When my parents arrived in Canada, Momma was consumed with worry about how to survive in the new land. “How do you make a living in this country?” she wondered. I can earn $5 a week at the glove factory,” Poppa replied. “That won’t do,” she said, “I think we should start a business.” “What kind of business?” he asked. “A neighbourhood grocery store,” she answered. “But I know nothing about it!” he protested. “We’ll figure it out,” she said.

So began Momma’s first venture, except that Poppa didn’t like it. He preferred to run the store himself, making it only mildly successful.

“I’m sorry you are so tired,” she would say to him. “We can eat the over-ripe bananas and tomatoes, but the income is too little.”

Once she taught me how to cook, Momma found work teaching in a Yiddish afternoon school, leaving me in charge of supper. Week after week, she would deposit most of her earnings into a tobacco can. Gradually, it got heavier.

Momma’s eagerness for business never faltered. “Lomir geyn!” she would say – “Let’s go for it!”

Most of her ideas involved making things at home. There was the homemade jam project, although it was not a big seller in the grocery store. The leftover jars became gifts my brother and I gave our teachers.

Next was the cutesy apron project. We had a Singer sewing machine and as we stitched together (I’d learned to use the machine by age 10), Momma crooned: “Oy, vi sheyn!”

“Aren’t these aprons pretty with their frills and colours?” she would ask me. But after selling to our friends and neighbours, many aprons were still left over. Once again, we brought gifts to our teachers.

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And then there was the brassiere project. Momma bought standard-sized bras from a manufacturer and customized them. Aunts, cousins, neighbours and complete strangers came for fittings. “I want one,” I begged my mother, pointing at the peach-coloured bras with pointed cups. She concluded that, at age 12, I was not ready.

Meanwhile, the world was changing – mom-and-pop grocery stores were faced with a new challenge: the supermarket. Poppa was comfortable slicing cheese, weighing fruit, packaging eggs and delivering by bicycle, but Momma kept pushing forward. “Let’s get practical,” she said.

Gradually, she found her calling in real estate. With her well-used motto – “Let’s go for it!” – she mobilized the men in our family. Even when they found her demands almost impossible, they continued to pitch in. Poppa, my brother and Uncle Jack, who lived with us, drove her all over town to look at properties. We moved from the apartment to a single-family home in a developing area. From there, Momma bought and sold two other homes for a profit.

After I married and left home, Momma began selling other people’s houses as a licensed realtor (with the help of my brother, who had become a lawyer). Her skills blossomed.

I remember a letter she wrote informing me that she and Uncle Frank had sold seven houses so far. “It’s intensive work, but we’re making progress,” she admitted. “Real estate is a challenge, yet it makes me happy. We are so busy, I have no time for anything. I feel like a weak fisherman; there are so many fish swimming by, I can only eat them with my eyes.”

When Momma died at age 60 of a heart attack, I was stunned. We were all stunned.

The dreamer, the doer, the role model and guide, the enterprising immigrant woman was gone. Lucky for me, I had learned so much under her tutelage.

Ahead of her time, she always said that, “A woman needs a profession to make a living.” To this day, in her memory, I continue to “Go for it!”