You Can Never Underestimate the Power of Generosity

Dedicated to Moshe

My mom was a true tomboy with a love for playing baseball. After two sports accidents that tore her kneecap apart and repeated surgeries, she’d missed too much school and it became increasingly difficult for her to finish high school. With no high school diploma, little money and zero prospects for further education, the future looked bleak and hopeless .

It was the 1950’s, and women were not encouraged to have careers. They were expected to be stay-at-home moms and housewives. Good career prospects for women meant landing a job as secretary with super dictation skills or bookkeeping.

My mothers grandmother, my great grandmother, had lost her husband in WW1. Finding herself alone and with a small baby, she emmigrated to Canada where she had family. War, as it often does, leaves it’s scars and extracts it’s toll of flesh. But despite my great grandmother’s trials and tribulations, she remained a strong woman with a can do, make do mindset. A heavyset woman, plagued by arthritis, she often had trouble walking. Of course that never stopped her from staying on her feet for long bouts of time cooking up some of her marvelous chicken soup or delicious varenikes.

Her small apartment was always a warm and welcoming place. The smell of freshly cooked food always came to greet you as you entered. As a way of making ends meet, she’d taken in a border named Moshe, a holocaust survivor, to help pay the rent. My great grandmother loved to cook and care for Moshe and he was considered part of the family. My mother remained close to her grandmother and often spent many hours at her apartment.

One day, while at her grandmas, my mom being only 15 at the time, was feeling a sense of despair about her future. She instinctively knew that she needed to take radical action. She managed to muster the courage to ask Moshe if he could loan her $300.00, with interest of course, to enroll in a skill building program that would teach her basic bookkeeping and secretarial skills.

Moshe, hearing about her proposition of getting interest on the money, gently looked at her and laughed. “What’s interest, I don’t want no interest”. And with that he took the $300.00 from under his mattress and handed it over to my mom.

My mom not only completed the program, got a top secretarial job, (at the time), began helping her parents financially, paid Moshe back his money in full, she never looked back. She continued to learn over the many years, eventually starting her own business with my father.

Time has long past and Moshe long gone, but his magnificent act of kindness and generosity literally changed the entire trajectory of my mom’s life. Moshe, we are forever grateful to you!