Menya's son Sam remembers Menya as being very good to the children:

"She had a heart. If a kid hurt himself and started crying, she would cry. But not my father, he was strict with everybody."

Menya maintained close ties to her three brothers and occasional visits took place between the Massachusetts and Montreal families. Whenever Menya went to Chelsea, she always came back with a permanent and outfitted with new clothes from top to bottom. Whenever her brothers visited Menya in Montreal they always came with a suitcase full of women's shoes in all sizes with the bottoms scraped to make them look like they were used. [This was probably a ploy to avoid paying duty on the shoes at the Canadian border.]

The most frequent visitors to Montreal were Morris and Sarah Gass with their children, and Adele Gass, Max's wife. Samuel Gass visited Menya once or twice a year and stayed as long as his supply of Camel cigarettes and instant coffee lasted. When word came that Samuel Gass had died, Menya dropped to the ground and knocked her head against the floor.  

Each summer, the Naimarks spent three weeks in Chelsea, one week with each brother’s family. These were delightful, happy times. The Naimark children would be taken on out­ings with their cousins. One Sunday each year there was a grand picnic, which included all the brothers, their wives and children, and the complete extended family. Louis Gass, a more distant relative who was very close to Sam Gass, organized this event year after year. Despite all this togetherness, the Naimark children never got to know their uncles intimately.

The Naimarks also had extended family in America on their paternal side. Jacob's brother, who went by the surname, Newmark, lived in Brooklyn, New York. Jacob left another brother behind in Turiysk—Surik (Israel) Naimark—who perished in the Holocaust with his family. This is a fate that the Naimarks would have shared if they had not immigrated. None of the Jews who were living in Turiysk at the start of the Holocaust survived it. The Naimarks knew they owed their lives to the Gass brothers.

The marriage of Jacob and Menya, the product of a matchmaker, was not successful. Jacob communicated poorly with his wife and children. Menya never complained, but in 1948, after the children were grown and married with children of their own, Menya left her husband.

Their grandson Arnold Feldman, the son of Mary Naimark and Irving Feldman, remem­bered them both after the separation:   

"Jacob appeared to be a very old man, possibly because he was bald and religi­ous, always either coming from shul or going to. I remember visiting on Sundays, or perhaps after Bar Mitzvah lessons, drinking tea from a glass. It was a very small apartment and we were a lot of grandchildren.

"I remember my grandmother more vividly. She spoke English very well and she taught me a Hebrew prayer to say before I went to bed at night. She was a very kind person. I visited her at Maimonides, which is a [nursing] home, after her heart attack, and she told me she had a good life. It had been a hard life but she was happy.

“She told me a story about when she was much younger. She was in bed, quite sick, and I guess she had high fever, and she said she had a vision she was dying. God came to her and said, What are you doing dying? You have eight children, you're not ready. And she got better."

Jacob Naimark passed away in 1957, and Menya in 1965.

Menya and Jacob's children all succeeded in the "new world." In 1932, at the age of eighteen their second son Sam Naimark joined the first American/Canadian group to go to Palestine as kibbutzim. In Palestine, he met his wife Esther Bloom. They returned to Canada with their baby daughter in 1937 during the height of the Depression. From Montreal they made their way to New York City where Esther's brother owned a bakery. He gave Sam a job driving the delivery truck, and Esther worked in the bakery. They eventually ended up in the liquor business in California.
 

Click here to read about Sam and Esther’s experiences in Palestine.

     
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