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 March 2008 Back to Table of Contents Back to Archives Main Page Section: Making a Difference
By Jana Eisenberg
Some of her early poems were written when she was a program director at the Jewish Community Center years ago. “The seniors adults in the center were such a diverse group—their personalities inspired me to write poetry for them,” she muses. Sunshine-Lassoff, who is my husband’s grandmother, is a lifelong New York resident. She was born in Niagara Falls in 1914, and her formative years, which, she believes, led to a sense of “rootlessness,” were spent moving around (and sometimes back and forth) between there and Jamestown, Dunkirk and Hornell. This trekking about was the result of the ups and downs of her immigrant parents’ various retail/manufacturing businesses during the Depression, through strikes and other tribulations. When she was 12, the household — which included her grandparents and a rotating cast of family members and workers — finally settled in Buffalo. “My parents worked all day, leaving me in the care of relatives,” she wrote in biographical notes she made in 2002. “I fought for a sense of identity and worthiness. Though I was introverted, I tried to excel at everything I undertook.” She did excel, earning the Jesse Ketchum Award the year she was in seventh grade, and catching the attention of ballet teachers from New York, who urged her mother to send her to the city for professional training. This was not to be; not because her mother didn’t want to lose her only child, but that she would be losing her child to “an uncertain future.” So Esther pursued her piano lessons. Her little ballet slippers, she writes “were retired,” but she “privately practiced ballet movements for many years.” She began studying piano with Mary Ann Howard, who was also the music critic for the Buffalo Evening News. At 13, Sunshine-Lassoff debuted on the radio, playing Gounod’s “Funeral March of the Marionettes” from a studio she remembers as somberly soundproofed thick black curtains. Howard instilled her with the repeated admonition that “genius is 10 percent talent and 90 percent hard work.” Sunshine-Lassoff applied this advice. “I became proficient at the piano,” she says. “My abilities opened many doors for me, and bring many interesting people into my life.” She married three of those people, accumulating an impressive string of last names; born Esther Mandelbaum, she became in turn Mayberger, Sunshine, and finally Lassoff. With Mayberger, she had one daughter: my mother-in-law Annette Lynn. Before marrying Mayberger, she had been keeping company with a young attorney for several years. Around 1934, she reports that he had her sit for a portrait, painted by his client, the well-regarded Hungarian artist Laszlo Szabo. Their subsequent break-up was so painful that he couldn’t bear to see her visage, so he gave the prize-winning painting to her mother. My mother-in-law now hangs it in her home. In addition to her traditional roles, Sunshine-Lassoff has been a playwright, composer and piano accompanist; she also has an enduring gratitude and ability to inspire loyalties beyond the norm, even now in the nursing home. She has outlived all her husbands, though recently her declining health finally forced her to leave her beautifully decorated apartment on Delaware Avenue. Oh, how I would have loved to see her on stage as a child, playing the piano or dancing; or later, singing in a chorus, or directing her charges at the Jewish Center in a skit. But I am happy that I have not been denied at least a smidgen of her prodigious creative energy and output. I began coming to Buffalo with my husband, Dean, in 2000; we married and moved back here to his birthplace in 2002. It took a few years, but, perhaps emboldened by my success as a freelance journalist, she eventually told me that she would like me to be her editor. We worked on Saturday afternoons, her reading aloud to me her works in progress, then handing each precious sheet over for me to type, as though this would make them “official” — or at least one step closer. She acknowledges that her health problems make it difficult to concentrate of late. “But,” she adds, ”I’m sure it adds to my desire to express myself. Being creative gives you a sense of self-fulfillment. You feel that you are using whatever talents you have to create something — so your powers don’t grow dormant. “Creativity is a powerful part of life,” she says. “And I think if you can use it to add to pleasure in a person’s life, it is also useful.” Jana Eisenberg contributes to Buffalo Spree and the Buffalo News. Editor’s note: Sadly, Esther Sunshine-Lassoff passed away just before the March issue of Forever Young went to press. With her family’s support, we decided to run the piece as a tribute, and have included several of her poems on the next two pages. back to top back to table of contents Current Issue | About Forever Young | Where to Find | Advertise | Our Advertisers | Community Calendar | Contest | Clubs | Contact Us | Archives | Home |
