These are portraits of members of the Rabinowitz family residing in upstate New York within my lifetime. Don Archer, MOCA director, is the artist and memorialist, using the Wombo Dream (AI) Artificial Intelligence program via text prompts. These portraits represent real members of Don's family, two still alive. These images are not photographs and have not been drawn from photographs and are not intended to be the likenesses of actual family members, but Don hopes they are not without some visual and psychological insight. They are digital constructs, and may be viewed as avatars of the real, without intention to be mystical or starry-eyed or especially realistc about it. Names have been changed.

The six Rabinowitz sisters grew up in the Jewish ghetto on the lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City in the early 1900's. They spoke Yiddish to their parents though some changed their name to Rabin to anglisize themselves. Some married very young, and most got a good education in the local public schools. They rallied among themsleves in the Great Depression that enveloped them, and congregated In the small upstate town called Luther, NY. Such was social security in that dismal era. They raised their own families, endured, and even thrived, the only Jews in town. They had by count some 20 husbands among them but far fewer children.

Disclaimer
Comments are specious, disguised as facts but may be fiction in whole or part

Names in alphabetical order

Cick name to go to member portrait

 

Fanny Baumgarten
Spirited, spunky, and very pretty, she was married at the age of 16 to a tubercular 18 year-old who died in a sanitorium in upsate NY a few years later. She had one son. She accepted an arranged marriage to a wealthy senior citizen who loved her dearly but left her miserable. He gave her a divorce and a portion of his money. Then she met Lou, and settled down with him in the Gramercy Park area of Manhattan. She had her own ideas, was one of the first organic food enthusiasts, visited fat farms regularly though she was thin and shapely as a fawn, and nourished herself on raw cabbage, celery stalks, clams, and warm beer. She was never sick a day in her life. After Lou died, she married another lover and lived with with him happily into her 99th year.

 
Lou Baumgarten
was the third husband of Fanny. As a young daring widow who was hitchhiking home on a late rainy night in Brooklyn, she was picked up on Atlantic Aveue by Lou in his new DeSota car and ferried home. He operated the Baumgarten Belting and Oil Company serving the garment industry in Manhattan and was a convinced batchelor until he met Fay. Bought a new car every year from Ike Cooperman, was generous and loveable, especially with children, and distributed half-dollar coins to any child he encountered. He never had children himself.

 
Lenore Cohen
After her husband died, ran a poor candy/variety/newspaper/ice cream store in Luther on the corner across the street from the railroad station. Never complained. Cheerful. Lived upstairs in a fire-endangered apartment for 30 years. Sent three children out into the world. Actually, not a sister to the other girls in her family, but a half-sister, for her mother had been a widow and remarried and she had a differnt father. All of this in the "old country," actually Kishinev, Moravia, Russia, home to one of the famous pograms. She carried a younger sister in her arms across the border in their escape to America, or at least that's what family lore says. Her store was heavily infested with flies in the summer, thanks to the "Rio Grande," a polluted stream that ran underneath. Finally, a daughter and son-in-law Moe Murray moved in with her and Moe managed the store and made it into a great money-maker. Young Dannyboy was hired as fly killer, outfitted with swatter, and paid one cent for every 10 flies he killed, by his own count. The fire upstairs never happened.

 
Ike Cooperman
was an upstate New York autodealer in Luther, NY. He was a local farm boy, determined as a youth to escape the rigors of farm life. He grew up in the era of the first cars, and mischevously took to racing them on local streets. He loved car, but had no mechanical sense. Everybody liked him. He had a reputation as a "good" Jew, an expression he could deplore and welcome at the same time. The bank financed him in a small way, even made him a director. He would never guaranity the quality of a used car that he sold, but he might tell you it was previously owned by the local Catholic priest who had hardly taken it out of the garage. It was easier to make a sale if you talked like that. Not religious, he was a member of a synagogue for social reasons. He had goiter, a disease that remained a lifetime concern. He loved and cherished his wife and three children. He prospered and they all lived grandly.

 
Sarah Cooperman
wife of Ike, was doyen of the family. She was regalled by one and all as cook, conciliator, counselor, and manager of home and hearth, even manager of her husband, if it came to that. She had married into the long Great Depression of the 1930's, and her sisters and their husbands, not prospering as had the Coopermans, looked to her and her husband for financial aid, pillowtalking her husband into whatever the needs were at the moment. Such was social security in this era. Her home became a haven for the family where many visits were made and enjoyed, and family problems resolved. She could also play a considerable game of pinochle with nickel-and-dime stakes that outbested the men in the family. She outlasted her husband for a number of years.

 
Peggy Cooperman
Cooperman daughter, lived in Coral Gables, Florida, in luxury, married to Dr. Herman Klass, famous heart specialist. Two children but never took the Klass name. Devoted her life to the playing of golf. Excellent player, this side of professional. Went out on the course daily. Her one son was troubled and moved out of the house permanently at a very young age.

 
Dr. Sam Cooperman
went to medical school in Italy, because no US medical school would accept him. Charges of anti-semitism made. Then to Ohio State University for for the study of Neurology, bank-rolled by his father. Married. No children. Not more than a dozen years later he suffered a serious heart attack and five-hour coronary surgery to by-pass five closed or narrowed arteries. He was on a breathing machine all this time, which was too long presumably for the early technology. He died on the operating table.

 
Solomon (Sol) Kline
was married to Miriam. Religious, which wa unusual in this family. Owned an auto agency in Brooklyn with a brother until it was disenfranchised for cause. Had a slipppery reputation, and was known to strong-arm his customers. Suspected of selling his wife's diamond ring, thought to be lost, for cash. Beseached his brother-in law Ike Cooperman for financing to establish a new auto agency, but was refused. His wife was bread-winner. Ended up fabricating mirror giftware by himself in a dark Brooklyn store. His brother meanwhile moved to California where he waxed rich, it was said.

 
Miriam (Mim) Kline
taught typing in a Brooklyn junior high school for almost 30 years. She was the major support for herself, her husband Sol, and a son Andrew. She and her husband owned a small neat brick home in the Sheepshead Bay area of Brooklyn NY. She was the baby of her family and the only one of six sisters to go to college. She was very pretty as a girl. Her husband's failure and shaky reputation as a businessman weighed on her and condemned her, as she felt, to a dreary life of schoolteaching. Retirement (with pension) came as a mitzva.

 

Heshie Lippman
Ruth Lippman
Heshie Lippman and his wife Ruth moved to Luther from New York City during the Great Depression where Heshie operated a small auto and truck tire shop. She was a very handsome and even stately young woman. Heshie was a small tough man but survival was too much for him. There was very little businesss but what there was killed him. He died of a heart attack lugging tires. Ruth then took a job in the office of a state reformatory some miles away. Never with much money, she was the most generous and kind of the Rabinowitz sisters. Sadly, died in an automobile accident on Long Island in a car driven by her sister Bonnie.

 
Dial Mackenzie
was a loveable Irishman with a disasterous marriage and was ostensably one of Ike Cooperman's auto repair mechanics, but had no diagnostic or mechanical skills so was relagated to chauffeur and handyman. He treated Danny Smith as a son, nick-named him Dannyboy in affection, and drove him to-and-from doctors even from New York City. He was like a family member by adoption.

 
Audrey McAdam
was Cooperman maid and confidant. Cooked, cleaned, watched after the children, tended the Cooperman home as her own, and was effectively treated as part of family. Never married, never had a boyfriend, never took a day off except for Christmas.

 
Peggy Murray
Four pregnancies, but childless. Her pregnancies ended in miscariages or babies were born dead. She became a Seventh Day Adventist, but nobody in the family knew what that meant. In her troubles, she was entiled to any religion she wanted. For her husband, she was help-mate in the store.

 
Moe Murray
was a long unemployed electrician in Brooklyn. He moved with wife Peggy to Luther to help his mother-in-law run her store. They stayed for the duration. Moe was a smart and energetic storekeeper. He rid the store of its ice cream and soda fountain, filled the counters with toys and homegoods, and saw sales mushroom. He and Peggy had a winner on their hands. Profits were hidden in merchandise, and income taxes were practally nil. Life was good!

 
Dotty Smith
mother to Danny and Bonny, wife to Gorden. She exemplified anxiety, almost about everything. She had a glorious high-soprano operatic voice by gift of nature, trained for the auxiliary chorus at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, and sat on Enrico Caruso's lap for a photo-op. Her few public performances were compromised by intense nervousness and she eventually relinguished her career for marriage to a difficult tone-depth Englishmen.

 
Gordon Smith
Husband to Dottie and father to Danny and Bonnie, he was raised as a Jew in London's West End ghetto, was educated soley at yeshivas (but knew his Shakespeare), and on a visit at 16 to Victoria Station observed the dead and dying returning from the war in France and vowed it would not happen to him. He joined the English Merchant Marine instead, sailed around the world, and begged, borrowed or stole papers in Capetown, South Africa, that changed his identity overnight from Baruch Mandelbeam, steward, to Gordon Smith, able-bodied seaman. Fleeing to Argentina, then to New York, he returned to his trade as furrier, then later by means of a loan from Ike Cooperman bought and operated a candy/newspaper/ice cream store in Catskill, New York, later retiring with Dottie to Florida. He beat up on his son Danny a lot, suffered bouts of depression and underwent shock treatments in a mental hospital. He died of dementia at the age of 96 in the home of Danny and his daughter-in-law in Brooklyn, NY.

 
Danny Smith
Sickly, difficult, rebellious boy and son, born with defective heart valves. Sometimes answered to the name Dannyboy. Spent much of his young life in bed. Crazy impassioned fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers, rising to success after years as the Bums, whom he followed afternoons on the radio (before TV), night baseball not quite having arrived yet. Bitterly hostile to the New York Yankess, who beat up in the Brooklyn team in successive World Series. Recorded the games on scorecard of his own devising. When he outgrew his heart problems, he would become a shortstop like PeeWee Reese, he dreamed. Indeed, he mostly outgrew his heart problems and played on Luther's high school basball team, but never learned to hit the curve ball.

 
Bonnie Zelinski
Brian Zelinski
They met in the Toy Building, 200 Fifth Ave, New York City, where Bonnie worked as a secretary and Brian's father had a small sales office as manufacurer of give-away small metal dime banks mostly as advertising tokens. Brian was a returning veteran from World War II, 15 years older than Bonnie and the lone employee of his father. Married, Bonnie and Brian moved from NYC to the potato fields of Long Island where the new suburbs were being built after World War II. They had three children. Bonnie was a cheerful mom but Brian was a difficult husband and father, and the household reeked of recriminations and anger. When his father died, Brian lost the business and drifted into lethergy and despair. Bonnie fell in love with a county attorney and official, and she and Brian divorced. Her new marriage was sun-blessed and the couple moved to the Sunshine State to spend the rest of their lives in love and comfortable retirement. Brian died alone and heartbroken back in Long Island.