Anna Cheskis Gelman

Anna Cheskis “Anchik” Gelman, 93, of Bainbridge Island, died Feb. 3 at Fir Acres Home.

She was born Aug. 30, 1911, in Boston, Mass., the only child of Bessie and Theodore Cheskis.

She was raised in the same house as her three cousins, Ben, Debby and Pearl Rubenstein. Her mother stayed home and looked after the children, while the other three adults went off to work.

She lived in Boston until she was about 10, then she and her parents moved to New York City. She went to Hunter College for her bachelor’s degree and to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a master’s degree in public health.

She had a short marriage to an artist named Fedya Kling that ended in divorce.

Her parents had been born in Russia, and in 1934 went back to the Soviet Union to support the revolution, and Anna went with them. They lived with two other families in a two-room apartment.

While in the Soviet Union, she worked for Herman J. Mueller, M.D., who was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1946 for work on hereditary effects of X-rays on genes.

In 1938 she was warned to get her mother and herself out of the Soviet Union. She also tried to get her father out, but he had never earned American citizenship so he could not emigrate once more.

Her father and her boyfriend, Tommy Sgovio, were arrested shortly after she and her mother left. Her father was killed and Sgovio spent 15 years in Siberia before being allowed to return to the United States.

Anna returned to the U.S. in 1938 and eventually moved back to New York, where she met and married Murray Gelman and became a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.She spent 40 years there.

She enjoyed walks on beaches and collecting things, and she and her husband enjoyed going to garage sales. They owned thousands of books.

They traveled, but also had a summer house in Milford, Penn., until the government exercised eminent domain and bought it from them. Then they started going to a Yiddish/Socialist summer camp and ran the Workman’s Circle, called Circle Lodge, where she endowed a swimming pool and senior center.

She endowed a professorship at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and gave the school $1.5 million dollars for a laboratory.

She came to live on Bainbridge in February 2004.

She is survived by cousins Debby (David and Rory) O’Sullivan of Bainbridge Island, Boris Czeskis of Carmel, Ind., Ann Cherlow of Arlington, Va., Woody Lichtenstein of Belmont, Mass., and Karel Wolfson of Chicago, Ill., and the large Cheskis family spread around the United States.

A memorial service will be held in the spring in New York City.