This Book of Memories memorial website is designed to be a permanent tribute paying tribute to the life and memory of Minnie Dworkin. It allows family and friends a place to re-visit, interact with each other, share and enhance this tribute for future generations. We are both pleased and proud to provide the Book of Memories to the families of our community.

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Our mother

Our mother was born in the city of Zhytomyr in the Ukraine in 1923. Her mother’s brothers were scholars and rabbis, who spent their days in study. Her mother, Dorothy, was educated and spoke and read Russian, which was unusual for a Jewish woman of that era. In 1919, only four years before her birth, 317 Jews were killed in Zhytomyr, in one of a series of pogroms, which had begun in 1909. In the wake of this terror, in 1925, our grandmother, Dorothy, and her daughters Minnie, and infant Shirley emigrated from the Ukraine, entering the US illegally through Cuba and making their way to Chicago. Dorothy’s husband never joined them. We don’t know why or what became of him, but the Zhytomyr Jewish community was decimated in the Holocaust, when tens of thousands of men, women, and children were brutally murdered by the SS. In Chicago Dorothy eventually married Louis Patman, a good natured man who owned a successful hardware store. He lost the shop in the depression, and my recollection of Louis, who I knew as my grandfather, was of an old man standing on a street corner in Chicago wearing a soiled coin apron and selling newspapers. I recall my grandparents sitting at their kitchen table, after a hurried supper of salted herring and black bread, counting the coins, and rolling them into papers. Early on, Dorothy suffered a mysterious illness which left which left her incapacitated, and temporally blind. It was impossible for her to care for two children; so, her sister, Mary, offered to take Shirley until she recovered. Shirley was an unusually beautiful child, and when Dorothy recovered, Mary refused to return her to her mother; henceforth, Minnie and Shirley grew up separately with little possibility for communication. I recall the highly emotional reconciliation of mother and daughters in the mid-50’s, at our house on Rascher Avenue. I was conceived in 1943, when my father was home on a brief furlough before being sent to the Pacific. By the time of my birth, he was with his infantry unit preparing for the invasion of Okinawa -- the bloodiest engagement of the Pacific War. He survived Okinawa, but, what was left of his unit, was designated for Operation Downfall, the invasion of the Japanese mainland, which was expected to cost as many as a million American lives. My mother gave birth, and cared for her baby, not knowing if she would ever see her husband again. Rumbling, in the background of all this, was the gradually emerging horrific news of the holocaust in Europe. Certainly, she lived with near constant anxiety. I was more than two, when I first met my father. Our parents were deeply and romantically in love with one another. Their example was a wonderful gift to me, and in turn to my children. Sadly, our father’s life was abruptly ended by cancer, leaving our mother, at 63, a lonely widow and with little preparation for dealing with the world. My own relationship with my mother was far from smooth; sometimes, she appeared to me to be insensitive to my needs and goals, which although conventional, were quite different from hers. Over the years, I’ve tried to understand her perspective and appreciate that she experienced and survived an historical tumult, horror and existential insecurity that I, having grown up in the comfort and security of postwar America, can never grasp. To her, a normal, uneventful life was an accomplishment. She was an honest person, who tried to do the right thing for her children; it is hard to ask more than that of anyone.
Posted by Barry Dworkin
Monday January 13, 2014 at 6:19 pm
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