Look to the future

Despite what she has had to endure after making aliya, Linda Epstein tries to see the positive side of life in Israel.

By GLORIA DEUTSCH
Linda Epstein370 (photo credit: GLORIA DEUTSCH)
Linda Epstein370
(photo credit: GLORIA DEUTSCH)
Linda Epstein endured a major tragedy with the death of her daughter five years ago, and the trauma of her marriage breaking up after 39 years. Yet in spite of these shattering events, she manages to maintain a positive attitude toward life and living in Israel.
She also began a brand-new career that she loves. In Wales and England, she worked for years as an optometrist. Here, she has developed her porcelain repair business and enjoys every moment of the intricate work. In her studio, surrounded by Meissen figurines with missing appendages, she works quietly, trying to recreate the piece as it came from the factory decades before.
“It’s very creative and challenging,” she says. “You have to find a way to repair the piece, and then paint it in the exact colors, but make it look like the antique it is.”
At university she studied sociology, but after she married her husband, a lawyer, and became pregnant, she decided she wanted a steady career and qualified in optometry, opening a business in Cardiff and later in London.
Her daughter had moved to Israel and Epstein visited often. She and her husband talked of moving here, but maintaining their work in the UK and commuting.
She also felt the time had come to acquire another skill as she became older.
“A friend told me she had done a course in restoration and was repairing a wonderful piece of art,” recalls Epstein. “I’ve always loved art in all its forms and I began to look into it. I researched on the Internet and found a course in Nottingham.”
She studied in the intensive three-week course and took to it immediately. Here was something she could do and enjoy, working in her own home.
In 2005 she made aliya with her husband.
Her daughter, Simone, had recovered from cancer and was free from it for five years.
“But it came back and she didn’t get better this time,” says Epstein, her gray eyes brimming with tears. “She died just after her 34th birthday.”
The stress of aliya and the terrible tragedy of their daughter’s death took a heavy toll. The marriage did not survive and Epstein divorced, deciding to stay here alone. Several years later, when she became a counselor for new immigrants working through the English-Speaking Residents Association (ESRA), she formulated several ideas about the destructive power of aliya if there are already stresses in the family.
“Everything is new and no one tells you how difficult it can be here without Hebrew. You come out of your comfort zone to a new country, a new language, with no job – and if you haven’t got the right coping mechanism, it can be disastrous,” she says.
She is certain that making aliya was the catalyst to ending her marriage.
“If we’d stayed in Britain we’d still be together today,” she says. “If there are stresses in a family, aliya makes it worse.”
Fortunately though, the tide was turning and Epstein was able to see the halffull cup. She began taking an art class and discovered she had a painting talent.
“The teacher said she couldn’t believe I’d never painted,” she says. She began a painting for her daughter but didn’t finish it in time.
“I gave it to my son Daniel in the US,” she says.
She started to help her old friend from Cardiff, Judy Stone, who was an established porcelain restorer. And through Stone she met Louis Machet, a widower and pharmacist originally from South Africa.
“Hashem [God] was looking after me,” says Epstein. “We met two weeks before Simone passed away. Everything fell apart, but he was there for me, a rock.”
After her Stone’s untimely death, Epstein carried on, finishing all the work Stone left unfinished. She built up the business and works every day in the small studio in the apartment in Ra’anana she shares with Machet.
She became active in ESRA and together with another old friend from Cardiff, Jennifer Bell, she started an advice center to help other new immigrants find out what they were suited for.
“It was a self-help group and we held meetings once a month and invited speakers,” she recalls. They managed to help change the lives of several immigrants for the better.
“We had one old lady whose daughter put her in a retirement home, and she was terribly depressed and hated it there,” recalls Epstein. “Through our group we got her involved in helping to teach English in schools. We also set up a book club for her and it’s still going strong. She’s a different person today.”
In spite of all the bad times, Epstein tries to see the positive side of life in Israel.
“You have to make your own life,” she says. “There is so much to do – concerts, lectures, volunteering.” She also likes the fact that there is no stigma attached to being single in Israel, the way she feels there is in Britain.
For Epstein her new career in porcelain restoration has been a blessing in many ways.
“It became like a love affair for me,” she says. “I work with beautiful things, which satisfies my love for art; I do the research, which gives me intellectual stimulation; and I put things right.”
She recently went to Haifa to see the Salvador Dali exhibition and was impressed by his remark that he was the luckiest man in the world because he did what he loved most.
“I’m also lucky to have found a place where I can look to the future,” she says.