Marcia Walerstein Sibony

6457 Bellaire Ave

North Hollywood, CA 91606

  home phone  818 308 7371 

cell 512-2748.

marciashosh@gmail.com

Posted 2013

Dear friends,

Writing about 50 years ago was difficult, writing about the last five years is easy, even if I can’t remember the name of someone I met one minute ago. Not too much exciting in the last five years.  I’m still teaching, but definitely winding down, and planning on taking my rather small pension soon, so I  also plan to continue teaching part-time as long as my brain and body hold up. 

We moved into our own house two years ago, and there has been a lot of fun gardening and making it inviting for humming birds and butterflies. Fat squirrels that eat EVERYthing, especially the great avocadoes we have, and baby possums are around, too.  Besides painting and photographing and writing his memoirs,  my husband loves to collect-everything, so our house is chock full of all of that, and my mess, too.  It is actually only 7 minutes by car to the Metro line, which goes through Hollywood to downtown, and connects with everywhere.  It’s also only two blocks from a tiny Armenian grocery that makes the most delicious fresh bread all day.

California almost fell into the ocean during the Great Recession of the last years, and the cutbacks in education were painful and disastrous.  It is not a pleasant event to turn away literally hundreds of students who are begging to get into your already full class of about forty.  As an officer in the local cc teachers’ union, last fall I  “fought the good fight” and the good-even- though- broke people of California agreed to pay a higher sales tax and tax the rich in order to get more funds for education. The housing crisis has more or less ended, so it looks like there will be much more tax money to at least return the college classes  to the level they were some years back in the near future.  This has already begun, but I still had to turn many away  last week   who needed my class and couldn’t get in anywhere.

My daughter, Orly, went to France her junior year, returned to Wellesley to graduate, but never took a class with Rob Paarlberg-sorry.  After graduation she happily returned to France working in the public school system just outside Paris as an English language assistant.  It’s a joint program between the U.S. and France that hires (with a partial salary!) many  of those who spent the junior year in France. I helped her with language techniques , like teaching “Head, Shoulder, knees and toes…”.  She picked up other part- time jobs, was invited to stay on a second year, the max, and did a Masters in something-Communications, Film and History…I’m not sure, but she got a degree with the highest marks on her thesis, so we crow…especially Dad, who knew what it was like to be a graduate student at the Sorbonne. While all this was going on, she managed to spend two weeks at the Cannes Film festival representing a L.A. production company, and went over with them for the festival this year, too. She stayed on for more internship and la bonne vie de Paris, and finally,  returned to us last winter.  I was so glad to have her back!  Her heart was in San Francisco, however, so the  next months were divided between L.A. and S.F. until she finally got the job offer she wanted. She’s been living and working there for two months, dealing with the French-speaking clientele of a crowdfunding organization.

 This past July I did another 50th-- of the Young Judaea Year-in Israel Course I was on right after h.s. This gave me the impetus to  get over to Israel since we had been detaining trips for about six years.  That was very interesting and lots of fun, and I saw my huge number of relatives, friends and Jews from Cochin, India, I befriended while writing my doctoral thesis.  I went with my good friend, because, “who knows how we will be in the future?”  Unfortunately this philosophy kind of turned upside down, and as a result of the trip, I came home really sick, and did not feel I could get on another plane for this reunion. 

I’m truly sorry I won’t be joining the event.  I’ve enjoyed reconnecting with everyone.  Have a great time, and I am out here in L.A. if you visit. 

I see that on my last update I posed these questions.  I still think they are relevant, so if anyone has time to ponder and answer them, I’d appreciate it.

Do we want some philosophical chats?  What did graduating from WL give us?  What did it not give us?

Many of us moved from that small community to the larger urban and suburban world.  How did it prepare us for that?  What do we believe we have positively transmitted to our children (or grandchildren) from the lifestyle which was the only one we knew?  I don’t plan to be at the reunion, so maybe some will join in the comments.

P.S.  I started kindergarten at Morton, and went through to the end, not counting my freshman year living in Haifa, Israel.  How many others got all their education in that wee little itty bitty town?

Marcia Walerstein Sibony

Posted 2008

Marcia and Orly at a concert at the Getty  posted 2008

Dear class of ’63,

It was lots of fun reading about how everyone is doing after all these years, so I will add a few cheery comments like the others.

I admit I had a rather freewheeling, continent-hopping life in my younger years, but since I became a mom, I settled down and earned the bread and butter (no bacon in my diet).  Hence, I’m a little behind schedule, so retiring won’t be an option for a few years.  I’m still a freeway flyer, holding down usually two college teaching jobs-- at Glendale, where I teach mostly Armenians English as a Second Language, and at L.A.Valley College, thankfully close to my home, where I teach ESL or English, as the need may be. At Valley my students, whether they are in ESL or college English classes,  usually hail from at least fifteen different countries. I find that encouraging and rewarding.

Orly more or less moved out of the house two years ago when she went off to Wellesley College, and then interned last summer with her cousin in San Francisco. She’s home this summer, however, earning $. Hopefully her earnings will have some value in Paris, where she’ll be next year, studying at the Sorbonne (my husband Nessim’s alma mater).  Nessim retired last fall and has been very busy making items to sell, such as hand designed Jewish playing cards, books in French about his childhood, print versions of his artwork, etc. (you can visit his website, www.jewishstarbox.com). Life without my daughter home was boring.  I found myself with more time, and began to be active in the Glendale Guild, an archaic name for the community college teachers’ union.  I’m the representative for this large off-main campus building where ESL and other training programs are housed. It’s quite fascinating--often frustrating work, and sometimes rewarding, and I’ve learned a lot, not only about unions and in-fighting, but also about the California legislature and the process of funding or trying to fund community college education here.  It also gave me the opportunity to attend a workshop at cool Asylomar near Monterey last summer, instead of beating the heat one more week in LA’s San Fernando Valley (It’s usually 25 degrees hotter here than at the coast.)

My big trips were a few years ago, one to Europe in ‘04, spending a lot of time in Paris with Nessim’s friends, and then the next year to Israel to see the family and everything.  It had been a long time--14 years—since our last visit to Israel.  Until February, we had planned to return to Israel this summer, with Nessim and Orly going on to France.  But with increased fares, dropping dollar, and not knowing how much next year would cost us with Orly abroad, we decided to hold that off until next summer, and see what will be. That’s the big question, what will be.

My gardening consists of trying to keep my poor pansies growing through heat waves, and training my morning glory to crawl along a fence.  My hobbies include feeding my cat and the larger ones, mountain lions and cougars who prowl the mountains.  I kayaked for fifteen minutes at my great nephew’s birthday party near Sausalito and am now ready to kayak to Hawaii to visit Marilynn Paradiso and Cindy, if they are still there.

In all honesty, the big change in my life is that I don’t feel I have to be running around doing everything. 
As most of you know, there was no choice of the matter as long as you were raising kids, and before that, I wanted to be doing everything that interested me or I cared about, usually not finishing anything.  So now it’s an occasional book or film, some of the many ethnic festivals (tonight we’re going to an Indian-Pakistan outdoor concert at the beautiful Getty Center) and worrying –about the state of the planet, the collapse of the U.S., my daughter abroad, gas prices or anything else that pops up on my computer screen.

I have really enjoyed corresponding with John King  While John and Laurie were hanging around the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, I was remembering places I had visited, or wanted to visit, that were not so far from Israel.  I had hoped they might put anchor at the marina not far from my sister-in-law’s in Bat Yam, but neither of us got there this year anyway.   

It was nice to see some more people have moved to the West Coast.  Keep in touch.  I’ll be here for a while. It's sad to see how many are no longer with us.

Do we want some philosophical chats?  What did graduating from WL give us?  What did it not give us? Many of us moved from that small community to the larger urban and suburban world.  How did it prepare us for that?  What do we believe we have positively transmitted to our children (or grandchildren) from the lifestyle which was the only one we knew?  I don’t plan to be at the reunion, so maybe some will join in the comments here.

P.S.  I started kindergarten at Morton, and went through to the end, not counting my freshman year living in
Haifa, Israel.  How many others got all their K-12 education in that wee little itty bitty town?

Marcia Walerstein Sibony