Shirley’s birth cemented them as a family. The two brothers still at home were thrilled with their little red-headed, green-eyed sister. Harry held her constantly, propping her up for the professional photographs they had taken when she was six weeks old and reluctantly relinquishing her to their father’s arms for the formal family portrait to be sent to Europe. The photograph shows Max, wearing his striped wedding suit and seated in an ornate chair, proudly holding his daughter; a smiling Freida Sima standing at his side in a formal black dress and the yellow jade beads she’d worn the night they met; behind them a young smiling Harry and on the other side a more reserved Ben, both in suit and tie.
For the first time since coming to America eighteen years earlier, Freida Sima began to relax. Less than a year before she had been an “old maid” and now she was a young mother with a handsome, attentive husband who made a good living and with whom she argued daily about politics and religion, “to spice things up when they get boring,” she would say. Her two stepsons at home adored their baby sister while the two in California celebrated her birth by mail.
Shirley was an easy baby whose coloring reminded Freida Sima of her redheaded mother Devorah, whom she missed so much at these moments. Having helped raise siblings in the past, Freida Sima knew how to care for a baby. But there were times a new mother wished to speak to her own mother for advice.
All in all, however, life was good; better, in fact, than she had ever imagined it could be. The family moved into a larger and more expensive apartment on Beck Street in the Bronx with separate bedrooms for each child, including one for Shirley when she would be weaned. For the first time in her life there was cash to spare, and Freida Sima joined her brothers in setting aside money to send to Europe to bring over some of their other siblings.
It took them a while to catch on to the fact that their father, afraid to lose more of his children to America, was using the money to buy more horses and land instead of tickets. When the three began sending actual tickets, he would just cash them in and do the same. The situation in the Bukovina under Romanian rule between the wars was not as beneficial for Jews as Austro-Hungarian rule had been, but no one dreamed that within a few years the Jews there would face annihilation.
* * * *
“If things are too good, be careful,” my grandmother used to say, “because you never know what’s coming around the corner.” Within months of her daughter’s birth, Freida Sima’s idyllic existence changed. Noticing that Max was constantly thirsty, she pressed him to go to a doctor. He did, and was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes at age 40. Not too long before he would almost certainly have been dead within a year – the fate of most diabetics until that time who at best were put on starvation diets in an attempt to lower their blood sugar and buy them another month or two of life.
The situation facing those with diabetes had changed abruptly in 1921 when synthetic insulin was discovered and made commercially available by the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical firm a few years later. However, many doctors at the time were unversed in how to treat diabetics correctly. Until patients found a specialist they lost valuable time and some became too sick to survive.
