LOLA PALEY-BYRON ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY:So, this is Christa Whitney and today is August 17th, 2011. I'm here at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts with Lola Paley-Byron. And we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Lola, do I have your permission to record this interview?

LOLA PALEY-BYRON:Yes, you do.

CW:Thank you. So, can you tell me briefly what you know about your family as far back as the family history that you know?

LPB:Wow. My mother was born in Kielce, Poland. She was one of three children. 1:00The family, I guess, as far as I know -- my son had done some genealogy searches -- the family was in Poland from the 1600s. Her family. And she had a very unusual last name, so she was easy to trace. The name was Pomeranzbrum. And her father actually decided to move -- most of his family stayed in Kielce but he decided to move to Warsaw because he wanted to keep his liquor store open on Saturday. So, they moved to Warsaw, my mother and two sisters. She was educated at a Jewish girls' school. My father's family was from Warsaw and their name was 2:00Papirbukh. And they probably could be traced by name as far back as the early 1700s. So, they were in Poland for a very long time. Both families were entrepreneurs. My mother's father had a liquor store. My father's father had an advertising business. And they lived in the center of Warsaw. My father had two sisters. He was the youngest. I don't know how far back you want me to go but when the war broke out, when the bombs fell on Warsaw, my parents were dating. And they decided they wanted to escape to the Russian zone. My mother couldn't 3:00convince her family to go with her. They had been in Poland forever and so it was another war, they were going to get through it. But my father and my mother and my father's mother and his sisters all fled to Bialystok. And there, they were arrested by the Russian police and taken to Siberia. My eldest aunt and her mother, my father's mother, were in the Vilna Ghetto. And my grandmother was murdered in Ponary and my aunt was in a concentration camp. My other aunt and her husband and my father and mother married on the way to Bialystok because my 4:00father's mother was very religious and she didn't want them hanging out and not being married. And they were taken to Siberia, to a labor camp, and I was born there, conceived and born there. When the war started going badly for the Russians, they emptied out all those camps. And my parents stayed in a small village, Topchikha in Siberia. My father joined the Polish contingent of the Russian army and they reunited after the war in Łódź. I was born on September 16th, 1943 and we stayed in Siberia till, I think, late '45 maybe or '46. And 5:00then, my parents went back to Warsaw and tried to find their family and they didn't find anyone. And so, that was kind of where that early history ended.

CW:Did they ever -- did they talk about Warsaw to you? Do you have sort of a picture in your mind of what their life was like there?

LPB:Yeah, I do. They were sort of part of the bourgeoisie. They were well-to-do. They had, you know, Polish maids and it was kind of a carefree lifestyle, I think, for young people. They were really part of an assimilationist movement. My father talked about, you know, being -- they were both in Jewish schools and 6:00they were part of -- you could either be a communist and kind of give up Judaism altogether and believe that that was kind of where it was all going to go, or a zionist, where everybody would eventually go to Israel, or an assimilationist, the belief that you would still be a Jew, you'd never be a Pole. Nobody wanted to be a Pole. But you were going to be a Polish Jew. And, you know, it made sense because they were Polish Jews for hundreds of years. So, they were part of that assimilationist movement, they were involved in Polish literature and history and all of that stuff. My father was a journalist. He reviewed films for "Kurier Poranny," which is the daily paper in Warsaw. And there was -- I got a 7:00lot of -- he drank a lot. They put the paper to bed late at night, they would go out and drink and sleep it off in the morning. And my mother, I think, had a sort of a harder life. Her mother had a breakdown and she was sent to live with her grandmother and sort of, at a very young age, take care of two younger siblings. So, she had it kind of much harder. But it was a very urban kind of -- they really thought they had a good life. And they had money and life was good. And then the Germans came.

CW:And what is your first memory?

LPB:Oh, wow. I think my first memory is in Bensheim, which was a DP camp in 8:00Bensheim, Germany. My parents had nothing left in Warsaw. And I'm not sure how they got to Bensheim but it was a DP camp and we lived in the camp in one room. My mother had a job at a bakery and I remember the room. I was about three. I remember the room, I remember swallowing a bobby pin (laughs) and being frantically taken to the hospital and that kind of stuff. I have cerebral palsy as a result. When I was born, I was born with a twin. I was a preemie. I think my mother tried to have an abortion and the result was that I had mild CP. And 9:00so, in Bensheim, I had surgery in Hamburg, heel cord surgery. So, Bensheim is the place that I remember first.

CW:And what was the atmosphere in the DP camps? Did you have friends?

LPB:I went to a kind of -- like a daycare. And so, I was very little.

CW:Right.

LPB:So, I was about three years old. We were there till I was four, just four. And my mother was a paranoid schizophrenic and they didn't know that at the time. I mean, nobody understood that whole thing. So, there were a lot of 10:00difficulties with her and with other people who were involved with her. But there were other people like us and I think it was mostly just a day-to-day survival. I was in another DP camp and I have more vivid memories of other kids there. But I was really little, so I don't remember too much.

CW:Can you tell me about the other camp?

LPB:Well, my father discovered that his elder sister, who'd been in a concentration camp and escaped, was in Paris. I'm not sure how that all happened. So, we left for Paris. And he had another sister who was with them in Siberia and then reunited with her husband who was in Italy. And she also came to Paris. So, that was the first time I ever met these aunts. The eldest aunt 11:00met a cousin, a first cousin who lost his wife and child in Poland. He had Aryan papers, so he was kind of on the other side. And she married him. They didn't plan to have any children. So, we moved to Paris. My father got a job in a factory making sweaters and things made of wool. He was a weaver, used this heavy machinery. And we had one room in a street in Paris that had mostly immigrants. And there, there was another family, much like us, who had a son. So, I knew him and I was sent at a very young age to summer camps. Even at the age of three, from Bensheim, I went to a summer camp. And I was sent to a summer 12:00camp that was mostly orphans. And that was sort of very uncomfortable because I was the only one with parents and they knew I had parents. There I met a girl, an older girl who kind of took me under her wing. And then in France, I was sent to a summer camp and there she was again. And the interesting experience there was that there was an outbreak of polio in the camp. So, my father got a job in a very large DP camp working as a supply officer for the Americans in the American zone, to Föhrenwald. And he had to leave. So, he left and they wouldn't let me out because we had to have a month of quarantine. So, when I left that camp, I couldn't remember how to speak Polish. I was about five. I 13:00could only speak French and my mother didn't speak a word of French. She only spoke Polish. So, we had to communicate by hand signals. I mean, I could understand her. I could understand everything she said but I couldn't respond to her and she had no idea what I was saying. And so, when we finally left by train to go to Föhrenwald, I bought the train tickets, I talked to the conductor. And when we reached Föhrenwald, my father took two days off from work and he spent twenty-four hours with -- except for sleep and he did nothing but speak Polish and eventually I forgot the French and could handle the Polish.

CW:So, how old were you at this point?

LPB:I was about five. I guess by the time we reached Föhrenwald, I had just 14:00about turned six. And there, there were a number of kids. It was a very big camp. We lived in a building -- I mean, I didn't realize how big it was until I learned about it as an adult because for me, there was a little -- it was one little place. There was one building and we lived in a room in that building. It was an old school. And the offices for the camp were the bottom floor of that building. And there were other kids, were kids my age and younger and some older. And there, I actually learned to speak Yiddish because there were kids from everywhere. So, the Polish wasn't sufficient. So, I did actually learn to speak Yiddish. My parents did not speak Yiddish. They spoke Polish. They were of 15:00this sort of assimilated bourgeois -- they understood it, they could speak it, they always used Yiddish expressions, and if they had to speak it, they could, but they didn't ever use it at home.

CW:Do you --

LPB:But I did. I used Yiddish with the other kids 'cause that's what they spoke. And some kids spoke Polish. And they had a school in Föhrenwald and they sent me to the school and the school was in Hebrew. And one day, my father opened a Bible and said, "Read" and I couldn't read anything and clearly I wasn't learning anything at that school. And so, they sent me to a German school which was outside the camp but close by so we could walk there. And there was another little girl in the camp, this was really interesting: they were German and everybody knew they were German but they were trying to get out. And so, they were pretending to be Jews. And, of course, all the Jews knew they weren't Jews because they just knew. So, anyway, this little girl and I went to the German 16:00school and there I spoke German. So, I guess one of the most interesting experiences there was that it was in Bavaria, so they were Catholics and you had to buy this Catholic prayer book. And, of course, my parents wouldn't let me buy it. So, I stole money from my mother's purse and I bought the book 'cause I had to survive in the school. And they had prayers every morning and they brought us a Saint Nicholas, very fancily dressed Saint Nicholas. And he pretended he had a book and he knew everything that the kids did and if they didn't do what they 17:00were supposed to, they would go to Hell and there would be this Judgment Day and all this stuff. And I knew I had stolen this money, so I figured I was in big trouble. (laughs) Anyway, my mother had learned German in school, so she was -- and she was blonde and green-eyed, so she always passed when they needed her to pass. And she sold stuff on the black market in Munich and we spent a lot of time in Munich. And my German was very proficient. And, of course, the purpose was to come to the United States. We did have visas to Australia, as well. But my mother always wanted to come here. She had an uncle who was here and we came. 18:00We finally went to Bremerhaven and stayed there for a while until everything was processed and then came on, in '51, in June of '51 on an Army ship, the "General Sturgis," to New York Harbor where -- my father's sister was here at the time and some of my mother's relatives, as well. But most of my childhood, that I rememb-- early childhood was in Föhrenwald.

CW:And can I ask, do you remember plays or cultural events or specific holiday celebrations in Föhrenwald?

LPB:I do. There was, I mean, there was a big hall and all the Jewish holidays 19:00were celebrated in Föhrenwald and there was a synagogue that my father took me to. There was always -- I don't know where we got the matzah. I have no idea. They must have made it in the camp. But the New Year and Yom Kippur. And my mother was who she was. So, nobody ate but she went to the local store and she got herself something. So, yeah, so all those holidays were celebrated in Föhrenwald. It was all Jews, and they kept it going, there was -- friend of ours who was a cantor who took part in the -- and it was a real synagogue. They had a real synagogue in Föhrenwald. You know, old seats -- and I don't know where it came from but they had all of that.

CW:What were your first impressions of the US?

LPB:Oh, my goodness. I remember going -- my aunt lived in New York on 86th Street, on West 86th Street, and we went to the local grocery store. That was unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable. I remember that. And with all this food, I mean, nobody bought food that way. You went to the local market outdoors and you'd never buy food for a week 'cause there was no place to keep it, there was no refrigerator, there was no -- so, that was totally remarkable. We were sponsored by a family who came here in the early 1900s in Patterson, New Jersey. 21:00So, that's where we went. They had a wood-frame house. They gave us the upstairs. It was the biggest place. I had never lived in more than one room -- that I could remember. My parents and I both. And the bathroom was never in the room. So, we had, for the first time, we had our own bathroom, which was remarkable. And I had a room, my parents had a room. There was a dining room, there was a kitchen. It was a palace. The couple who owned it had a candy store downstairs. And they hadn't been in Poland forever. So, there was a payphone in the candy store and the guy goes -- I remember this. The owner of the candy store went to my father and was explaining how to use a telephone. Of course, in Warsaw, there were telephones and there were cars and there were -- he had no idea that -- one of my most significant memories, I think, was that there were 22:00some kids who were in the neighborhood. And at that age, you pick up languages very quickly. And I had learned a little English and they asked me where I came from. And so, I remembered in Germany that you weren't supposed to say you were Jewish. You were supposed to say you were German. And I was so fluent in German that I could say I was German. So, I told them I was German. Course, I didn't know that Germany was the enemy and they tried to burn me with cigarettes and they -- matches, and it was terrible. I mean, I had no idea kind of what the rules were and the rules were the German? Oh, my Lord, that was not -- so, that took a while. My parents were pretty remarkable in that -- you talk about sort of bilingual and education, all of that stuff. They really believed in education. Whatever country I was in, whether I spoke the language, I didn't speak the language, I went right to the school. And even in France, they sent me 23:00to a preschool, in France. Didn't speak a word of French. I didn't have any idea what was going on. And all of a sudden, the teacher took me by the hand and she opened the door and there was a set of stairs, was pitch black. It was a cellar. And she was saying something. I had no idea what she was saying. She was pointing to the cellar and I'm figuring out I've done something and if I don't -- I'm going there. But they didn't -- I mean, it didn't cross their mind. So, in Germany, when I wasn't picking up what I needed to where they were teaching Hebrew, they sent me to the German school. I didn't speak German. Didn't matter. It didn't matter. And then, we were in New Jersey and they sent me to the local school in Patterson and I was -- I just turned eight. And they put me in kindergarten because if you didn't speak English, you must have been a moron or 24:00something. And I could already, of course, read German. So, it was interesting. My father, who spoke some English because he had taken English in school worked very hard to get me moved. And he taught me to write. They were writing cursive in the second grade. I probably should have been in the third grade. He taught me to write and they put me in the second grade. And then, we moved to New York. My father got a job. He was selling twine door to door. And I could read and I went into the third grade, sort of in midstream. So, I never really had sort of the kind of education, kindergarten, first grade. I kind of, I don't know. But I ended up kind of in an age-appropriate grade. And then, I went to school in New York.

CW:And -- no --

LPB:Yeah, go ahead, I'm sorry.

CW:What were -- I mean, the home environment that you grew up in, your parents had been sort of assimilationists. After the war, did that remain? Did you go to shul ever or --

LPB:Poland was the enemy. They didn't want to talk -- I mean, they always spoke Polish. I know about people who just refused to speak Polish. They always spoke Polish. But they didn't want to have anything to do with Poland. Hated Poland. My father's mother was very Orthodox. His father wasn't but she was and he was very close to her. And we did. We went to shul. I never learned to read Hebrew. 26:00They never sent me to Hebrew school. There were no bat mitzvahs in those days. Nobody heard of anything for girls, so it didn't make that much difference. But he went, he was comfortable in an old-time Orthodox shul and so he bought tickets for the holidays. No matter how bad things got -- and between my parents, they got pretty bad. My mother was a pretty sick person. There was always Pesach in my house. He really made sure that those holidays were remembered. Since he didn't know when his mother actually died, he chose Rosh Hashanah to do yizkor for her. And most of that I got from my father. My mother's view of Judaism was that she knew who her enemies were. She was a very 27:00instinctual person. Wasn't very intellectual at all. And so, that was very lucky for me, I think, when I was a baby because there were no incubators and my survival was totally because she was like a little animal. She talked about I couldn't suck so she expressed milk on a spoon, fed me with a spoon. She was a survivor through and through and the Jewishness in her soul was she knew who the anti-Semites were and she knew who to keep away from. And so, she was very connected in a kind of survival way but not in a -- I'm trying to think of the word. Not in a way that she commemorated any of the holidays or any of the -- I 28:00mean, my father did it and so she went along. But that was not meaningful. What was meaningful to her was sort of her own preservation.

CW:And what was meaningful to you? I mean, did you like the holidays?

LPB:I did. I did. They were very important to me. The ritual. Passover is still my favorite holiday. And what was significant was that no matter what was going on, I always got new clothes. My father taught me phonetically to read the Four Questions. There was always a seder. It was much abbreviated but he -- and for 29:00Rosh Hashanah, there was always a celebration, he always went to synagogue and I went with him. For Yom Kippur, he always fasted. My mother didn't. And honestly -- and he never insisted that I did. When I was a teenager, I did it because I kind of wanted to know if I could do it. And then, I got married and my husband wasn't too interested in it. And I guess one year my father was in the hospital and I decided I would fast on his behalf. And then, when I had children, I said we either have to do it or don't do it. We can't play the game both ways. So, you know -- and I did it my own way. I'm not very observant. But I think Judaism is visceral for me. It's not what I do; it's who I am. But I remember that those 30:00holidays were very important. Very important in my life. It's really what I took away for my own children.

CW:What were the -- well, you mentioned education already but what were the values that you felt your parents were trying to pass on to you?

LPB:I think maybe the most important -- it's interesting, 'cause I had a real dichotomy in my home. My father was a very decent, honest person. My mother was like a little animal. She could cheat, steal, whatever she needed to do and she had no guilt. I mean, an example of that was they lived in Florida and she was 31:00working at a fine jewelry department in the department store. And she stole like a son-of-a-gun. And they gave those employees a lie detector test every six months. Always passed. She had no superego. She had no sense of guilt. So, I had, on the one hand, I had her and on the other side I had my father. And I think he was much more significant and I was very lucky because of that. I think I could have turned out much worse. And I think decency was probably the biggest value. And tolerance, I mean that was very important. I remember the Holocaust 32:00was kind of an example of how you don't discriminate. And when we first came to this country, well, my father afterwards got a job working for my uncle who made eyeglass frames and he went to Atlanta in the '50s. And he saw the "colored" and "white" bathrooms and he actually became physically ill. They had to find him a doctor. And he couldn't believe it, that this was a country that this could happen in. So, that was a very, very important value that came away from the Holocaust, that you just -- no matter who those people were. And that was very important value of his. And respect for human beings. I think there was a certain way that Jews were supposed to behave towards other people. That was important. The charity and that sort of kindness to others. And so, I think that 33:00was a pretty significant thing. The one thing that I neglected to mention early on, which I think is probably important, is I was actually born in Siberia. But when we were in Föhrenwald, there was a big grapevine of what was happening for people to come to the United States. And because it was the '50s, nobody who had any connection with anything communist was being let in the United States. And France had a large communist party and, of course, Russia. And since I had no birth certificate, my father came home one day to Föhrenwald and said, "From today on, you were born in Warsaw." Didn't ask any questions. I mean, didn't have to say anything. That was it. "And you were never in Paris." And he made up some cockamamie affidavit, who knew, that I was born in hiding. Anybody who had 34:00half a brain would know that -- in Praga, which is kind of on the other side of the river the Germans didn't destroy, in an apartment that belonged to my uncle and it was this whole cockamamie thing. And so, my citizenship papers say Warsaw and I don't think at this date I'll be deported. But so, everything -- so, as far as everything, my passport, everything says Warsaw, Poland. Doesn't say Siberia. So, I think that's a kind of an important piece of information.

CW:So, we've been talking a lot about your early life. I wonder if you can just give me a snapshot of your life today, your career and your family?

LPB:I went to college in New York, to NYU. I was, well, I was fortunate for my misfortune that I got a scholarship from the Division of Vocational Rehab, because of the cerebral palsy. And the philosophy was that they took people who were handicapped who had the potential -- they would test you, who had the potential to go to college and they would pay for your education with the idea that you would then not be a burden to society but you could contribute in spite of the handicap. So, by some crazy reason, at the age of eighteen, I don't know how I figured this out, I decided I could have gone to Hunter in New York, which was free. But I decided to apply to NYU, which was one of the most expensive schools in New York because I thought, well, if I got the scholarship and they 36:00thought I was paying, I probably would be treated much better. So, I went to NYU. It was a wonderful experience for me. It was the small campus of NYU, up in the Bronx. It only had a small liberal arts college and an engineering school, so there were only twenty-two hundred of us. And I really blossomed there. Was a great experience. I majored in sociology, totally by accident. And I really felt like it was a good fit because it kind of thought the way I thought. I really felt that society had a huge impact on the individual and it was -- anyway, so I met my husband there and I got married right out of school and went to graduate school in social work. I got pregnant because of the war in Vietnam. (laughs) 37:00All of us were getting pregnant so our husbands wouldn't have to go. And then, I moved from New York to the Washington, DC area. I have a daughter who is now forty-one years old and -- I'm sorry, she's forty-three years old. And twin sons. I was a twin. My twin died at birth. My son-- I have twins and now my daughter has twin girls. So, there's a big twin gene. And I think my grandmother was a twin, as well. And I worked in a foster care agency for a while. I had such a good experience in college, in higher education, that I've always been interested in that. And for some reason, I gravitated to the University of Maryland and I got a job in academic advising. And that led to becoming the 38:00director of an academic advising office. It was a wonderful career. It didn't pay a lot but it was very fulfilling and I had a wonderful time. And I got a lot of kudos. And after about fifteen years of marriage, my husband and I divorced. About two years later, I met somebody and he and I lived together for about eleven years and then we married and we were together about thirty years. He developed Parkinson's disease and about six years ago, he started to have some very serious cognitive and emotional symptoms and became both emotionally and physically abusive and I had to leave. So, right now, I'm kind of in a 39:00transition. I'm living with one of my sons and waiting for this thing to be resolved. My daughter has four children: a girl, who's fourteen, and a son who's twelve, and twin girls who are ten. And one of my twin sons has a son who's seven and a daughter who's five and a little one who's two. And my other son has a little girl also who's two. So, from having no family, I have a huge family, which is very nice. And they're very supportive and my son Craig got interested in Jewish genealogy and he spent a year-and-a-half in a post-doc in Cambridge, England, and he did a lot of research on my family, which was very easy to do 40:00because of these crazy names. Everybody with those names is related to me. There are no other Pomeranzbrums or Papirbukhs. So, he actually was able to hire -- I mean, the genealogy world is insane. I mean, they all help each other. And he and I went to Warsaw in 1996, I believe. And he was in England. I met him in London. We flew to Poland. My Polish, I understand everything. Was a bit of a struggle. I was there a week and I could speak. And because I don't have an American accent, I have a Polish accent, I have a Warsaw accent. When I was in 41:00Kraków, they knew that I didn't come from Kraków; I came from Warsaw. So, we were able to go to the streets where my parents lived. Everything, of course, was demolished and the building that my father grew up in is now the ugly Stalin memorial. And they moved the building up the road. But the building he was born in was still standing. It still has the shots in the brick. And the most significant part of that trip was I went to the library. Oh, we had a guide who loved me because I could speak Polish. And we went to the archives that were all written in Cyrillic. So, we had a woman who spoke Polish but read Russian. So, 42:00she would read the Polish to me and I would translate in English to my son and he would write it down. Anyway, I was able to go to the library and find issues of this "Kurier Poranny" from 1938 and actually got -- was able to find my father's movie reviews. That was incredible. And this guy, who was the guide who really took a huge liking to me because I was not the typical American, they wouldn't let -- I mean, it's amazing how they preserved the paper. It was the paper, I mean the paper in paper. It was not yellow. It was preserved between two huge pieces of cardboard. Just plain cardboard. And the top of the cardboard had holes in it and it was tied with shoelaces. And that was it. And they 43:00brought this thing up and I opened it up and the paper was the paper. It didn't fall apart, it was not yellow. I have no idea. For some reason, that place was -- everything in Warsaw was bombed. This was not bombed. They had the paper. And that was incredible. And, of course, they wouldn't let me copy it 'cause it was so old. But this guy knew everybody and he was able to get those articles copied for me and sent them to me. So, I have them. So, that was amazing. It was truly amazing. And I learned to read a little Polish. And we got a whole different treatment in restaurants and they knew -- my son got the English menu. I got the Polish menu. And I could have never made the trip if my parents were alive. It would freak them out. They just wouldn't have let me go. The thing that was 44:00interesting still, they had -- we went in Kraków to the café that does the klezmer and the klezmer was being sung by Germans and everybody in the audience was German 'cause they could understand -- I mean, it just freaked me out. It totally freaked me out, this whole Jewish revival stuff. And we did go to the whatever that is, the historical thing that they now have. And we went to the cemetery and we were able to find some Papirbukhs in the cemetery. And we went to this apartment building that belonged to my uncle, his father, in Praga, which was preserved. It was across the river.

CW:Where you were supposedly born?

LPB:Where I was supposedly born. Opened the door, we go inside. My uncle wanted 45:00pictures. He was still alive. I opened the door, I go inside, and on the mailbox is the word "Żyd," which is "Jew" in Poland, in Polish, in marker. And a hangman's noose on the thing. And they are who they are. I mean, Columbia University has sent a rabbi there. I went to the Nożyk Synagogue. We walked, on Saturday morning. There were a couple dozen people there who had sort of discovered they were Jews and came out of the woodwork. But the front door had been demolished. But the Polish served me well and by the time I was -- and it was sort of amazing experience as we were on the train and I was looking down at the rails, and suddenly the word for rails in Polish came into my head. I hadn't 46:00heard that word -- maybe fifty years. I mean, I don't know how long -- who used that word. And there it was. It was just really -- pretty remarkable. And I had even, before I went -- and there were some letters of my father's and I couldn't read -- I worked at Maryland and they had a foreign language department and they did something really interesting. They would create foreign language classes if they could find four people who were willing to take them. They could be anything. Polish was one of them. They could be Farsi. And they would find somebody on the staff who spoke the language. And there were tapes and a book and that person would lead it. So, there was a woman who worked in the astronomy library who was Polish. And so, I took this class so I could learn to read. And 47:00then, the people who wanted credit, they brought somebody in from the University of Pennsylvania, they had a Polish department, who was a real Polish professor. And so, I did a little bit of that. I got a kids' Polish book and I tried to learn some words -- remember some words. But it was remarkable how much of it just was suddenly there. And I spoke -- I mean, my parents spoke Polish to each other, all my relatives spoke Polish to each other, but I spoke English to my father by the time I was ten and he spoke English to me. So, we spoke English all the time. I spoke English to my mother, my mother spoke Polish to me. So, I didn't use Polish since I was ten years old, at all. So, it was incredible, that whole experience.

CW:Did you keep up any of the other languages you had learned?

LPB:I took French in college, so I can read and write. But no, I didn't. And I 48:00didn't remember. I mean, I was so little. And I was fluent in the way a five or six-year-old would be fluent. But no. Other than Polish, nothing.

CW:You mentioned before that your parents would use Yiddish sayings occasionally. Do you remember any of them?

LPB:Yeah, and since I'm here I'm going to ask you 'cause I didn't really know what it meant. The one that stands out in my mind, my father would call me a "baryer [brick wall]." Do you know what that is?

CW:We'll look it up after.

LPB:It had something to do with being kind of tough.

CW:We'll have to look it up. (laughs)

LPB:Words like "shlimaz1" and, oh my gosh. I'm not thinking. There were really a 49:00number of words that he used as descriptors that I think you could only use in Yiddish. But it's funny 'cause I thought to myself I go to the Yiddish Book Center, I'm going to ask them what that means, if it's a real word. And I think that's a word. I mean, I think that's the word he used. Maybe it was something close.

CW:We'll find it?.

LPB:Words like "balebosta [lady of the house]." If I thought about it, I'd probably -- when I leave here, I'm going to think of a whole bunch. (laughs) Yeah.

CW:It's okay. You also mentioned sort of how you created your own way of celebrating holidays when you started your own family. Can you tell me a little 50:00more about that?

LPB:We never did Hanukkah at home at my house. So, I had trouble with that one. My kids had to kind of -- and we never did Shabbat in my home. My aunts both did but my mother -- and, yeah, I mean, it was a thing a woman did and it was never going to be my mother's thing. In fact, my mother always wanted a Christmas tree. So, we were in Föhrenwald, she found a German caretaker who cut down a tree for her and we had a Christmas tree. We were the only Jews, I think, in Föhrenwald that had a Christmas tree. We had everybody in the building making little paper rings and things and chains and real candles. And she always wanted one. My father let her have one. So, we didn't do that. But in my ho-- I guess 51:00the High Holidays were important and those were always celebrated. My first husband and my second husband, too, they're both Jews but they weren't very connected at all. Since I had kids, always fasted on the New Year. Told my kids as they got older that if they wanted to eat, they had to make their own food because I wasn't going to do it. And so, they knew that the holidays were important. They knew that being Jewish, for me, was very important. That was part of who I was. Passover was probably very significant for me. And I remember my father waking me up in the morning and the story of Passover was -- and I did 52:00the same thing with my kids. And so, on some -- I think they knew that being Jewish was very significant for me. It was just really who I was and how I made choices. When I first divorced and I was looking for a therapist, I was only going to go to a Jewish therapist 'cause the expressions I use and who I am and where I come from, I just felt -- not that somebody wasn't Jewish couldn't understand. But I just felt somehow that there was some kind of affinity for -- as far as that went. So, it was always important.

CW:And did you send your kids to religious school or --

LPB:I did not join a synagogue, so my kids went to Sunday school. It was called 53:00the Unaffiliated Sunday School for Jewish Education. I guess I didn't want to affiliate -- I don't know. I just didn't have a good feeling about the relatives who I knew who were in synagogues and what they -- I don't know. Anyway, so I preferred kind of doing my own thing. And the parents in that unaffiliated Sunday school did Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services. And then, when I worked at the university, the Hillel rabbi became a friend of mine and they actually, in the university, they conducted Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox services. So, I went for years and years and I'm still going to the services that are led by this same rabbi at a high school. And my kids, my daughter, I gave her a 54:00choice for a bar or bat mitzvah. And she wanted -- I mean, for a bat mitzvah. I said she didn't have to do it and she wanted to. And so, she studied with a young woman who was actually in one of the classes that I taught. And she was very interesting. Her mother taught Yiddish. And her name is Lieberman. I don't know if you know her. At Maryland. And her daughter -- and they were Orthodox. Her daughter was in a class that I taught. And she tutored Hope. And she really had some difficulty that she had to resolve because she really liked me. But she called people like me gastronomic Jews. So, she struggled with that whole thing. 55:00But Hope had a bat mitzvah. My sons had a bar mitzvah at the university. After Sunday school, they did tutoring. And so, they both did that. It's interesting how it all turned out. My daughter, I used to say she's twenty-one and she's never been single. She's like a man magnet. She never dated a Jew. Never. And they understood that that was very important to me and I knew it was important to my parents. And so, I kind of knew that I would never marry somebody who wasn't Jewish. And so, I was sure that -- she married a rabbi's son, a Reform rabbi's son, can you believe it? Amazing. My son, Craig, who became this genealogy researcher and who -- this is a really interesting story -- was 56:00obsessed with going to this little village where I was born, in Siberia. I mean, he was completely obsessed. I said, "You are out of your freakin' mind. What are you cra--" I mean, he got involved with a woman who's Catholic and the agreement was that he wouldn't marry her unless the children were raised as Jews. And he was my religious one. He went to serv-- he was in Cambridge, he went to Orthodox services there. He did all the Jewish genealogy. He only was going to marry a Jew and he ended up marrying a Catholic. But with this woman who hates to travel, she went with him. They flew from Washington to Beijing and from Beijing, they took the Trans-Siberian Railway and they stopped in all these 57:00different Russian cities. And they arranged for interpreters and they went to this town. Nuts. Overnight, I mean, she doesn't trav -- she gets nauseous in a car. I mean, I don't even know how -- but anyway, they went and they went to this little town. And, of course, there was nothing in this town that would have even remotely resembled what it was like in '43. And they were asking people -- I was born in a hospital. The hospital had been torn down. There was no remnant of anything. My aunt had drawn them kind of a little map and that was all wrong. And so, he was very depressed. I don't know what he expected to find there. So, 58:00there was a hall of records. And, of course, I never had a birth certificate, so what are they going to find there? Well, lo and behold, my aunt, my father's sister who was in Siberia with us, registered my birth. And there it was. He got a copy of a birth certificate with my name on it. He was --- they were both --- he was insane. He called me at work, he was from the chandeliers. "Mom, I have your birth certificate! You never thought you had that but there is your birth certificate." So, that was pretty exciting. And he did it. They did it. That was his significant journey. And they have three kids and two of them have been to a mikvah [pool for ritual immersion]. They've been immersed and they're going to do it. I don't know how that's all going to turn out. My other son, his brother, 59:00married a Jewish woman who -- very well versed. Went to Hebrew school, went to Jewish camp, knows all the stuff. Doesn't believe in God but knows the whole thing. Her husband, my son, believes in God but he was not well versed in the -- he doesn't read Hebrew. He had trouble in school, so he had to memorize the part that he had to read and so on. So, it all turned out kind of funky. But anyway, all my kids do -- well, not Hope. My two sons do Shabbat, which is something that was never -- we kept saying we'd do it 'cause they were in Sunday school but it was not something I was ever raised with, so I didn't do it. But they do it, so yeah.

CW:And what's important to you about being Jewish in your life today? You say it sort of influences how you make decisions.

LPB:It's who I am. It's who I am. I can't even describe it. I mean, it's just who I am. And I think it influences, in tiny little --- in some way, everything I do and everything I believe in. I buy my kids Yiddish picture books. (laughs) The story about the goat, that was kind of one of the things that I didn't even realize. But after I left my job, I meet for lunch with my former boss from time to time. And she talked to me about how significant it was to my staff that when there was something to be done, I had a story, some kind of story behind it. And 61:00a lot of those stories were Jewish-influenced stories. They were examples of what needed to be done now or something that happened that needed to be fixed or some significant work related -- we worked with people. That was our job. I worked with students in trouble, we all worked with students and with staff. And so, it's all --- it's kind of part of who I am. And so, everybody knew the story with the goat because my parents would come to visit and they were not easy people. And so, I had three kids under two. I mean, that was crazy. And I thought life was hard. And so, then my parents would come for three weeks. And 62:00then, I let the goat out. And, man, life was a breeze. There's nothing to it. So, that's kind of an example of --

CW:Can you tell the story of the goat and --

LPB:Oh, okay. It's probably not exactly right but it was a poor Jewish farmer, very religious, who had, I don't know, six children and a wife. And they lived with their chickens and in this one room. And he was just beside himself. He didn't have any money. And so, one day, he was sitting and looking at the sky and saying, "God, please, I've been such an observant, devout Jew. You have to help me!" So, He said -- and this is an abbreviation. He said, "Buy a goat. Get 63:00a goat and bring the goat in the house." So, God answered him. Okay, so he got a goat and brought the goat in the house. The goat ate all the kids' clothes, everything that was -- went out and he said, "God! What are you doing? I mean, now I even have to go out and buy clothes for my kids, have to do all this stuff! The goat ate everything!" So, God said, "Get rid of the goat." So, he got rid of the goat. Comes to God, he says, "God, thank you, thank you! Life is so easy! Everything is wonderful!" And blah. So, that was always nice --- that was kind of the story that everybody knew about the goat. So, yeah, so they were those kinds of things. But people who know me know that so much of who I am, so much of what I do and the things -- I mean, I remember looking for apartments 64:00when we moved to Washington and looking at the door, looking at the names, see if they were Jewish names. Picking a doctor 'cause he was a Jewish doctor. It's just, I mean, it's visceral. It's in my body. And it's who I am.

CW:Well, I just have a couple more questions. And if there's anything you want to add, but I'm curious, because of your father's experience when he went to Atlanta, that story, was the Civil Rights Movement a big --

LPB:Yes, very big.

CW:Big, yeah.

LPB:Very big. I was very involved. I was in SNCC before it became very militant. 65:00It was a very important part of my college life, that whole '60s era. And it's, yeah, and even -- something came to mind. My daughter, in her years of never being single, dated some Italian kid from high school who was very racist. And he said something to her, I don't know, and she said, "You can't come in my house and say that." So, there was a real -- my kids had a real awareness. And I think even my kids in front of -- if somebody says something, they'll say, "That's not acceptable here." So, yeah, I was very active in civil rights as a 66:00student and even afterwards. Attended all the marches here in Washington. And, yeah, it was very important to me.

CW:Any specific event stand out that (UNCLEAR)?

LPB:Wow, I don't remember. I don't remember. You know, I said -- I will when I leave here but I don't remember anything specific.

CW:Well, are there any other topics that we didn't touch on that you wanted to --

LPB:I don't think so.

CW:-- talk about? Well, I just have one last question. Two last questions, actually. I'm wondering if you have a favorite Yiddish phrase or word or song?

LPB:Oh, my gosh. I have a lot of Yiddish music at home. God, I use Yiddish all the time. "Mensch" is probably one of my favorites. I'm trying to think.

CW:Well, why is mensch -- why do you love that word?

LPB:Because it's what I want my kids to be. It's what I want people to be. For me, I think when somebody once asked me what's the most important value, I call it decency, being a human be -- what I consider being a human. I know a lot of 68:00humans aren't like that, but -- so, for me, that's probably one of my favorite words. It's funny, 'cause I use Yiddish a lot. But I'm blanking and I'm trying to think. I have all this Yiddish music. I can't think of it.

CW:That's okay. A question just came to mind: I'm wondering, with your experience with Polish and Yiddish being in there and other languages from the early part of your life, how does language affect your identity, if at all?

LPB:That's interesting. It's very important. And what's interesting, I don't know if this answers your question, but what comes to mind for me is I have friends who -- for example, I have a friend whose son married an Israeli and they live in Israel and they have a child. And she goes and visits. And she thinks it's rude for people to be speaking another language in her presence. I would never, ever think it was rude --

CW:This is your friend?

LPB:-- for somebody -- yeah, my friend -- who's speaking a language I didn't understand. And what was really interesting, my daughter had that experience where a friend of hers thought it was rude that somebody was speaking another 70:00language. And she had an epiphany that she never realized. She said, "I didn't react that way at all because I was always around people who spoke a language I didn't understand." And so, she didn't think that was at all strange. She was with my family, they were speaking Polish. She didn't understand a word they said but she was very accepting of that. So, that's a different -- and I've heard other people -- oh, and that whole issue of being angry because people in other countries don't speak English, which is nuts. But I know there are people -- and I find that just remarkable. And if there are people even with me and they're speaking some other lang-- yeah, to me, that's just a very normal and natural way to be. And I'm interested in languages. I've always been. This is kind of crazy: I took French in college for a long time and then I took a year 71:00of Italian because I thought it was beautiful. And I took a year of Russian and when I took Russian, the woman who taught it, she had us get up and read. And I figured it was so similar, it's a piece of cake. And I started reading and she looked at me and she said, "You speak another Slavic language, don't you?" 'Cause it was harder for me to have the right accent because it was too close than it was for somebody who just spoke English and took Russian. So, I've always been interested in languages and it's always been part of who I am. It's an interesting question. I didn't think of that.

CW:Great. Well, I'm wondering if, for a last question, if you have advice for future generations? Can think about your grandchildren or just future generations.

LPB:Well, I think tolerance is probably my most important value I would hope -- 72:00although sadly I don't see much of it. That there would be more of that, more tolerance, more acceptance of people who are different and kind of letting them be who they are. I guess that would be, probably, the major thing.

CW:Great! Okay.

LPB:Good?

CW:Thank you so much for sharing.

LPB:You're welcome.

[END OF INTERVIEW]