Dorothy Buzan Feldman

Dorothy Buzan Feldman was born in Philadelphia in January 1923 at Pennsylvania Hospital to Ana and Harry Buzhansky. Ana had arrived in Philadelphia from Kovne (Lithuanians now call it Kaunas) only 1 year and 9 months prior as a twenty-two year old named Chasse Pitun. Chasse married Harry within her first 10 months in America. He on the other hand had an 8 year head start by having arrived in Philadelphia in 1913 as an 18-20 year old from Vilkomir (Lithuanians now call it Ukmerge) where he had been born as Aron Buzhansky. They didn’t name her at the hospital, but eventually settled on Dvoyre in Yiddish and Dorothy in English. Nearly everybody would come to know her with great affection as Dottie.

In October of 1923 before Dottie’s first birthday her parents moved into a rowhome at 2410 South Beulah St (at Ritner) in South Philadelphia. Her sister Ethel would join the household in 1925, and their brother Edwin in 1935. Dottie learned English in the neighborhood schools, but kept up her secular Yiddish studies in the folkshul network run by Lodge 18 of the Jewish People’s Fraternal Organization (JFPO) of the International Workers Order (IWO). She spoke highly of getting “luft” with her father on the Fairmount Park Trolley during the full heat of the summer, reading and discussing with him the news as reported by Morgn Frayhayt, and listening to the working class choruses in which his comrades of “Di Linke” would sing. She described her mother as running “the roost” at home, and wishing for her a full life in America uninterrupted by the displacements of war or the eternal oppressions of Jews. Both of them got full lives, more or less, each living a century or more.

Dottie graduated from South Philadelphia High School for Girls in 1940, and would soon come to work in the offices of the various war industries at the Navy Yard during the mass mobilization to defeat the Nazis in the old country and fascists all across Eurasia. She remembered well her parents’ terror when mail from aunts, uncles, cousins, and elders across the Pale of Settlement just suddenly stopped arriving. She probably lived on Beulah street until she was 21 when she met and then married Jack Feldman who lived at 4642 N. 12th Street (at Wyoming) in August of 1944. Jack was 25. When he was a bit younger, we know that he would attempt to impress women at dances by boasting that he was planning to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigades to fight fascism in Spain between 1936-1939. He never did, and Spain was lost by the time they wed amidst a massively expanded war. His pickup line probably would have impressed her. Though stories of him riding his bike from Philadelphia to Atlantic City to get his own taste of luft fun di zaltsikn yam (salty sea air) certainly did. After he was called by the Army to duty at Fort Knox in Tennessee to be trained and to train others as a tank mechanic, she fondly recalled visiting him on her first excursion by railroad to a land far from Philadelphia.

After the war, Dottie gave birth first to Michael in 1946 and then in 1951 to Carl. Between the births of her two sons, they settled at 1958 N. Myrtlewood St in Strawberry Mansion. Amid the Red Scare in the summer of 1951, the FBI opened a file on her father, Harry, due to the betrayal of snitches. Just before her 29th birthday in January of 1952 the investigation led to a knock on her door. The two agents who interrogated her ultimately left frustrated that “at the outset she adopted an antagonistic attitude and proved completely uncooperative.”

That knock on the door, and of the doors of her friends and family, led to a mass dispersal from Strawberry Mansion, and a necessary and timely pivot to family, work, and the peacetime dividends. And to secrecy. She remained tight-lipped about those years her whole life. She, her husband, and her two children, moved first to Logan facing Kemble Park, and then eventually to 8037 Gilbert St in West Oak Lane. Jack built the house himself with his own hands on that lot, though he never truly finished it. His grandchildren would play under the scaffolding. He also built a healthy chunk of the rest of the airlite housing of post war Philadelphia as a member of Local 1073 of the International Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. Though Gilbert street was unique, precious, and Dottie brought a special light to it.

That house and parental encouragement played a role in Michael’s development as a photographer as well as Carl’s life in trade. Michael Feldman married Mary-Ann, and they gave Dottie her first grandchild, Adam. Carl Feldman married Adrienne, and they gave Dottie her second grandchild, Matthew. Adam, author of this obituary fondly remembers meals, celebrations, Maxwell House seders, sleepovers, heated discussions, the sounds of baseball, art, tools, Omni magazine, and interesting furniture filling the home. She visited her grandson Adam when he lived in Brussels with her son Michael, and she years later brought her grandson Matthew to Europe as well.

Dottie lost her mother Ana and her husband Jack months apart in 1999. In the years that followed, she moved out of Gilbert street and into Oak Summit Apartments in Glenside. When Arcadia University bought the complex, she relished the vitality that youth brought to her community. Eventually she took a boyfriend, Art, who was an activist in his community of World War 2 veterans. With him she experienced Europe a third time.

Throughout her life she worked as a secretary or in other ways running about an office. Some of her employers included Wanamakers, Snow Associates, Merck, and finally Pitney Bowes from whom she was laid off well into her 80s. She was beloved by her fellow workers, decades her junior.

In the final years of her life, she lived with Michael and Mary-Ann in Fitler Square. She witnessed the birth of her great grandson Leo Bowers-Feldman in 2015, and suffered the loss of her own son Michael in 2017. In quick succession she lost her brother Edwin, and her sister Ethel. She is survived by her son Carl, her grandsons Adam and Matthew, her great grandson Leo, grand daughter-in-law Jamie, and her daughter-in-law Mary-Ann who provided nearly 8 years of loving care until she died peacefully in her sleep at home with the full dignity of in-home hospice care under Medicare and delivered through Penn Medicine.

She will be buried at King David Memorial Park in Bensalem next to her husband Jack, near her mother and father and sister, and much of the rest of her close family who emigrated to America, and those born to those emigres. A better world isn’t here yet, but it was a better world with Dvoyre in it. Barukh dayan ha emes, the internationale will be the human race.