Zaphra

A friend wrote to me that Zaphra Reskakis died recently. Even though she was 93 when she died, it’s still a shock, such was Zaphra’s vitality and thirst for life.

Maybe the first thing you should know about Zaphra—if you haven’t figured it out already from her last name—is that she was Greek. She was Greek through and through. Her parents came to America from Greece. She married a Greek-American. She spoke Greek. She thought Greek. She lived the Greek culture, talked about it, and, ultimately, wrote about it. Her e-mail address was yiayiazaph@… “Yiayia” means grandmom in Greek. Greece and all things Greek ran through her veins.

Zaphra

She was a small woman with a high sense of curiosity and chutzpah, or whatever the word for that is in Greek. The closest I can find in Google translate is θράσος, or thrásos, which means “audacity.” Yes, she was audacious, but calmly and doggedly so. She just did things. I met her in a writing class I taught at the West Side YMCA in New York many years ago.

She said that when she entered college, she told her parents she wanted to be a journalist. “They said, ‘No. You'll be running all over the world meeting men.’ So they pushed me to become a pharmacist, which they somehow thought was a mainly female profession. As it turned out, my class at Columbia was comprised of 90 boys and 10 girls.” She worked as a pharmacist all her life.

She later married—not well, according to her account. But she had her adored children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

She began writing late in life. Not only did she write, she published. Not only did she publish, she read her work on a semi-regular basis at the Cornelia Street Cafe in New York’s Greenwich Village. I saw her here, her diminutive figure just barely reaching over the microphone, reading her work and making people laugh. She was fearless.

Cornelia Street Cafe in Greenwich Village where Zaphra often read her work

When she was a girl, her father at one point had—what else?—a Greek diner, called B-29, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and she wrote about that. That piece was published. She wrote about a (maybe) serial killer living next door to her. That piece was published.

The ever-ebullient Zaphra Reskakis

I would visit her from time to time at her apartment on West 52st and 8th Avenue. It was a small place, but it suited her fine. It was subsidized housing for older New Yorkers, and it looked pretty good to this broke writer, I can tell you.

She was adored by her children and grandchildren, and sometimes when I visited her, one of them would be there, attending to Yiayia and listening to her stories and eating her Greek sweets.

In later life, she was a translator for the Department of Justice. They needed people to translate wiretapped conversation they picked up by suspected criminals who spoke in Greek. She loved it. Eventually, she moved to an assisted care facility in Yonkers. She kept going, going, going.

We kept in touch sporadically. She was on Facebook, and we messaged. We e-mailed. She would comment on my Substack pieces, one of which was about how no one has ever seen the Gideons place a Bible in a hotel room, but clearly they do. Zaphra wrote me, “Love this. Maybe Gideon’s will deliver by drone as the elders age—just sayin.”

Zaphra, still telling her stories to the end.

As the writer Patty Dann, who also taught Zaphra writing, said about her, “She was an amazing person, with remarkable stories—she never ceased moving forward and trying new things—a real inspiration.”

So true, Patty, so true.