She wanted to die with her boots on

For a decade, I used her to model “The Introduction Speech” — my first assignment for “Fundamentals of Speech” at Touro College, L.A: “I was terrified of math teachers. In Romania, where I grew up, math meant being called to the front of the class and asked horrid word problems: At what time would the two trains coming towards each other at X speed collide in the tunnel? The trains, the teacher, and the tunnel collided in my head and gave me migraines. I couldn’t have imagined that someday I’d come to admire a math professor, of all creatures, though this one teaches “Overcoming Math Anxiety.”  

I introduced Dean Esther Lowy to class after class of TCLA students not to get into her good graces – over the years, we became good friends but also had our squabbles (about the ratio between salary and course load, what else?) My speech was designed to illustrate the concept of central idea: “I admire Dean Lowy’s ability to solve the problem that has confounded many women of my generation: how to successfully balance the demands of family and career.”  Plenty of women I knew worked hard at this but sometimes ended up with painful losses in one realm or the other. And here was Esther Lowy, mother of eight children and “a baker’s dozen of grandchildren,” as she put it (the number grew to seventeen).  When only four per cent of math Ph.D.’s were women, our dean got her doctorate from NYU’s Courant Institute and won a Woodrow Wilson fellowship. She had several children while teaching math at UCLA and, between classes and babies, managed to get her MBA and her broker’s license too.  And then, with some kids married, others still at home, she led the opening of TCLA  in 2005,  hiring faculty, creating an infra structure and a curriculum, getting students, funds, scholarships, fighting to survive and thrive in the educational marketplace.

I especially relished presenting my speech to my women students, many of whom were starting the process of shidduch dating, or planning weddings, or maybe even had a baby or two at home. Esther was passionate about encouraging our young women, most of whom came from the religious world, to finish their degrees and develop their careers.   

I also drew on my Esther Lowy speech at social gatherings to counter the prejudices against religious women that friends, relatives and acquaintances from my world – the secular, and/or Reform world – often betrayed when the subject of my job came up.  I, too, had no exposure to the Orthodox community – modern or Haredi – until I started teaching in it. I got my doctorate at UCLA in the 1980’s as feminist theory courses were just coming into vogue and wrote my dissertation on Virginia Woolf.  I derived some of my notions about my religious sisters from Bread Givers, a popular novel in Women’s Studies courses everywhere, about the trials of Sarah Smolinsky, the youngest daughter of a misogynistic rabbi who destroys her three older sisters with disastrous matches, denying their rights to educations, careers or lives of their own.  Though this novel was published in 1925, many people I know who haven’t even read it, imagine religious women as oppressed baby machines who spend their lives steeped in diapers and dough.  And even within the Orthodox world, I discovered, the less observant can harbor such prejudices against the more observant.  “I hate sitting next to the frummies on those long flights to Israel,” a woman from the progressive, modern Orthodox shul I recently joined told me. “All they do is feed their kids and get crumbs all over you.” This was the first time I heard the term and realized it applied to all those who, like Dean Lowy and many of my students, cover their hair, arms and legs.

Unlike Sarah Smolinsky or her creator, Anzia Yezierska, Esther revered her father. He taught her to wake up at dawn, when the mind was clearest, to work on mathematics. Esther liked to tell his story after I told hers.  The late Mr. Freilich was liberated from Auschwitz by a British officer who noticed the very low number on his arm – which indicated that he miraculously survived for years. Eager to save his life, the officer offered to take him in his jeep and get him immediate care.  The frail inmate refused. “It’s Shabbat,” he explained. “Until today, I was a slave, but now I’m a freeman.” Later he became Assistant to the Head Rabbi of Rome,  fell in love with Ida, who was born in the city of Auschwitz and also survived the death camps; together, they emigrated to America and settled in New York, where Esther and her brother, Dr. Avrohom Freilich, were raised.  No challenge she ever faced, Esther told us, came close to what her parents endured; by comparison, nothing she did was difficult.      

Like all successful people, Esther had an inexhaustible energy and drive, a prodigious work ethic, the ability to juggle, multi-task, and forego breaks or sleep to accomplish her goals. She also had a clear sense of priorities: Torah first, along with family, and they often intertwined. She gave her career her all, but it never took precedence.  Honoring thy parents, caring for the sick, being there for your children mattered above all.  “My children are my crown,” she proclaimed. And she respected and encouraged these priorities for her faculty and students as well.

Here’s a memory: Sitting in her office around 9:30 Pm on a Monday or Wednesday evening  (when the men’s classes are taught) to discuss my next semester’s schedule and maybe a student’s situation,  Esther gets a call  from her daughter, Mindy, a rising star at Pricewaterhouse in New York.  The dean excuses herself for a minute. Mindy just got into the car her firm provided. She will call her mom around 1 AM her time when the driver gets to her apartment. Esther asks about my two kids, then also in New York, and then about my mother who lives in The Bay Area and struggles with cancer. I tell her that she will be repeating the “embolization” that has been prolonging her life but doesn’t want me to fly up for the procedure again. “Don’t listen to her,” Esther says. “Go. You’ll do a make-up.”  Caring for Ida, an amazing woman I got to know and love, is the number 1 priority in Esther’s life.  The dean is fierce if she suspects students of disrespect or dishonesty and always backs her faculty on grades and ethics. However, when it comes to family duties, if they’re genuine, she insists we help our students work them out.  The world would be a kinder place, I think, if Jewish mothers ran it.

When my mother died in 2010, Esther flew to her funeral in South San Francisco in the midst of a storm.   There was a curious connection between Esther Lowy and Regina Kortz – though they never met and came from entirely different worlds. ( An actress, a socialist and a feminist in her youth in Romania,  my mother acquired and operated  San Francisco’s Fillmore West, where Bill Graham staged his rock concerts in the 1970’s). Esther was a boomer, like me, but she had the toughness and stoicism of women from my mother’s world. Regina, who lived through the Holocaust and Ceausescu’s imprisonment of my father, also miraculously survived liver cancer for many years – almost sixteen by the end.  She told no one about her illness other than her sister, my brother and I.  She took the bus instead of a taxi to UC SF Med Center, and even after blood transfusions ran to her office to manage her properties and then to the market to buy fresh ingredients to cook dinner from scratch. She worked until her last breath.  Esther seemed to understand her even better than I did.   

I only fully grasped the connection as I sat by Esther’s hospital bed at Cedars Sinai last November, only weeks before my friend and dean died. She kept her illness to herself until she practically collapsed at school. During my visit, Esther confided that she had struggled with cancer for years.  “You have no idea how your stories about your mother affected me,” she said. She also told me that she had often been in pain, but resisted the meds that might have blunted her concentration. “What’s the matter,” she would prod herself, “are you a baby that you can’t take a little pain?” I told her that she was a fighter, and she would continue to win.  “Thanks, but I know the odds,” the math professor said.  Still, when Rudy,  her husband of forty years, eyes filled with tears, led me to her room several weeks later, their home ringing with the voices of the children and grandchildren who flew in from New York for Shabbat, Esther spoke to me about her plans for Spring semester. The words that Rabbi Laura Geller used to comfort me about my mother echoed through my mind: “She wants to die with her boots on.”     

The Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln, a  17^th century text we read in my Lit 101 course, often evoked our Esther of Touro.  The German-Jewish Gluckel had fourteen children, ran her own factory and business, made shidduchs, guided careers, and wrote her memoirs.  “Study the Torah,” she advised her heirs, “for it is like a rope which God has thrown to us,” and then go about your business “of providing for your children” — “for on this the world is built.”  In my years of teaching in the Orthodox community, I’ve met  many Gluckels and future Gluckels – brilliant, ambitious young women preparing for careers in teaching, law, health, medicine, business, counselling – whose mothers and grandmothers achieved tremendous feats in their families, communities and careers.  Like the powerful, capable, and determined women from all denominations and parts of the Jewish world — married, single, or childless like my beloved aunt Tina, chemical engineer and family matriarch — we are all descendants of Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah.  And of the woman of valor, that ultimate super woman.    

Irina E. Bragin, Ph.D. is the English Department Chair at Touro College, Los Angeles