No exact formula exists for the first step of finding the right partner.
By SUSAN DE LA FUENTEA TRENDY ‘50’ cake fetes the relationship that began by chance on campus.(photo credit: Courtesy)
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.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 fourth-year 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 department to support myself.Because telephones were not a common feature then, and cellphones didn’t exist, visits to friends were often unannounced. In line with this retro perspective, the only computer on campus was a gigantic monstrosity that occupied an entire building near my office.THE WRITER’S family celebrates the golden milestoneWe met by chance on campus. Mordechai came by to visit my roommate Sharonah after attending Nehama Leibowitz’s famed Bible class. Sharonah, a psychology student at Barnard College, knew Mordechai from Maimonides High School in Brookline, Massachusetts and was about four years younger than I was. Perhaps that’s why we had little in common then, and she soon switched rooms so she could improve her Hebrew.Sometimes when Mordechai came and Sharonah wasn’t in, he chatted with me instead over coffee and cookies. When he left a note for her and I saw his last name, I was baffled.“’de la Fuente.’ What’s that?” I asked. “That’s my name,” he grinned. For real – it was no joke!“I’m sorry I wasn’t home when Maurice (Mordechai) came by,” Sharonah said. “I hope he didn’t bother you too much.”“Not at all,” I countered with my usual candor, “He’s quite intelligent and interesting.”For some reason, I had piqued Mordechai’s curiosity, so he asked Sharonah about me. She gave him a little background information and informed him that I had no current boyfriend. Her feedback was sufficiently positive that he continued to drop in occasionally, and we arranged to meet on Purim. He read the Megillah at the Kotel, which then had a friendlier mehitza (divider), and then treated me to orange juice on Jaffa Road. Accustomed to the cantors of Hampstead Synagogue, I wasn’t particularly impressed by his reading!During Passover, we met in the North and shared an evening boat trip on the Kinneret. On Lag Ba’Omer, he didn’t find me home, but left a note expressing some disappointment. Actually, by then I had lost interest. I knew he was younger than me and only came for a year, so how could I take him seriously? Also, though he kept telling me how European he was, I thought him the quintessential American. We met a couple more times, and went to the book fair one evening. I had a phone in my office, so I probably gave him the number. After all, we had become good friends.Mordechai was soon scheduled to leave Israel, which ultimately triggered some intensity on his part. At any rate, when we surprised ourselves and others by getting engaged that June, we gave Sharonah credit as our matchmaker or shadchanit and honor her in that capacity to this day. She says it was her only successful shidduch and she never expected anything to come of it.I would add two pointers for those still seeking their soul mates. Keep an open mind, and give your friendship a chance to develop. Secondly, don’t worry about minor age differences. They should straighten out in time – as long as your partner helps with the dishes and vacuuming, of course.
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