Abraham Bogdanow

from a letter written by Jody Massey to Smadar Belkind about her grandparents Abe and Mollie Bogdanow

Molly was an extraordinary cook. She made some of the most amazing food I've ever tasted in my life, and I recall so well her preparations for Shabbat, with the chicken from the kosher butcher and the way she cleaned it. The thought still gets me when I think of what she went through to clean that sucker each week, but the results were astounding. Her chicken soup was liquid gold with its homemade egg noodles melting in your mouth. The taste was almost beyone belief. I used to stand by her and watch her every move, so fortunately, I can come close to preparing some of the things she used to make, but I still believe I fall a little short. She was an awesome cook, that's the only word to describe her food and there was so much of it -- chopped liver that I can still taste in my memory (not that I eat liver today, but I would if she prepared it, I'll bet), and the kneideleche, even her gefilte fish (which I won't eat today either, though I ate it then and loved each bite).

..... but she was more than just that. A simple woman who had so little education but one who worked hard to learn to write English so very well, much better than she spoke it in fact. I still have one of her letters and it still amazes me that she wrote so well, not great English, but at least she tried and succeeded in a huge way. She was one smart cookie, and Abe was no slouch either. He read voluminously in at least three languages and it was he who introduced me to Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Goethe. He gave me "War and Peace" for a birthday gift one year (I think I was 7 or 8 perhaps) and he said, "Here, read it and then tell me what you think about it. I've read it in Russian and in English and I think the Russian version is better." Of course, I never could have read the Russian version at all, but I know I read the English version, at first to please him and then to please myself as I struggled through it and started to love what I was reading. Quite a feat for a child of that age, but he pushed you to the limit if you were at all responsive to him, and his love of reading and the value he placed on education really have both inspired me throughout my life.

They were amaizing people. You would have been proud to know them both, though they had their quirks that was for certain. But all in all they were simply a humble Jewish couple, just a homemaker/cook and her upholsterer husband (who was an artist more than just an upholsterer), who made the world a little nicer for two little girls and their two little boy cousins. They were very good to Shelley and me and we had some wonderful times with them and with Billy and Larry. It was the four musketeers -- "the boys" and "the girls" and we had terrific times together.