My bisabuela Berta: A trailblazer in education

My great-great-grandfather, Salomón Drucaroff, was one of the many hundreds of thousands of Jews escaping the pogroms of the Russian Empire to land in Argentina at the turn of the 20th century. Upon arrival, he and 30 others were given an infertile plot of land on which to establish a new life and, in 1905, they founded the town of Rivera on the outskirts of the Buenos Aires province. 

Legend has it that, when building the town, its inhabitants first wanted to erect a synagogue, but Salomón, a well-respected man, insisted on first constructing a school. Per his word, Rivera came together to establish the town primary school, founding the town on a precedent of educational valoration.

Salomón Drucaroff had three children: Sara, Berta and Sansón. Berta, my “bisabuela,” was to embody Salomón’s single-minded pursuit of education, eventually earning a degree in biochemistry — something next to unheard of in the country at the time.

As Rivera grew, Salomón purchased cows and established a butchery. Every morning, at the crack of dawn, Berta would roll out of bed and help her father prepare various cuts of beef for sale, later heading to the local primary school, which she attended from a young age. She would continue the same routine every morning, aiding in the butcher shop to be able to support her going to school.

When the children of Rivera were of the age to attend secondary school, the town found itself without the resources to establish one. Lacking a formal school to attend, students had to demonstrate their scholastic competence by taking an annual standardized assessment distributed in a larger city. To allow their children the opportunity to graduate secondary school, the townspeople invited a teacher from Morocco to prepare students for the exams. 

After months of preparation and study every year, Berta would travel to the nearest city by train to take her exam. After receiving their degrees, it was common practice for the men to leave town and attend university, while women were taught to be content with even being educated up to that point. The Drucaroffs, however, would not be ones to conform to common practice.

In the 1930s, following her older sister, Sara, Berta moved nearly 600 kilometers to Rosario, Argentina to study at its university. The two stayed with their relatives and, for years, both slept in a single room, cramped together, with Sansón eventually joining them. 

In spite of the conditions, there were never complaints — they never had it easy up until that point anyway. Back in Rivera, Salomón’s neighbors told him that he was crazy to even have thought of sending his daughters away to study at a university. But he knew what he was doing.

Berta, after earning her degree in pharmacy, pursued further education to become a biochemist. She would meet Manuel Horenstein, whom she married and with whom she eventually would move to Mendoza, Argentina to practice. There she became the chief of the laboratory at the Hospital Central of Mendoza, the largest hospital in the city, for decades until retirement.

Berta did her part in normalizing women’s education by demonstrating that it can be done through grit and tenacity. She traveled hundreds of kilometers to take tests and, further yet, earn a university degree. She was a first-generation immigrant from a town that had been founded on a barren plot of dirt eight years before she was born. 

Astoundingly, beyond the practical challenges, she met little outright resistance in her pursuit of what was then seen as a man’s schooling, in large part due to the steadfast support of her father, who understood the value of a degree from a standpoint of pure pragmatism. Salomón said that the best inheritance he could leave for his daughters was an education, since it would allow them to provide for themselves. He loved his children and wanted to guarantee their stability without him, and he saw scholarship as their best shot at a fulfilling life.

In all of her toil, Berta never thought of herself as “pobrecita” — never once thought “woe is me” — just because she was a woman. Berta saw obstacles and worked around them. She had a vision for what her future could be. 

But for all of her achievements, she only got so far because she stood on the shoulders of those who supported her, from her father to her relatives in Rosario. It was because of their support and vision that Berta was able to dictate her own story. History does not happen in a vacuum — change is not the labor of the individual but the community. 

They say it takes a village to raise a child. It also takes one to make history.