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Hanna Spencer

Professor, author, wife, great-grandmother. Born on Dec. 16, 1913, in Kladno, Czechoslovakia; died on Aug. 29, 2014, in London, Ont., of pneumonia, aged 100.

You could tell a lot about Hanna from looking in her enormous freezer. Even at the time of her sudden death, at the age of 100, it was filled with carefully prepared meals – not for herself, but for the many dinner parties she hosted. The parties spoke to her wide circle of friends, and that of her late husband Elvins, accumulated from the graduate students and colleagues they met during their years as professors at the University of Western Ontario, from their friends at tennis and exercise classes, and Hanna's bridge club, book clubs, lecture and symphony series. There seemed no end to her eclectic interests.

The meals themselves – chicken paprika and sauerkraut, plum dumplings and other Eastern European dishes – spoke to Hanna's childhood and early adult years in what was then Czechoslovakia, where she had earned a doctorate at the University of Prague and worked as a teacher.

But there was much more to Mom than food. That freezer doesn't hint at her experiences as a non-observant Jew at the time of Hitler's annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938, and her escape, along with her immediate family, to Canada (no thanks to Canada's restrictive immigration policy against Jews – the Fischl family had to pretend to be gentiles). Hanna recorded these experiences in her journal, which was published 60 years later as Hanna's Diary, 1938-1941. In it, she tells how she met Elvins Spencer, the brother of a colleague at the private school in Ottawa where she taught a year after arriving in Canada.

I don't think I ever heard Mom use the word feminist, but in her own quiet way that's what she was. She waited until her two children, Erica and Martin, were well established in school to resume her teaching career, but before that, she leaped into local politics, helping to elect the first female alderman in London, Ont., and becoming president of the London Council of Women.

When she did return to academia, she started as a lecturer at Western, eventually gaining tenure and becoming a professor of German – and a world authority on the German poet and journalist Heinrich Heine, publishing books and academic papers and speaking at international conferences.

Mom had a sharp and inquiring mind. She was a formidable bridge player and even in the last week of her life remained almost unbeatable at Scrabble. Despite her obvious intellectual abilities she was self-deprecating. For example, many years ago she talked about her enjoyment in doing the Reader's Digest vocabulary quiz, which she was very good at. But she played down her success by noting that most of the words had roots in Latin or Greek, both of which she had studied. She brushed off her success as though this knowledge were a form of cheating, as if to say, "Well, anyone who knows Latin and Greek would know that."

Above all, Mom had a contagious zest for life. Not many 99-year-olds are told by a shoe salesman, "Those shoes are too old for you." It wasn't until the day before she died that she finally acknowledged, "This is the first time I've felt my age." Mom left us on her own terms, not wanting to linger or go into decline. She left us wanting more.

Marty Spencer is Hanna's son.

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