Obituary by Paul Sheftel, June 17, 2024
Sara Sheftel, née Silverstein, died peacefully on Sunday June 16, 2024, at age 93. Sara led a rich and full life both professionally and personally. She was born in Montevideo, Uruguay and lived the better part of her young years in Santiago, Chile where she attended Santiago College. Her father was a gifted artist and her mother his adroit business partner. Sara was a gifted and accomplished concert violinist. At age 20 she came to New York to study at the Juillard School, working with lrenowned teachers Dorothy DeLay and Ivan Galamian. She earned her degree in the early 1950s. At Juilliard she met Paul, her future husband and the love of her life.
Sara had a probing intellect, was multi-talented and always restless for varieties of experiences. She was deeply sensitive to all things visual, a gift she would have inherited from her artist father. Upon graduating from Juilliard, she took courses in interior design while even considering a career change. At that time husband Paul, also a recent Juilliard graduate, won a Fulbright grant for advanced piano studies in Rome. Their life took a new and wonderful direction. They performed together extensively throughout Italy earning considerable attention and plaudits. The then-director of the Conservatorio of Santa Cecilia, composer Guido Guerrini, took an interest in their work. Their public performance of his sonata for violin and piano was highly praised and contributed to Paul’s Fulbright renewal. During those years their lives were profoundly enriched by the arrival of their two daughters, Claudia and Gigi.
Their entire stay in Italy lasted 10 years. Thanks to her years at Santiago College, Sara was trilingual with an impeccable command of Spanish, French and English — Italian soon followed. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations located in Rome needed simultaneous interpreters with precisely those languages combinations. Sara acquired that challenging skill with breathtaking ease and was soon not only interpreting for FAO in Rome but traveling to far-flung parts of the world — Europe, Ghana, Poland, Cuba, Israel — under UN auspices.
For many years, upon their return New York Sara, never abandoning her first love, the violin, became a staff interpreter at the UN. The restlessness returned and Sara, while still working at the UN, then enrolled for psychoanalytic studies at the renowned Center for Psychoanalytic Studies (CMPS). After many years of intensive study and training, Sara graduated with a doctoral degree. For her thesis she combined her passion for Mozart, her training as well as her probing study of Mozart and his family, to write a fascinating dissertation on what the psychodynamics of that family might have been. Lectures and articles followed; she also honored one her most influential mentors, Dr. Hyman Spotnitz, by editing a festschrift in his name. She developed a thriving psychoanalytic practice and made a profoundly meaningful contribution to the lives of many.
Sara was deeply loved by the many who will grieve her loss. She is survived by her loving husband Paul, her two adoring daughters, Claudia and Gigi, and four equally loving grandchildren: Catherine (with husband Joe), James (and his Caroline), Zoe and Miranda, as well as fathers David and John.
