My feisty friend Elly Guggenheimer died this week. She was ninety six. EIlly once said that in her family the men were lawyers and the women were volunteers. Elly made a long, prominent career out of volunteering as an advocate for consumers, for women, for children. When I met her she was already in her seventies, still going from meeting to meeting. We worked together on the board of a non-profit about childcare.
Elly, was lively, flirtatious, wore short skirts, and loved to be the center of attention at the large dinner parties she gave in her Park Avenue apartment. It was the time people still gave dinner parties in Manhattan and served roast beef or leg of lamb as the main course.
Once in a while we would have lunch together. During the most interesting lunch we ever had Elly told me about her life in the 30’s and 40’s as the daughter of wealthy German Jews. Her husband Randy, the son of another wealthy German Jewish family, had a mother who was a famous New York philanthropist. German Jews, she explained, may have attended Temple Emanuel-El, which, oddly enough, looks rather like a mosque, but they celebrated Christmas, exchanged presents and lit the tree.
She also told me she remembered that around 1941 a group of women came from Europe to talk to her and her friends about what was happening to Jews in Germany and Poland. She said most of the women in her crowd felt-- what did this have to do with them? She admitted she may have felt that way as well and that she still thought about it and regretted her callousness and her stupidity nearly fifty years later.
I saw Elly the last time when she was in her early 90's. She was very unhappy. Her husband had died and her grand East Side apartment now seemed dusty and shabby. She told me that there was very little good about getting old. “You aren't any different than you ever were. But nobody notices you anymore, " she said. "People expect you to get nicer, kinder. But you're not."
Elly had a series of small. diminishing strokes. One of the very few people who still went to see her told me that during a seemingly lucid moment, Elly said, “I used to be an important person but I am not anymore. “ But that she no longer seemed angry about it. She had, in fact, become rather sweet. And someone who visited her in the last year said that she had stopped talking, almost entirely, but that, occasionally ,she would answer a question by singing a few words, sometimes even rhyming them.
She had been an important woman in New York and done a lot of good things but she had really always wanted to be a lyricist and write Broadway musicals. When everything else was finished and forgotten, Elly could still sing.
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