They were European, so there was nothing, and I mean nothing, that went past them
I’d meet with clients at my dining room table, and we’d sit, schmooze, and work. I always made sure they knew that “what gets said at this table stays at this table” — a cardinal rule that came down from Sinai, and far be it from me to transgress it. After we shared so much, each client I was working with became my best friend, and many have remained so to this very day.
Some of my clients were children of Holocaust survivors — a group all our own — and as an unprecedented gift, many would invite their mothers (or maybe the mothers invited themselves) to accompany us to choose the fill-in-the-blank — venue, caterer, florist, musicians, photographers, etc.
When the grandmothers were present at these planning meetings, things sometimes took, let’s say, just a bit longer. These magnificent women had met and married their spouses, rebuilt lives, established homes, attended PTA meetings with their American counterparts, and tried their best to fit into American culture. They’d accepted their losses with a grace and strength beyond human measure while baking cookies and adapting and attempting to pretend that mass murders and annihilation hadn’t happened. That alone deserves a standing ovation. And now, they were being invited to help plan their granddaughters’ weddings. How incredible!
There had to be an allowance for “when I got married after the war, there were no parents, and we all wore the same simple wedding dress that had to be altered to each of us…” to the “our menu consisted of salami sandwiches — if we were lucky,” spoken in an accent heavier than the snow you hoped wouldn’t fall during the balmy Cleveland winters.
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