Jane was born on February 1, 1931, in Harlem, New York City to Sally (Sara) Murray and Moll (Donald) Flanders. Just a year earlier, Moll and Sally bought an neglected farm in East Chatham, NY, near where Sally’s sister Bobby and her husband Tommy had bought another place in 1929. The two families spent summers at these ramshackle homes. They were very close then, and continue to be to this day, for which the family has Jane to thank to a large degree.
Early on, they moved from New York City to Chappaqua, NY, when Sally inherited her family home.
We came from Chappaqua, New York, where the schools were very good and everybody was academically oriented. It was a place where it was cool to be good…. My mother came from an old Quaker family in Chappaqua. My father was a mathematician at New York University. They were originally pacifists.
Jane Ziff
In 1943, when Jane was twelve, Moll’s work took them to Los Alamos, NM. Jane had a difficult time dealing with the reality of the move, despite her initial romanticization of the ‘adventure’. Later she would tell stories about climbing out of the window after roll call at school and going horseback riding. Flirting with the soldiers also seems to have been an outlet for her. After seeing the movie Oppenheimer she complained that the site had originally been a boy’s school and that none of the older buildings appeared in the movie. She especially missed the hall where her father directed Handel’s Messiah at Christmastime.
Despite not graduating from high school, Jane was nonetheless accepted by the University of Chicago to study for two years in their Great Books program (still running today). During this time, she met and dated Larzer (Larry) Ziff (brother to Howard Ziff). She sang in the U of C’s Collegium, where her son and daughter-in-law, Max and Dorothy, met many years later.
When Jane turned 21 she inherited $1000 and took herself off to France for three years.
My mother’s stay in France seemed very romantic to me. Since she was staying illegally, she had to leave the country every three months, so she did a fair amount of travelling around Europe. She had an exciting story about travelling with someone whose passport got lost somehow and meeting them after they sneaked over the border through the woods whistling, I’ve forgotten what snatch of opera loudly so that they would recognize each other and avoid the border police. She had stories of confusing ‘umsteigen’ with ‘aussteigen’ and ending up going the wrong direction. She caught hepatitis in Paris and octopuses on the beach in southern France, where she was also arrested for skinny dipping. She sang, did translation work, she smoked pot. She lived.
Ellen Ziff
Eventually, the endless uncertainty started to wear on her and Jane returned to Chicago, living in an apartment neighboring Larry and Morty (Howard). It is here that Jane began her relationship with Morty and started her family. Jane and Morty married in 1957, the year her oldest child Ellen was born. Jane struggled with much misfortune in these years. In 1958, her father committed suicide, and she lost her mother to a car crash shortly thereafter. Around this same time, she lost her second child, Emily, to crib death (SIDS) and had three still-born babies after Max was born in 1960, due to the Rh-factor.
Chicago was where Jane started her career in early childhood education, which she continued and expanded after her move to Amherst, MA, in the ‘70s. It was the days of Johnson’s Great Society, and subsidized pre-school education, and Jane worked for several years at a Montessori preschool in the neighborhood. Both Ellen and Max spent hours there playing and learning, while Howard rose to become Night Editor at the Chicago Daily News and began to cook elaborate meals on the BBQ in the backyard, while also teaching journalism part-time and performing the ‘Sir Toby Belch’ parts in many amateur plays, a lifelong interest.
In 1968, the family moved to Urbana, IL, because Howard got a job at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. It was a tremendous change for the family. Max and Ellen became faculty brats, Howard a professor, and Jane joined an ESL-program at the University of Illinois, while keeping up her ties to Chicago by travelling there once a week.
Three years later, in 1971, Howard was hired to create the Journalism program at UMass, Amherst, a project at which he succeeded admirably. Jane, meanwhile, did some searching before she, too, ended up with the project that filled the rest of her career: running the music program at the Common School, a private grade school in Amherst, MA.
Mom got involved in teaching music around the time that our beloved family friend and Chicago connection Kirsten Williams Kaiser moved to Amherst to work at the Common School. Kirsten had worked for many years in the slums of Chicago and welcomed the chance to teach at a school where she could expect that most of her students would end up not only alive but as functioning adults after childhood. Mom’s experience with the music program set her career plan for the rest of her life. She got an MA in music at UMass and inspired generations of children at the Common School. There was a recorder program for the younger kids and chamber music whenever possible.
I’m sure that what most people remember best, however, was the musicals which closed the students’ last year, sixth grade. Together with Kirsten, my parents produced a musical every year which gave every student a chance to shine, all the Gilbert & Sullivan operettas, the Magic Flute, and more. Dad adapted the text and lyrics (the fake Japanese in the Mikado became: Kawasaki, Yamaha, Mitsubishi, ….) Mom was responsible for the music. It was a labor of love in so many senses of the word.
Ellen Ziff
Soon after Jane and Howard moved to Amherst the original Farm property in East Chatham, NY, was divided up and they began to build their own house in the field that Jane had always loved, south of the original house. The house started as the Ziff Needle and gradually grew into the remarkable place that it is today. Jane and Morty hosted several picnics a year, they staged Shakespeare plays, Jane played the piano and the recorder and sang rounds and madrigals. Howard loved that she was happy.
At the age of 60 Jane took up the viola. She had two string quartets, one in Amherst and one at the Farm. Whenever she could she would gather people together, either at one of her houses or at the original Farm house in New York State, for all the chamber music and singing she could manage. Jane cared deeply about inclusiveness. All were welcome.
When Jane and Morty neared retirement, they bought the house on Moorland St in Amherst to retire to. It was smaller than their previous house and closer to the university; the pool where Morty swam every day was across the way. Jane continued her career in music education by increasing her private piano lessons with a yearly student concert as a highlight. Jane also returned to ESL as a volunteer via the Jones Library in Amherst and had several students who came to see her regularly, mostly Korean graduate students and wives of graduate students.
Of course, Howard’s years-long battle with Alzheimer and vascular dementia took a tremendous toll on Jane. After Howard died at the age of 81 in 2011, she had a hard time regaining her tone of mind and strength of body, but she continued studying foreign languages like Chinese and developed an interest in cosmology and physics. She read voraciously and kept up with the news until the bitter end. She even appeared on the Dutch national news by Zoom, commenting on the January 6 attack on Congress.
Jane’s family continues to grow, friends, grandchildren, nephews and nieces of all flavors, you name it. Without her the family would not be what it is. We will do our best to continue her legacy of love and inclusion that makes us what we are today.