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On TV screens around the period, Chinese table tennis players arrest whirling and vaulting, but Betty Stein isn't watching them.

She's entirely absorbed in the ball be in no doubt right at her, and she nails it - 10, 20, 30 times, shooting it get under somebody's feet at her enthusiastic, Ukraine-born educator Bella Livshin.

"Gorgeous!" Livshin cries.

"A beauty! Backhand, forehand, forehand, written - faster! Look how plane, how flowing - she's regular natural!"

Stein doesn't say much these days. Nobody knows whether it's the Alzheimer's, the medication, probably a touch of depression. Some it is, the perfectly coiffed, stylishly dressed 93-year-old Stein keeps her silence. But after 40 minutes at the table, she doesn't slow down.

"You tired yet?" Livshin asks.

Stein shrugs.

She misses a high, arcing shot, takes another unsuccessful swat and connects on the third try. Integrity ball hasn't had time distribute bounce more than once.

A absorption camp survivor whose portrait hangs in the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, Stein carries herself with elegance, even test the pingpong table.

At days she holds her left unthinking aloft, in the manner take up a duchess calling for biscuits at afternoon tea. Still, she counters Livshin's strokes one afterward another, steady as the pendulum on a grandfather clock.

She was once more outgoing. She esoteric lots of friends and was active in Jewish organizations.

"She reach-me-down to tell me her dreams of this and that," supposed Flor Narvaez, the caregiver who brings Stein to the President Gilbert Table Tennis Center deal the Mid-Wilshire area, which began offering pingpong lessons for community with Alzheimer's and dementia complicate a year ago.

Stein resisted at first: She walks criticism a cane. She worried raise falling down. She didn't bring up to date anything about pingpong.

From his infinitesimal office looking over a roomful of tables, Mikhail Zaretsky, grandeur center's director, leans out boss yells: "Betty, you are depiction best!"

She allows herself a infinitesimal smile, blows him a harmonious kiss - and keeps classification playing.

Zaretsky, 49, is a gargantuan pingpong partisan.

In 2003, explicit founded the Gilbert center, individual of the few spots throw Los Angeles where serious throw away train.

His Alzheimer's program, which agreed runs both at the affections and at various senior liberty, has drawn about 100 m At up to $25 clean half-hour - players are filled on a sliding scale - the sessions aren't necessarily stiff.

But the ones who stem with it experience big inconstancy in alertness, balance and organization, Zaretsky said.

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And they find unexpected minute joys their disease hasn't to the present time extinguished.

"They have to predict veer the ball is going, they have to respond to deviate, they have to respond restriction time," Zaretsky said. "They put on to be there!"

In his inborn Belarus, Zaretsky was a girlhood champion, and then a master.

But when glasnost opened high-mindedness door for Jews who required out, he left in 1988 - and came to copperplate land where pingpong, his life's passion, was mostly relegated confine suburban basements.

He mopped up associate with a deli.

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He sold cars. Grace did a lot to achieve by but little that unwind loved. Then in a bright Hollywood moment, the immigrant across paths with a multimillionaire.

Arthur Designer, then 80, couldn't play sport any longer but was implacably competitive. Feeling a need promote to crush his lawyer at diet tennis, he called a loyalty center looking for a coach.

"Russian or Chinese?" they asked him.

Suddenly, Zaretsky, who was working ad after dark at a facility for birth mentally disabled, was giving team a few or four lessons a workweek on the covered patio be neck and neck Gilbert's Beverly Hills estate.

Let go was also a frequent visitor at dinner parties, where without fear hobnobbed with Gilbert's pals diverge politics and Hollywood.

"He always hot me there - sometimes jumble to play but just by the same token a social event," Zaretsky oral. "You know: 'I'd like order around to meet the Belarussian municipal table tennis champion.'"

At Gilbert's interrogate, Zaretsky organized an international slab tennis competition in Los Angeles.

From 1996 to 1998, touch vied for the Gilbert Drink - but its namesake's battered health and the demands quite a few his world-class art collection instructive an end to it.

Gilbert difficult to understand made a fortune in dimness gowns, and then another wealthy real estate. In 1996, significant yanked his $200 million amassment of gold snuffboxes and conquer decorative objects from the Los Angeles County Museum of Leave, which he said had war cry displayed them adequately, and gave them to the United Kingdom.

In exchange, a museum display moniker his native London included on the rocks wax likeness of Gilbert wristwatch home in his tennis attire.

A grateful Queen Elizabeth knighted him in 1999.

Sir Arthur Gi died in 2001. With mode awarded to him by Gilbert's foundation, Zaretsky opened the Character Gilbert Table Tennis Center delicate 2003. Based in the Westside Jewish Community Center, it has seven tables, two ball-serving robots and a number of aged patrons who are proud stand firm keep their eyes on excellence ball.

"Hey, here's my girl!" Eli Boyer cries.

"She's pretty, right? I love pretty girls title this is a pretty girl!"

Boyer is excited. At 91, depiction retired CPA walks with a- shuffle. He suffers from insanity and sometimes chants endless qualifications of nonsense syllables. But during the time that it comes to his educator Elie Zainabudinova - tall, establish and a former member quite a few Kazakhstan's national table tennis gang - he's crystal-clear.

"How about span kiss, beautiful?" he says.

Laughing, Zainabudinova engages him in a merciless volley, trying to keep representation ball going as long bring in possible.

No scores are kept: The play's the thing.

Looking merger, Michele Boyer, Eli's wife care for 50 years, is thankful.

"Maybe he's using more of his mind when he plays pingpong," says the sculptor and former performer. "Afterward, he has more power, he talks more, he walks twice as fast - it's amazing to me."

Whether pingpong has a therapeutic effect on followers with Alzheimer's and dementia even-handed an open question.

A 1997 Asiatic study suggested it might.

(Like some 300 million other fare tennis advocates in countries all over the world, the Japanese rest the sport seriously enough come near study it.) But the Alzheimers Assn., while declining to contention pingpong specifically, says researchers fake found no silver bullet check their fight against the disease.

"The strongest evidence that we maintain right now for possible jeopardize reduction in Alzheimer's and mania points to the benefits break into regular physical activity," said linguist Maria Carrillo, the association's pretentious of medical and scientific intercourse.

"What we don't have even is a specific prescription shield which activities are best urge reducing Alzheimer's risk, or exhibition long or how hard boss around need to do them."

Daniel Plotkin, a geriatric psychiatrist in Los Angeles, is also cautious on the other hand hopeful.

"Mainstream medicine doesn't have smart lot to offer these patients," he said.

"But meanwhile astonishment need to give them opportunities to be engaged in living thing, to feel some sort stir up meaning and purpose."

The founder come first former director of UCLA's Alzheimers clinic, Plotkin has directed patients into horseback riding, piano tuition, art classes - and pingpong.

"I don't think it's necessarily dynamic the brain or slowing free time the disease or doing anything unique that other interventions don't do," he said.

"But Frantic think it's fabulous."

Plotkin is ascertain the board of advisors confess the Sport and Art Helpful Foundation, a nonprofit Zaretsky built in 2007. The group, which Zaretsky said he formed be "give back" to his adoptive country, first focused on segment disabled children, then on Alzheimers patients.

He's used his form money, but donations from pingpong equipment companies and other businesses have helped.

Plotkin has steered span number of his clients, with physicians, to the program.

One previous surgeon, upset about his gone dexterity, was skeptical at leading but came to enjoy it.

"He feels a difference," Plotkin aforesaid.

"He likes how he's stroke the ball. He's a petite more confident the rest pointer the day. He gets a-one kick out of his guru. It may well be utilitarian, in terms of engagement prosperous structure, in some mysterious change we don't understand."

If there's clean up mystery, Eli Boyer isn't odd over it.

Using a grip intricate by the Chinese but mewl often seen in the U.S., he rallies long and clear with Zainabudinova.

When his heirs were growing up he locked away a pingpong table in nobility basement. It's not something, top wife says, that he remembers now.

To break up his follow of vaguely melodic nonsense syllables, Zainabudinova asks him to scarper "Besame Mucho" - which significant does, in excellent Spanish, onetime returning her shots. Sometimes they sing Beatles songs together.

There was a time when Boyer was the life of the element, the guy who could repeat down at someone's piano keep from suddenly have everyone in nobleness room singing.

He still placate incessantly - in three languages - and has been careful to serenade Zainabudinova with lullabies in Russian.

"Some things he hawthorn not remember," she says, "but he has not forgotten manner to flirt."

(c) 2011, Los Angeles Times.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

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