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"So sad: Brave & kind Fanny Silberman, model 4 'Lily' in 'The Entities' story in my book Moral Disorder , has died in Toronto. A bright star."

That was the message novelist Margaret Atwood's posted on Twitter upon learning of the death of her old friend and real estate agent, Fanny Krongold Silberman.

The mother of Canadian Supreme Court Justice Rosalie Abella, Silberman died at her home recently after a long illness. She was 92.

At fewer than 144 characters, Atwood's tweet probably has the distinction of being the most succinct eulogy delivered, at least in memory of Silberman. But it was far from the only one. And it's not hard to understand why.

Her life might have been an object lesson in the uses of adversity.

She was born in Ostrowiec, in the Polish district of Kielce, about midway between Warsaw and Krakow. According to the eulogy delivered by her daughter Rosalie, Fanny "grew up in relative privilege ... a happy and feisty girl with an irrepressible and mischievous spirit."

She planned to go to medical school, but her father, a successful manufacturer, persuaded her to help him manage his roofing materials factory.

A blessing in disguise, perhaps, since had she left Ostrowiec for studies, she might never have met Jacob Silberman, the young law school graduate of Jagiellonian University in Krakow, who had come to visit.

Jacob later told his daughters that Fanny was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, who also turned out to be the smartest. She, in turn, thought he was a god. "She put him on a pedestal as soon as she met him and ... never let his feet touch the ground," her daughter said in the eulogy.

They were married Sept. 3, 1939, the day the Allies declared war on Germany, after the invasion of Poland. Thirteen months later, their son, Julius, was born. But the war was fast closing in on the 10,000 Jews of Ostrowiec. By April, 1941, a ghetto had been created, its residents put to work in German construction companies, cement and brick works. Worse was to come. In October, 1942, news spread that the Nazis were about to round up the ghetto population for transit to death camps.

Protectively, the Silbermans entrusted young Julius to a Polish woman whose family had worked at their factory for 40 years. But three days later, when Fanny went to retrieve him, the woman told her that she had panicked and taken the boy to Jacob's parents in the town of Sienno. By the time Fanny reached the town, the fateful roundup there had already been conducted - Jacob's parents and the baby were among 2,000 Jews sent to Treblinka, a German extermination camp in occupied Poland.

In 1943, Fanny and her mother were sent to a Nazi work camp in Leipzig; Jacob and Fanny's brother Sam ended up in another camp in Schlieben; both were sub-camps of the notorious Buchenwald. Fanny later attributed their survival to mere luck, but it is known that she absorbed much of her aging mother's workload and gave her part of her own food rations. Even then, the inmates were so hungry that they made slingshots and killed crows for food. When Soviet troops liberated Schlieben in April, 1945, only 130 prisoners were still alive.

Returning to Poland after the war, Fanny learned that Sam and Jacob had been transported to Theresienstadt, in what is now the Czech Republic. She set out immediately by train, only to learn that the camp had been quarantined with a typhoid epidemic. No one was allowed in.

With a bravado and resourcefulness that characterized everything she did, Silberman snuck into the camp, found her husband and brother, and snuck them out.

Eventually the Silbermans and Krongolds fled back to Germany. In a displaced person camp in Stuttgart, Rosie was born in July, 1946.

Sister Toni followed in 1948. Jacob soon taught himself English and was hired as a lawyer by the Americans to defend displaced persons who got into trouble.

It took the family four long years to win the right to become Canadian immigrants - a battle against Ottawa's inertial None Is Too Many (Jews) mentality. But Canada was the country they wanted and they eventually were rewarded for their patience; they crossed the Atlantic on the U.S.S. General Stuart Heintzelman, an American troop ship, and arrived at Halifax's Pier 21 in May, 1950. They took the train to Toronto and settled at Oakwood and St Clair.

As her daughter remembered her, Fanny was more than a mother; she was a life force. "She sent us to the library every Friday and made sure we read three books a week. She taught us math and writing; helped us with our homework and projects; taught us how to swim, skate, play volleyball and ride a bike; and made sure we practised piano every day.

"She sewed our clothes from paper patterns, but had what our friends called an underdeveloped sense of style. I can't begin to tell you how humiliating it is for a 10-year-old girl to be told by her friends that a striped blouse doesn't match with a polka dot skirt just because there's blue in both of them."

Silberman herself "was utterly without vanity; beyond basic lipstick, she never wore makeup. And she was perhaps honest to a fault.

"She told Toni she was beautiful," Rosalie said, "and told me I wasn't, but that it wasn't a problem because my personality would make up for it. I kept hoping she'd change her mind and tell me I had personality and looks, like Toni, but those hopes crashed the first time she saw me interviewed on television when I was a lawyer. 'Oh Rosie,' she said, 'you were so articulate.'

"'Thanks,' I said, 'but how did I look?' She paused and then said: 'You looked so articulate.'"

Unable to practise law in Canada, Jacob built a successful career in life insurance. But in 1969, when Fanny was 53, he was diagnosed with liver cancer. Fanny took care of him day and night in the last months of his life. And when he died at home in 1970, she fell apart."

"That's when Toni and I realized that the reason she came out of the war happy and positive was because her husband was still alive. For her, and until he died, that was the beginning and end of her purest happiness. Now he was gone and she was lost."

She needed a new focus and she found one - in real estate. She already had been dabbling in the field. Now she became a certified agent and was soon dispensing her unique brand of wisdom to members of Toronto's cultural elite - Atwood, artist Charlie Pachter, film maven Helga Stephenson and others.

In Atwood's short story, The Entities , the Fanny character (Lillie) is described as the antithesis of the typical real estate agent. "There was nothing sharp-edged or chic or brisk about her." She drove her car, an old white Ford, peering over the top of the steering wheel, "like someone in a tank turret. ... She did not speak of the camp she'd been put into, nor of the lost baby. Why speak? What difference would it make? Who'd want to hear. Anyway, she'd been luckier than most. She's been so lucky."

Strong word of mouth carried Silberman from one client to the next. But they were more than clients - they became friends and sometimes surrogate children.

For Stephenson, "Fanny was like a second mother ... this elderly woman with a thick Eastern European accent. She was a fighter her whole life. She never accepted the status quo. She was a very lively, funny, smart, a person filled with boundless energy… always busy with her beloved family, her real estate clients, her endless collecting of tchotchkes in garage sales and finally, her friends, to whom she gave her love, loyalty, sympathy, advice, dinners and tchotchkes. When she went into battle mode to secure a house for a client, she was a wonder to behold. Never once did I worry and never once did she fail me. In fact, I always felt sorry for the other side."

When the deals closed, and the clients moved in, Fanny, wrote Atwood, sent plates of "hard, beige, European cookies."

Pachter, who went on something of a real-estate buying spree in downtown Toronto in the 1970s, says "Fanny was a loving, luminous character. She had certain stock phrases, spoken with a Yiddish accent. 'Don't be greedy and don't give yourself a headache. And 'what for do you need it?'"

Later, when the recession of the early 1980s struck, and interest rates soared, Pachter was forced to liquidate his holdings. He lost tends of thousands of dollars. "Don't vorry," she said. "You vill start over. You vill rise from the ashes."

Exactly as she had done.

And he did. She found him a house with a backyard warehouse that would be perfect for his studios. It was listed at $389,000, far beyond his new budget. Pachter didn't think there was much point in bidding, but Silberman persuaded him to try. He started at $140,000 and got a sign-back at $385,000.

"Never mind," said Fanny. "That's progress." Typically, she refused to let up. Weeks passed. Eventually, he bought it for $205,000.

One day, Pachter introduced her to a new client - designer Scott Thornley. As a joke, he introduced him as Sheldon Tarnevetzsky. Thornley went along with the prank and, married to a Jew, had acquired enough Yiddish to carry it off, meeting Silberman regularly for lunch at Epicure, on Queen Street; she always had a hamburger with fries, instructing the waiter to get rid of the lettuce and tomato.

"Fanny had the biggest heart of anyone I ever met," says Thornley. "I was captivated by her story and how she lived with it. She wasn't haunted by it. Her personality was blithe, so generous in spirit. You wouldn't have thought it to look at her. It wasn't apparent up front. But she was one of the smartest people I knew. She could read any situation. She was indomitable and she was spectacular."

Eventually, Thornley summoned the courage to disclose the truth of his Gentile origins.

"Fanny," he said. "I have something to confess. I'm not really Jewish."

Silberman pushed her plate away. "Scott, I'm so glad you told me. You know I still love you but ... it makes a differ-ence."

What that difference was, he says, "I never knew - our love for each other only seem stronger as time went on. In part, for me, because it was clear of a lie - a sweet untruth - and maybe it was so for her too, I don't know. [But]we continued to banter in Yiddish."

Her son-in-law, Irving Abella, says that some part of Silberman's optimism was willed, borne of a determination "not to let the Nazis beat them. They would survive and they would succeed. They would not be cowed. There was no sadness, no depression. She was a force of nature, a candidate for one of those Reader's Digest 'most unforgettable characters you've ever met' stories."

But to win, you needed to be educated and she worked hard, with her children and grandchildren, at being a teacher. "When my kids visited her," recalls her daughter, "there was no television, just reading and mathematics. And they quite liked it."

As the eulogy put it, the grandchildren "saw her teaching for what it was - a reflection of her ferocious commitment to them and to their future, and part of her unwavering belief that life is what you make it, and to make it, you have to learn it."

In her later year, Silberman suffered a series of disabling strokes, which Rosalie said, "eroded her memory and mobility, but not her dignity ... never complaining, never angry, always gracious. That was who she always was and that was who she stayed ... following no one's path but her own; living many lives but never reinventing herself, only reinventing what it took to keep her spirit joyful and positive; presuming nothing and no one, but prepared to work hard for everything and everyone she cared about; and wanting nothing except happiness for those she loved."

Fanny Silberman was born on April 28, 1917. She died on Feb. 17, 2010. She was predeceased by her husband, Jack Silberman. She leaves daughters Rosie (Irving Abella) and Toni Silverman; brother Sam Krongold; and three grandchildren.

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