Betty Fagenson Lewis: My Autobiography, 1903 -- 1998
My Autobiography
I was born on April 14, 1903. My mother was 39 years old and had already borne four other children, all girls. My mother had married late - she was 25 when she married. Apparently there were not many prospects for marriage in the village where she lived.
Mother had lost her oldest child in 1900 and sometimes talked about the child - Razel - who died of a ruptured appendix. There was some epidemic that had occurred in a nearby town, and all the doctors - maybe there was only one doctor in the shtetl - had gone to attend to the sick in the other town. There was no one to operate on Razel.
