Family resemblence
I heard from Birgit Wolz today. She took the time to look at what I wrote about her last week. She wrote “you look just like your grandmother”. I took no offense to that since she was referring to my Grandma Lizzie, not my Grandma Fannie. I think that I look like both my parents.In fact, I had an experience about fifteen years ago where as I was washing my face, I looked into the mirror and saw what Lizzie probably looked like in her 30′s. I told my father about it and he gave one of his famously negative retorts of, “yeah, no great beauty”.
What Birgit doesn’t know is that most of us Brody’s look alike. We have the high cheekbones and the short heavy legs (with the exception of Valerie) that my mother referred to as “Brody legs”. The ten Goodwin cousins we do look a lot alike. Although not V, as I think that her father’s family’s genes must have been stronger, but B and N look more like my older sisters and me than A did. R certainly looked like us and D did when he was thinner. It’s not just us Goodwin cousins, but it includes many of the children and grandchildren of Lizzie’s siblings. But I more than the rest of the cousins have the deep set eyes.
Brodsky family from Kiev
As I thought about the family look or traits I was thinking about how much Marc Chagall’s wife, Vava Brodsky and Lizzie looked alike. So I just spent the past couple of hours going through articles about Chagall on the web. Chagall is my favorite painter so I enjoyed looking at the images of the paintings. I really enjoy the ethereal quality of his work and the colors. I found plenty of pictures of Chagall, but no photos of Vava-in all of the articles about her or them the photos had been extracted. I did come up with this painting of Vava.
I learned that she was from Kiev, as was Lizzie, but I don’t know the actual town. Chagall had commented, “I have another wife-the third-from the Brodsky family itself from Kiev”. The Brodsky’s were sugar magnates. The writer Shalom Aleichem who wrote The Tales of Tevya, better known as Fiddler on the Roof, worked for this family. 
I don’t know if my family is this group of Brodsky’s, but it brings to mind Lizzie’s story of getting off the boat at Ellis Island and being asked if they had any money and her father pulled out his money belt to show that they did. In the Ellis Island logs it showed that they came with $150-more than any of the other immigrants on the ship, and what was a lot of money in 1904 when they arrived on December 15th on the Hekla that shipped out of Copenhagen.
Vava was 25 years younger than Chagall. She was his muse and he felt she was extremely beautiful and highly intelligent. Nothing wrong with that. Those are good qualities for men to notice. I certainly like being noticed for both, but sometimes, especially now as I’m getting older, I’ll take the beautiful over the intelligent.
I also found this painting of a chicken that goes along with Lizzie’s chicken rancher days.