our 300 plus producers are located west of I-91. Sales of Massachusetts syrup are mainly within the state.  For more information visit www.massmaple.org.

                           Syrup flows from the evaporator

Maple syrup production benefits the environment by preserving forests and woodlots, important habitat for birds and other animals.  By making commercial use of forested areas, sugaring saves them from other uses that might destroy the trees.  Sugaring preserves approximately 15,000 acres of open space in Massachusetts.  It also allows local dairy farmers to stay in business by giving them additional income.                  

Unfortunately, maple sugar production everywhere is is threatened by the invasion of the Asian longhorned beetle, which destroys hardwood trees, particularly maples.   It was  discovered in Worcester, MA, where 25,000 trees were destroyed to stop its spread.  Today officials urge people to keep an eye out for the pest and, most particularly, never to transport firewood from one location to another, but always to burn local wood.  For more on the beetle and how to identify it, see www.beetlebusters.info.

Maple syrup is high in antioxidants, minerals, especially manganese, vitamins, especially Riboflavin (B2), and low in fructose.  For recipes that use maple syrup, visit millbrookhouserecipes.com.

Historic Deerfield’s Leap Year Celebration

In John Ford’s enormously seminal film The Searchers (1956), two men spend five years searching for a young girl who has been abducted by Indians. When they find her, she has entered her teens and become one of the chief’s wives. At first she declares her allegiance to the tribe but later changes her mind and agrees to return home with the men. The reasons for her change of heart are never explained, nor did they need to be for a 1950’s audience. The girl had obviously come to her senses, remembered her past, and realized the advantages of returning to “civilization.” Such was not the case, however, with most white women captured as children and raised up in Indian tribes.

One of the best documented cases is that of Eunice Williams, daughter of a prominent Puritan clergyman, who, with her father and brother, was captured in the 1704 raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts, by Mohawk Indians and their French allies and marched 300 miles to Montreal through deep snow. The raid was a small piece of the War of the Spanish Succession—the one that made Winston Churchill’s ancestor Lord Marlborough famous—which had spilled over onto the American continent. The raid took place before dawn on February 29 and is commemorated every leap year by the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association. (Pocumtuck is the name both natives and colonists used for Deerfield at one time.)

This year’s commemorative events included lectures, reenactments, and demonstrations of colonial housekeeping crafts.

 Re-enactors, many of whom had come considerable distance, staged the battle that took place after the attack on Deerfield when militiamen from Northampton and other nearby settlements, seeing flames, marched to Deerfield and engaged the French and Indians as the last of them were leaving the burning village. Turned back by an ambush, the militiamen were unable to rescue any of the captives. This year about twenty re-enactors, pretending to be Frenchmen, English colonials, Mohawk and Abenaki, stood in for what had been a battle involving about 300 men. This left much to the imagination, but a narrator helpfully told the story while the actors “did battle” on a field at the Deerfield Academy.

As for Eunice Williams, although her father and brother were eventually “redeemed” (ransomed) and returned to Deerfield, she never went home. Captured specifically to take the place of a Mohawk child who had died, and converted to Catholicism by her Indian family, who lived in close proximity to the French, she refused every attempt by her father and brother to persuade her to return. As a teenager, she fell in love with a fellow tribesman, and, although dubious about the inter-racial union, the local padre married them when they declared they would live together unwed if he did not. Throughout his life, her brother, a clergyman like his father and tortured by fears for her immortal soul, wrote to and of her, and, on occasion, she and her husband visited him, pitching their tent in his yard in preference to sleeping in the house. Eunice herself remained illiterate, so we have no record of what she actually thought about her life with the Mohawk, although her actions speak quite loudly.

For more on Eunice Williams and the conundrum she posed for her family, see John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive (1994). To observe the next commemoration of the 1704 raid on Deerfield, you’ll have to wait until 2020.

Father Comes Home

World War II left millions of children wounded, homeless, hungry, impoverished and often orphaned in defeated and victorious countries alike, as the V-mail below attests.  In the United States, the kids were, for the most part, all right, although the stress and dislocation of the war years left some homeless, as a youthful Maya Angelou discovers in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.  But impoverished or not, universally, across the globe, children waited for their fathers to come home.

My sister Gretel was born within a fortnight of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and for most of her first four years my father was a soldier. 

He was discharged from the Army in the fall of 1945 after five months in London, spent interrogating German POWs. He reunited with his tiny family at my grandmother’s house in Buffalo since the Army did not house dependents once soldiers were deployed overseas (which may explain why some kids ended up homeless).  Removing his officer’s hat, he threw it on the floor, emphatically declaring, “I’m done with the Army!” at which point my sister burst into tears!  In her mind his Army uniform was as much a part of him as his mustache.

V-Mail from London, June, 1945, from my father to my sister, describing a little girl in ragged clothing, hoping for some chewing gum from American soldiers

Children’s parade on V.E. Day (May 8, 1945) in San Antonio, TX.  Gretel is pushing a baby carriage; the boy behind her rides a tricycle, and the child behind him carries a watering can; the boy in front carries the flag.

Sugarshack Restaurants in Western Massachusetts

Gould's, the iconic sugarshack restaurant on Route 2 in Shelburne, has closed.  Gould's has served tourists and locals alike since 1960 and will be sorely missed.  

                                       Davenport Maple Farm Sugar Restaurant

But off Route 2 at 111 Tower Rd. in Shelburne is Davenport Maple Farm with a restaurant, sales area and evaporator to view.  The restaurant is opens in the sugar season March to mid-April, 8:00-3:00. Their pancakes and other syrup delivery items are quite straightforward and include gluten-free options, but their "Finnish" pancakes are unusual and delicious! Diners are served a 2 oz. bottle of maple syrup to use with their breakfast and take home as a souvenir.                                       Sap buckets hang near Davenport's evaporator.

The Red Bucket Sugar Shack's red buckets         

Sadly, this delightful sugar shack has closed its doors for good, but I leave the pictures up in memory of it.  Worthington in western Massachusetts is far off the beaten trail from Charlemont, but when the Red Bucket Sugar Shack topped a 2013 Fox News survey of the ten best sugar shack restaurants in the U.S., we had to go.  

We were happy to report that Fox News has much better taste in restaurants than in politics!   

 

The sales area fills with steam from the evaporator (above).

Worthington boasts two other sugar restaurants, both open weekends in the foliage season as well as the sugar season. Just off 112, Windy Hill Farm claims to be the oldest sugar shack restaurant in Massachusetts and is certainly the most rustic.  If you need cream for your coffee, an open pint will appear on the table, family members grab breakfast among the guests, and if you need to use the facilities, a genuine outhouse awaits you. 

Windy Hill Farm: the oldest sugarshack restaurant in Massachusetts

But the food is plentiful and good: feather-light French toast, waffles, or a variety gigantic pancakes—apple, pumpkin, chocolate chip, blueberry—that you can mix and match, and the restaurant has a loyal following and a longer season than most.  It’s open from 8-2 in a sugar season that lasts from late February until Easter and re-opens in foliage season.

Inside Windy Hill

South of Windy Hill, right on 112, the High Hopes Farm sugar restaurant, open from 7-2,  serves an all-you-can-eat buffet... 

 

Satisfied customers at High Hopes Farm

 

 

 

 

 

...with pancakes, French toast, scrambled eggs, home fries, bacon, sausage, ham, and a variety of beverages including tea, juice, and coffee.  A pitcher of pure maple syrup sits on every table, and, if you sit near the window, you'll look down on a beautiful gorge, carved out by the Little River.

 

 

The Little River runs behind High Hopes sugar restaurant.

 

 In the fall, High Hopes turns its evaporator room into a haunted house and serves the same plentiful buffet.

 A number of sugarshack restaurants serve the I-91/Northampton area. Steve’s Sugar Shack at 35 North Road in Westhampton is open weekends from late February through mid-April from 7-1. The menu is limited, but the French toast is delicious and the blueberry pancakes look great. Steve’s employs an efficient system for ordering your meal. Guests are seated at long tables near or below the evaporator. On Sundays, a neighbor brings his oxen, who, ostensibly, pull a sled outfitted with a tank to gather sap from buckets in the woods. (When we were there, however, the oxen mainly greeted visitors, while their owner explained how he used them for his logging business as an environmentally friendly alternative to a truck.)  

 

 

 

 

Oxen greet visitors and (maybe) help with sugaring at Steve's Sugar Shack in Westhampton. 

 

Williams Farm Sugarhouse, located on Routes 5 & 10 just south of Historic Deerfield, is open daily mid-February to mid-April and serves a variety of delicious pancakes, waffles, French toast and various sides, including maple cream doughnuts.

The Williams family began sugaring on Mt. Toby in Sunderland in the 1850’s and opened their more conveniently located sugarhouse in Deerfield in 1994. Patrons order at the counter and can visit the evaporator in the next room while they wait for their food. 

 

 

A Williams family member stirs the boiling sap.  A sign from the original Mt. Toby Sugarhouse sits against the wall.

 

 

 

 The North Hadley Sugar Shack is conveniently located on Route 47 three miles north of Route 9 for those who want to visit the Amherst area. 

 They serve the standard French toast, waffles, and pancakes, with eggs if you want them and ice cream, fruit and whipped cream toppings also an option.  Breakfast is served every day in sugar season (mid-February to mid-April) from 7:00-2:00.  Compared to the more out-of-the-way sugar restaurants, service here is very fast.  Visitors can view the evaporator, which sits right outside the dining room, and a well-stocked farm store is open for most of the year. 

 

 

       Tending the evaporator at the North Hadley Sugar Shack

 

 

 

 

The Strawbale Cafe at Hanging Mountain Farm at 188 North St. in Westhampton is open year round for breakfast every Saturday and Sunday from 9-2 except in January.  The cafe has a full breakfast menu, including pancakes with a wide variety of add-ins, during most of the year but is more limited in sugar season because of the large crowds.  The menu is simplified at that time and pancakes are limited to chocolate chip and blueberry, but, of course, the sugar house is working and can be visited.  Seasonal vegetables, like asparagus, are added to the menu as they become available.  The cafe is so named because it is made from bales of straw although these are covered by wood and stucco, so you won't see any straw when you visit.  

 

 

 

 

 

In the town of Hancock, almost on the New York border, Ioka Valley Farm offers four-season family entertainment, not least of which is its maple breakfasts, served from mid-February to early April on weekends 8-3.

Once a dairy farm, Ioka offers an array of pancakes and French toast, including a delicious stuffed French toast, in the former calf barn, aptly named the Calf-A.

 

Visitors can observe an enormous high tech evaporator and purchase all grades of maple syrup as well as maple cream, maple sugar, maple cotton candy, cider doughnuts and other farm produce. Ioka’s four-season entertainment includes a petting zoo and play with wooden bovines in the summer and fall.

Hong Kong University Book Talk on Ozu: A Closer Look

If you haven't read the book but you'd like to see the movie, here is the link: https://youtu.be/lISq-7bID94

 

Max the Cat

Max was like a delicate flower that faded too soon.  He had a water fetish and loved to drink from a running tap, from an unguarded cup or glass or even a watering can; he tracked kitty litter into the bathtub as he examined the droplets that gathered around the drain.  A mischief-maker, he chewed on paper documents and tipped over waste baskets to get attention.

He had a purr like the running engine of a Mac truck and engaged it incessantly, signaling hunger, affection, or pure joy.  He slept on our bed by my feet or cuddled up with companion Rocky for an afternoon snooze. Neither as athletic nor brave as Rocky, he was nevertheless unafraid of Pepper, our well-meaning but over-active mini-Aussie, whom Rocky loathes.  Max was the peace-maker and go-between.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sweet, petite, and beautiful, he stole our hearts and has not returned them.

"Good night, sweet prince; And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest."

 

 

Empire of Light

The first of at least four films paying tribute to old movie theaters, The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971) involves a relationship between a middle-aged woman (Cloris Leachman) and a teenaged boy (Timothy Bottoms).  Sam Mendes has updated the story to a tourist town on England’s South Coast in the 1980s.  Stephen (Michael Ward), who is Black, is trying to get into college when he takes a job at the local movie palace, whose upper floors are shuttered.  He begins an affair with co-worker Hillary (Olivia Colman), a mentally fragile, middle-aged woman, whose love-life consists of having sex with their married boss (Colin Firth) in his office.  Stephen frees Hillary from that bad relationship, but his own with her has no future, either.  Shattered when Stephen breaks off their sexual liaison, Hillary must find her way to a more appropriate friendship with the ever-loyal Stephen, who is forced to face down discrimination and violence on his way to being accepted into college.

The film moves slowly, punctuated by two loud and jarring episodes: Hillary’s breakdown upon Stephen’s withdrawal from their affair and the attack on Stephen, in the theater, by a group of skinheads; both involve the violent smashing in of doors.  Parallels, in fact, structure the film: Hillary’s two affairs; the “family” of theater workers, frequently shown sitting around the table in their break room, and Stephen’s small family, also shown sitting at their kitchen table; Hillary’s dead but formerly philandering father and her boss; Stephen’s absent father and the projectionist’s confession that he, too, had run out on his wife and son.  These parallels anchor the story and, along with its evocation of goodwill and tolerance, keep it from floating away on the tides of Hillary’s mercurial personality even as its strength comes from the uncompromising depiction of her instability

Gertrude Erlich Sternbach 1922-2000

Gertrude Erlich was born in Rotterdam, New York, not long after her father, Sam Erlich, had immigrated from Poland, possibly at the behest of his sister Betsy and her husband Jake Coplon.  The Coplons settled in Schenectady in upstate New York, where they opened a successful children’s clothing store.  Sam, who immigrated with his second wife and three children from his first marriage, opened his own store in Rotterdam and fathered five more children, including Gertrude, but found the community unsatisfactory, due to either anti-Semitism or a lack of Jewish neighbors or both and relocated the family to Brooklyn.

Gertrude and Sam, 1927

He died soon after, and his widow relocated again, this time to the Jewish enclave in Manhattan’s lower East Side.  A teenager by now, Gertrude joined the Hebrew Educational Society (H.E.S. or the Edgies) where she began keeping company with Abe Sternbach, six years her senior.

His mother’s sole support and suffering from poor eyesight, Abe, a commercial artist, managed to stay out of World War II until 1944, when he was drafted and shipped to the Philippines to paint signs for the Army.  Gertrude met him upon his discharge in North Carolina and suggested it was high time they got married.  They settled in a basement apartment in the Bronx, and, in 1949, Steven, their only child, was born.

Like many couples after World War II and with the help of government-subsidized housing, the Sternbachs merged into the middle class.  They moved to Brooklyn; Abe continued working as a commercial artist, while Gertrude raised Steven and eventually worked part-time for the Brooklyn Public Library.

Gertrude and Steve, Greenwich Village Art Fair, 1954

She never lost touch with her Coplon relatives, and, once they acquired a car, the family made frequent trips to Schenectady.  Abe retired early, and the couple rediscovered the Edgies, joining a Brookline branch of H.E.S.

For Jews everywhere, but especially for those whose families had immigrated to America in the last decade before the U.S. slammed its borders shut in 1924, the grim news of the Holocaust evoked the specter of “there but for the grace of God, go I.”  For that generation, the founding of Israel came as a great triumph and a great relief.  In the late 1970s, Gertrude fulfilled a decades-old dream of visiting the Jewish state.

Gertrude at the New York World's Fair, 1940