My American Story: Jill Lafer

Women’s health activist Jill Lafer honors the strength and empathy of her Eastern European family.

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I can trace my ancestry to the mid-nineteenth century when my family emigrated from the Austro Hungarian Empire, Belarus, and Russia. Similar to other Ashkenazi Jews, they were fleeing repression and rampant anti-Semitism; they sought freedom and economic opportunity in America for their families. My great grandparents settled in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, and in Utica and Brooklyn, New York.

Town Hall of Glace Bay, Nova Scotia

Postcard of Utica, NY, 1934

Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn, 1918

 A sign from my great grandparents’ store: Rosenblums

Around the turn of the twentieth century, my great grandfather Simon Rosenblum opened a dress shop in Glace Bay, Max Benjamin toiled as a peddler in Utica, Joseph Weinstein opened a tailoring shop in Brooklyn, and Jacob Stober, the last to arrive in about 1910, was a peddler who eventually owned several fine dress shops in Montreal. These peddlers and shopkeepers watched their families flourish; their children and grandchildren became doctors, lawyers, engineers, judges, hoteliers, songwriters, and entrepreneurs. They became part of the fabric of the United States and Canada like so many other immigrant families from all over the world.

The stories of the women in my family have strongly influenced my life and my values. 

My maternal Grandmother, Miriam Weinstein Benjamin

My maternal grandmother, Miriam Weinstein Benjamin, born in 1908 in Makow Poland, sailed on the SS Rotterdam in 1918 to New York. She lived with her father, ailing mother and five siblings in a small apartment behind her father’s tailoring shop in Brooklyn. She studied accounting while employed by an Investment Advisor for the Brenner Brothers, who were fur traders. Years later, when her mentor retired she became the Brenners’ sole financial advisor and one of the first women on Wall Street. The Brenners sold fur skins, and my grandmother issued credit and was integral to the founding of Alixandre and other prominent furriers. As the first woman President of an American Technion University chapter, she also raised my mother and aunt. According to my mother, she never spoke of her childhood in Poland-- she only wanted to be American. However, she once told me that she had borrowed a dress for her passport photo from her cousin, who subsequently perished during the Holocaust.

My Canadian great grandmother, Ethel Rosenblum, operated the store in Glace Bay.  The eldest of her eight children, my grandmother Sarah was born in 1900, raised four sons, and also worked with her husband, Jacob, in Montreal. They instilled a deep love of learning, family, and hard work to their children and grandchildren. Until my grandmother passed away in 1990, we spoke regularly, visited each other in New York and Montreal, went to theater and museums together and discussed life, family and values. 

Jacob & Sarah Stober and their four sons, approx. 1940

My great grandmother, Esther Rosenblum with her children and some sons and daughters in law, 1938. My grandmother, Sarah, is top row far left.

Lou and Miriam Benjamin, My mother, Ruth, far left and her sister.

I was fortunate to have two loving grandmothers who had a tremendous impact on me as a young woman, but my father had the greatest impact of all. He was my life champion. 

My father, Dr. Gerald S. Stober

My father, Gerald Stober, was the only one of Sarah’s four sons to leave Montreal. In spite of the Jewish quota he graduated McGill Medical School and selected New York City for his residency. He met and married my mother Ruth; they moved to back Montreal where I was born. In 1958, they returned to New York for better economic opportunity. My father was an OB/GYN, a founder of New York-Presbyterian Queens Hospital and was the first to permit fathers to be present during Caesarean sections, a right for which he vigorously fought. My mother managed his practice for 30 years and, like generations before them, they worked together to create a good life for their three children.

Ruth and Gerry Stober dancing, circa 1975

He was always a champion of women. Prior to Roe v. Wade my father witnessed women dying and irreparably damaged from botched illegal abortions. He understood the difficult choices women made between their families and careers. His patients included women of color and immigrants who were primary breadwinners—similar to so many women I have spent decades advocating for at NARAL and Planned Parenthood. He often spoke to me about the difficult daily lives of his patients as compared to my life of privilege, and he opened my eyes to the lives of others less fortunate. Although I didn’t know it at the time, this message was the beginning of my political awareness.  

The aspirations and dreams of my relatives who arrived here 150 years ago have been fulfilled. Like so many immigrants to this country, they were industrious women and men. They were fortunate to be accepted at our borders. America gave them the freedoms and opportunities to flourish and in turn, they became proud, engaged, and productive Americans. 

About the Author:

Jill Lafer has been a leader in the women’s reproductive rights and health movement for over 35 years. Jill is the former board chair of Planned Parenthood (“PP”) Federation of America and currently serves on the PP Action Fund Board, the PP PAC and the Tri State Women’s Maxed Out PAC. Previously, Jill served as board chair of NARAL Pro-Choice New York, was a board member of the National Institute for Reproductive Health and was treasurer of The No Bad Apples PAC founded by New York State Senator Liz Krueger.  

Since 2009 she has served as a mayoral appointee (Bloomberg, DeBlasio) to the Central Park Conservancy Board.  She has also served on the boards of The Children’s Museum of Manhattan, New York City Opera and Guild Hall in East Hampton.  

She is a fellow at Stanford University’s Distinguished Careers Institute.  Jill has been a guest speaker at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Harvard Business School, Columbia business School and UCLA’s Anderson School of Management.

Jill’s background is in the business sector. She was an auditor for Arthur Young and Company, worked in strategic planning for Citibank and co-founded a consumer licensing business, Hoffman/Lafer Assoc. L.L.C.  In June 2020 she founded Bandon Partners LLC, a consulting firm for not for profit organizations. She is currently consulting to rePRObymama.film, a Midwest based film festival dedicated to women’s health, rights and justice.   She is married to Barry Lafer and has three children and two granddaughters.

My American Story: Kati Marton

After witnessing the arrest of her journalist parents in Soviet controlled Hungary, and tanks driving through the streets of her hometown, Kati Marton arrived in the USA on her 8th birthday.

[Kati, center,with mother Ilona and sister]

I’m a refugee. I came to America with my parents as a little kid, and had no connection or roots or history in America. No one in my family did, we were complete strangers to this land. I did not speak any English. My parents considered America to be our last, best hope. They had survived the Nazi Occupation of Hungary, which my grandparents did not survive. My grandparents perished in Auschwitz, so I have never even seen photographs of them.

[Newspaper clipping announcing the arrest of Kati’s parents in 1955] 

[Leaflets like these were distributed in support of Radio Free Europe’s program to transmit news programs past the strict censors of Soviet governments]

[Soviet tanks in Budapest, 1956]

[Revolutionaries capture a Russian tank, Budapest, 1956]

When I was six years old, I was a witness to my parents’ arrest. They were imprisoned under false charges of being CIA agents, but their real crime was that they were good reporters covering a lot of bad news as the Soviets occupied and slowly took control of Hungary.

[One of Kati’s first English lessons was memorizing the commercial for Ipana toothpaste]

This was in the aftermath of the second World War, the 1950’s and the coldest days of the Cold War. My father was [working for the Associated Press], and my mother with [United Press International] in Budapest, which was why they had to be jailed: they were the last independent press behind the Iron Curtain. I did not see my father for two years, and my mother for a year. The worst thing was that no one talked about what happened to them, because it was a rather common occurrence for people who the government deemed to be “Enemies of the People” to disappear.

 My parents were sentenced to very long prison terms. Then came the Hungarian Revolution and they were free - they went right back to work as reporters. So again they disappeared, covering the biggest story of their lives, which was the freedom fight that got rid of the Russian occupation. But that freedom lasted ten days and then the Soviet troops came back. As young a kid, I saw tanks in my hometown and strange soldiers patrolling my neighborhood. 

[Kati, 10, left, with her family in Vienna, 1957]

Still, my parents did not want to leave our country until they were tipped off that they were going to be arrested again, and my mother simultaneously discovered that she was pregnant with my younger brother. They finally started making plans to escape - we had several misadventures. Over the years, my parents had spent a small fortune on guys who were going to smuggle us out of Hungary through Yugoslavia into Austria and something always happened. Finally, though, we did succeed and it was a year of such turbulence that I didn’t go to school for a whole year. 

[Endre and Ilana Marton, right and center, receive the George Polk Journalism award for their work covering the Hungarian revolt shortly after arriving in the U.S. in 1957]

[After we arrived,] everybody was extraordinarily busy with acclimating ourselves. But we had nothing, I mean nothing. We came with four suitcases. My parents let my sister and I pack our own suitcase, and of course I filled mine with toys and a couple of choice and entirely impractical items of clothing. But I thought that was very sweet of my parents to let us bring something of our life and of our former homeland with us. All of which to say, we were bringing nothing to this country. We were not nuclear physicists, we were not Norweigan, we didn’t speak English, and yet we have collectively managed to live very productive lives.

My father and mother both got a bunch of journalism prizes for their work, subsequently. America really took a chance with us because we did not bring wealth, we did not bring any type of technical background. We were just very eager to Americanize. And to finally breathe easy. 

[Kati, center, with her parents and sister in Hungary]

We were the modern refugee family, with the two little girls, and the pregnant mom, and the very handsome reporter dad  - who soon became the Associated Press’ Senior Diplomatic Correspondent. 

And my mother decided she was going to start a new career in her mid forties. She had been a reporter too, for a rival news agency, but she decided that with a little baby due and two little kids who were traumatized, which was myself and my sister, she would start a more, shall we say, conventional life as a high school French teacher. 

I think [the transition] was tough for my parents, they were in their forties, middle-aged. And the toughest thing for them was the culture and the music. And we, the kids, tried to get them to listen to our music and explain why The Beatles were better than Beethoven, but they weren’t buying it. They were willing to put up with a lot, in terms of having noisey American kids, because they had a tremendous sense of gratitude about the second chance they were getting here. 

[Ilana and Endre Marton in Washington D.C., 1970’s]

And these days I have to admit that as much as I miss my parents, I am kind of relived that they’re not here because this is a passage in our country that would shock them. And I can’t even imagine what they would think of the way the press is treated now and being called ‘Enemies of the People’. It’s sad to say that is a phrase that has reentered our language these days, as the press is deemed to be the enemy of the people. Only the people now are Americans. That would come as a total shock to my parents. So would the nastiness of the conversation between and among Americans, because we lived in a fairly ordinary Washington suburb where I am sure that it was roughly 50/50 Republicans and Democrats. Nobody either cared or knew who voted for Kennedy or who voted for Nixon. It was just a part of the American deal that you have your party and we were welcomed into this neighborhood.

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About the author:

Kati Marton is an acclaimed journalist and author, as well as an activist advocate for human rights and the freedom of the press. She is an award winning former NPR and ABC News Correspondent, the former chairwoman of the International Women’s Health Commission, a director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, and a member of the Council on Forign Relations. Marton has published eight books, which have been translated into five languages. Her Cold War Memoir Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America was a National Book Critics Circle finalist in 2009.