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ANNA GORFINCKLE
Anna was blessed with great vitality and good cheer all of her life. When she stopped in for a visit, the Meiselman home would quickly transform from quiet to zesty life itself. Our father aptly always referred to her as "the Tornado". Anna was blessed with long years of good health and enormous energy. She worked at a full time job for the town of Brookline until, I believe, she was 81 years old, and she could have continued even longer. She retired only because her supervisor had died. Unlike the rest of us, I never recall seeing Anna slump in a chair from fatigue or exhaustion. And she never had the notion that she had to do special exercises to retain her fitness. She just kept living. And living meant doing. And doing meant everything from walking two miles almost daily after she had 2 hip replacements to visiting our sister Pearl, sick with brain cancer at the Mass. General Hospital, every day at lunch when she had a job in the legal center in downtown Boston. Anna was very bright. She graduated from Dorchester High School just as I was born--in fact, I believe she stopped to see our mother and newly born me on her way to her senior prom. She was then eager to go to college and to study law. Our father, who was sympathetic to women's education in general, was troubled by Anna's wish to go to law school--or even to get a 4 year college degree. What troubled him---and this was in 1924--79 years ago--- was the fear that what was then thought of as heavy education might impair her attractiveness in the marriage market. And for him, marriage was certainly more important than college degrees. So there was a compromise. Anna took a two-year program at Boston University's College of Practical Arts and Letters that combined some college courses with advanced secretarial training. Thereafter, Anna was a highly skilled legal secretary, first working for the old Yankee law firm of William Makepeace. She continued working there for some years until just before Barbara was born. Those were mostly tough years of the Great Depression, but Anna continued to earn a pretty good living as a legal secretary. I still recall her bringing me into the law office to show off her kid brother with the big blue eyes and platinum blond curls. Anna later did legal and similar secretarial work for many years. Because she was both bright and organized, she would have made an excellent lawyer. As it was, she often handled many of the legal details for the lawyers she worked for. She also had much good sense ("saychel"). Anna had a deep interest in Jewish studies, too. She enrolled in a special adult education program at the Hebrew Teachers College, then in Roxbury, and I believe she received the equivalent of their degree. I remember going to her graduation with my parents when I was 4 or 5 years old and recall that I could not understand anything that was going on. Her interest in Jewish studies was part of Anna's compelling sense of integrity and loyalty. She was a Jew so it was natural that she pursue Jewish studies as well. In fact, Anna was a deeply involved member of Temple Mishkan Tefila for almost 60 years, since she and Sam Sparks were married there in 1933. Her home was kosher and she ate at Orchard Cove's kosher table. After Barbara was born, Anna stopped working. Sam Sparks made a pretty good living so Anna stayed home to raise Barbara and to keep house. Years later, when Sam was sick and unable to work, Anna simply went back to her own old work, never asking for special thanks or gratitude. There was work that had to be done, so she simply did it. No special deal. A few years later, Sam Sparks was stricken with a heart attack and quickly died, but not before saying "I love you Anna". The sudden death of her beloved husband, and Barbara's father, profoundly upset and deeply enraged her. After several months Anna went to visit relatives in California, hoping the change would somehow lighten the burden of Sam's loss. She spent quite a few weeks in the Los Angeles area, and I guess she felt somewhat better. At the time I was teaching at the University of Chicago and doing some very important research with Milton Friedman. One day, Anna phoned and said she wanted to leave California and visit me in Chicago for a few days on her way back to Boston. I was not married and had a small 1-bedroom apartment in Hyde Park, the neighborhood of the University of Chicago. So I invited her to "visit", giving her my bedroom, while I slept on a Murphy bed that came out of the wall in the living room. The visit to L.A. had been helpful, but she thought that most of the people there were foolish. After two days in Chicago Anna said that she wanted to get a job, so I sent her to the University's Job Placement Office. She quickly took a job transcribing notes from and the dialogs of psychiatric sessions at the University of Chicago's hospital. In fact, she got very deeply involved in all the misery of the psychiatric patients. Then, she started to evaluate her own life and prospects and slowly these seemed pretty darn good, especially compared with those patients. Her spirit improved, and she soon gave up notions of leaving. She met some of my many friends and their families, and once she even argued with Milton Friedman about his comments on the importance of luck. Anna felt that life was too personal to be covered by mere probabilities and chance. In any event, she really dug in for a couple of months. That impaired, rather altered, my own social life, but she was prospering. She finally left and was more or less back to her original self, energetic, active, busy, doing---until the end. A few years later, while I was living in Washington, D.C., I met my darling wife, Winnie. One night in the summer of 1965, I phoned Anna to tell her that I had been going with a wonderful woman who also came from Boston and that we planned to marry. At that timeAnna was going with George Gorfinckle, whom she later married. When I told Anna about Winnie's family, there was one big Anna scream because only the night before she and George had just visited George's nephew ---Winnie's brother, Stanley Charm and his wife Shirley. So all the family connections sort of came together. Within a few months, afterGeorge and Anna and Winnie and I had married, George Gorfinckle became both my brother-in-law and the uncle of my other brother-in-law. In any event, Anna and George were happily married for a number of years until he, too, died of a heart attack. Before that, whenGeorge's business failed, Anna again went back to work and otherwise helped. This talk is too long, but I do want to summarize a few more points. First, I, and then my family, were always welcome at Anna's house in Brookline over many years. That was our home in Boston. She welcomed and loved us, but never directed us. Second, Anna was always truly happy to be with us and to accompany our lives and progress or to soften the wounds, the defeats the sicknesses, even the inevitable deaths. Indeed, she was happy to be with her wide range of friends and relatives. She was always a giver, never a taker, and she treasured all of them as special jewels and gifts. But mostly she reveled in her own family, her daughter Barbara, and Barbara's wonderful children and grandchildren---her own great-grandchildren. Again the love, the integrity and the welcome and the joy of life itself. Part of her secret was using her vast energy and good health to celebrate life. And that is the same sense she had, even in small matters, in growing and treasuring her plants and tomatoes and even her grass---the great gifts of God that need the human hand to plant, to nourish and to flourish. Dear Anna, you have enriched our lives, you have made our lives possible, you have given us the rare examples of consistent integrity and energy and good purpose. Your life thanked your parents and your family, and you provided so many clear examples for all of us to follow. We mourn your death, but we glory in the wonderful life you led, the love and cheer you gave to us, and the examples for all of us, including your grandchildren and great- grand- children, to follow. As I said after the death of our brother, Leo, 9 years ago,
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