Memories of a Vanished Time

Book excerpt: My mother, Ruth Blumenfeld, née Korn, was born on January 15, 1915; and died on August 18, 2015, aged one hundred years, seven months, and three days. My father, Max David Blumenfeld, was born on February 25, 1911 and died on December 26, 1994, about two months shy of his eighty-fourth birthday... I love my parents so much and I don’t want them to be forgotten, which is why I am writing this book. And I am writing this memoir for myself as much as for anyone else, because in doing so I bring my parents back to life in my memory. I do the same when it comes to my grandparents and aunts and uncles. I write also for my family members, who may wish to know more about our background. And I am writing for the general public, who may find this memoir of interest as being the embodiment in specific people of the history of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in the United States... When my father was born, World War One was several years away, and when my mother was born, World War One was raging. They lived through the Roaring Twenties and Prohibition, the Great Depression, and World War Two, and the subsequent wars... They lived through the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. The technological changes in their lifetime were the greatest in human history, from the evolution and ubiquity of the telephone, and of electricity and electric lighting, to airplane travel and the proliferation of the automobile, the invention and spread of radio and television, and the invention of such conveniences as frozen orange juice, the electric clothes drier, and the electric dishwasher, and, later on, of the internet, the computer and the smartphone, and of so much more... The world was a better place because Mom and Dad were in it. They did much political and social good in their time because they cared, and they wanted to help create a kinder, better, more loving world for everyone, a world where the ideals of equality and justice for all would at least begin to be fulfilled. When people like them disappear from the earth, the world is a poorer place.