Obituary: Emma Franca Ottolenghi
May 24, 1935 – May 9, 2022
June 25, 2022 “I’ve had a wonderful life, not always happy but, yes, wonderful. I am ready to die.”
~ Emma Franca Ottolenghi to the emergency room physician as she faced the imminence of her death.
Emma Franca Ottolenghi, 1935-2022
A wonderful life, indeed.
Emma, known across the generations as Mimma, Dr. Wennberg, Mom, Dr. Ottolenghi, and Mimmi Emma, was fierce, independent, a feminist, a mother, an activist, an artist, a grandmother, a tchotchke collector, and strong-willed to the end. Her abundance of willpower – one mighty spine in a tiny package – served her well across her long and interesting, but not always happy, life.
Emma was born on May 24, 1935, the second of three children to Nella Guastalla and Carlos Alberto Ottolenghi, a young Jewish couple living just outside of Torino, Italy. In a 2016 Storycorps interview, Emma recalled spending her early childhood playing in the beautiful gardens of the family’s large and rambling compound.
These tranquil experiences did not last. In 1938, Italy’s fascist government began issuing a series of Racial Laws (Leggi Razziali) that progressively tightened the state’s control of the Jewish population. Carlos and Nella, who considered themselves fully Italian, could only watch as their family and community were increasingly punished for being labeled “la razza ebraica,” meaning “the Jewish race.”
Sensing worse to come, the Ottolenghi family fled the country on September 19, 1939. Although Jews were not allowed to take most of their assets, the refugees did manage to abscond with a large wheel of Parmesan cheese. After boarding a boat in Genoa along with several of Carlos’ siblings and families the Ottolenghis sailed across the wartime Atlantic.
After traversing the Panama Canal, the family finally landed in Guayaquil, Ecuador, on October 12. They made their way by train from the port to Quito, where Carlos and two other refugees – none of whom spoke Spanish – quickly set to work to fulfill the promise of their visa: establishing Ecuador’s first pharmaceutical company, the still ongoing Laboratorios Industriales Farmaceuticos Ecuatorianos.
Sadness and sorrow, however, were not done with the Ottolenghi family. On December 20, 1940, Nella died after giving premature birth to her third child, Anna. From that point forward, Carlos became the sole parent to his three young children. Though Emma was just 5 at the time, she remembers her father’s deep grief even as he tried to fill the void of their mother.
Emma and her siblings initially attended the newly formed American School in Quito. With the war over, however, Carlos progressively sent his children overseas to complete their education. For Emma, this meant traveling alone to New York in 1950 at the age of 16, where she met her brother, Paul (age 18). The two then crossed the border to Montreal, Canada, where they rented an apartment with two other teenage cousins and attended local high schools and, eventually, McGill University. They were joined by Anna in 1955, age 14, who along with Emma, helped to keep the student household fed.
After receiving her undergraduate degree from McGill University in biochemistry in 1957, Emma enrolled in medical school at the McGill Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences. At the time, McGill had a quota limiting Jewish students, and she also was one of only two women in her class. Emma, however, developed creative ways to resist bigotry and sexism, including taping the photo of an especially offensive professor to the bottom of her well-used ashtray.
In downtown Waterbury (circa 1967), Emma Franca Ottolenghi and children (l to r) Nella, Paul, Marc, David. Family photo
In 1958, Emma married John Wennberg, a fellow medical student from Washington State, in a simple civil ceremony witnessed by two university friends. Emma and John’s relationship proved to be fruitful, if not entirely compatible. Over the course of the next five years, Emma would give birth to four children. Their birth certificates provide a handy geolocation map of Emma and John’s entry into the medical field: David, born in Montreal in 1960, during their last year in medical school; Paul, born in Washington, D.C., during residency; Nella, and then Marc, born in Baltimore, during Emma and John’s post-doctoral studies in public health.
In 1966, the family moved to an old farmhouse in Waterbury Center, Vermont. Emma and John both opposed the Vietnam War, and John’s position at the University of Vermont carried a draft deferment. The move also enabled Emma’s specialization in gynecology, as she quickly gained her OB-GYN license simply by working at a hospital birthing ward.
* * * * * *
Emma’s 40-year career in women’s healthcare and reproductive rights can be summed up as a tale of two places: Vermont, followed by everywhere else. After securing her practice license, Emma started working at the UVM Student Health Clinic. At the time, abortion was illegal in Vermont, and Emma would frequently find herself providing students with information about abortion services in New York City. The alternatives in Vermont were bleak: every local hospital had a “septic unit” for patients who suffered through botched abortions.
In 1972, the Vermont Supreme Court deemed the state’s abortion law to be unconstitutional, at which point abortion became “neither legal nor illegal.” Rather than wait for legal certainty, Emma and several other physicians and advocates launched Vermont’s first abortion clinic: the Women’s Health Center which soon became a lightning rod for anti-abortion activists, who regularly threatened clinic staff. Emma, however, was unintimidated and she continued traveling twice a week to the Colchester clinic, even after starting her own gynecology practice in Waterbury, where she became the beloved physician to countless women. (To date, Vermont is the only state that has not passed a law restricting abortion access since Roe v. Wade.)
In 1978, after several difficult years, Emma and John divorced. This was a challenging period in Emma’s life and she struggled to regain her footing. Perhaps in a bid to start anew, Emma hired a local carpenter (and her kids) to build a “dream house” a short distance up the road from the farmhouse. Her beautifully realized vision, however, would soon become more home base than home, as Emma undertook what can only be described as a transformation.
* * * * * *
Emma’s journey outward began with a 1983 trip to revolutionary Nicaragua. The brief “fact-finding” visit reignited Emma’s connection to Latin America and she came home determined to find a way back. It took another three years and outreach to more than 200 organizations, but Emma and a close friend and midwife finally found Save the Children, Bolivia, an organization willing to accept their volunteer services.
Emma and her colleague (and family) arrived in Bolivia in the fall of 1986 and began setting up a health clinic in Circuata, a small, remote Andean town located an 8-hour drive from La Paz (via some very hair-raising roads). An excerpt from an early letter to a friend captured her new, but still very Emma, way of life:
“Today was fine, the first day without adrenaline rushing. I bought some really nice (llama) yarn - a little rougher than alpaca but easy to knit, I did the first pelvic exam in Bolivia, and then I cooked dinner - almost normal, right? Now at 8:30, I’m in bed with two candles, eating chocolate, and listening to a Vivaldi Flute Concerto…”
Other letters home, however, were heartbreaking, as Emma detailed her too-frequent experiences with the deaths of children (at the time, Bolivia had one of the highest child-mortality rates in all of Latin America).
With this first volunteer experience, Emma reclaimed her maiden name and embarked on a new life of adventure. Although she would frequently visit her Waterbury Center home, Emma spent the better part of the next 15 years on the go, returning to Bolivia (now as a paid employee), and then to the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Guatemala, India, Russia, South Africa, Peru, Bangladesh… Emma’s family and friends often lost track of her exact location. Fortunately, her steadily growing collection of rugs, textiles, art, and tchotchkes, provided a fairly accurate narrative of her travels.
Emma worked for multiple organizations during this second phase of her career, including Save the Children, Development Associates, and the Population Council. Over time, her focus gradually transitioned from direct care, to training and technical assistance, to field research studies, and finally to consulting, which included a 2014 rewrite of the World Health Organization’s comprehensive guide for cervical cancer control. Throughout all of her travels and positions, however, Emma maintained a clear sense of purpose, which she summarized in a 2008 interview: “I am a feminist, and I want women to be able to choose what they do, not just in medicine, but in life.”
When she wasn’t fighting the big fights, Emma relished in small pleasures. She was a remarkable culinary improviser and enjoyed nothing more than inviting friends and family over for long evenings of delicious food, drinks, and conversation. She had eclectic reading tastes as evidenced by her living room, which was always cluttered with folded magazines and open books. She took untold joy in the beautiful little things, and she loved, loved, loved, the Northern Lights (and her very fortunate pets). This curiosity and care for the world never dimmed, even during her final years, when she stayed closer and closer to her Central Vermont homes. At her heart, as one of Emma’s last acquaintances put it, she had an “amazing zest for life.”
The final three weeks of Emma’s life encapsulated both her zest and impact. First at the hospital and then in her home, she received a constant stream of visits from friends and family, including all ten of her grandchildren and her dear sister Anna. Her room was filled with laughter, art, stories (half of which Emma claimed were true), chocolate, flowers, and many sweet and sad tears. There also was the occasional illicit gin and tonic, which her kids supplied on the sly (with a wink and a nod from the nurses). When the hospice chaplain stopped by in the final week to ask Emma if there was anything she wanted to talk about, Emma quickly replied, “How about reproductive rights?” True to the very end.
Emma died on May 9, 2022, just shy of her 87th birthday, surrounded by her children, tchotchkes, and Joey the cat. Emma’s family and countless friends, patients, and colleagues, live forward with her memory as a constant blessing, and that is one good and true measure of a wonderful life.
* * * * * *
A celebration of life service will be held at 10 a.m. on Sunday, July 31, at the Rusty Parker Memorial Park in Waterbury, Vermont.
In lieu of sending flowers, why not spend the day reading the Sunday Times, pouring yourself a reverse martini with Barr Hill gin (after 5 p.m. of course), and making a generous donation to a reproductive rights organization of your choice.
Emma would approve.