Alice G. Zwerdling

Alice Granoff Zwerdling, 100, died Saturday, August 18 in Bethesda. It was a peaceful end to a lifetime of travel, adventure and working with -- and befriending -- people from around the world. She gained widespread media attention last March, including on the front page of the Washington Post, after a huge tree in her yard in Kensington crashed through her roof and bedroom ceiling during a windstorm and hurled wreckage on top of her as she slept. As she lay on a gurney in Suburban Hospital’s emergency room, she kept laughing, “This is the most bizarre thing that’s ever happened to me.” She fully recovered after receiving dozens of stitches in her scalp and leg – yet more evidence for her extended family and wide circle of friends that she was indestructible.

They were wrong. Alice died after slipping into a coma after she ate breakfast and went back to bed for a nap, at the Residence Inn of Bethesda, where she had lived while waiting for her house to be repaired. She loved her morning oatmeal from the hotel breakfast bar so much that she had said she was reluctant to leave.

Alice was born Alexandra Granova in 1917 in Odessa, then part of Russia, in the middle of the Bolshevik Revolution. Her mother fled three years later from the on-going civil war, taking Alice and an older sister while leaving their father and two older brothers behind. Their struggle to make it to the U.S., based on family accounts, reads like the plot of a movie: the two girls posed as orphans with false papers, their mother disguised herself as a peasant woman; they hid in hay carts and sleighs led by smugglers as they snaked their way past warring factions; a deserting soldier seized Alice as a human shield and leaped with her into a river, while trying to escape his pursuers; her mother almost died of typhus as they holed up in a rooming house near the Polish border.

They finally reached Ellis Island in 1923 and joined relatives in Lansing, MI. Her adult brothers immigrated later. Alice didn’t see her father again until she was an American teenager, living in Detroit. As she learned then, her father had been condemned to execution by the workers council at the chocolate factory he managed in Odessa, but other employees intervened and saved him as a “friend of the people.”

During World War II, Alice worked at the Willow Run bomber factory near Detroit, where she edited and wrote a newsletter that was part company news, part features, and part employee gossip. She took a new job as secretary at a cousin’s law firm, where she met her future husband, attorney Joseph Zwerdling. They lived in a handful of cities across the country, where he was stationed as an Army Judge Advocate and then as a lawyer for the federal government, before settling in Silver Spring in 1952.

Alice always regretted that she had not gone to college, because her family could not afford it, but her passion for people and books, travel and theater, opera and ballet taught her more than multiple degrees. During the early 1960’s, she transcribed field notes for anthropologist Stanley Diamond, about his groundbreaking work with a remote tribe in Africa. She expanded what would become her lifelong fascination with other cultures by taking a job in the mid-1960’s with what’s now called Meridian International Center. Alice helped run orientation programs there for visitors from developing countries, from Cambodia to Congo to Pakistan and Brazil, who were brought by the U.S. State Department to study in the U.S. Her neighbors in Silver Spring were occasionally struck by the sight of busses pulling up to her family’s small brick rambler, and streams of Africans and Asians in traditional dress pouring into the yard for their first American-style barbecue. Alice retired from Meridian House, her last paid job, in the late 1980’s.

For most of the rest of her life, she continued to work with people from other nations as a volunteer English teacher. She traveled widely into her early nineties, visiting family and friends – and touring with Elderhostel – in Europe, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Middle East. She took part for years in book clubs; the members of the most recent one were all older than 90.

Alice lived with gusto until just before the end, dining out regularly with her children at neighborhood restaurants. A few weeks before she died, her longtime charades group visited her suite at the Residence Inn for one of their traditional fried chicken dinners. Alice’s two best friends from the early 1950’s, themselves just under 100 years old, had scheduled to meet her for deli lunch the Monday after she died. The three ruefully called themselves “The Remnants.”

Alice is survived by her children, David Zwerdling (and wife Marti Teitelbaum), Judy Zwelling (and husband Shomer) and Daniel Zwerdling-Rothschild (and wife Barbara), plus seven grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. The family will hold a memorial service later this year, the date and location to be announced. In lieu of flowers, family and friends may make a donation to Doctors Without Borders, which Alice supported until she died.

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