Sylvia Cole

Remembering the Bough of Summer and the Winter Branch: a Memoir by Sylvia Cole

This is a woman's frank, uninhibited personal story played out against the backdrop of the major world events of the 20th Century.

Sylvia Cole was born on the Lower East Side to Jewish immigrants from Austria-Poland. By the age of six, she was living with her maternal grandparents, her parents having come down with tuberculosis as a result of the Spanish flu of 1918. The entire nuclear family was dispersed: her parents in a sanitarium in Denver; one brother in the foster care system; and the youngest taken by an aunt and uncle on the day he was born.

At nine Sylvia was sent to an orphanage from which she was rescued by a benefactor a year later. She lived for four years with an aunt from whose home she ran away. She wandered homeless in New York City until she was taken in by a teacher at Hunter College High School, from which she graduated first in her class. She then lived as an au pair girl in various homes while she attended Hunter College, making Phi Beta Kappa.

This is the story of her adventures, including running away to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains with another girl, the story of her loves and marriages, first to a Broadway actor and then to a well-known educator, of her intellectual passions. She retired from a career as an outstanding teacher of English in the New York City high schools and discovered that there is life after retirement. She became an editor and writer and appeared monthly with her husband, Abe Lass, on "New York and Company" at WNYC for two and a half years.

She has two married sons, four grandchildren, and a boyfriend.