This is me with my mother, Salomea Sara Drucker, nee Gelb, Presser in her first marriage to my father. The photo was taken in Boryslaw in the 1920s.
This is one of the photograph’s I got from my cousin Howard. Howard (Hagaj) Gelb was the son of Simcha, my mother's eldest brother. Howard was born in Poland; in 1926 he emigrated with his parents to the United States. Ten years ago he came back to Poland, the country of his childhood. We were together for several days and I became very close to him. When Howard went back to the States, among the family papers he found photographs of my family and sent them to me. These are the only pre-war photographs I have. The rest was lost.
My household was very politicized. Father combined Zionism and socialism. Actually, he was a mixture of various views and, to top it off, he was also a believer of sorts. He was a heartfelt Zionist who dreamed about a Jewish country as a land of cultivated Hebrew and social justice. He was a member of Poalei Zion. Sometimes my father’s views would verge on communism, but at the same time, he hated the Soviet Union. And so did my mother. She was a dualist in thought.
At home there were endless debates. As a teenage girl I was annoyed by them; those discussions were very passionate and I was raised in their midst. I had my own growing-up problems and wanted to have a normal, quiet home. Instead my home was torn by continuous verbal battles. My parents felt intensely about current affairs. Together with their friends they discussed Zionism, the situation in Palestine and anti-Semitic incidents. They also talked about literature and cultural events.
The library at our home was enormous for the times, with many books in German and Polish, mostly from the period of Romanticism. My parents did not limit themselves to Jewish culture. My father was an outstanding specialist in German literature and very knowledgeable about German art, while my mother was immersed in Polishness; passionate about Polish theater, she knew all Polish actors. Whenever she could, she went to theater performances in Lwow.
When I was eleven my mother took me to a performance with an actress who seemed extraordinarily beautiful to me. Now I know that was Modzelewska, but at the time I didn’t realize that, of course.
