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My great grandparents escaped the pogroms in Russia before the revolution and emigrated to the southern part of London with many other russian Jews. London was seriously anti-Semitic back then, schools sucked or were unavailable so my grandmother, one of twelve kids, got the fuck out of there and became a self taught speech therapist (?) after emigrating to Paris at 16 . She me her common law husband who was an artist studying there with Picasso and the others. He had escaped the Warsaw ghetto to Paris.  They fought the Germans as part of an underground and split for the USA after WWI. 

Their over achieving daughter, my mother, also self educated, due to a prolonged illness that kept her out of middle and high school for many years, graduated with top honors from Syracuse University at 18 years old. She vowed never to let a prolonged illness such as hers affect other people. She graduated from Rush medical school as a surgeon at age 22 here in Chicago by taking up two of the rare slots allocated for Jews or women since she was a Jewish woman. 

She had the balls (chutspah) to marry my dad, a Black man, in the 50's. My dad had the balls to marry a white woman in the 50's. Wholatta balls there. They got hosed with water during the Civil rights movement, and later, as the first minority to move into an all white neighborhood,  integrated Oak Park - a republican strong hold at the time (can you imagine?) and dropped us mixed race kids in the OP school system. She said we moved in because of the good schools.  We suffered bricks through windows, arson, vandalism. My mother would have none of this and fought back, more integration followed.

She had had enough of being on call for surgery all the time and gave it up to become one of the first ER docs. This gave her a regular schedule which allowed her to take on Mayor Daley #1 concerning the poor state of ER care in the city. She eventually became Chief of the ER at Illinois Masonic Hospital and with duh Mare was instrumental in developing the city wide fire department and hospitals' joint trauma system we have today. 

She became the chief of the ER dept at UIC medical school where she helped write the Illinois certification board exams for ER.  She continued to run the Masonic ER where one of her ER doctors, who fancied himself a screen writer, wrote a script for a play and TV pilot. The TV show was about life in a busy Chicago ER. The Chief of the TV ER character of his pilot was an over achieving, yet competent woman loosely based on my mother.  You may have heard of it. My mother did not have a walking disability though. 

She died peacefully last week.  Love ya Mom.