Happy birthday, Grandma Rae

On this day 130 years ago, my grandmother, Rae Berlin Goldstein, said hello to the world in a shtetl in Belarusse (she called it White Russia) as the youngest of thirteen children. Fled with her family (they had to hide her in the china cabinet when the Cossacks came to the door, so the family lore went), landing on Ellis Island when she was about nine; became fluent in English; marched for woman suffrage; and sent three daughters to college with her sewing machine and candy store at the corner of Clinton and Myrtle Avenues in Brooklyn, NY. (Her hubby, my grandpa, Elias Schochet -- renamed Sam Goldstein at Ellis Island -- who died the year after I was born and whom I never met, a rock-rib Republican, spent most of his time in the back of the store listening to opera, according to even more family lore.)