Betty Z. Jordan of Silver Spring passed away on Sept. 15, six weeks before her 104th birthday.
The first American citizen by birth in her family, she was born in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 24, 1921 to Samuel Zaritsky of Kiev and Esther Fishman of Warsaw. As a native Washingtonian born in 1921, she numbered among the city’s residents even before the Lincoln Memorial, inaugurated seven months after she was born, numbered among the city’s monuments.
Fate never pampered Betty Jordan throughout the more than a century that followed. From the beginning, hardship was a familiar, if unwelcome, companion. Her parents were recent immigrants of modest means, her first language was Yiddish, and she came of age amid the historic high-water mark of American antisemitism. As a job candidate, she had no education beyond high school to commend her nor, as a single mother, spousal support to sustain her. Yet Betty did not merely manage; she triumphed.
When she entered the workforce, she was a girl of 17; when she left it, retiring only because she could no longer drive herself to work, she was a grandmother of 90. In between these two bookends of her career were seventy-plus years of toil. Where others might have buckled under the weight of the dual demands of single-motherhood and full-time employment, Betty sought not to lighten the load she carried, but to add to it. For three decades, she was both a full-time administrative assistant in America’s premier military hospital, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and a part-time saleswoman at mid-century America’s premier department store, Lord & Taylor. As if this occupational balancing act were not enough of a feat already, for a few of these years, she held down a third job, working as a transcriptionist for a nonprofit.
As only one with such a capacity for work could be, Betty was what Shakespeare called “a tower of strength” and what the Bible called “a woman of valor.” Well before “strong woman” and “independent woman” became catchphrases in the popular American conversation in the 1980s, Betty Jordan provided the prototype. “My mother is my hero,” declared her daughter, Lynn Abramson, at Betty’s ninetieth birthday celebration. Nor was she speaking only for herself.
An example to be followed was the least of what Betty gave to those close to her. Giving was the central theme of her life. She worked so many hours, for so many years, not for herself; her lifestyle, after all, was modest to the point of self-denial. It was to be able to give with an open hand — initially to provide for her daughter, then to spoil her grandchildren — that was both her motive and her reward.
If some are stingy both with themselves and with others, and others are generous with themselves but stingy with others, Betty belonged to a much rarer and nobler group: those who are stingy with themselves but generous to others. Her instinct was always to stint herself so she could lavish on others. If her loss would be a loved one’s gain, there was no sacrifice, large or small, she would not make. On the “large” side, this meant being a single mother who, at one time, worked three jobs. On the “small” side, this meant taking her grandson week after week to a restaurant that he loved but that she silently — and and passionately — disliked.
Betty’s pleasures were few and simple: Chinese food, mahjong, a seat on a patio or a balcony on a nice day, a cup of coffee just below boiling point, a shot of Grey Goose, a cover-to-cover read-through of the Washington Post every morning. It was as if her love for her family was so vast there was too little room in her heart for any other affections.
Betty’s memory will forever be cherished by those whose lives she touched, none more so than her family, and it is they who will keep the legacy she leaves behind in honored remembrance.
She is survived by her daughter, Lynn Abramson (David); her grandchildren Carly Kliger (Dave), Scott Abramson, and Adam Abramson (Sara); and her great-grandchildren Lexa and Logan Abramson, and Avery and Miles Kliger. She was predeceased by her sister, Adele Z. Penn.