This, unfortunately, was the love of my life and very early on. She, and all her family, spoke five languages, English, French, German, Russian and Yiddish. She was charming and we spent many an afternoon drinking big mugs of tea sweetened with strawberry jam and accompanied with seedless rye with sweet butter. Her mother made butter cookies with chopped walnuts, piroshki (?), that were divine. She had the happiest, healthiest family I have ever known. She went on to get a BA at Antioch, a Ph D in Microbiology at Yale and an MD at Harvard where she taught and practiced. She was a gynecologist there and had rows of different insurances on her web page she would accept and, knowing Masha, if you had no insurance she would work something out. Because that's the kind of person she was. She died in 2010. Never met another like her. She was the finest woman I ever met.