THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 1, 1995 TAG: 9412310036
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: SENTINELS OF THE CENTURY
From the horse and buggy to the lunar landing
SOURCE: By PATRICK K. LACKEY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 91 lines
AT AGE 103, Pauline Zfass does not say ``I have had a beautiful life,'' though she has.
No, no, she says, ``I have a beautiful life,'' and she does.
``I don't even think I am one hundred and three. I think I am sixty . . . sixty-five.''
She sits at her grand piano in her apartment high in Norfolk's Hague Towers. She was one of the first occupants, one of the renters who more than 20 years ago supposedly threatened to throw then-owner Donald Trump into the swimming pool, before he backed down from a proposed rent increase.
From memory she plays a waltz written by her husband, Samuel, who died in 1958. Her left hand strikes the boom-chuck-chuck chords, her right hand skims keys to pick out the melody. The song, she said, is titled ``Waltz in Waiting.'' She has had the piano more than half a century.
As she plays, dozens of faces, all relatives, watch her from the 29 framed photographs on the piano. Seated nearby are Zfass's two daughters, both successful in business, both happy and almost girlish in their mother's company. Her three sons are in Richmond, all doctors, a fact she mentions half a dozen times in a hour.
``You are looking at a wonder,'' Zfass tells a reporter, and the daughters nod in agreement.
Eyeglasses lie on a coffee table, but Zfass uses them only to read. Her eyes are clear, her smile constant, as she plays the good host, feeding the reporter delicious cake and hot coffee.
She is asked, ``So how do you like the century so far?''
The first decade could have gone better. Her father was a well-to-do builder in Russia when the killing of Jews began. In one day in November 1905, Russian peasants incited by government officials massacred more than 1,000 Jews in Odessa alone. That year, at age 13, Zfass fled with her family to Norfolk. The only family possession they carried, besides the basics, was a brass samovar.
First thing in the morning, Zfass milked cows at a farm her father bought near what's now Military Circle. Days she went to Maury High School. After school she worked at a shirt factory.
Asked what was different back then, she shook her head as though to say, How many grains of sand on the beach? They didn't have a car. They didn't have electricity. Women couldn't vote and few jobs were open to them. What was the same? Just naming changes in the past 50 years would be hard, she said, let alone 100.
She married in high school, against her parents' wishes. She had four children by age 22. The fifth arrived 20 years later. The three boys, as you'll recall, became doctors.
She was asked, ``So what are you proudest of?''
The reporter expected to hear about the sons. Instead she said, ``Everything I did, I did on my own. Nobody could change my mind through my lifetime. I was stubborn.''
``She's right about that,'' said one daughter, Ethel Carmel, in real estate.
``Her husband was very supportive,'' said the other daughter, Raye Swartz, in antiques. ``He played a good second fiddle to her. He complemented her, so she was able to go her own way. He would do the physical work.''
They ran a dress shop. He opened and closed each day. She went to New York to buy dresses.
During the Great Depression, two sons were in medical school at the University of Virginia. There wasn't enough money, so she left her husband to run the store while she moved to Charlottesville to run a boarding house for a year. No Depression was going to keep her sons from being doctors. The third son, the child who came 20 years after the others, had a car in college. He had it as easy as the first two sons had it hard.
The first dress shop, on Church Street, was called The Thrift Shop. Later they had Paulette's at Ocean View.
She closed her dress shop in 1969, and even today misses it.
At age 87, she studied Hebrew and was bat mitzvahed at Beth El Temple, in a black tie affair.
She played poker every Thursday night well into her 90s, till the other players became ill or died.
She continued driving till about five years ago. Her daughters say she started driving the family's first car, a Model T, with no lessons.
She visited Europe in 1958. As Swartz put it, ``She came here in steerage. She went back first class aboard the Queen Mary.''
``Even when it was hard,'' Zfass said of her life, ``it was beautiful.'' ILLUSTRATION: LAWRENCE JACKSON/Staff photo
Photo
Pauline Zfass' family fled the pogroms of Czarist Russia.
by CNB