Vera A. Glasberg

Vera Hessen was born on November 15, 1912 in Riga, Latvia, which at the time belonged to Russia. When she was a baby, her family moved to Rybinsk, a small town on the Volga. They stayed there for a short time and then settled in Kiev, where they were living in a big, lovely apartment at the outbreak of the 1917 Soviet Revolution. After her father had been arrested twice, the family fled to Riga in 1921, in cattle cars heated by several little iron stoves, also used for cooking, with 15 or 20 persons to a car. With the optimism and openness that characterized her, she often told her children, Vic and Irene, about that move as well as so many others: " It was a very strange feeling, but very exciting, very interesting, very unusual." In 1922 the family moved to Berlin, where they stayed for 2 years, living modestly in two furnished rooms. Vera remembers her private Russian tutors with affection and how she met many of her lifelong friends at school there. In 1924, when they moved to Danzig (now Gdansk) the German school and community were her first encounters with anti-semitism. But she also has wonderful memories of the opera season in Zopot, with Wagner operas performed outside and the Walkyries on horseback coming down to the stage through the woods. The next move was 1929, to Brussels, living in two rooms in the home of a Russian lady. Vera was delighted to move to a European capital! Although she now had to study everything in French, she completed her high school education there and found a wonderful job with the Touring Club of Belgium. Thanks to the President, she was warned just in time that they had to move again. On May 10th, 1940 the German Blitz invasion of Belgium had started. Along with other Jewish families, Vera and her family boarded a train in yet another cattle car and fled to Toulouse, in southern France. Here Vera met and married Samuel Glasberg. He had a visa to go to the United States and in August 1941 they boarded a boat in Lisbon and sailed to New York. They lived in Manhattan where Irene was born and then Vic. And in 1951 they bought their house in Forest Hills, the first time since she was born that Vera that was living in her very own place. Sam rapidly got a job and when Vera's parents joined them after the war, she did as well. But what really mattered to her was not related to work: it was her family and her friends. This remained true when, in 2008 she made her last big move to Alexandria, Virginia, living with Vic and Cristina for five years and then moving to her own studio at The Fountains. Family and friends continued to surround her as she has always surrounded them with love and understanding. Despite being over a century old she was always open to new ways of thinking and doing things. This is surely why, all through her life and to the very end, family and friends of multiple generations visited from far and near, always keeping in touch—as she did whenever one of us needed her. It is no surprise that when her children asked her to tell about her life, she said "My family is really my proudest and happiest achievement, if I may say so. Irene and Vic are friends, and that is what I always wanted to see happen. And they are human beings that I can not only love but respect. I am glad that you asked me to write it down. It has given me pleasure to plunge into what has been a good life, full of happy souvenirs. Whatever was difficult has receded into oblivion."

Tributes

Vera A. Glasberg

November 15, 1912 - June 3, 2016