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My mother Eva received her nursing degree from Mt. Zion Hospital School of Nursing in San Francisco in late September 1943 when she was 22 years old.
I wrote about Eva’s career in the July 7 post. In Vienna, she dreamed of becoming a doctor, but the lack of financial and emotional resources, as well as insecurity about being a non-native English speaker, prevented her from pursuing that goal in the United States. Instead, she took the more traditional route for a woman and became a nurse.
In the last few posts, we read about how Eva and her brother Harry worked summer jobs during and after high school, sending their meager earnings to help their parents in Vienna. After coming to San Francisco in late 1939, they had to grow up immediately. Eva completed her final year of high school and then enrolled at Mt. Zion. Harry finished high school a year later and joined the army. They supported themselves and asked little of their relatives who emphasized that they could not be relied on for further financial assistance than what was given to them to help them come to San Francisco. They saved as much money as they could in the hope and expectation that they would help their parents once they made it to the US. They had to be practical and could not pursue unprofitable dreams. My mother, already a serious sort, threw herself into school and work.
In the 1980s, when I worked at San Francisco State University, I taught a course designed to help undergraduates do well in college. I asked my students to identify an issue or skill that was preventing them from academic success and to create a plan to develop the skills to improve. One semester, one of my students was a Baha’i who had come to the US to escape religious persecution in Iran. He was appalled by the complaints of his American classmates – to him, they had everything, their complaints were insignificant, they took their education for granted and did not care about learning. For him, education was the key to survival and there was no time to waste. He had no choice but to succeed. His story resonated with me – my mother had escaped similar circumstances and felt much the same as he did about her high school experience. While her classmates were worried about prom, she was worried about her parents’ survival. Education was the key to her being able to support herself and, hopefully one day, her parents. Such a heavy burden on young shoulders.