Pamela Olson Phillips with Abe Landsman, 102, resident book critic at Lechayim Lunch.
She calls it alchemy. The lightning in a bottle that’s captured in the space between the listening and the telling of stories.
Pamela Phillips Olson began the process in 2005 from behind the lunch counter at Goodman Lechayim Lunchtime Plus, a noontime meal for elders run by Jewish Social Services at Temple Beth El. Soon she found herself right at the table.
“I came as a volunteer and friend, and suddenly I started asking questions.” The answers became stories, and the stories have become a book.
Lechayim Lunch: Ingredients for a Good Life lifts the reader into first-person tales of horror, happiness and, at times, astonishing happenstance.
There’s Milt Leidner. As a 21-year-old Army Air Corpsman in 1941, he stood at the rail of an old sightseeing boat that ferried him down the Hudson River taking him and his fellow enlistees on the first leg of their journey to war. “I could see my home, my apartment fronting the Hudson. I could see my mother’s flowers on my windowsill.” He pointed it all out to his buddies and waved.
Four years later, a young Marine watched a negative appear in a dark photo lab in Hawaii. She was the first person to see the iconic image that became known as “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima.” Roberta Wells became Milt Leidner’s wife, and, thanks to the G.I. Bill, the couple landed in Madison, where they raised two daughters and opened their own photography studio.
At age 5, 91-year-old Lillian Zwilling left a shtetl in Poland so small, “it didn’t even have a name.”
At 102, Abe Landsman is Lechayim’s resident book critic, making reading recommendations with an emphasis on politics and biography.
Victoria Junco Meyer was born in Mexico in 1914 and went on to teach Spanish literature at Vassar College. That’s where she made a big impression on one of her students, a young woman named Jacqueline Bouvier. Yes, that one. Years later, after becoming first lady, Jackie Kennedy climbed down from a plane in Madison with the president. “There was a crowd waiting to greet Jackie with flowers,” remembers Meyer. “But when she saw me, she ran right over for a hug and left them holding the flowers!”
Olson comes to her devout listenership honestly. She’s a 35-year veteran Madison family therapist who specializes in multi-generational counseling. Like many of the elders who speak in the book, Olson has a jovial bluntness that reflects her belief that life is too short for ambiguity. When I suggested that good listening is merely a matter of “keeping one’s mouth shut,” she said, “that’s not it at all.”
“If I’m there to really hear someone, I try to open my mind to the point where I have no expectations,” says Olson. “And I just listen and ask questions that need to be asked to make things clearer. I join them in a certain way. Our faces sometimes come together with the same expression.
“It’s kind of mysterious and wonderful because I’m wrapped in the moment that they’re describing; even though it may be years and years ago.”
Olson talks a lot about how lucky she’s been to hear these stories. Readers of Lechayim Lunch will feel the same way.
Pamela Phillips Olson will read from Lechayim Lunch at 6:30 p.m. on Monday, June 6, at the Madison Public Library’s Sequoya branch.
Note: This story was change to reflect the fact that the Lechayim Lunch is a program of Jewish Social Services.
