In her 100th year of life, Ella Goncharskaya can still recite the phone numbers of nephews and other relatives she left behind in Russia more than 20 years ago.
Arbors at Sylvania crowned Mrs. Goncharskaya with a Happy Birthday tiara and hosted a birthday celebration with her family and friends Thursday afternoon at the residence.
Cheerful and touched by her party, she proudly sat at one end of the room with her well-wishers gathered around. Her strong, long, silver and gray hair was braided perfectly, and her outfit was carefully selected in tones of purple for the special day.
Mrs. Goncharskaya, who doesn’t speak any English, had her niece, Tanya Borochin of Sylvania, translate her thoughts about the past century of her life.
Asked to recall her life’s happiest moments, she seemed overwhelmed instead by her life’s tragedies.
“Well, I can’t really describe happy moments, but bad things in my life,” she said through her translator.
When she was born in 1913, the western Ukraine was a terribly unkind place for Jews to live. She and her family lived in a Jewish settlement under a Russian tsar. Her mother eventually moved the family to the Volga River in central Russia.
