The Jerusalem Post - The Jerusalem Post Magazine
50 far 50 good • By SUSAN DE LA FUENTE
50 FAR 50 GOOD – a play on So Far So Good – was the slogan our daughter blazoned onto the T-shirts she designed for us all. The happy occasion was our golden wedding anniversary in the spring. Luckily we managed to celebrate this memorable event with our Israeli contingent of children and grandchildren. Thursday night was dinner in Beersheba, Friday a Negev hike, then we enjoyed a Shabbat at the Sde Boker field school. We celebrated just before COVID-19 shut us all indoors.
Such good fortune – half a century spent with one’s spouse – cannot be taken for granted. No exact formula exists for the first step of finding the right partner. During my childhood in London, I naively thought that my parents’ courtship had followed a normative course, and that most marriages begin that way. I realized much later how rare their story was.
My parents of blessed memory got engaged after a mere week’s acquaintance and married three or four months later, aged 29 and 31 respectively. Sadly, they only had 15 years together, due to my father’s untimely death at age 46, but what sparked their lightning romance?
The setting was the stony beach at the seaside resort of Brighton, near London. It was late summer 1937, two years prior to World War II. My mother Miriam (Margarete Hammerschmidt) came from a small town in East Prussia. She traveled to London alone around 1935 to flee Nazi Germany. Her younger brother Siegbert (Sigi), who escaped a bit later, was interned on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien, before he became a combat solder in Europe. As their parents were trapped in Germany, Miriam sent them money regularly from her meager salary.
Like most refugees, mother started out at the Jews’ Temporary Shelter in the East End of London. She was then assigned as a domestic helper in a Jewish home. As a non-citizen, she could not work in her profession. After an initial unhappy experience, she switched jobs to work with the Moss family in the north London suburb of Muswell Hill. Mrs. Moss was a kind elderly woman, whom mother always remembered with gratitude.
When Miriam came down to the beach and tended gently to the older lady, wrapping her up against the stiff breeze, she was unaware of a pair of eyes scrutinizing her. My father, Mendel Lazar Jacobson, manager of the family shoe store at Dalston Junction, North London, was lounging in a deck chair nearby with his brother Joe, when Miriam caught his eye. The friendly young man had no hesitation in striking up an acquaintance with this attractive young woman. Actually, he had the audacity to wave her over, but our yekke mom rightly rebuffed this breach of protocol. After a few days of holiday romance, they got engaged. Mendel had grown up in the East End of London, where his father manned a stall in the Petticoat Lane market. My grandparents were East European immigrants from Bauske and Kovno who fled to London in their teens.
No exact formula exists for the first step of finding the right partner
SWITCHING FORWARD to my acquaintance with my husband Mordechai in the late 1960s, it was a casual, non-romantic relationship. He was studying at a Jerusalem yeshiva, a gap year before finishing Yeshiva University. I was a fourthyear Hebrew University student who was dorming that year on the beautiful Givat Ram campus. After three years of wanderings, I found these accommodations the closest thing to bliss, and most convenient, as I worked in the physics