Ordinary can be Extraordinary...

photo courtesy of Michael Chehkov Association

Recalling a simple life in Brooklyn
by Dale Russakoff

Jessie Singer Sylvester moved anonymously through old age in Brooklyn in the 1970s, absorbing one loss after the next — her job of 59 years, her beloved sister, her friends, her sense of security, her sharp mind. Still, she soldiered on, attending to her sister until she died, cooking and cleaning for herself, going to classes at the local senior center and visiting parks, museums and what she called “the Botanical.”

It sounds so ordinary and unremarkable, which is exactly why Ms. Sylvester, 22 years after her death, is experiencing a rebirth of sorts as Every Elder. A film of her life, “Beautiful Hills of Brooklyn,” has won awards at film festivals from Los Angeles to Moscow, and will be shown on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan.

New York City’s commissioner for aging, Lilliam Barrios-Paoli, is showing it at senior centers across the city as a teaching tool to sensitize staffs to the inner lives of New York’s elderly. Schools of social work are using it in courses on aging.

“It really drives home the point that life is not made up of great big events. It’s an accumulation of little things that happen every day that can make or break you,” said Ms. Barrios-Paoli.

Ms. Sylvester’s story came to light when Ellen Cassedy, her great-niece, discovered a diary she had kept faithfully from 1976 through 1979, following her retirement from the Society of Automotive Engineers, where she worked as a secretary until age 77.

Ms. Sylvester died at age 89 in 1988. She willed her dresser to Ms. Cassedy, who came upon the diary in a recessed drawer of its pull-down desk. Ms. Cassedy said that her great-aunt must have turned to keeping the diary as “a secretarial impulse — keeping a record.” It was written by pen in immaculate Palmer method script.


“I sat down on the floor and started to read it and could not put it down,” said Ms. Cassedy. “It was this extremely spare, unemotional, very functional, daily record of her life, but I was mesmerized and I saw a real poetry in it. It was precious to me to know that even after all the losses, she continued to find her life meaningful.”

Using her great-aunt’s own words, Ms. Cassedy, a writer and founder of 9 to 5, a national working women’s organization, wrote a one-woman play about Ms. Sylvester, which became the basis for the film. The actress Joanna Merlin played Ms. Sylvester in both.

Besides Jessie, the heroine of the story is a staff worker identified only as “Sunny” at the Jay Senior Center on Ocean Avenue. Ms. Sylvester writes with joy about Sunny’s classes and discussion groups. “Sunny’s on vacation,” she wrote one day. “Nobody can take Sunny’s place.”

At Sunny’s poetry hour, Ms. Sylvester is introduced to Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” which links the unsung individual to the majesty of all humanity. (“Very nice,” Ms. Sylvester wrote of it.) Ms. Cassedy interspersed soaring, celebratory lines from the poem with such factual, mundane phrases from her aunt’s diary as: “Rested a while. Got an apple. Had supper. Washed the dishes. Then to bed.” The title of the film and play, “Beautiful Hills of Brooklyn,” is drawn from the poem.

Ms. Cassedy tracked down “Sunny,” Sondra Brandler, now an associate professor of sociology, social work and anthropology at the College of Staten Island, part of the City University of New York. Dr. Brandler remembered Ms. Sylvester as a lonely woman and energetic volunteer; she was shocked and thrilled to learn of her impact on the older woman’s life.

This is why Ms. Barrios-Paoli wants the city’s senior center staffs to see and discuss the film. One discussion it inspires, she said, is whether life is better for today’s Jessie Sylvester. Ms. Barrios-Paoli said that these days the city could have provided Ms. Sylvester with a home health aide and meals, perhaps allowing her to remain longer in her home — if someone were to inform social services of her decline. The senior center might have provided more opportunities to get out and enjoy the city.

It was the crime wave of the late 1970s that ultimately drove Ms. Sylvester from Brooklyn. A Social Security check was stolen. Elderly neighbors were mugged and robbed. “The situation in our neighborhood becomes worse every day. We are all in it,” she wrote.

Then in 1979, she came home to find her apartment ransacked. Her niece in Great Neck found her an apartment there, and although Ms. Sylvester had resisted moving before, she signed for it. Ms. Cassedy said her aunt never recovered from the move. She later moved to a nursing home, where she died.

Ms. Sylvester’s diary stopped when she left Brooklyn. She reported her last day, like all the other days, without sentiment. Her niece had told her to make out a final rent check for $120.94. “I did as she suggested,” Ms. Sylvester wrote. So ends the diary, the play and the film.

But now Ms. Sylvester lives on, at film festivals, senior centers and universities. The film had its worldwide premiere in Moscow last year at the International Zolotoy Vityaz film festival. “I have to wonder what on earth my aunt would have made of it all,” Ms. Cassedy mused. “I hope, like Whitman, she would feel she contained multitudes.”