Gwebs Cryptographer

I am in LA visiting family for a few days – flew here Sunday – and am flying back to Beijing, via Seoul, on Thursday. My grandmother died. She was 92 years old, and lived a thoroughly long and heroic life. Her funeral service today was beautiful. My stepfather, a lawyer who takes two days off a week and is studying to be a rabbi intoned a beautiful prayer, my uncle Mark, a violinist, hired a solo cellist, and that performance too was haunting. My mother, her two brothers, my grandma’s rabbi, and several others, all eulogized my grandmother, and though I have asked her and others to tell me her personal history many times, today I got the most complete version of the story.

Elizabeth (Lisl) Shapiro was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1915, at the beginning of a time of great change and disaster in Europe. Her father, an engineer, was summoned to Moscow to work on the construction of that city’s subway, and Grandma began medical school there. When Stalin arrived, they moved to Vienna, but then Hitler decided to pay a visit. Her father was interned at Dachau, but her mother found a way to get him out. At that time everyone realized it was necessary to leave Austria, but everyone in the family had been born in different countries, so getting visas together was impossible. I don’t know where everyone else went, but grandma’s uncle, my name-sake, got her a visa to come to London as a domestic servant (just in time for The Blitz) and, so the story goes, she began knitting diamonds into hollow sweater buttons to provide exiles with a means of carrying their wealth with them when they fled the Third Reich.

When grandma went to London, her brother Otto found his way to Trenton, NJ, and when the time came, he found a way to bring her over. There, she met my grandfather at a party, where he was playing violin, and the two moved to Hollywood, where my mom and my two uncles were born. They then moved to Inglewood, and there my grandma stayed until she was 90.

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