Bernard Axelrad Scholarship Fund

My mother, Rose, just had her 93rd birthday and the occasion should not go unnoted since she is a special lady. All who know her can attest to that.

Despite fading eyesight, diminished hearing and faltering step she still lives alone in her apartment. She shops, bakes and cooks, cleans, and does her own wash, and is quite self-sufficient. Anything she can do herself she will not allow having done for her by others.

Possessed of her full mental faculties, her acuity of memory and thought are remarkable for any age. People love conversing with her because she is open, affable and wise. She can convey disagreement without being abrasive.

Mom graciously exudes an aura of acceptance and love and is ever ready to listen sympathetically to those who call upon her. Conversation at her apartment is invariably accompanied by a cornucopia of food.

My mother was always there for me as I was growing up. She was my nurturer, my benefactor and my confidant. kept few secrets from her because even her disapproval was not harsh or repelling and her counsel was treasured.

She would cover my school books, tie my shoelaces, bind up my wounds and treat any illness as good as any doctor. My clothes were washed, ironed and patched with detailed loving care, and the sweaters she knit for me were the envy of the other kids. I always felt she could do anything.

Complaints about too much homework, tough teachers and unfair grades were heard patiently with neither undue criticism nor endorsement, only with wise guidance. My mother provided a soothing and reassuring presence for me and I could never recall her being in a foul mood.

All four of my children individually have a special relationship with her. They feel her unstinting love and her keen interest in their lives. They confide in her (as I did) and value her opinion since she is not rigid and is open to their views and counter-arguments.

The relationship goes back a long time. When my three older children were toddlers, she lived around the corner from us and they began each morning by wending their way to her place for hot cereal and loving words. Basking in her warmth was a good way to start their day.

Later, her Friday evening seven-course meals were a gathering place for grandchildren and guests where both the food and conversation were bountiful. There they knew that accidentally spilling the wine on the clean white table cloth or arriving unavoidably late for dinner or leaving early to keep an appointment would not be deemed a high crime or bring a rebuke.

She did for them all over again what she had done for me as a child and throughout my life — warm acceptance interspersed with wise observations. Even her critical commentary is acceptable since it is accompanied by an unequivocal love, and they know that no sacrifice by her on their behalf is too great.

To this very day my children candidly share their feelings with her and treat her as a peer. The interaction between doting grandmother and devoted grandchildren has been extremely salutary. She is always there for them with food, kind words of support and loving embrace. In turn she has been brought from the shtetl to the modern world of today in the discussions with her grandchildren.

Both the young and the old are the better for it as the generation gap between them is bridged by mutual love and trust.

When I talk to her after a visit from a grandchild she literally glows and gushes with love for them.

Despite the physical and emotional ailments besetting a nonagenarian, she retains a youthful spirit and is open to change. At age 92 she consented to having her apartment decorated anew and refurnished.

Now that is a sense of hope and faith!

For me it is especially gratifying to observe her having a good old age because the first 90 years were not so great by any objective standard.

She was born in a small shed in Austria-Hungary, the middle child of 11 with five sisters and five brothers. She was completely lost among her siblings. Being of sweet and undemanding nature in a poor family burdened with so many children was not conducive to getting attention.

At the age of eleven she was shunted off to a distant village to take care of two small children of a working couple. Her father would come by every month to gather up her meager yet needed earnings. The other members of her family she rarely saw during this two year indenture.

Then, at the age of thirteen she was sent off to America where some of her older siblings had preceded her.

Like many other immigrants she worked hard, lived with distant relatives whom she paid $1 a week to share a room with several other kindred souls. It was a grubby, harsh and lonely existence.

Life with my father was also no bowl of cherries. All of his life he worked making pants pockets in a sweat shop — never earning as much as $3,000 in any year. In addition, he was even more frugal than his limited wages required, always saving for a rainy day and old age. He was a dour and unhappy man and didn't really learn to laugh until he was over 80.

My father was that era's traditional male head of the family who always knew best even when he didn't really. In that atmosphere my mother's superior talents not only did not have an opportunity to flourish but they were actively squelched by my father to maintain his dominance. If in the workplace he was nothing, then at home he would be the boss.

Along the way she suffered the devastating loss of a talented son at 19 in a senseless World War II battle.

And, from 1973 until his death in 1985, she cared single-handedly and zealously for my father whose leg was amputated as a result of an accident and was confined to a wheelchair during the last 11-1/2 years of his life. Thus she toiled away the eighth decade of her life without a murmur of complaint or a whine of recrimination.

The most incredible aspect of my mother is how she has managed throughout her life to retain her serenity of disposition in the face of such adversity. Almost all of her life she lived in near poverty, either overlooked for who she was or subjugated by inferiors, aesthetically deprived, without any visible nourishment of the soul or spirit. And, yet, throughout she has maintained her equanimity and sweet nature, her goodness, kindness and sensitivity to others.

Her special way of caring and sharing and giving from the heart survived misfortune.

My mother is no embittered old lady crushed or even scarred by her hard and oppressive life. Her regenerative love and warmth triumphed over all adversity.

While quite humble and self-effacing (even self-denigrating), she has an innate sense of dignity and good taste.

All who visit with her leave entranced by her facile mind and fertile memory as well as by her beauty, serenity and grace.

She is an inspiration to all who know her on how to grow old gracefully.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY. Rose Axelrad is joined on her 93rd birthday by her two grandchildren living in Los Angeles, Adam, a law student (center), and Kevin, a psychologist.