HARRY BOONIN ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY:This is Christa Whitney, and today is March 20th, 2018. I am here -- where are we, exactly?

HARRY BOONIN: (laughter) You're in Warrington, Pennsylvania.

CW:Warrington, Pennsylvania. I'm here in Warrington, Pennsylvania, with Harry Boonin. We're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Do I have your permission to record?

HB:Yes, you do.

CW:Great. So, I'd like to start by asking, where is your family from in Europe?

HB:Well, my father's family is from a little town in Minsk Gubernia, called Slutsk. And my mother is from a little town in Russia, called Yelizavetgrad, a much larger town than my father was from.

CW:And when did they come to the US?

HB:Well, my mother came first. My mother comes from a very large family. She had seventeen brothers and sisters. And she was in a part of the country in 1905 that experienced pogroms. And one of her brothers joined the Jewish defense league/club/organization that helped defend the town against the pogromchiks, the people that made pogroms. And her brother was killed in defense of the town. And at that point my grandmother had enough, and she picked up the family. There were seven children with her, and they came to Philadelphia. All eighteen children didn't live through birth; I think about five or six of them, I was never able to determine. But my mother grew up in Philadelphia with her nine sisters and brothers.

CW:And about when did your father come, father's family?

HB:My father came five years later. He came in 1911. And his story is that his mother and father both died within a year of each other, and there were eight children. Two of the children were going to school in America in 1911, and six of the children from ages twenty-three to five were still in Russia, and they wanted to come to the United States to be with their other two brothers. But they had no one to bring them here except themselves. So, in planning for that, it took three years. And they wrote a series of letters, which have all been preserved, and they're all in Yiddish -- not all. There's one or two in Hebrew and a couple in Russian, but ninety-nine percent of them are in Yiddish. And some of them are very long, and they talk in quite some detail about all of the 3:00problems that the emigrants considered, both real problems and imagined problems, before they left on their emigration. Their emigration to America is really a story in itself, but they made it to Philadelphia, and the six of them were brought together with the two brothers here, and the eight of them raised themselves. Five of them went to college, and my father became a lawyer. And my mother was also a lawyer. So, I'm a first-generation American.

CW:And I'm just curious; what were the real and imagined problems that they --

HB:A lot of the real and imagined problems -- one, for example, is that at Ellis Island they put out a -- I guess you'd call it a regulation that to enter 4:00America, you needed twenty-five dollars, or else you would become what in the law was called a public charge. And that became a question in other ports as to whether the twenty-five dollars applied. In Russia, it was interpreted -- if you didn't have twenty-five dollars, you'd be kicked out. And in some ports in the United States, they were very liberal. And at other ports at other times, they didn't enforce that rule uniformly, so sometimes it was necessary, and that became a big issue when -- I know a lot about it because there was a fellow from Atlantic City named Abe Resnick, and he was with my father and his brothers and sisters when they came in 1911, and he didn't have any money. And my uncle had some money, so he gave it to him, but he didn't get the fellow's name or address or anything, (laughs) and the others. And he kept it from the rest of the family 5:00because he didn't give away this twenty-five dollars 'cause he thought he'd never get it back. But the fellow was very honest and came from Atlantic City to Philadelphia expressly to pay them twenty-five dollars back. But I don't think they needed it.

CW:Wow. And do you have a sense of what life was like in these two places where your parents came from?

HB:Yes. I have a good sense of my father's town because of all the letters that my grandmother and grandfather wrote. The area around the little town they grew up in was a farming community. And the Jews mostly farmed where the work was the hardest and the peasants didn't want to do it. The biggest problem for the Jews was that they could not own land, so they had to rent it outside of town, which meant if you were growing something like cucumbers -- many of them grew cucumbers -- that they had to take the water themselves, either with their horse and wagon or just carry it on their shoulders out to where the farm was and 6:00water it. If anybody has ever grown cucumbers, they take an awful lot of water. And then, of course, when the cucumbers become ready to be picked, everybody's cucumber and everybody's field is picked at the same time. (laughs) So, when you went into the center of the town with cucumbers, everybody had cucumbers, and they -- 'course, they weren't worth too much. Also, they grew potato and other garden vegetables. It's very interesting; when I had the letters translated about forty years ago, the woman who did the translating was from Riga. And she surprisingly said to me -- it was either in 1938 or '39, just about the time that these countries were being divided up between Hitler and Stalin, that she went to a Yiddish college -- I didn't know Riga had a Yiddish college. I still don't know. But that's what she told me. So, she studied Yiddish. Then, she 7:00immigrated to Israel. And she got into a very bad divorce, and that's when I met her. And I told her the story that I had these letters, and she wanted something to do. So I said, "Well, we have a couple hundred letters and about --" -- more than that -- "-- but over a hundred are in Yiddish, and some are five or six pages long." She said she would charge me a dollar to translate each one. Well, I felt sorry for her. I tried to give her a little more money, but she didn't want to do it. She finally got to one of the letters that talked about how difficult farming was for the Jews in Russia, and she started to cry. And I didn't understand why she was crying. She said, "Everything we were told in the Soviet Union was not true. It was false." And she was told that the Jews never did any hard work. And that's what they learned in the Soviet system. And that made her cry when she read something that she felt was the truth for the first time.

CW:And were these families religious that -- observant?

HB:No. If I showed you pictures of the family, my grandfather wore a yarmulke when photographs were taken. In Slutsk, when my oldest uncle left in 1903, it was the tradition to take a photograph with the oldest son who was about to be drafted, because he knew he could never get back to Russia, and he knew he never would see his parents again. So, they made these memorial photographs. And my grandfather is wearing a yarmulke, but nobody else in the family is wearing a yarmulke. If you'd like, I can give you that picture. I never really showed it to anybody. But it's a dramatic picture because it confirms part of Jewish history. And I'm sure every family must've had a photograph like this, which may 9:00have been lost or never sent to the United States.

CW:Can you just explain briefly about the draft and why they -- it was so desperate to avoid it?

HB:Well, the draft started out -- there's a lot of misunderstandings about that. And starting in 1825, they drafted Jewish kids as young as eight years old for twenty-five years. And of course, they marched them in Siberia at eight years old, and almost all of them died along the way. But when Alexander II took over in 1856, he reduced that, and it was finally reduced by law in 1874 to four years. But the biggest problem with the draft was that you would have to eat pork, and you would have to eat foods that are forbidden to Jews. And most people who were on the religious side didn't want to be forced to do that, and 10:00rather than do that, they would leave their family, which was a big choice. They were leaving a lot of brothers and sisters behind, and they were coming themselves. Many of them came hoping to bring their families with them at a later time when they'd raised enough money. But the family back in Russia -- I had one story where the family back in Russia said they thought it was too dangerous to go to the United States, and they wanted to stay in Russia. Things you don't hear today.

CW:And what about your mother's family? Were they observant?

HB:My mother's family lived in the Ukraine. And my theory in this -- it's only a theory, and I'm sure a lot of people disagree with it -- almost everybody in Russia in the nineteenth century and the later part of the eighteenth century started out in the north: Lithuania, Latvia, and those areas around there. And it was a very religious area. But not everybody was religious. And when Russia 11:00opened up land that they won from Turkey in the south, they made it easy for Jews to immigrate there. And it was almost like manifest destiny in the United States, where people went west for a reason: to get land, to be more free, to be more open. So, in Russia people went south, and my feeling is they were the less religious people. It doesn't mean they still weren't religious, but they weren't religious as the people in the north were. And so, my family in the south -- I have a picture from 1897, and there's about twenty people in it, a lot of men and boys, and none of them are wearing skullcaps or kippah or yarmulkes. And they didn't have head covering. And they weren't religious in the sense that 12:00they didn't want their lives to be governed by religion. They didn't have any objection to the traditions that they loved of Judaism, such as Passover and getting the family together. But they really enjoyed the part of Judaism that brought the family together, sorta like American Thanksgiving, I would equate it to. It doesn't mean that they -- but they were not close with the synagogue. My mother, when she was dying, I asked her for some information, and she told me a story. It's hard to believe, but she said that when my grandmother, who had the eighteen children and had had one of her sons killed in the pogrom, would seek advice in the town -- it was a big town. There were twenty-three thousand Jews and sixty-five thousand total people -- my grandmother would go to the local priest for advice. She didn't go to the rabbi. Whether that was unusual or not, 13:00I don't know. I was surprised to hear it.

CW:Wow. Did she talk at all about the pogrom?

HB:No, but the book we have, we wrote as much as we could, and I found a lot of information about it. The (laughs) unusual part of the pogrom that my uncle got killed -- we were told as children -- I have twenty-two first cousins, or I had, at one time. And we were all told by our parents that our uncle Victor was killed in a pogrom. I don't think his name was Victor; I think it was Vigdor. And "Vigdor" is sorta hard to say, and if you say it in English and American it became "Victor," I think. That's what the story is. So, when a fellow was doing some research for me at Yelizavetgrad, he found a newspaper article that identified everybody killed in the pogrom. The last name of the family was Davidovsky. And he did find a Davidovsky. But it wasn't Victor or Vigdor; it was 14:00Joseph, his brother. And everybody told us in the family that Joseph had been killed in a fire. So, either my grandmother gave the newspaper reporter bad news because she didn't want to -- maybe Joseph was dead, and she didn't wanna tell him that Vigdor was still alive. Or she had some other reason that makes sense. That doesn't make sense to me because Vigdor never came to this country. So, I just assumed he was killed in Russia. But I don't know if he was the brother of my mother killed or -- but we dedicated the book to Victor, 'cause we didn't know all this (laughs) at the time. We learned it after the book came out. (laughs) But that was the relationship with religion, and I think why the Jews went to the south. And one other fact in that is that informal studies have been 15:00made by our genealogy society of what kind of Jews settled in Philadelphia from 1882 to 1924. And he found out what I thought all along, that -- he said that seventy percent of the Jews that settled here came from the Ukraine. Which meant that they were these more free-loving people who did not want to be dominated by religion, whereas the people that settled in Boston, to a large extent, came from Latvia and Lithuania, which were much more educated and much more religious. That's a general statement. There's a million exceptions. But in generalities, I think it has some substance behind it.

CW:And where did you grow up?

HB:I grew up in a part of Philadelphia -- I was born in 1936. I'm eighty-one 16:00years old. And I grew up in a part of Philadelphia that was not Jewish. My mother was a lawyer; my father was a lawyer. They both loved Judaism. But I think that they loved the American dream and assimilation also. One was not loved any more than the other. But they wanted to practice their Judaism in an American part of town. So, I grew up on a street that had one other Jewish boy, but I was not friendly with him. And my best friends -- one was German, was Ray Buch, and another was German, Jimmy Melwick, and the third was Ray Fritone. He was Italian. And so, I grew up in "Saint Matt's Parish," actually. (laughs) That's how I describe the area. And I really didn't meet anybody until my bar mitzvah, and then when I was fourteen, I was told there were girls, (laughs) so 17:00I was told that I should go out with a Jewish girl. So, that broke the -- but the growing-up years, the important years, Jimmy and Ray and I all had dogs, and we would spend a lot of our time not like most Jewish boys did in the inner city, but we lived right next to a huge park, and we would all take the dogs down there. And there was a railroad siding down there that we would spend the whole day down there with the dogs and bring our lunch, and they would play, and we would play. I grew up in the park, and my early years were much different. School was much different. Schoolmates never gave me any -- they never identified me in any way that I could understand because of my Judaism, and I didn't experience any anti-Semitism. When we chose sides for baseball I was chosen last, but I thought I was a terrible player, and I thought I should not 18:00have been chosen at all. So, for me it was a real big deal to be put out in right field. Everybody was in right field because there were no left-handed batters in those days. But I thought that the children that went to my grade school were very fair. This was during the war. And during the war, the fields had victory gardens. And people talk about the victory gardens during the war. But the victory gardens that we had had literally dozens and dozens of victory gardens. And I don't remember too much about it 'cause I was too little, but the one thing I do remember is in the summertime, I remember I lifted up my head -- I had my little garden next to my father's garden -- and I lifted my head up, and you could see all the people hoeing and raking their little plots so they could bring home the vegetables for their wives to can. And mom used to do the 19:00canning in our house. But I do remember that scene in my mind.

CW:Can you just explain briefly what a victory garden is? People might not know -- what a victory garden is?

HB:Oh, a victory garden. During the war, we were urged to do certain things to help the war effort. Like, at the end of our block, we had a big can. I would say it was five feet high. And I was about two feet high. And it was about thirty-six inches in diameter. So, it was a big can. And my job was after dinner, if Mom made peas in a can, I had to take the can opener and get the bottom off, and then I would step on it to flatten it out. So, I had the lid, which was tin, the bottom, which was tin, and the stamped-on can. And I would get together with these, and I would take it down to -- end of the block, and you'd throw it in the big can. And if I didn't hear a sound for a while I knew it was empty because it would clank at the bottom. But if it was full, it would 20:00make a dull noise, meaning that the whole thing was full. And it was amazing to me how quickly it filled up. So, that was one thing we did to help the war effort. Another thing was victory gardens. What is a victory garden? It was named that -- it's a sales pitch as to how the average civilian can help in the war effort. And by growing our own vegetables, it freed up farmers and farmers' sons to go into the service. And the farmer's son who worked on tractors, I learned much later in life, were a very important part of maintaining the B-17s over in England. They had so many kids that grew up fixing tractors that -- in those days they were not dealing with electronics, and most of the boys were very willing and had a lot of knowledge on it. So, these victory gardens freed up a lot of people, I think, and we were told that we had to can different 21:00things. We were not kosher, and when we got done making bacon, mom would put bacon in a little jar, and then when the jar was full of grease -- it was in the refrigerator, so it congealed and became hard -- then my job was to take it up to the butcher, who was not Jewish, and he would use this for the war effort. I never had the nerve to ask him what they did with it (laughs) for the war effort. But everybody said it was used for something, and to this day I don't know what it was used for. And then, of course, we all had ration books. And if mom sent me to the store to buy some meat and butter -- I remember meat and butter, I don't know if cheese had a rationing -- and I didn't understand the ration book, but they were stamps, little stamps, that they would take out, and there were little flimsy pieces of paper between them. And the clerk would show me which stamps to give her for the meat and which stamps to give her. So, even 22:00little kids were involved in the war effort then, the victory garden being one of them. My father was the civil defense person on our block, and to protect our house, everybody had to have a can of sand. So, if the Germans came over and bombed our house, we had one bucket of sand to put out this whole fire, (laughs) and -- but everybody did what they could. We never got bombed.

CW:Good thing. And what was Jewish about your home?

HB:What was Jewish about the home? Mostly the holidays. We didn't have too many holidays. My father died very young. My mother and father were lawyers, and they practiced together, and when I was ten years old my father died, so mom had to carry on by herself. And it was easier for her to go to her sister's in Trenton. We spent almost every weekend in Trenton in my lifetime, and almost all the holidays I remember, from the Passover meals and -- I sort of considered them 23:00almost the same as Thanksgiving. Everybody would be there. At Passover, a lot of religious people read the whole haggadah. We have two girls, and I tried to teach our girls the haggadah. And they both loved it. But I never learned it, and I didn't use it. But to me, it was very similar to Thanksgiving. I saw the same people; we ate the same food. Except for -- what did Sylvia make? What kind of cake did Sylvia make?

F:(off-mic) Sponge cake.

CW:Sponge cake?

HB:A sponge cake, yeah. Was it a sponge cake? Sponge cake. It was delicious. And we had that on Passover, (laughs) but we didn't have it on Thanksgiving. Everything else was sorta similar. I don't know if that answers the question or not.

CW:Yeah, definitely.

HB:One other thing about religion: my father was not permitted to be bar mitzvah. My uncles hated the Jewish religion. They hated it because of the way 24:00they were treated in school, and they made my father hate it. He didn't like the way my uncles acted because he never went to school and was never beaten up and given a lash or anything that they experienced, so he didn't have that. He was very open-minded. And when he died he was forty-two, but he was studying Hebrew, and he wanted to become bar mitzvah when he wasn't allowed. But even though he had no Jewish training and no Jewish encouragement, he was the one who founded the Jewish synagogue in our neighborhood.

CW:And what was the synagogue called?

HB:NEJCC, the Northeast Jewish Community Center, at Walker and Tyson, in -- I guess between Mayfair and Torresdale, it was. The building still stands, but it's used to sell old clothing today.

CW:And what was your feeling towards the Jewish religion growing up?

HB:Well, maybe one good story about that was my own feeling was that all these 25:00friends of mine were Catholic or Protestant, and they all had Christmas trees -- I was in their house -- and I always liked the Christmas tree, I always liked seeing them happy, and I always liked seeing them getting presents. But I'm not a jealous type of person, and I never wanted a Christmas tree. I never expressed that to my mother, and my mother never said anything to me about a Christmas tree. I was very happy with the life we had, and I was very happy for them. And that sort of -- I was terrible at my bar mitzvah. I didn't want to go through it. But mom said, "You got to," so I got to, I got to. So, I used to sing with the rabbi. And I can't sing. And he would chant a little verse and then have me chant it. And he would always say to me, "Are you really trying?" (laughs) I 26:00don't know; I get a kick out of the story. Then, the next thing I hated about the bar mitzvah was I was real short. So, he takes me up on the bimah one day, and I can't see over the lectern where the Torah was being read from. So, I told him, I said, "I can't see over this thing." So, he said, "That'll be no problem, we'll put a Yellow --" -- they used to have Yellow Pages for advertising for the phone. And in Philadelphia, the book was about four inches thick. So, he said, "You'll stand on that." So, I stood on that. I still couldn't see. He said, "Don't worry, you'll stand on two Yellow Pages." So, I stood on books that were about eight or ten inches high, but they had a slippery cover, so when I'd stand on them, they were sliding all over the place when I was supposed to be concentrating. I just about was falling off them. (laughs) So, I put more emphasis on trying to stay straight than I did on what I was supposed to be doing. But I got through it, and then I dropped my Hebrew right away. But I did 27:00join a AZA group. That was a group for young boys. 'Course, they had young girls, and we used to have dances, and I liked that. (laughs) That's when we were fourteen. But what I really liked was we had sports. We played baseball and basketball and football against other AZA chapters, and I got to see other parts of the city, and I liked that part of it. But that was not religious. It met at the synagogue, but not religious. And I had never had any thoughts of -- when I got to the age when you think about getting married, I never thought I'd marry anybody but a Jewish woman. And boy, was she Jewish! Is Jewish. (laughs) I'll tell you more about that later.

CW:Did you hear any languages other than English when you were growing up?

HB:No. The languages I heard were mostly Italian in the barbershop, and I didn't 28:00understand it, but most of the barbers spoke with an Italian accent. I remember them all telling me, As soon as I retire, I'm going back to Italy. (laughs) Everybody said the same thing. But Italian was about the only language I remember. Oh, the policemen on the block were Irish, but they -- they spoke with an Irish accent, but I didn't know whether they were born in Philadelphia or they were born in Ireland. To answer your question directly, I didn't hear much in foreign languages.

CW:So, earlier you were talking about the war effort. How much were you aware of what was going on in Europe when you were growing up?

HB:I'd say almost nothing. Mom didn't talk to me. I don't know why she didn't talk to me. Or I didn't express any interest and she thought she wasn't gonna waste any time on me if I wasn't interested. And that's probably -- she probably would've talked to me had I expressed an interest. I think I was very immature 29:00during those years and -- some kids, you know, really -- like, my cousin had a big map of the war. But in his case, he was a little older than I was, and he had two older brothers in the service. One was fighting in France. So, he had a real interest in it. I didn't really know anybody -- other than my cousin's older brothers, who I did know slightly when I was younger. (pauses) What was the question again?

CW:Well, just what were you aware of, if anything?

HB:Oh, about the war. Well, I knew that my father was a -- the warden -- the civil warden? I forget the name of it. But if anybody had any questions about the war, they were supposed to come to see him. And I knew from all the things I explained that this is what the civilians did. As far as the war itself goes, the only thing I remember -- and it must've been in 1944 -- I remember that my 30:00uncle on my father's side used to come over on Sunday night, and everybody would gather around the radio, and we would listen to one broadcaster, I forget who it was, who used to say, "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, this is --" and he'd give his name. And he would say, "And hello to --" -- this is not exactly right -- "-- to all the ships at sea, and let's go to France." Somebody who knows the period would know who that was. And then, I turned it off 'cause I didn't understand what he was saying. I was about eight years old. The other thing that surprised me about the war is I collected stamps because you were supposed to collect stamps, and I still have my stamp book from 1944. And my mother bought me a big envelope full of canceled stamps from all over the world. And there were Nazi stamps in there. And I used to play with them 'cause I didn't 31:00understand what it was. And I was surprised that mom didn't take 'em away from me. I never -- I didn't want to embarrass her, and I never asked her a question about it. But that's about -- I don't remember V-E Day. I should, but I don't. But I do have a picture of me on V-E Day. It's a very interesting picture. It's on the cover of one of these books, but if you wanna get a picture, it's nice. It's myself and my younger cousin, Joel, who's one year younger, and my older cousin, David, who is six years older. And we all became lawyers. And in the middle of the picture is my grandmother. So, my mother used to call the picture "Grandmom and her three lawyers." (laughs) But to answer your question. I didn't have any real connection with the war, to that little extent, and I really have to dig in my memory for those things.

CW:And then, I'm curious if you remember at what point you learned about the 32:00Holocaust. Because sometimes people remember that distinctly.

HB:Well, I can't answer that directly, but I remember when I got a copy of "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by Shirer. That was in -- he published it in 1960. And I remember thinking, How can somebody write this after so many books have already been written? That's the way I approached it. I had no idea what would happen after 1960. I was looking from 1960 back to 1945. There was a professor -- and that's what surprised me -- but there was a professor at Gratz College here in Philadelphia -- it's a Jewish college -- and she wrote a book called "The Holocaust." And I think that that's the first time the word was ever used. I don't know when the Holocaust -- Levin was her last name. I'm sorry; I 33:00forget her first name.

CW:That's okay.

HB:But many, many books, obviously, and the word was picked up. It must have been used before she used it, and she must have written the book sometime in the '50s. But the first time I was aware of the Holocaust -- I was more aware of things like the McCarthy era than I was of the Holocaust. I would say it was much later than most. I know I was aware by 1960. And I was already in college. But I don't know -- we never talked about it in high school. There was no discussion of it. I don't know if you want to hear about the McCarthy era.

CW:I do. I would be curious to hear about it.

HB:I have an unusual story.

CW:Yeah.

HB:I told this story many times, and nobody believes me, so I -- I don't know what I can do. Other -- if you believe me, fine; if you don't, that's fine. I 34:00was in eleventh or twelfth grade, about sixteen years old. And we were studying immigration. And the teacher asked a question as to how many people have -- are the son or the daughter of parents that neither one of them were born in the United States? So, four of us stood up. I remember this pretty clearly. And the first person said, "My parents were born in Ireland." And the next person said, "My parents were born in Italy." And the next person said, "My parents were born in Italy," or Irish -- or Ireland. And then, she came to me, and I said, "My parents were born in Russia." And she said to me, "No, they weren't." So, (laughs) you try to figure it out as to how do you get -- how do you -- so me, as a stupid kid, I said, "Yes, they were." (laughs) I didn't know what to say. So, she said, "You're expelled." So, she expelled me. She made me get out of the room. So, I go home. So, it's about eleven o'clock in the morning. And mom says, "What in the world are you doing home?" By that time, mom had a business and 35:00relied on the business to make her money. She just couldn't make enough money in law. She still did the law, but she was home. So, I told her this crazy story. So, mom really got mad. She knew a lot of the background which I didn't know. And she grabbed me by the arm, and we really, literally marched into the vice-principal's office. Mom was a very, very polite person, and very caring. But I never saw her march into somebody's office without any announcement, without anything. And she went up to the desk and told the vice-principal what I just said. He got as mad as she was. So, they walked me up to the classroom; they said, You stay in the hallway. I was always sorry I never heard what happened. But in about five minutes, I was told to get back in class. What happened during that period of 1953 was one day we came in the class, and my geometry teacher was Mrs. Chrone, spelled C-h-r-o-n-e, or K-h-r-o-n-e, and they 36:00said, Mrs. Chrone isn't here. She won't be coming back. And that was it. Well, the kids in those days, they didn't think too much. The Un-American Activities Committee was meeting in Philadelphia. And what I learned later -- I didn't learn this till thirteen or fourteen years later, till I finished college and finished law school -- was that she had taken the Fifth Amendment and wouldn't name names, and so she was fired by the school board. Then, about two weeks later my homeroom teacher, whose name I now forget, somebody came in the room and said that Mr. Perlach -- that was his name -- Mr. Perlach will not be coming back. And we were not told anything about him. And he was fired for the same reason. Later on they were all given back pay for thirteen or fourteen years. But at the time, it was -- the vote in the school board was I think something 37:00like twenty to one. There was only one person who voted not to dismiss them because they had a legal right to invoke the Fifth Amendment. So, that was the story of (laughs) my school years. But nobody talked about it. Except for one funny story with my mother: When I got out of the Navy, I went to Penn State. So, I had to come home right after I registered for my classes. This was in 1958. And McCarthy died in '57. So, mom says to me, "What class are you taking?" I said, Well, I'm taking this, I'm taking that, I'm taking this. She says, "What language are you taking?" I said, "I'm taking Russian." So, she looked at me, and she says, "If anybody asks you what you're taking, you tell 'em you're taking French." (laughs) I felt like saying, Mom, McCarthy's dead. But I was always polite with my mother, didn't say anything.

CW:When did you start getting interested in history and genealogy?

HB:Well, when I got interested in Yiddish first was an interesting story. At thirty, I had taken out a lot of girls and gone out with a lot of girls. I had finished my schooling, and I was working. And I think May and June of 1967, when I was thirty, were two of the months that were the most important in my life. First, in May, I got a job with the United States Navy as an attorney, and I worked there for thirty-one years. And it was a wonderful job, and I worked with wonderful people. The next month, June, was when the Six-Day War occurred. And that really changed my life to a big extent. I was so involved in it in a way that I had never been involved in anything. And that September, I started with my Hebrew classes. And I took them for years, as an adult trying to learn 39:00something which I should have learned as a kid. About a week after the war was over, I get a call from a boyfriend of mine, Bud Sitnick. And he says, "I got a blind date for you." I said, "Fine." And he says, "Well, we're going out, and we're going down shore." I said, "That's great." So, Ruth's side of the story is funny. Ruth gets a call from a girlfriend. And that's this Ruth here. (laughs) And her girlfriend says, "I got a date for you, and we're gonna spend a day at the shore." And Ruth says, "A day at the shore? With a blind date?" She says, "You're kidding!" So then, Ruth got to thinking. She says, "Yeah, I bought a new outfit, and this'll give me the chance to wear the new outfit. But can't we go out for a cup of coffee or something like that, spend five minutes? (laughs) I gotta spend five minutes with --- all day with this guy?" So, we get together, 40:00and we get in the back of the car, they were at the front of the car, and we drive to Atlantic City. And we were talking, Ruth and I -- Ruth has a good sense of humor, as you found out -- and I start to kid around. And I noticed that when she was talking, she would add things very naturally that were in Yiddish. And I had never taken out a girl who ever said a word in Yiddish. So, it struck me as -- it struck me. And this went on all summer. Then we -- we really liked each other right away. And we went to New York, and on these rides to New York, Ruth would tell me about her growing-up years. And they were exactly opposite from mine. She grew up on a block -- well, she grew up in Strawberry Mansion. Strawberry Mansion in Philadelphia at one time was a hundred percent Jewish, almost impossible to conceive today. I don't think there's places in Israel that's a hundred percent Jewish. And everybody on her block either spoke Yiddish 41:00or spoke English with a Yiddish accent. Ruth likes to tell the story that one day one of the fathers of her girlfriends died. She had a lot of girlfriends on the block. And her mother remarried what was called "a real American." (laughs) And that was somebody born here. There was nobody else born in the United States on the block. So, all the kids on the street used to go in her house to hear her father speak English without an accent. (laughs) Ruth had a lot of stories that I never heard anything. And I remember every one of them. She told me a lot of them more than once 'cause I love to hear them. But one of my favorite stories she told me was that she and her mother -- she has two brothers and two sisters. The two brothers are gone, and her two sisters, one's eighty-nine and one's ninety-seven. Ruth is the youngest in the family. But they didn't have any money to join a synagogue. But the end of their block -- they had these little row 42:00houses, and at the end of the block was a synagogue. And at the end of Yom Kippur, it's a Jewish tradition to blow the ram's horn at the end to indicate the end of Yom Kippur, and then you can eat, 'cause it's a fasting day. So, Ruth and her mother would sit on the porch. And the rabbi would actually blow the shofar on the street so everybody on the street could hear it. And then, Ruth and her mother would go, and they would know it's time to eat. So, she always fasted on Yom Kippur. I tried fasting once, I passed out, (laughs) and I got twelve stitches in my head, and I stopped that. But she told me a lot of stories that summer. And it just opened up a whole new world for me. So, that was in 1967. We were married in '69. And what happened was, just to continue with 43:00Yiddish, I became interested in Jewish genealogy. And I called up one of my aunts, 'cause my uncle had just died, my oldest uncle, on the Boonin side of the family, my father's side. And I'd said I'd like to come over and talk to her and learn a little about the family. And she says, "Come on over." And she says, "I'll show you the letters." But she didn't say what the letters were, I had no idea, and I didn't ask her. So, our youngest daughter was then five, and my youngest daughter, Jessica, and I went over to her house, and she gave me lunch, and she said to me, "I guess you're ready to see the letters." And again, I didn't say anything. And so, she led me upstairs. I had been at their house many times, never been upstairs. We went in their bedroom, and she closed the door, and behind the door was a little door. And she opened the door, and it was a stairway to an attic. Of course, I'd never been to the second floor; I'd never 44:00been to the attic. We go up in the attic, and it was a very cold but very bright February day in 1979. I'll never forget it. And we go up into the attic, and it looked just like a Norman Rockwell painting. It had everything in there. The old Singer sewing machine, the old trunk they used, the immigrants used, and everything else you would imagine to be in an attic. And she says to me, "See the trunk? Open it up." So, I opened it up. She says, "Take everything out of it." So, I took everything out of it. She says, "What do you see?" I said, "I see nothing. It's the bottom of the trunk." And she says, "That's a false bottom." So, I never did anything with trunks; I never even heard of false bottoms. So, I found out how to take the bottom out. When I took the bottom out, there were these piles of letters written -- I didn't know that at the time, but they were surrounded by a piece of twine. People don't use twine too much these 45:00days. And my uncle must have put them there, I don't know how many years before. And I said, "What are these, Aunt Gert?" And she says, "Well, your uncle saved stamps." I knew that. And all the envelopes were without the stamps. (laughs) So, one of the things that came to my mind is, The only reason he saved all these letters was for the stamps! (laughs) So, they were all missing. But the envelopes were there. And inside the envelopes were the letters. And they were written between 1908 and 1919 is the last one. And there must be four or five hundred of them. About I'd say 350 to 400 are in English. A lot of them -- and most of them were written between 1908, when they started -- I don't know why the letters started. I guess those are the ones that my uncle saved -- until 1911. And what happened during that period when they just happened to be writing 46:00letters is my grandfather died in 1909. And there's a beautiful letter from my grandmother of what her six children still at home would miss by not having a father. And she names my father would miss the image of his father, and he would never know it. My second uncle, Leo, would be the one who'd say kaddish, and he would really never know his father, but he would have to say kaddish. And the older ones, my uncle Sam, would not be able to be trained by his father, and he would never be able to make a living. And she went on to all six sons as not how it would affect her, but how it would affect their sons -- and daughters. They had two daughters. I digress here a little bit. But one of the daughters was Sarah. And one of the letters says -- I forget who it was from -- their father, I think. Sarah came up. She must have been about twelve at the time. And she 47:00pleaded with her father to go to school, to a Russian school. And her fa-- Sarah died for education. And her father said, "I only have so much money, and the boys have to go to kheyder" -- to Jewish school -- "and in the winter they need a coat. And so, I can use the money either to send you to school or buy a coat for --" and he named one of his sons. And he said, "Of course the money has to go for the coat." So, she never went to school. After the mother and father died and they came to this country, Sarah was by then fourteen. She was told that she was in charge of the house. She had to get the kids up in the morning; she had to cook for them all; she had to clean; she had to wash all their clothes. And she never got to go to school. So, to get out of that, I'm sure it didn't take much encouragement for her to marry the first boy who wanted to get married. They had four kids quickly. And she was right back into where she started at, in 48:00that now she was taking care of four of her own children. And she hated it -- not because she hated the children, but she always wanted to learn. And her first love was poetry. So, she decided on her own that on Sunday, she would take the day off and go to poetry readings. But she didn't hire anybody to look after the children. Two or three of them -- they were in diapers, and the oldest one was maybe three or four. And she'd leave 'em alone. I think her -- I'm just guessing at this -- that her husband's family must have known this. And her husband's family wanted to get control of the children for reasons I don't know. But she and her husband were divorced soon after that. Anyway, they reported her to child services, that said that they were abusing the children. And so, the 49:00children were taken away from her, and she was never allowed to see them again. So, Ruth and I learned all this when she died in 1988. And she was buried in the Boonin plot in Philadelphia. And all of her husband's grandchildren came. And they had never met her. And they were so anxious to find out about their grandmother, because they were never allowed to talk. And it was an interesting day we spent at the table. My cousin Miriam was there, who's older than I am. And she knew a lot of this. A lot of what I'm telling you I learned from Miriam. And the children learned for the first time. But it was a shame for Sarah because it affected her mentally, and she did oddball things that everybody thought was -- that she was a little touched in the head. But if you knew her background, you knew the reason for it.

CW:Yeah. So, what was the impact for you of hearing your wife-to-be's story of 50:00her background?

HB:Well, that's a good question. We have two daughters. They were born in '71 and '73. And we kind of got tied up with the kids. And Yiddish sorta took a back seat for both of us. But in '79, when I got these letters and I saw they were all in Yiddish, and then I would read some of the translations to Ruth. I couldn't read the Yiddish, 'cause it's all in handwriting. And in fact, the translator told me that it was in an older Yiddish. Because my grandmother was born in 1855, I think, and what she learned -- Sholem Aleichem had some effect -- this is what I've been told. I don't know if this was a fact -- had an effect on the language of Yiddish linguistically almost like Shakespeare did with English. And there's a difference between before Sholem Aleichem and after. What 51:00the difference is, I don't know. I've just been told there's a difference. But this woman who translated them said that she understood what was going on. So, that must have wakened, and I'm guessing here, a new interest in Yiddish both in Ruth and I. The kids now -- our oldest daughter in '79 was eight years old, and our youngest was six years old. That year, Sarah went to a Sunday school. She was eight. And she came home, and she said, "Dad, I have to build a sukkah." I didn't know what a sukkah was. So, she had to build it in a shoebox. So, we built it in a shoebox, and we made a really nice little sukkah. And I said, "Sarah, what if we were to build a real sukkah?" So, a sukkah is a place where the Jews pray at the time of harvest, and I thought it was a great idea. But I wanted a sukkah that I could build -- it was about six feet by four feet. It was 52:00small. But we could get a table in there. Maybe it was eight feet by four feet. So, I had two neighbors -- I forget their names now. But I told them -- one was an engineer, and one was a math teacher. And I said, "I want you to design a sukkah for me that I can take down every year and use." So, we had an old awning, so I used that for the sides, and we had a tree with branches on it, so I ran a rope of -- and put the branches on, and we had a sukkah. And for many, many years we had a sukkah. Well, that was the beginning of it. And just the time I was -- Yiddish had sort of taken a back seat. Sarah sort of brought Judaism and things that I had never known about to the surface. This was in 1979. So, in 1980, I said to Ruth, "Why don't we go to Gratz and we take a formal course in Yiddish?" And I was looking in my Yiddish book -- I don't have 53:00it here, but I have it in the front room -- and it's dated in October 1980, so I know when we started. And so, we both had our book, and we were taught by Hannah Clearer. I don't know if you know Hannah. She's -- wonderful, wonderful girl. She was -- grew up in New York, in a section of New York where everybody she knew was the child of a Holocaust survivor. So, they all spoke Yiddish. It was natural for them. But she had a wonderful way of teaching. I loved her teaching. And we went for two years. And then, I think because of the kids and -- we just couldn't devote -- she used to give us homework like it was -- we used Weinreich's book, "College Yiddish." And she treated it just like -- and she gave us a lot of homework! And I guess we found it hard with bringing up the kids and doing that, and something had to give. And then, I became interested in 54:00Jewish genealogy then, and I thought we couldn't do everything. So, we made a decision to give up the Yiddish. You know, good decision, bad decision, anyway, it was a decision. And that was the way things stood for about eight or nine years, until the late '80s or early '90s, when Mark Asher said to me one day -- he's the fella who did a lot of translating for me. A great guy and a -- I'll tell you more about Mark Asher. And Mark said he was starting a leyenkranz [reading circle], and he said there would be five of us: there would be Mark and Andy Cassel, Ruth, myself, and a girl by the name of Pearl. And Andy was just learning Yiddish, and he was a -- Andy's a very, very smart guy. He wrote the "Inquirer" economic page for years. Very, very smart. He's retired now. And Mark -- and he started to learn Yiddish when I did, but he -- as I was telling you 55:00before, that he had a great background in Hebrew. And it really helped him out with Yiddish. But he is really a student. He loves Yiddish. In fact, once I was at the Yiddish Book Center, and I said to Ruth -- this was years ago, twenty-five years ago -- "What can I do for Mark?" And in those days, they still had some beautiful books out for sale. And they had this beautiful gold-leaf book on the life of Sholem Aleichem. And I said, "How much?" And it was like, ten or fifteen dollars. It was incredible. I wanted to buy something like for a hundred dollars for Mark, but I knew that he would want this. He was really shocked when we found it. He had never seen the book before, and he has it now. He's had it all these years. But Mark decided to start this reading circle. And we did it for about one day a week for about five years. And the rule was you could only speak Yiddish. Well, I didn't say too much. (laughs) The others did 56:00the talking. But then, about the second or third year, a Russian doctor joined us. And her father had been a Yiddish teacher in Russia. So, to the reading circle, she brought how Yiddish was handled in Russia and what words in Yiddish came from a Russian derivative and how they came to mean what they do in Yiddish. And she could explain the difference. Ruth added to the group that she knew a lot of things you don't read about in books, especially with women -- Ruth and her mother would go out shopping, and a lot of it had to do with things around the house that Mark couldn't find out from a book. And so, Ruth would advise him on things like that. So, everybody brought something to it. But this was all done in Yiddish, and I was struggling to understand what everybody said, (laughs) 'cause I don't have a facility for language. But I loved Yiddish, and I 57:00wish I did. But I don't have a facility for too many things. But that's because my mother and father didn't give it to me; it's not my fault. So, we did that for about five years. And when it came to writing these books, when I wrote the four books between 1992 and last year, when I finished the last one -- there were four of them -- there were many occasions where I had to do research in Yiddish newspapers, Yiddish letters, Yiddish documents, that my Yiddish -- what little Yiddish I knew -- helped me. I've always tried to translate -- I remember, from Masliansky. He was a famous preacher in Russia who came to the United States and preached in Yiddish and wrote his biography in Yiddish, and he has a whole chapter on Philadelphia. So, I translated it as best I could, and then I would give it to Mark and he would mark it all up and I'd give it back to him to make sure it's all correct. So, he was a great guy, and I still -- in 58:00fact, I told him about your letter, and I will give you -- do you want to get in touch with him, he can tell you -- I don't think he knows Hankus Netsky, so he doesn't have anybody (laughs) to say he's great other than me. And he's a wonderful guy. He's a little -- excellent, I'd say. But I think he doesn't realize how much he knows and how much he could give. I think that he's very modest, let me put it that way.

CW:So, in this leyenkranz, what did you read? What were you learning?

HB:We read different things. Mark would cut little articles out that he thought we might be interested in, and we read those about all different subjects. Now, no one of them stands out in my mind. I think that reason is that I had such a hard time understanding the spoken Yiddish that nothing stood in my mind. I 59:00think that Ruth may remember better than I, or Andy or Mark may remember it better. But it was a wide range of things that would be of interest and that you could handle, like, in an hour and a half. And he tried to pick things that he thought would be interesting to the group.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:Well, I'm curious, you've mentioned your books. How did you come to the decision that you wanted to write your first book? (laughter)

HB:Well, that's a good question, and I do have an answer for it, sort of a funny answer. I said I worked for the Navy, and the Navy sent me over to England on business. But I had the weekend free, and I was in London, and I took a walking tour -- I don't know if you've ever been to London, but London has all these walking tours. And one was called the Jewish Walking Tour of the Old Jewish East 60:00End of London. And I was really taken by the tour. It's all Bangladeshi. It's a Bangladeshi section today. But the Bangladeshis leave the mezuzah up on the door 'cause they think it's good luck. (laughs) I got a kick -- I remember that from the tour. But I said, "This is wonderful! When I get back from Philadelphia, I'm gonna take a tour and learn about all this stuff." So, I get back to Philadelphia, and I look around, and I poke around, and nobody's doing the tour. I said, Well, that's strange, because this is around Fifth and South Street, in Philly, where the Jews settled in 1882, and it was a -- by 1900, it was almost one hundred percent Jewish. And I said, "All right, I'll do this myself." But I'd said to myself, I don't know anything about it. I knew nothing. I was not born in South Philly; I didn't know the history or the current situation. So, I started to study it, both by going down there -- and I walked through every 61:00street. And I thought, Well, maybe I'll do the tours. So, I started doing tours, and I don't know how I got people to (laughs) get money out of, but I charged ten dollars. And people started to take the tour. And then, I thought, Well, I'd tell the synagogues about this. Since nobody was doing it, they signed up with me. Well, after about a year I said, Gee, it would be nice to be able to hand a pamphlet out to these people to show them some of the things I'm saying, 'cause they can't possibly remember everything I say. So, I had in mind a four-page pamphlet. But I kept on doing research, and I kept on finding more and more and more. Anyway, in the end it turned out to be a book, (laughs) not a pamphlet. And that's "The Jewish Quarter of Philadelphia," and that's what got me started. And I was surprised how much I found. And then, my friend Andy Cassel said -- because all these books are self-published. And self-published books are hard to sell because it's hard marketing them. It's hard to get the marketing. And he 62:00said that he would get a reporter on the "Inquirer" as a favor to me to write a story about this whole thing. So, I said, "Yeah, sure, (laughs) I'd love it. It won't cost, you know, twenty-five thousand dollars." So, the "Inquirer" puts out a whole-page spread on this book on the Jewish quarter, and at the bottom it says, "Boonin will be speaking at the YMHA" on such-and-such a night in 1999. So, we had a big crowd there. There really was, because of Andy's getting this story in the newspaper. And the book -- I had a lot of copies printed. I had a lot of chutzpah, really, to print so many copies. But it sold well. And the Jewish museum in Philadelphia took the book, and they still sell it, almost twenty years later. And the book did very well. And I sort of became known because of the book. Within a small circle of people who were interested in that stuff, not known in Canada, across the river or anything. (laughs) But within a 63:00very small -- and I'm still asked to give talks today about the book. Not the other books, but that one. So, I got interested in -- one of the synagogues in the book fascinated me. It was built as a Universalist church. The Unitarians and Universalists were originally separated, and then they became the UUs. They got together. But this was built by the Universalists, and it started in 1793, and that year there was a great plague in Philadelphia, the mosquitoes -- and ten percent of the population died, and the building slowed up. But it finally opened up in 1796, as a church. And those ten years from 1790 to 1800 was when the government of the United States was in Philadelphia. And John Adams was vice president, and he actually went to the opening lecture given by -- who's the guy 64:00that discovered oxygen? Priestley -- what's Priestley -- Joseph Priestley. And Joseph Priestley was a Unitarian. But all the churches in Philadelphia would not let a Unitarian speak because they were too liberal. Priestley was too liberal, and the Unitarians were too liberal. But the Universalist church did. So, it's funny; the Unitarians and Universalists got together a hundred years later, but here they are in 1796, getting together. Then in 1889 the Universalists -- the area then was taken over by the Jews, and the Universalists decided to sell the property, and it became a synagogue, and it's still a synagogue today. And I have some wonderful pictures of the synagogue today. And I was so interested in this story, I said, "I'm gonna write a book about the building, and the book'll include the history of the church and the history of the synagogue." So, that's 65:00what I wrote about. And I was sort of fascinated by that. That took another eight years. Then when I was doing the history of the synagogue, I found out that one of the sons of the member was a professional boxer. I said, "Well, that's unusual, to have a son of a -- somebody in a synagogue who's religious to be a boxer." Well, then I found out there was somebody else who was a member whose son was a professional -- these were professional boxers. They did it for money. And then, I found out that the biggest boxing manager in Philadelphia, who was very well known at that time, his father and mother were very active at this synagogue. Well, that sort of got me -- and I knew nothing about Jews and boxing, I had absolutely nothing. I remember when I was a kid I used to run home to see -- before they had reruns -- to see Joe Louis and Joe Walcott and Rocky Marciano and all those guys fight in the early '50s. But that was just because everybody did, and everybody liked it, and I didn't know anything about Jewish 66:00boxing. So, at that point I decided to say, "Well, I'm gonna look into this." So, I started to look into it while I was still writing the book about the synagogue. And I put about two or three pages in there, but I couldn't stop thinking about, How did these guys get involved in it; is there a story here? And I was off and running again. Well, in this thing, one thing led to another thing to another, another. So, I get involved in Jewish boxing. And I don't know anything about it. I did as much as I could. And I found a guy who was the boxing historian in Philadelphia of all ethnic groups and races. And he was very encouraging. So, one day in the mail, the postman knocks on the door, and he says, "I got a big box for you." So, I open the box, and in it, he sent me --- unsolicited --- he didn't tell me it was coming -- his entire book on Jewish boxers. They were mostly stories from the newspaper. I was astounded he would 67:00send this thing without telling me. Turns out later he has an entire book on Italian boxers, on Irish boxers -- this guy's crazy. (laughs) But he was a big help, and I didn't write about too many things he had in there. But it was more the encouragement he gave me, that he said that there is an interest in this, although it's very small. And that didn't bother me. I just thought that, Was it big at the time? Whether it's small now or not, that's the way things go. And I felt about all these books, the reason I wrote them and the reason I wanted to publish them was that I felt at first that I was not the right person to do it. Somebody else should have done this. There are a lot of professors that know a lot more about this stuff than I do. But they weren't doing it. And I felt if you waited too long, all these people would be gone; you wouldn't find out anything. And that's what drove me to all three books. And I guess I did want to write them. But I was disappointed that nobody with a PhD in history -- which 68:00are really trained historians. I'm not a trained historian. I don't know anything about history. So, at that point, I decided that I'm gonna try to write a book about boxing. So, I looked it up, and I found an awful lot. And then, I found out in 1928, there were more Jewish boxers than any other ethnicity. I think the Jews were something like twenty-three percent. And the Irish had been in the forefront. But when the Jews came in the United States, they were very poor. It turned out to be like -- today it's the Mexicans, and the blacks have always been in it. But the blacks were held back during the 1920s after Wilson became president. He was very prejudiced against blacks, and the boxers sort of picked up on that, and they wouldn't allow the champions to fight any black 69:00fighters. So, the blacks were very small up until the 1930s. And that's why Joe Louis became so famous, because he made it popular to be able to fight a white man and win. Up until that point, thinking was much different. You know, prejudice continues to this day. But he made a big change in the thing. And at the same time, the blacks then went up in numbers. The Quota Act was passed in 1924 that cut off Jewish emigration from Russia, and the number of Jewish boxers went down to almost nothing. But I was writing about the period in boxing from the 1890s until 1924. After 1924, there was a couple years. So, in the boxing book I got in touch with -- and since this was so long ago, it was hard to meet people that knew anything about it. Soon I turned out to know more about these 70:00boxers than the families I would interview. They were learning from me; I wasn't learning from them. But I did find a son who was still alive of Lew Tendler. Lew Tendler was a little late in the boxing; he was the most famous Philadelphia Jewish boxer. And I met his son. His son was then eighty-six. I published a book in 2016, and he lived about another six moths. And he lived long enough for his son to read him a lot of the book, and his son told Ruth and I -- we were invited down to Atlantic City for dinner -- that he really enjoyed the book. What really made me happy is that he could see the book in print. And one of the biggest thrills I got in the boxing book was I was writing about a big fight in Yankee Stadium, the first prize fight ever held there. And it was also at the time where radio was just introduced into sports. I don't think it was -- I 71:00don't know where it stood in baseball, but the first radio broadcast --

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

HB:-- from ringside was in 1922, just the year that this fight took place. So, I was looking up some things about the radio broadcast. And then, it came to me, Gee, these guys are both Jewish. Lew Tendler's Jewish, and he's fighting the champion, who happened to be Benny Leonard, and he was Jewish. And I said, "They're both Jewish guys, and they're both pretty close to the immigrant generation. Maybe one of the Yiddish newspapers picked this up." Well, just at that time, there was an Israeli project of putting Jewish newspapers from Israel and the United States online. And I didn't think they were going to include any Yiddish newspapers. But I looked through the index, and I found out the "Morning Journal," one of the big Yiddish newspapers of the day, was online. Well, I could read enough Yiddish, and I knew when the fight was, so I said, "Well, if 72:00they had sent a reporter --" -- I surmised all this -- "-- if they sent a reporter, it would probably be the day after, couple days after the date of the fight." And of course I knew the date of the fight. So, I got a hold of this three-page article. It was a very long article. And darn if I didn't find this article in the paper about the fight. And what happened, this reporter says -- he says, "Everybody's listening on radio, they're going to the fight. I'm gonna go to Hester Street, and I'm gonna find out what's really going on." So, he goes down -- this is all in Yiddish -- and he goes down to Hester Street. And everybody's out on the street -- it's the summer. Took place in July of 1922 -- and everybody's on the street 'cause they couldn't get in the ballpark, or they couldn't afford it, really. And it was on the radio, but I don't know how many people knew about the radio. So they were standing on the street. And he records what they say. It takes up three pages in my book. I quoted the whole article. Well, in one part of the article the Jews are arguing about the -- if one of 73:00these Jews lose, then another person will take his place, and he could be Italian. So, somebody else in the crowd says, "The Italians, they're anti-Semitic, and they don't like the Jews." So, somebody else pipes up -- and he writes all this down -- he says, "Even the pope is against the Jews." So, at that point I show it to Ruth, and Ruth says, "You can't put this in the book." I said, "Well, it's the truth." Ruth said, "You can't do it." So, I was torn between hurting people's feelings on one side and not telling the truth on the other. So, I said, Well, I'm not smart enough to figure this out. There's a woman who lives next door here who's sort of like a lay Catholic person. She goes into hospitals and helps people who are Catholic with prayers and helping 74:00them in any way they can. She's a wonderful woman. So, I told her this whole cockamamie story. And I said, "Agnes, is this the right thing to do, to print it or not?" She says, "Let me think about it; gimme something to read." So, I gave her the thing to read. And she gives me back a written dissertation on what her position is. (laughs) I still have this, in handwriting. And she says, "You're not being true if you don't print what was actually said." And that's what she said. And she's a devout Catholic. So, I thought, Boy, if she is, and they're saying all these bad things about the pope, I really better print this thing. But she said, "I want you to read a book by David Dalin" -- D-a-l-i-n. He's a rabbi. And he wrote a book about Pope Pius XI. Pope Pius XI died in 1939, and that's when Pope Pius XII took place. But this instance took place I think when 75:00Pope Pius XI was already the pope, but the earlier pope was Pope Benedict. And this was said in -- and then they got to talking, and this -- I forgot, part of this story is they were talking about the Balfour Declaration, where England said that they would have a homeland in Palestine for the Jews. And everybody was saying by the pope, they meant Pope Benedict -- is the pope they were pointing to. And David Dalin wrote a little about that. And he said that that's not true. And he backed up Pope Benedict, and he said he really was friendly with the Jews, even though Jewish history said he was not. And the Jews were learning this from Jewish history. But he said that -- and he quoted -- he must read Italian -- he quoted a lot of things that Pope Benedict said. And he said that they would be willing to -- and I have this all in the book. I don't know 76:00it word for word -- but they'd be willing -- the pope would be willing to be friendly neighbors with the Jews if they settled in Palestine and became a nation there. And it was a very positive statement. And I put that in the book also, to show that there's two sides of every story. I didn't take a side. So, that was how I got involved in all these books. And then, everybody asked me, Well, what's your next book? And I said, "My next book -- if I publish a next book, I'm gonna be found murdered, but I don't think I'll be murdered because my wife would be the first suspect, so she would never murder me." (laughs) But I don't know if I'm gonna write another book or not. But if I did, I know the subject already. I would love to write a book about the actions the State Department took in 1938 and '39, after Kristallnacht but before the beginning of the war in September '39, as to the interference they played in Jewish attempts 77:00to bring relatives to this country. And our family, my mother and father, were both trying to bring my mother's first cousin here. And I found the file, actually in the -- there's a Jewish women's organization here in Philadelphia, and they still have the files. And I looked through it. And they kept on asking more questions, I asked -- mom said, "Well, I'm a lawyer," and they said -- the State Department wanted to know how much she made. She said she made $1276 for the year. But my father was a big lawyer; he made two thousand dollars for the year. So, the State Department threw it back and said, Not enough. Your cousin in Vienna -- a cousin who was in Vienna -- they don't make enough money. And so, she can't come. So, my mother went to her older brother, who was in the paper-hanging business, in -- this took place in 1939 -- and he said that he 78:00made five thousand dollars a year and had a life insurance policy. Well, that really impressed the State Department, for some reason, and so they changed their mind. And this goes into August. Now remember, the war started on the second of September, and they got this through the State Department, and they got it to the American consulate -- I don't know -- the American embassy was in Berlin, but they had a consulate in Vienna in 1939. And I think it got to the consulate. Anyway, she got to Portugal, and she got on the ship, and the ship was on the ocean when the war broke out. And some ships on the ocean actually turned around and came back, but her ship continued to New York. And she was the only relative we had who spoke with a Yiddish accent. I saw her not often, but when the family would get together, we had family reunions every year for many years. We don't have them now. But we had them for many years, and she used to 79:00come. And I always liked to listen to her English with a -- what Ruth heard when she was growing up, of the Yiddish accent, which you don't hear today.

CW:And there was one phrase that you knew in Yiddish when you met Ruth, right? There's a story about a phrase that you knew in Yiddish?

HB:Oh, yeah. (laughs) The phrase is -- the only words I knew in Yiddish were -- I knew "gey esn [go eat]" and "gey shlofn [go to sleep]" and all that stuff. My mother used to call me Hershl. But I only knew a few things. But the one phrase that sticks in my mind was "gey avek," which means, "Go away. Get lost." So, this was a phrase I remember my grandmother saying to me. The reason she said it to me -- when I was nine years old, I always had a yoyo, and I was always playing with the yoyo. And grandmom's hands shook a little bit. She would sit there reading the newspaper. She always read the stock page. (laughs) She wanted to be wealthy, so she -- I don't know where she learned English, but she knew the stock page. She used to say to me when I was nine, "Your hands will shake 80:00like mine when you get older." (laughs) So, I told this story to Ruth when we first met, and she says, "That's horrible that a grandmother would say that to a son, 'gey avek.' You should've jumped up on her lap." I said, "You didn't jump up on grandma's lap." That was not the kind of grandma grandma was. She was tough. She wanted me to work. And I got stories about that too. So, after a while -- we're married now thirty or forty years. A lot of times I don't do everything that Ruth wants me to do, and sometimes I'm annoying. And she says to me -- one day she says, "You know, your grandmother was a lot smarter than I thought she was." (laughs)

CW:So, I wonder if you can tell me what -- what was so special about South Philly?

HB:That's a good question. I think the special reasons they're there was three. One, it was near the dock, so when they got off the ship -- but the ironic part 81:00about that is most of them came from Ellis Island. And they would come to a freight -- when you came by train from Ellis Island, the immigrants would always be taken at night, when there's no passengers, and they'd be let off at the freight depot. They were never let off at Thirtieth Street Station --- well, that wasn't built then. But the main depot in Philadelphia, where passengers would get on and off, Broad Street Station -- that was a big station -- they would never be let off there. And Ninth and Spring Garden was where the freight was let off, and that's where the immigrants were let off. So, the story about them all settling in South Philly 'cause it's close to where the ship came in, I think the ships came in and brought about sixty thousand people into Philadelphia, Jewish immigrants. But in Ellis Island, it was a million! It's just an infinitesimal amount. So that can't be the reason. But anyway, it's still used as one of the reasons. The second reason is all of the sweatshops -- the biggest industry in Philadelphia was some sort of tailoring. And the 82:00wholesale clothiers who hired one worker, and that was a cutter. The cutters were not Jewish. They were paid the most in the shmate industry, (laughs) the clothing industry. And they were all between Market Street and Arch Street, on Third Street. And the buildings are all still there. And the original sweatshops were right below Market Street, on Bank Street and Strawberry Street. And they're still there, and all the buildings are there. But I don't think anybody knew this history. I put the whole history, and I have all kind of attachments at the end of the book that show the people were there. But in the sweatshops, they were all run by Russian Jews. They were run by Russian Jews, and the Russian Jews were hired. So, you would give material that was cut in the wholesale clothier to the Russian Jew, and you would charge them a dollar fifty for the material, and when it came back as a sewn suit, then they would get two 83:00dollars for it, so they'd make fifty cents. And they had the whole family. And you could work on it in your one-room place in the boardinghouse that had no running water or anything like that. Had eight kids, and they all worked on all these tailoring things. I don't know if that quite answers the question --

CW:So, that was the second reason, was the sweatshop. Was there a third reason?

HB:The third reason is the rent was cheap. And South Street ran east and west, and Fourth Street ran north and south. And there were little shops along there. And the goal of everybody was to have their own shop.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

HB:Their object was to work for themselves, and a good portion -- this is a good example, the cover of the book, because the cover of the book is taken of a tailor shop. And they have the Yiddish theater posters -- these are two pictures 84:00of plays at the Yiddish theater. You can actually read -- this one's called "Tsurik tsu zayn folk [Back to your roots]." And the other one's called "Kol shofar [Hebrew: Voice of the shofar]" -- "The Call of the shofar." And they're all at the Arch Street Theatre, which is a big theater. But that shows -- and I got a lot of kudos for making a tailor shop the cover photograph on the book because that's what everybody's grandfather did, and they said, Is that your grandfather, is that your grandfather? That's my grandfather. (laughs) They all got a kick out of it. Now, what was the question? (laughs)

CW:Yeah, that was it. Those were the three reasons. But I did want to --

HB:The one thing --

CW:The fir--

HB:-- I wanted to follow up with on the tailor shop: when I was writing one of the books, I got fascinated with the Depression. And I just wanted to see -- I don't know, I just wanted to see Depression records. Oh, it was over the Blitzstein Bank went -- bankruptcy, and I found out that the National Archives in Philly had the indexes to the bankruptcy records. The bankruptcy records 85:00themselves were downstairs; now they're in St. Louis. And so, I said, (coughs) -- excuse me -- "Can I see the index to bankruptcies for 1932 to '34?" And they bring me up this book about four inches thick. And I start rummaging through it, and I see one name after another, and they're all Jewish, and they're all tailors. And a poor tailor didn't have anything. I don't know why they just didn't close shop, why they went through bankruptcy. (coughs) Excuse me. I was shocked by that. I was shocked by the number; I was shocked by the fact that they went through bankruptcy, and you could see the depth of the Depression when you read something. You didn't even have to read the petition. All it would put down -- assets of seventy-five dollars. Why would you go for a lawyer, so the lawyer could charge five dollars? I mean, that's why Mom made $1,200 for the whole year. But I digress.

CW:So, Arch Theatre was the Jewish theater in South Philly?

HB:I write a lot about the Arch Theatre in the book. Today I forget a lot -- I wrote about it twenty-five years ago. I tried to write about all the Yiddish theaters that were in Philadelphia. And the most important one was very short-lived. It was at Fifth and South Street.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

HB:I found the story of the Yiddish theater very, very interesting, one of the more interesting stories. And I found every little Yiddish theater. But one great story had to do with Boris Thomashefsky. He was so well liked as an actor that New York mahavs, big deals, wouldn't allow him to play in New York, so he had to play in this hick town in Philadelphia, all these hick towns. So, he 87:00spent 1889 and 1890 in Philadelphia. And he caused a real furor here, 'cause here he goes to this little theater -- there's a great picture in the book of this little theater, with a sign in Yiddish outside. So, he's here about a year. And Jacob Adler comes over, who's the greatest Yiddish actor. And he says, "Oh, I'm going up to New York and try to get Adler to come down here to Philadelphia." So, he finally does. (laughs) You'll get a kick out of this next part: he gets Adler, and Adler comes down here, and they play together. And I think they put on two performances. It was a little shy on evidence about what happened. I was surprised, but I had a lot of information; I had to fill it in with my own thoughts. But this part was said. (laughs) The next part he said, "We enjoyed Philadelphia, we enjoyed the night time, the light time, and Adler 88:00was a great dancer, and we went all over, and after everything was over, we went to the hayliker hoyzer [holy houses]." You know what they are?

CW:But you should explain. (laughter)

HB:Well, in Yiddish it means -- I don't know if I'm saying the Yiddish right -- "Happy houses." And "happy houses" were bawdy houses, let me put it nicely. (laughs) And so, they spent every night there, and they liked it, evidently, in this neighborhood. And all the girls were Jewish in the houses. But they bring another side of the immigrant life. The Yiddish theater was the most popular, but it had a problem, because the people didn't earn that much for food, so how could they spend a quarter on going to the theater and deprive their own 89:00children -- they have these massive families. So, it was hard. But this was a little theater, (laughs) and Boris Thomashefsky -- you should read some of this stuff. His father would write the story, and he would write the story, and then at the end he would leave three pages blank. He would give them the story and say, "Here it is," and then the last three pages would be blank. So, he says to his father -- all in Yiddish, of course -- (laughs) "Why don't you write how this thing ends?" He says his father don't know, "You're a smart guy, you end it!" (laughs) There's a lot of that going on. Then the first Yiddish show they gave in Philadelphia, they didn't make it clear whether it was in Yiddish or German. So, they advertised it in a German neighborhood. So, the whole theater was filled up with pretty wealthy Germans who came to see this play. And the play was all in Yiddish. (laughs) Well, they started booing and started walking out. And Thomashefsky says there was a couple people left in the balcony, but he 90:00said, "We continued with the whole show." But it shows you the beginning. And they didn't have the notoriety or the actors or the -- just the audiences they had in New York. But for a short time, the Yiddish theater here in Philadelphia was very big. And when the Yiddish actors in New York would get into trouble, they'd come down to the Arch Street Theatre. The Arch Street Theatre was very big. It sat about three thousand people. And it had been used by the greatest actors we had in the United States and then was finally taken over by one of Thomashefsky's brothers. And they put on all the famous shows, and all the famous actors came down and would act here. And then, in 1930 or '31, just about the time that Hitler was coming to power, they had most of the protest meetings 91:00in Philadelphia at the Arch Street Theatre. It was torn down in 1936, but it was the biggest building for the Jews to use for protests. It was not in the Jewish quarter. The Jewish quarter used the B'nai Abraham for protests, and that only sat about fourteen hundred people.

CW:What do you think that people nowadays can learn from that period of Jewish history that you've spent so much time researching?

HB:Well, I think one thing you could learn is that -- to be happy and to make things important, you don't have to have four televisions and six cars. It's a different life. And the other thing that really comes true is how close families were 'cause they all lived together. And one of the things that is really nice is when you had your grandfather live next door and you could walk to your grandmother's house. And a lot of people that grew up in neighborhoods like that remember their grandmothers and grandfathers. Now our grandson grows up in 92:00Massachusetts, and he doesn't know us on a day-to-day basis, and I think that's a big loss as far as social mores are concerned and the culture is concerned. As far as Judaism is concerned, it shows that there was a big portion of the Jewish population that was never religious. I think the religious give the ideas that people are not religious today, implying that they were years ago. I don't think they were years ago. (laughs) It may have been a matter of degree. They may have been more than they are today. The one thing that's different is that almost everybody married Jewish, so the children were the children of two Jews. I think that what's happening today with so much assimilation -- only about fifty percent of Jews marry other Jews -- I think that's a plus, in a way, for Jews because there was an awful lot of anti-Semitism, and there still is. But a lot 93:00of people today who are Christian -- we have friends here -- have a grandson who's half-Jewish. And that makes a big difference. And the people become very interested in things they don't know, and they want to know more about what their half-Jewish grandson or granddaughter is doing. And it's true with races, whether it's black or white -- Obama proved that. And so, the years are different. And so, I think it shows a different society and a different way that people lived. I don't think most people are interested in history. I think it's a little group of people who are interested in what happened in the past, and rightly so. Most people are interested in what happens today and what's gonna happen tomorrow. And that's the way the world should be. But I think it still should be preserved for people who want to know so fake news doesn't get out 94:00there and people really do know what happened before they were born.

CW:From your perspective, what is the place of Yiddish in the world today?

HB:Well, when you read knowledgeable people, more knowledgeable than I am, they say it's a dead language, and that's the way they explain it. I think that most of its importance is in history, like when I'm trying to write about when Yiddish -- like the example of being on Hester Street and having all these people meet and what they say, that's very important if you're interested in what happened years ago in the Jewish community. If you don't know Yiddish, like I don't, I'm really limited. And if people don't know languages and don't know -- especially Yiddish -- it's very, very difficult to do research. I knew enough 95:00to know what I wanted to get translated, and I could translate some of it. I know a little Russian; I took three years of Russian in college, and I took years of Hebrew when I was an adult, and I took a little bit of Yiddish. So, I knew enough to get me into the stories that I wanted to tell. But if I translated any of them, they wouldn't be correct translations. So, I'm sort of in a -- and we have a very, very negative attitude in this country about teaching foreign languages, especially German and Russian and Arabic languages. They're just not thought of as -- you're kind of weird; you're taking a foreign language. It's not something that this country -- whereas other countries, they're happy. And I can see why. There you're in Spain, and you're in French 'cause it's right next door, and you always go there. Here you're in America, and before the airplane, nobody ever went anywhere. So, it's very negative. And 96:00then, to see that they're still so negative on languages -- you get Babbel; you gotta get these tapes and learn from Babbel. But you don't learn from your grandma and grandpa.

CW:And I'm curious for you personally, as we wrap up here, what has doing all this research and writing and studying, how has that impacted you personally?

HB:Well, the one way -- the biggest way it affects you personally is if you try to write a book like these, you meet almost a hundred people. And you're affected personally by how willing people are to help you, both librarians, archivists, and private people who you tell them some oddball story and they say, Oh, I'd like to help you, I'd like to give you a picture of this person or a picture of this thing, or, Come on over the house and we'll talk. And people 97:00are very willing to share stories. And that's very rewarding. I was never the kind of person who wanted to earn much money. I never thought I'd earn as much money as I do, to have a nice house and nice wife and nice kids and everything. So, for me, I'm a little -- I'm not the true American that wants to be a millionaire. I never wanted to be a millionaire. But it's what you want out of life.

CW:And is there any -- now that you know a little more Yiddish, do you have any favorite Yiddish word or phrase?

HB:"Gey avek." (laughs) It has meaning to me. I think Yiddish phrases have meaning to you when you -- like a word that Ruth, my wife, would find interesting is the word "kigl." (laughs) What my mom once said to Ruth, "You 98:00gonna make a kugel?" Well, Ruth got insulted, and she says, "It's kigl." (laughs) So, Ruth gets it, because she does speak galitsyaner [Galician], so that's the way she learned it from her mother. She does get a kick out of this continuing fight between the Litvaks and the galitsyaner. And so, that -- I sorta learned that from Ruth, how serious she takes some of these things, 'cause they really did take it seriously. She takes it with a grain of salt, but she still retains that dichotomy that meant so much years ago and means nothing today.

CW:And I'd just like to end by asking if you have any advice for young -- future generations, younger people today?

HB:Well, for future generations, I'd say learn as early as you can as much as you can. Everybody that I talk to -- especially in music, this is -- who started early -- music and golf. Those are two of the things I'm interested in. The 99:00people that started earliest have a head start, and don't waste your early years, like, anything you can learn early. And it's wonderful when parents can get a child at a young age to study, whether it's Yiddish or music or golf or whatever it is, don't waste your early years.

CW:Great. Well, a sheynem dank [thank you very much].

HB:(laughs) Thank you.

CW:Thank you so much for taking the time.

HB:Well, thank you very much, and lots of luck with the programs. This is a wonderful -- the Wexlers are -- I don't know them, but they're wonderful people, and I want to thank them for giving me this opportunity.

[END OF INTERVIEW]