Ella Oppenheimer

Excerpt from American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Bird, Kai and Sherwin, Martin, Alfred A. Knopf (2005)

". . . Ella Friedman, "an exquisitely beautiful" brunette with finely chiseled features, "expressive gray-blue eyes and long black lashes," a slender figure—and a congenitally unformed left hand. To hide this deformity, Ella always wore long sleeves and a pair of chamois gloves. The glove covering her left hand contained a primitive prosthetic device with a spring attached to an artificial thumb. Julius fell in love with her. The Friedmans, of Bavarian Jewish extraction, had settled in Baltimore in the 1840s. Ella was born in 1869. A family friend once described her as "a gentle, exquisite, slim, tallish, blue-eyed woman, terribly sensitive, extremely polite; she was always thinking what would make people comfortable or happy." In her twenties, she spent a year in Paris studying the early Impressionist painters. Upon her return she taught art at Barnard College. By the time she met Julius, she was an accomplished enough painter to have her own students and a private rooftop studio in a New York apartment building.

All this was unusual enough for a woman at the turn of the century, but Ella was a powerful personality in many respects. Her formal, elegant demeanor struck some people upon first acquaintance as haughty coolness. Her drive and discipline in the studio and at home seemed excessive in a woman so blessed with material comforts. "

• Reference: Find A Grave Memorial - SmartCopy: Jun 26 2023, 16:42:12 UTC

J. Robert Oppenheimer: And the American Century

Ella Friedman, beautiful, slender, and of distinguished culture and bearing, was the daughter of the German-Jewish immigrant Louis Friedman and his American-born wife, the former Cecilia Eger, the non-Jewish child of a German father and an Austrian mother. It was from his mother and grandmother that Robert Oppenheimer inherited his brilliant blue eyes. Ella had studied art in Baltimore and Paris and offered private painting lessons at home and in art classes at a local college.21 After Louis Friedman died in the early 1890s, Ella remained with her widowed mother in the family apartment at 148 West Ninety-fourth Street. Probably she met the future president of Rothfeld, Stern and Co. through the Rothfelds, who may have known her father through the textile trade or through mutual friends in the Society for Ethical Culture. Although the Rothfelds and Oppenheimers were prominent members of the society, the Friedmans were not.