Chemistry, Fashion and Real Estate: My Grandmother’s American Dream
Chemistry, fashion, business, real estate — these are some of the interests that carried my grandmother, Martha Schneider, through her life journey from Budapest, to Mexico, and finally to the U.S. Through it all, she flowed with what life brought her and leaned on her natural talents to make the most of any situation.
Martha Schlesinger was born in 1923, in Budapest, but she did not live there long. Around 1929 her father Berzi — sick of European war, rising antisemitism directed at his family, and lack of opportunities — made the decision to leave. He took his wife, Rose, and two young daughters to Mexico. Why Mexico? The details are a bit hazy — he may have been aiming for the U.S. but had difficulties getting in, and Hungarian acquaintances who were already in Mexico led him farther south, specifically to the coastal town of Tampico.
Martha studied chemistry in high school. After she graduated, the infamous family lore is that her father dryly asked her “Quieres estudiar?” (Do you want to study?), and she said yes. So her parents found her a family to live with in Mexico City, and Martha set off to finish her chemistry studies at UNAM — the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
After graduating she opened her own pharmacy in Mexico City. She was running that pharmacy when she met my grandfather, Jerry Schneider, a Jewish New Yorker and clarinetist who had performed on Broadway, and who was vacationing in Mexico City. They got married, Martha got pregnant, and the pharmacy work fell away. With two young sons, and a Bohemian husband, she needed money.
Martha had always loved fashion, and it was the work her parents did. So she opened a women’s clothing store in Las Lomas, one of the most upscale neighborhoods of Mexico City. Martha did have a business mind and the store did well. She opened two additional stores in other parts of the city. That success enabled her to buy a house for her family in the comfortable residential neighborhood of Tecamachalco.
Eventually, she, Jerry and their now three children (including their youngest, my mother, Susan) moved to Los Angeles. It was a difficult transition. They lived in a small apartment in Hollywood, and my grandfather worked as a shoe salesman. But building on her fashion skills, Martha got a job as a buyer at Bullock’s Department Store. She parlayed that work into joining a blouse manufacturer called Na-Ma, eventually becoming Vice President, shareholder and the right hand of the president of the company. In a more modern era, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that she herself would have run the place.
She bought her family a house in the Hollywood Hills, and years later, she moved on to Bel Air. She wisely invested in real estate, buying several apartment buildings across Los Angeles, enabling her and Jerry to retire comfortably. What an extraordinary journey of grit and adaptation — the embodiment of the American dream. I hope I inherited some of her cleverness, natural interests and talents, and the go-with-the-flow attitude that carried her across countries and continents.
