THERE ARE NOT many graves in Cork's Jewish cemetery, and the long greensward is three quarters empty. As her friends took it in turns to winnow the earth over Sheila Goldberg's coffin, we were aware as never before how this community, coming to the close of its history in Cork, had left as its watchlights, its beacons, the stalwart presences of the Goldbergs.
This is the time to admit that Sheila Goldberg was lost to us several years ago, although a lifetime; of good manners switched to automatic and masked the symptoms of her illness. Hospitalised, her elegance remained; she welcomed, visitors with the grace she had always shown in her own drawing room in those years when every variety of calamity found succour at Ben Truda. Perhaps this was an aspect of her Jewishness. Perhaps it was the training of her early life in Belfast.
The lowering of the flag on the City Hall, the presence of the Lord Mayor with his chain of office on the steps as the funeral cortege halted briefly there, the number of city elignatories at the funeral were municipal gestures of appreciation of a woman who was for nearly sixty years much more than the Lady Mayoress she became during the mayoralty of her husband Gerald. A mourner recalled the wording of the death announcement: donations could be sent to a number of charities. "She never missed an opportunity was the half rueful, half admiring comment, and we smiled at the memory of what it had been like when Sheila went looking for money. Meals on Wheels, the Cork Spastic Clinic, ABODE, Co Operation North: listing the achievements, all of them now institutions in the city, would take too long and would not do justice to her sense of enterprise, her indomitability and her deep sense of social responsibility.
She was also the person whose work with others brought to Cork such artists as Yehudi Menuhin, John Ogdon, Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten, Sir John Barbarolli and the Halle Orchestra, Leon Goossens, David Oistrach, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic. She was secretary to the Cork Orchestral Society for a total of 22 years. Only a few months ago, with Gerald, she was sponsor of a recital at St. Luke's Clinic by the RTE Vanburgh String Quartet - a concert she could not attend. She instituted the Cork Lunch Time Concerts series which has been running now for nearly 35 years.
She could do all these things, for several reasons. One was the unwavering - although I suspect sometimes quizzical - support of her husband Gerald and of their three sons. But why would she do them, apart from her sense of the civic? She did them, she needed these enterprises - they were not whims or pastimes, but have outlasted her - because she was sophisticated, cultured, and intensely attuned to the creative life. Her sense of hum our, honed by sixty years of living in Cork, irradiated her relationships with people such as Aloys Fleischmann, Sean and Geraldine Neeson, Seamus Murphy, Elizabeth Friedlander. Her far flung family, cultural and educational connections kept her in tune with international affairs, to the great advantage of her adopted city.
As her black coffin was being brought to the grave at Curraghkippane in Cork the sun, as it is wont to do, shone out suddenly in long bright beams across the valley below the cemetery. The Hebrew phrases were recited; we were reminded that she stretched out her hands to the poor, that in her tongue was the law of kindness, and that her own works praise her in the gates. The sun shone, the river glinted in the valley, family and friends clustered around Gerald's stoical figure. I thought of the verse from Tennyson's Ulysses chosen by Gerald for what was to be their last shared message at Christmas:
Tho much is taken, much abides, and tho/ We are not now that strength which in old days / Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are, / One equal temper of heroic hearts, / Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
It only remains to say, inadequately: Dear Sheila - Thank You.