TORONTO — Miriam (Mary) Schlanger, 89, left, defies her chronological age. She recently walked five kilometres in a charity fundraiser, she raises thousands of dollars for charities each year, helps the homeless, is actively involved in her synagogue and travels by public transit, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
“I’ll be 90 years old in May, but I don’t feel 90,” Schlanger said.
Her social activism comes from her experience living in Siberia during the 1940s.
“I remember being hungry in Siberia, and I want to cry when I see people standing in line for food or begging for money. I always carry spare change for the people on the street,” Schlanger said.
The CJN interviewed her with her daughter, Soozi Schlanger, a musician and visual artist who said her mother is “intuitive and relentless,” adding “she is the smallest lady with the biggest heart.”
“Tzedakah is a way of life for me,” Miriam Schlanger said. “This year I raised more than $11,000. I work for many charities, including [the] Canadian Breast Cancer [Foundation], Baycrest Foundation, Masada chapter [of Hadassah-WIZO] and others. I also volunteer at Out of the Cold, cooking one day a week.”
Schlanger’s eyes sparkle and her movements are fluid. Her good health confirms the statistics that say many elderly people today are 20 or more years younger, health-wise, than people were a generation or two ago.
Schlanger said her life is “wonderful now,” but that was not always the case when she was younger.
“Thanks to my daughters who forced me to move eight years ago from Bathurst Manor, where I was very lonely after my children moved away, I moved to Manning [Avenue] and Bloor [Street] where my children live, where I have a lot of friends and where I am very active at the Narayever shul. Now I am very happy.”
Born in Latvia, Schlanger (formerly Aron) and her family left the country during the war, in 1941, by running some 30 kilometres to the Russian border and eventually ended up in Siberia.
“It was a miracle. It was the only day ever that the border with Russia was open and we got through. Most of the others who remained in Latvia perished,” Schlanger recalled.
While in Siberia, she worked in the fields in the summer and in the winter she went from village to village as a live-in seamstress.
Although her grandmother and mother were poor, she remembers they took food to other poor families for Shabbat and her father helped everyone who came to the door.
In Siberia, Schlanger and her father used to walk 16 kilometres to a small shul, at which she met her husband-to-be, Jonas.
After the war, the couple was placed in a refugee camp in Bergen-Belsen, where their two daughters were born. In 1947, they moved to Toronto, where Schlanger’s brother had settled. They arrived with Helen (now Grande), then two years old and Liba (now Berry), then six months old. Her daughters Soozi and Goldie were born in Toronto.
In the early 1950s, the Schlangers opened a fish and grocery store at Bloor and Manning.
“The first years were very difficult,” she said.
“I guess you can say that I’ve come back home. There are people here who still remember me sewing dresses for my daughters.”
Schlanger has a unique way of raising money for charities. She hands self-addressed envelopes, containing the name of a charity, out to people and says, “Just put a donation cheque in the envelope and send it to me.” She added that if people forget to send the cheque, she calls them.
“Charity is my best pleasure,” she said. “I just like to help, and every time a cheque comes in, it is better than if it would be for me.”