They Survived the Spanish Flu, the Depression and the Holocaust

NEW YORK — For most of us, it is almost impossible to comprehend the ferocity and regularity with which life was upended during the first half of the 20th century. Plague and conflict emerged on an epic scale, again and again. Loss and restriction were routine; disaster was its own season.

Until a polio vaccine came into use in the 1950s, outbreaks occurred somewhere in the country nearly every spring. Public gatherings were regularly canceled; wealthy people in big cities left for the country. By the early 1920s, Naomi’s baby sister was stricken, leaving one of her legs permanently paralyzed.

Naomi and Eva were introduced by Grace Paley at a reading of her work in the 1980s. They were well past middle age, long after the tragedies and social disruptions of the previous decades had touched them each with such intimacy. When catastrophe is sequential, it eventually trains its survivors to greet terror with the serenity of the enlightened.

“The minute we got to Holland it seemed so wonderful that there were kind people there on the station platform,’’ Eva once told an interviewer for a feminist oral history project. “They gave you orange juice and smiled at you.”“And then, when we were in England,’’ she said, “I very soon realized that I was extremely lonely.”

Throughout their lives, Naomi and Eva have exhibited a kind of fearlessness ably nurtured by misfortune. After she graduated from high school in New York, Eva went to Detroit to work in an auto factory. Sexism and homophobia made their inevitable intrusions. Eva’s mother thought that she should run a hotel or a beauty parlor. But Eva was fiercely ambitious for a certain kind of urbane, cerebral life. Eventually she became a professor of comparative literature at Sarah Lawrence College. She married two men. She had a son with one of them. She was a lover of Susan Sontag’s.

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