Marta Garelik - A Woman of Ruach
copyright ©1998 by Jessica Schorr Saxe

"I feel like knowing Marta is an honor," said Deborah Langsam, her voice choked with emotion and a tear in her eye.

"That was about 15 years ago, when Marta Garelik was a sprite in her late 70's. Though neither of us had seriously considered that a mind and spirit so lively could ever die, we knew Marta's friendship was a rare gift.

Marta died 2 years ago of cancer. Some great people die amidst fanfare, some in relative obscurity. Marta was one of the latter. Her remarkable life made her a hidden gem.

She was born in Vienna in 1902 to the editor of Vienna's evening newspaper and a mother whom she described as "one of the wisest people you would ever find." Her adored grandfather, a philosopher at heart, found in the child Marta a soul-mate. Walking with her through the streets of Vienna, "he trained my mind to observe and to judge. Was this building right? He took me to the new Emperor's palace and told me all the mistakes the architect had made. He taught me logic and he taught me to judge--to have an opinion."

When Marta was 13, she had spinal meningitis. She credited the fact that she was the only survivor of the epidemic to her mother. "They were very short of medication and refused to give me a second injection into the spinal cord. The first didn't work. She was fighting like a lioness." Her mother knelt down in front of the professor who was head of the hospital and persuaded him to try another shot. In the morning she was better.

The hospital was so proud of their success that they introduced her to the parents of other children brought to the hospital. The nuns fed her hunks of ham to make her gain weight "so I would be a showpiece."

"So I had sinned. I had eaten ham. It was hard for my mother to digest that. She didn't have to digest the ham, but she had to digest the fact that I had eaten it to get well."

"The first feminist I ever knew," Marta's mother was intent that she get an education. Her principle was "if you can get an education, nobody can take that away from you." She was determined that Marta study medicine.

In stead Marta entered law school as the first woman, an accomplishment she dismissed by explaining that the socialists had opened the Law Faculty to women and that she just happened to be the first.

Marta served the required 7 years apprenticeship, one in the courts and 6 in lawyers' offices. According to her account she charmed and impressed all her supervisors. She related that when she worked for the president of the Court of Appeals, "as usual, we became very good friends." He let her and her mother use his box at the Opera. And he became so attached to Marta that he told her mother he wanted to adopt her.

Marta had a successful practice, represented prominent clients, and became the first woman to argue before the Austrian Supreme Court. Yet her success occurred on a backdrop of antisemitism, sometimes, restrained, sometimes virulent. Marta had lived with it since childhood when Jewish children sat separately from Christian children in class. Though she sometimes wished it would away, it was omnipresent. "Only much later," she commented philosophically, "did I realize how good it was that we were conditioned for what was to come."

Then came the Anschluss, the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938. Marta remembered the night the Nazis marched into Vienna. "On that terrible Friday evening, the hordes marched under our windows yelling to the beat of the drums: 'Death to the Jews,' smashing the store windows just for emphasis."

The treatment of the Jews by their countrymen was brutal. "During the few months after the Anschluss when I was still able to work in my profession--the instant removal of Jewish lawyers would have endangered Gentile interests--I came in contact with some S.S. men from Germany who were stationed in Vienna to supervise the Anschluss. They expressed their amazement at the cruel and ferocious behavior of the Viennese masses towards the Jews. They told me they had not seen such excesses in Germany."

Marta experienced personal betrayals. Blond and blue-eyed, she was not known by everyone to be Jewish. The head of office personnel, a good friend, congratulated her on not having to compete against Jewish lawyers any more, a matter on which she forthrightly set him straight to his great embarrassment. But the biggest betrayal was seeing her "best and devoted friend," the president of the Court of Appeals, her would-be adoptive father (who did know she was Jewish) appointed president of the Supreme Court the day after the takeover in recognition of his work for the Nazi party.

Months of desperation followed. Marta first engineered the escape of her brother to France, because men were being rounded up, and she feared for his immediate safety. She then set about trying to figure out her own escape, a difficult task because the Nazis had closed the Austrian borders and other countries had closed their border to immigrants. Clients rallied to try to save her. One offered her a prospective husband from Switzerland. He visited and was interested, but she declined. "I couldn't sell myself for citizenship. I can't explain it. It would have been a nice idea to get out."

Eventually a client in London arranged a British visa. By the time she escaped there was a decree that money couldn't be taken out of the country. Afraid to hide any, she flew without "the money to buy a cup of coffee." Once she arrived in London, she took a cab to her client's house, where mercifully her client was home to pay her fare.

A relative of her client's arranged for her to go to Northern Ireland which was interested in getting some experts in handicrafts from Vienna. Always good with her hands, Marta soon found herself being exploited. Her supposed benefactor pocketed the salaries paid by the government and gave Marta, their leader, barely enough to buy them food to survive.

Marta knew Italian, French, Latin and German, but no English. However, after living in desperate circumstances for a few weeks, she realized "this can't go on." After all I have some training."

To learn English, she took a few shillings and bought the cheapest romance novel she could find, figuring it would have the most basic and repetitive vocabulary. She read it cover to cover over and over "not allowing myself to use a dictionary" for lack of time.

"After I had read it a few hundred times I spoke English." She then marched down to the nearest police department and explained her plight. "They listened as if somebody had come from Mars." Yet in a week or two, someone came to ask for her. It was the Minister of Commerce. He took her seriously, closed the store and discovered that the same man had another group of people also enslaved.

Marta and her colleagues became government employees. She ran a successful factory, and eventually her mother and brother joined her in Belfast. When I would quiz her about her ingenuity in learning English and extricating herself from her situation, she would say, "You do what you have to do."

Within two years Marta had emigrated tot he U.S. where she again started over and eventually had a successful business. She married late in life and came to Charlotte with her husband who later died here.

But it was not Marta's colorful, courageous history that made her such a remarkable person. Many people have adventurous or tragic pasts, but Marta used hers to learn how to live in the present.

She was passionate about life, about learning. She approached every moment of life as a morsel to savor. One sensed that she took no pleasant moment for granted.

She had no illusions about human nature. Her experiences with antisemitism, her betrayal by friends, led her to observe about others, "It's easier to hate than to love. That's human nature." Of her servitude to the person supposedly rescuing her, she observed matter-of-factly, "When there is misery, there's always someone who exploits it."

Of her own role in her past, she never had any regrets. She said that whatever decisions she had made were the best she was capable of at the time. And about the things that had been done to her, she was not bitter. She had lost her friends, her homeland, her career. I sometimes wondered if I or other professional women (or men) of my generation could lose our hard-earned careers and maintain such a philosophical attitude. Yet I never heard Marta talk about the life she might have had if she had been able to continue as a successful lawyer.

She was devoted to her friends, and her role in friendship was to give. When she came to dinner, she brought a pastry or cookie she had baked. She crocheted us baby blankets or made us wall-hangings. At her memorial service, her friend Burgel Pruett told the story of her move. There at her new house on moving day was Marta, then in her 80's, insistent on being given a task. She put down all the shelf paper in Burgel's kitchen. That which remains is known as the Marta paper.

One of her freely offered gifts was her advice, often unsolicited. She had opinions about all the chosen companions or mates of her women friends. In my case, I got off easy. She approved of my choice of a husband, but could never resist reminding me that she had fallen in love with him first. Had I only recognized her wisdom, we could have shortened our courtship considerably.

She was also happy to give advice on childrearing, always prefaced with a pro forma acknowledgement that she had no experience in the matter. Once years ago my then teenaged daughter was moody at dinner. As I drove Marta home, she instructed me to straighten her out. "She must learn that the world is not interested in her moods."

She was also wonderfully flawed: headstrong, opinionated, tactless. She had no patience with ideas she considered foolish or shallow. It was as if life was too short to be bothered with them. I generally enjoyed her blunt assessments of the world as long as I wasn't the current target. But you knew where you stood with her . She was a regular guests at our Seder for years, but she never hesitated to remind us that the real Seder for her was her grandfather's. Never mind that he must have been dead for 70 years, never mind the work we did on ours--I knew we would always be second best.

At one of our Seders we asked our guests to talk about what freedom meant to them. For many of us the response was like answering a civics question. But Marta pulled herself up to her full height of about 4 feet 8 inches and delivered an impassioned speech rooted deep in her experience. Cherishing freedom was no abstraction for her. And, as her friend Carol Douglas said at a later Seder, Marta taught us that sometimes being free requires courage.

As Marta aged, she began to lose her eyesight. "My mother always said that you can't expect every part to die at the same time," she would say with the same philosophical attitude she took to the rest of her life. First she had to give up driving, then her handwork. She baked ever more to repay the friends who drove her to her classes, lectures, concerts and plays. Then it became difficult to read. Her house filled with magnifying glasses and large-print books. Then came the talking books. Yet she never complained about her losses; she always seemed to be moving on.

Cancer and senility began to take Marta piece by piece, and Carol cleverly managed to persuade independent Marta to accept full-time help so she could stay at home. By that time, Marta was a mere fraction of the person we'd once known. She was there in form--with her crisp, intellectual, always authoritative Austrian-accented voice--but not in content, much of which had become nonsense. Yet enough of Marta remained that her caretakers became devoted to her. Entering her home in the last months of her life, I would find Maude Fallows, Vivian Bryant, Maggie Freeman, Fran Jones, or Sarah Hunt preparing to take her on an excursion, bringing her some new garment or treat, or delicately plotting to trick her into some task she was resisting. While dying, Marta had made one more set of friends.

Enough of Marta was left as she died for Maude to observe eloquently at her memorial service, "Marta loved people, especially children; animals, loved to feed the ducks in the park and talked to them, fed pigeons, squirrels and chipmunks right outside her kitchen door. She loved flowers, trees--especially the shape of trees, admired--or didn't—the architecture of buildings, loved good food, music, opera, to dance, loved the color yellow and aprons with pockets. It was just sheer pleasure to share with Marta her corner of the world."

She faded slowly into death until one evening she drew a breath and then drew no more. She left those who knew her a remarkable legacy—of courage, of cheer, of what it means to be a friend--and that you must never ever give up or give in.

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