She recalls, for example, that when the earthquake jolted San Francisco, her family’s home on the outskirts of the fiery city became a haven for those fleeing with their possessions in wagons and carts.
“My mother killed all the chickens she had in the yard and fed hundreds of people,” recalls the bright-eyed centenarian, who looks years younger than her age. “And I remember going to the egg man. We got all the eggs he’d give us.”
Back then, Hoffmann’s parents owned a general merchandise store near their home on San Bruno Avenue; her mother gave free clothes to earthquake victims and let them sleep on the store’s floor.
“My mother was very generous,” Hoffmann says.
Her father, she adds, was “a jolly old man.” Unfortunately, he was also afflicted with severe arthritis. When Hoffmann was a young woman, her parents moved to a ranch in San Jose, where they felt the climate would be better for her father’s health.
While Hoffmann continued living in San Francisco, it was to her parent’s house that her late husband, Louis, took her on their first date — on a day that was “raining cats and dogs.”
“Oh, I fell in love with him the minute I saw him,” she says with a smile. “He wore gloves and spats. He looked like a million dollars. He was a wonderful man.”
A cabinetmaker who emigrated from Russia in 1914, Louis Hoffmann “did a lot of the woodwork all around the city,” his widow says.
He crafted the bookcases that hold the prayerbooks outside the sanctuary at San Francisco’s Congregation Sherith Israel; the Hoffmanns were early members of the synagogue and belonged to several other Jewish organizations, as well.
He even designed their house near the city’s West Portal district. A central feature was its grand ballroom, a site of frequent entertaining. “We had parties and dances,” Hoffmann recalls. “We had our son’s bar mitzvah there.”
Widowed since 1968, Hoffmann remembers many details about her late husband. Not the least of those was his affection for her “noodles and milk,” a blend of cooked noodles, hot milk, sugar and cinnamon that her late husband liked to eat for breakfast.
“We used to buy 50 pounds of noodles at a time,” says Hoffmann, sitting in a Jewish Home activity room dressed in a bright purple sweatsuit. “We’d get them wholesale.”
Hoffmann’s husband wasn’t the only fan of her noodles and milk concoction, however. Before she moved into the Jewish Home two years ago, a grandson from Portland, Ore., made the dish a staple during his visits here.
“The usual,” he would tell his grandma when she asked what he wanted to eat in the morning.
A mother of two, grandmother of six and great-grandmother of 11, Hoffmann is known among kin as a kugel and banana bread-maker extraordinaire and an author of long, affectionate letters.
“She is the most loving and caring of Jewish grandmothers,” says granddaughter Roberta Wain-Becker, a music teacher who lives in Mill Valley. “Her main concern is how everybody is.”
Wain-Becker is among those who will attend a Sunday, Feb. 16 birthday party for Hoffmann at the Jewish Home. The family, understandably, wants Hoffmann to cross the century mark with fanfare.
For her part, the 100-year-old takes the milestone in stride. “I don’t even think about it,” she says. “It’s just another day, another year.”
Still, Hoffmann does have a piece of wisdom for those interested in achieving longevity. “You just have to work hard,” she says. “Working makes your life sweet.”