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