Suzanne Sadowsky

I was born in the middle of the Great Depression in Brooklyn. It was the Brooklyn of Neil Simon’s plays. At that time the borough was well populated mainly with Jews and also lots of Italians and Irish. Before the war, Brooklyn had more Jews than most any country in the world, except for maybe Poland. By the end of the war, well… you know the rest.

My nuclear family consisted of my beloved parents David and Bina Sadowsky (may they rest in peace) and my wonderful brother Edward who is seven years older than I. We lived in the Kensington area of Brooklyn, not far from Ocean Parkway. I used to walk with my best girl friends through Boro Park to get to Montauk Junior High School. A few years later we took the trolley car in the other direction down Church Avenue, past Ocean Parkway to Erasmus Hall High School on Flatbush Avenue.

By the time I was sixteen, I couldn’t wait to get away from home and I did. I went upstate to Alfred University where my favorite subjects were math and theater. When I graduated I moved back to the city, lived in Manhattan and worked for the Bureau of Labor Statistics as a statistician and economist. When a job in the Bureau’s Western Regional Office came up, I applied for it and I got transferred out of the Big Apple to the City of the Angels where I sojourned for seven years. It was there that I was married and gave birth to my daughter, Heather Rachel Richardson, who is the light of my life.

In 1975 I finally reached my destination when another opportunity with the BLS allowed me to move up north to my present home in Woodacre. Unfortunately, my marriage did not last past my daughter’s seventh birthday. I was a working mom until I “graduated” from the BLS in 1990. I took a couple of years off and since then I’ve given up the life of a commuter and I now work in the nonprofit sector as close to home as I can. After years of searching and traveling to the nearest synagogues in Marin and Sonoma counties, I found that I no longer wanted to be a shul commuter, and that was the beginning of the idea for a Jewish congregation in the San Geronimo Valley.

Copyright © 1998 Suzanne Sadowsky