Alice Zabarsky
Most of the people I would expect to meet "on the other side," are people I've known and I never knew Alice, but I know a lot about her and I know you've never heard of her, but maybe you should have.
She was my wife's grandmother and she died before I met Alicia (as did her parents - I've never had "in-law problems" in this marriage).
Still, let me tell you some of what I know about her. She and her husband, David, left the Ukraine to escape what many Jews fled in Eastern Europe, the two Ps - Poverty and Pogroms. For those whose history learning didn't include this subject, pogroms were incidents during which the military and/or citizenry arose for no specific reason or an invented reason, and went on a rampage killing Jews and destroying what little property their Jewish population had managed to gather.
Unlike many Eastern Europeans, however, Alice and her husband didn't come to the U.S. Instead, they went to Cuba.
In those years, Cuba was not yet ruled by Fidel Castro. It was ruled by a series of dictators, while the Zabarskys lived there. The later dictator was Batista. Batista was a bastard. It was his stealing and corruption, and the cruelty he leveled on his own people that gave rise to the revolution that Castro initiated.
But oddly, according to what Alice told her granddaughter, Batista was good to Jews. I wouldn't be amazed to learn - though I certainly don't know this - that this was only in comparison to what Jews experienced in the Ukraine (as well as in much of the rest of Eastern Europe), but they felt comfortable there.
They had two children there, including Alicia's mother, of course, and after saving their money they opened and ran a delicatessen, serving Havana's sizable Jewish community and anyone else in Cuba who wanted a pastrami sandwich. I'm sure the sound could be heard far and wide: Me gusta pastrami con cole slaw.
In any event, despite their comfort level socially and economically, they had to leave Cuba. It wasn't for politics or economics or religion or war. Alicia's grandfather contracted a malarial disease in Cuba and was told that he could die if he didn't leave the tropical climate. If this were a joke, they'd have decided to move to Miami, but it's not and they moved to Los Angeles.
When her daughter, Ricki, contracted tuberculosis and Ricki's ex-husband didn't jump in to take care of his daughter, Alice and David began to raise Alicia. It should be added that except for now-newly emerging strains of tuberculosis (TB), that disease is now usually cured by a a series of antibiotic treatment. In those days, however - the 1950s - it was still a sometimes fatal ailment, and its cure involved isolation, primitive drugs, and rest.
Alice, who had thought she was done raising young children, wasn't. She made sure Alicia had food (which she often didn't want to eat), clothing, a roof over her head, and anything else she and her husband could provide.
Ricki had been the complete American, despite having been born in Cuba to Ukrainian parents, so she expressed surprise when, on returning home from the City of Hope, where she'd received her TB treatments, she found that little Alicia spoke English with a Jewish (Yiddish) accent.
Alice made sure that when Alicia was sick, despite what the doctor said, that her granddaughter didn't receive any meat until she was over the illness. And she recovered faster as a result. On the down side, she was convinced that the best cure for being sick was an enema. She may have been right, but the experience of being sick in her house couldn't have been pleasant.
Many years after her death from pancreatic cancer, her granddaughter often recalls her as a sweet, kind, funny, strong, and loving presence. If there's a heaven, I know I'm not in charge of deciding who gets in. But from everything I hear and everything I see of her in her descendant, there's no question.
