A Wild and Precious Life by Edie Windsor

My grandfather took her to Lisbon and booked passage on a ship in the lowest class. The financial stability of a good marriage would pave the way for the rest of the family to join her and leave poverty behind-a heavy responsibility for anyone, much more so for a girl barely a teenager. Her older brother had already left for America several years earlier to try to establish a new life, but he hadn’t succeeded in building a foundation that could support the rest of the family.Ĭele was considered the smartest and most beautiful of her four sisters, and my grandparents decided she had the best chance of finding a husband in America. She refused to speak much about her past, but as I grew older, I gathered bits and pieces of it together through stories told by my aunts and learned that she’d accepted the responsibility of ensuring the future of her entire family at a very a young age.īorn in Korostyshiv, a Jewish slum roughly seventy miles west of Kiev, she immigrated alone to Philadelphia in 1907, when she was just thirteen. This level of devotion to her children continued throughout her life. She slept on a small cot by our hospital beds, and our father would relieve her every other day so she could return home to freshen up. My mother’s name was Celia, but everyone called her Cele, pronounced like the animal. I’d stand in my bed, steadied by the rails, and wave at each white coat in an attempt to see how many I could get to wave back. I turned the parade of doctors into a game. Stuck behind the metal bars of an industrial crib, acutely aware of the fear in the air, with my mother’s constant fretting and doctors hurrying by our ward’s open door, grim looks on their faces. I was three years old, and this is my earliest memory. I’m not sure how she convinced the nurses to let her, but I know she was there. We were hospitalized for weeks in an infectious disease ward, and despite rules that strictly forbade parental presence, our mother stayed with us every single night. The virus found its way inside me, and my older brother, Blackie, caught it soon after. In 1932, a polio epidemic swept through Philadelphia, with 728 reported cases that resulted in eighty-four deaths.

A Wild and Precious Life by Edie Windsor