Fonds 1426 - Ann Cheroff Weinstein Fonds

Ann Cheroff was born in Brooklyn in 1923 to illiterate immigrant parents, the third child and first daughter eight years after two brothers; her younger sister followed two years later. She was raised in Brooklyn, and encouraged by her older brother, who had attended Brooklyn College, to pursue her education, ultimately financing a course in stenotyping at LaSalle Institute. This eventually led to a position at Bell Telephone Laboratories as the first of three Jewish girls to be hired.
Ann married Oscar Weinstein, born in 1910 in Romania, whom she met at a resort in the Adirondack Mountains, on December 23 1944. They married four months after meeting, and had their first child shortly thereafter, followed by two more: Donna, Ralph, and Joel. When Joel, their youngest child, was eight, Ann returned to school by registering at the Thomas More Institute, for their course, "The Literature of Becoming Oneself," which she followed by enrolling at Sir George Williams University in literature, psychology, and sociology. During one of these literature classes, she read Saul Bellow's "Dangling Man." Following her graduation she enrolled at Universite de Montreal where she reread all of Bellow's books, proceeding to write her Masters thesis on the subject.
Ann proceeded to teach at Dawson College for 21 years, before teaching at the Adath, Beth Rivka and Hebrew Academy, reviewed books for the Jewish Public Library and the Eleanor London Library among others, presented at a Modern Language Association conference on Bellow's writing, had critiques printed in the Saul Bellow Journal, and attended as a guest speaker the Saul Bellow International Conference in Haifa. She became involved in the McGill Institute for Learning in Retirement, published "Me and My Tor-Mentor: Saul Bellow: A Memoir of my Literary Love Affair," and spoke often at local synagogues and community centres.
Oscar Weinstein died in 1999, and Ann died in 2017.