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January 17, 2006
The Neediest Cases
A Determined Volunteer Gets
Some Help for Herself
Luda Demikhovskaya, an immigrant
from the former Soviet Union, in the Manhattan office of the International
Center for the Disabled.
By
THOMAS J. LUECK
There are those who let a disability get them down. Then
there is Luda Demikhovskaya.
"This is how I have learned to survive," she said the other day, smiling
broadly from a motorized wheelchair and offering a bright blue business card
to a visitor. "Lyudmita Demikhovskaya," the card says, "Disabled Activist."
"I have always volunteered," she said. "I help other people."
But even Ms. Demikhovskaya, 64 and seemingly indomitable, needs help from
time to time.
She was born July 4, 1941, on a train screeching across the dark landscape
of the Soviet Union, away from her family home in Minsk as that city was
bombed in the early weeks of World War II. Two years later she was found to
have polio.
She endured repeated operations, learned to walk with leg braces and
crutches and excelled in school. Her dreams of becoming a doctor were
denied, she said, because her disability and religion (she is Jewish) were
both the objects of Soviet discrimination.
Ms. Demikhovskaya immigrated to the United States in 1979 with her mother
and a sister and settled in Brooklyn. Although trained as a medical
laboratory technician, she said, she spoke no English, had no established
relatives in America to help and was "scared to death of what lay ahead."
But she immersed herself in American culture, quickly learned the language,
and volunteered with the International Center for the Disabled in Manhattan
and the United Jewish Appeal. Seeking ways to press for the rights of
disabled people, she also began decades of unpaid work for such groups as
Disabled in Action, the Disabled Network of New York City and the 504
Democratic Club.
Her pursuit of a career, though, was proving difficult, and her financial
burden became heavier in 1988 when her mother was found to have Alzheimer's
disease. Until 1993, Ms. Demikhovskaya cared for her mother almost
constantly in the one-bedroom apartment they shared in Midwood, Brooklyn.
"I wanted to be like everybody else," she said, recalling how she sank into
periods of deep depression. "But I am disabled and I had to take care of my
mother."
In 2000, a year after her mother's death in a nursing home, the stars in Ms.
Demikhovskaya's life appeared to align. She had completed a computer course
at New York University, and was working part time as a computer technician.
But the next blow fell swiftly. In an elevator accident at the university in
2000, one of her legs, already ravaged by polio, was irreparably damaged.
That meant that her braces and crutches no longer sufficed: she needed a
wheelchair.
Unable to rely on public transportation, she could not keep her part-time
job, and her trips to Manhattan and meetings of her advocacy groups became
far less frequent.
Without a job, she said, her monthly income dwindled to $666 in Social
Security benefits, enough to cover the rent on the same rent-controlled
Midwood apartment she has occupied for 26 years, but not much else.
Ms. Demikhovskaya turned to her computer, and to the contacts she had
accumulated helping others, to put her life back on track. One agency she
contacted was the Jewish Association for Services for the Aged, which
receives some of its financing from UJA-Federation of New York, one of seven
local charities sponsored by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund.
The UJA-Federation provided a $600 grant so that Ms. Demikhovskaya could
have an experience she had dreamed of since childhood.
It sent her to summer camp.
For two weeks in August, she attended the Block & Hexter Vacation Center, a
retreat for the elderly in Poyntelle, Pa. Far from the cramped isolation of
her Brooklyn apartment, she painted pictures, attended lectures, tried her
hand at pottery and found herself surrounded by others of the same age and
religion.
"You need to get away from the city and your problems," she said. Among
other benefits, she said, the camp experience drew her closer to Jewish
traditions and beliefs.
"Remember, being born in Russia, I was not brought up in a religious way,"
she said.
Although she never abandoned her volunteer work, Ms. Demikhovskaya said she
found herself energized by the summer retreat. Now, spending two or three
days a week at the International Center for the Disabled, she publishes an
in-house newsletter and counsels other disabled people on such things as
housing and medical care.
From home, she uses her computer to send e-mail messages, championing causes
like taxi access for the handicapped. One of her e-mailed notes, arriving on
a reporter's screen the other night, was more personal.
"I was suffering so much in my life," she wrote. "Now, closer to the end of
my journey, I want to help others live better."
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