PENINA GLAZER ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: Today is the 16th of June. I am here with Penina Migdal Glazer to do an oral history. So, I was wondering if you could start by talking a little bit about your family, as far back as you know.

PENINA GLAZER:Okay. My family? Well, my mother's family comes from Slutsk -- that's in Belarus, or White Russia, as it was called. And I believe that it was a town of about twenty thousand people or so, with a fairly substantial Jewish 1:00population. My grandfather was a shoykhet [ritual slaughterer] there; that means he was a ritual slaughterer of -- for meat -- of animals. And my grandmother -- what she did is, they -- she would -- Jews could not own land, right? So, she would lease orchards in bloom, from the time of the bloom till the time of the harvest. And according to my mother, she could just go out and look at the trees when they were in flower -- fruit trees -- and she knew how much harvest would come based on that. And so, she would lease them, and then she would -- after the harvest, the land then went back to the landlord. And she would do that 2:00every year. She also had eight children. She was apparently immensely efficient. I did know her, until I was about ten years old. And she was a great lady. There are some kind of fun, interesting stories about them. They lived in a smaller town nearby called Pahost, and they wanted to move to Slutsk, and my grandfather wanted to get this job as a shoykhet. He actually also was -- had smikhes -- he was ordained as a rabbi -- but he wanted to work as a shoykhet. And when he went, you had to meet with this kind of board of -- I guess rebonim, you know, rabbis, elders who sort of gave you the okay that you could have the job. And he went, and he was quite learned, and so they questioned him on all kinds of things -- because, you know, shoykhet was not supposed to be some boorish 3:00person, 'cause he had to do this quite violent work, so they wanted to make sure he was very steeped in Torah and all that. And he passed with shining colors. However, they said he could not have the job. And this is now right at the turn of the twentieth century -- right about then -- and he said, "Why can I not have the job?" And they said, Because we heard that you're a Zionist, and we are (UNCLEAR) -- we are definitely anti-Zionist. And so, if you tell us that you're prepared to give that up, then you can have the job. And he said, "No, but I'm gonna stay here and convince you that I'm right." And according to the way the story goes, he stayed for about three hours to convince them that this idea of a future state of Israel -- which is, after all, a half century before it really happened -- was a good idea. And in the end, they said Okay, he could have the 4:00job. So, they moved to Slutsk. They were there during World War I, when my mother said that the Russians and Germans were shooting the bullets right over the roof of their house. It was a pretty scary thing. Actually, she said the Germans were much nicer to them than the Russians -- which is, of course, a surprise, as we think about history later on. And they lived, I think -- they weren't rich, but they lived a reasonably comfortable life. Then came the revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution. The Bolsheviks came, took a lot of stuff away from them. But mainly, the big problem was that the family was very involved in Zionism, and they began to persecute them for that. And the Bolsheviks were very anti-Zionist. So, my mother's older sister was in -- was 5:00kind of engaged to a guy, or courting somebody who later became her husband -- he was arrested and sent to jail for five years for Zionist activity. And there was a lot of stuff about that -- there was a lot of fear. So my -- somebody arranged for my grandfather to get a job in Rochester, New York. And a sister of his who was already in this country sent the money for passage. And in January of 1924, just before the immigration shut down, they arrived in New York -- my grandparents and all but their two oldest children, who were too old to come in on my grandfather's visa. Actually, my mother lied about her age and made herself two years younger so that she could get in on my grandfather's visa. She was the third-oldest. Her eldest sister decided to stay and wait for the 6:00boyfriend to come out of jail. And her older brother left for Palestine, where he lived for the rest of his life. And so, they arrived here in 1924, originally went to Rochester, and then, after a short while, my mother was sort of worried about being a burden on her family, so she went to New York to work and later met my father. My father's family is from Poland, and a small town outside of Warsaw -- darn, I forgot to look up the name. But he moved to Warsaw when he was one. And his father left for the United States. And from the United States, he 7:00sent a get -- a Jewish divorce -- to his -- my father's mother -- to his wife -- the man's wife. And she subsequently remarried to a much older man, who -- and they had a butcher shop. But then, the war came -- World War I. Things were very, very tough. My father was an only child. His mother had had multiple -- I don't know what -- still births, miscarriages, bad luck in having other children, and so she only had this one child, my father. One of the most amazing things that I can never get over is that she was afraid that the malekh-hamoves -- the angel of death -- would see him and take him away from her, because she had lost these other children. And so, in order to trick the malekh-hamoves, she 8:00didn't talk to him for the first year of his life. I mean, she must have talked -- like, some little instructions or something, but she tried not to speak to him, to see if that would somehow bring some luck. It's an extraordinary thing (laughs) -- every time I think about it -- that he developed into a sort of reasonably normal person. It's just an incredibly powerful thing to me. Anyway, he did. And then, the war came. And finally, his father sent a ticket for him to come to America. And some man was supposed to bring him -- my father was fifteen -- some man was supposed to bring the money and get the ticket and kind of be an 9:00escort for my father going back to New York. And the man stole the money. It didn't work out. Somehow, he got the ticket -- I was never quite clear on the details of that -- but he had to leave by himself. So, at age fifteen, he said goodbye to his mother -- she must have known she wouldn't see him again -- and he made his way to Rotterdam from Warsaw. And he told me that you stay with these various landsmen [fellow countrymen] -- you know, the people who came from your town in different places put you up. And he finally made his way to Rotterdam. And from there, he waited, and they took a boat, and he came to New York. And he went to his father's house. And when he got to his father's house, things were not so great. His father had remarried quite a while before that, and there were three little children. And his father's wife was apparently 10:00psychotic -- she later was institutionalized for, I think, a lot or all of her life. Anyway, it was very chaotic in this house. So, he left. He said, "I just couldn't stay there. It just wasn't gonna work out." So, at fifteen, he's in New York, he's on his own. He -- that's it. So, an uncle did give him a job, I think, in a seltzer factory. And he lived in some kind of a boarding house where people stayed. And sort of made his way -- went to night school, learned English -- you know, I think paid a price that a lot of immigrants pay -- he never had the education, he was really quite intelligent -- that he should have had. But he made it. And he met my mother. And they got married in 1933 and began their 11:00own family. Do you want me to keep going?

CW:Yeah. I would love to hear about what it was like for you -- you know, you have heard -- it's amazing that you know all of these stories so --

PG:Right.

CW:-- what was the environment that you grew up in?

PG:Okay. So, I'll tell you what happened to them after they got married, right? They lived in Brooklyn for a short while. They were workers -- they were working-class people. And although, you know, in the style of some people of that time, they were very well read; they were -- my mother was very involved in Zionist activities; they were the kind of people who went to lectures all the time, and so on. But neither one of them graduated from high school. My mother, you know, speaks excellent -- well, until she died -- spoke excellent Hebrew and Yiddish and English. And she doesn't even know where she learned English. She 12:00said, "I'm not sure where I became literate in English." But she did. Anyway, they lived in Brooklyn. And it was, I guess, okay. It was the '30s. It was tough. It was the Depression. Several of her -- a number of her siblings made aliyah to Israel; they went to live on kibbutzim. And a sister of hers was preparing to go -- to make aliyah. And they did it on these little farms -- in New Jersey, this one was -- and it was called the Hechalutz Farm, where they were sort of practicing to be on a kibbutz. And she told my parents that -- who were young -- they had one little baby, my sister -- and that they were starting a new cooperative community, a New Deal co-op, like, a back-to-the-land community -- near this Hechalutz Farm in New Jersey. And she thought that my 13:00parents should join this utopian community, this cooperative community, and that she would lend them the five hundred dollars that you needed to go into this community. Five hundred dollars was a lot of money. And so, they went. And that's where I was born. It's sort of in central New Jersey. Now it's quite developed, but at the time, it was in the middle of very rural New Jersey. The town itself is pretty much the same. We went back there (laughs) for a little reunion a couple of weeks ago. And it was called Jersey Homesteads at the time, and later, after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, it was renamed Roosevelt. And that's how it's known now, as Roosevelt, New Jersey. This was a New Deal 14:00cooperative community for Jewish -- immigrant Jewish workers of the Cloak Makers' Union. And so, the idea was that you would get a house and a small piece of land, and there would be a cooperatively owned factory and a cooperatively owned farm and a cooperatively owned general store. And the people like my father went there. They worked for the WPA -- the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal agency -- building the roads and the sewers and the infrastructure for the town. And these little Bauhaus houses were put up that were very, very modern for the time: they had central heating, they had refrigerators, gas 15:00stoves. They were really quite a bit nicer than these apartments than my parents lived in in Brooklyn. And they moved there. And it was an extraordinary place for me to grow up. There was a very strong community. The co-op failed very quickly. That was kind of unfortunate. And it failed for a variety of reasons. One of the principal reasons was that they had gotten the blessing of the union to do this, but then -- this was the height of the Depression, and they moved in in 1936 -- and the union realized, We can't allow contracts for garments to go to this little town out in New Jersey. We have a union hall full of unemployed 16:00workers here in New York. And so, they kind of disrupted what should have been jobs coming to this factory. There were other reasons, too. But in the end, the co-op failed. But the people stayed. And the houses were actually owned by the government, and so you paid sixteen dollars a month rent to the government -- until 1945, when the houses were sold to the people. And there was this enormous communal spirit there. Very shortly after the town was formed, a very famous artist by the name of Ben Shahn moved to the town, and around him came an artists' community, too. So, you had, in effect, two hundred homes -- two hundred families -- largely, Jewish needle trade workers and their children, but a sizable minority of artists who came around Ben Shahn. So, the school had a 17:00gorgeous Ben Shahn mural on the history of labor. And the spirit was -- everybody was involved in building the school, which went through eighth grade, and a kind of -- clubs and all kinds of things like that in this town. And this was sort of very central to our existence. We had a huge garden. My mother canned things and made all kinds of stuff. And we actually were quite poor, (laughs) but you didn't know it. There was sort of no way of knowing that you were. Everybody was the same. We had this beautiful outdoors. The houses were quite nice. The school was excellent. So, you didn't really realize that you had very little money as much as I think you might have under some other circumstances.

CW:So, I'm wondering if you -- just 'cause I'm personally really interested in space -- if you could just close your eyes or imagine what the space of this place was that you -- the co-op that you grew up --

PG:I was just there a few weeks ago. I hadn't been back for many, many years, but my sister and brother and I decided to make a little homecoming trip. And my husband, Mickey, and my brother's wife, Marcy, also went. So, five of us drove out there. And we were shocked at how much it's the same. There are some changes, but there was no mistaking that this was the town. So, as you drove into the town, at the main intersection -- first of all, as you're coming in, on 19:00the left-hand side is a corner, which when we were growing up was called the "hitching corner," because not that many people had cars, but if you were a kid and you wanted to go to Hightstown -- the sort of next town that was a bigger town where there was a movie and stores and things like that -- you stood on that corner and you waited for somebody from the town to come by and give you a ride. And then, there was another corner in Hightstown where you waited to come home. So, the first thing was that corner. And then, you see these houses, which are -- some of them were two-story, but mostly low, flat-roofed, one-story, white cinderblock Bauhaus houses. Our house had five rooms -- amazingly unchanged. We knocked on the door and the woman let us come in -- she was so 20:00nice. And when you came in, there's a little foyer and then a large living room that went into the kitchen, and then on the other side, a long hallway and three bedrooms off the hallway and a bathroom. And outside, a back porch and a big backyard. And then, the garage was attached to the house and also attached to the garage of the other house. So, it was freestanding, but the garages were attached. And then, behind the garage was a little workroom -- storage room -- where, if you can things and so on, you store -- there were shelves and you stored all those things there and stuff. It was fun when we went back and we 21:00showed her the trees that my parents had planted -- I mean, a lot of them were planted since then. They moved out in the 1950s; we're talking about fifty years here, so -- but there were still some trees they had planted and some shrubs. And the house was -- they had put siding on the outside, and also a little bit of a peaked roof, but inside, it was amazingly the way we remembered it. It was really -- so, you came into the town, and there was a large circle that was like one of the main routes of the town. You could go all the way around and come back to where you started -- where we lived, on that circle -- and that was called Co-op Circle. Another major street that intersected it was called Rochdale Street, I think -- or -- yeah, Rochdale Street. And Rochdale was a very 22:00famous cooperative community that came out of England that people knew about. So, you could see Co-op Circle and Rochdale Street, you know, were the main streets. There was Farm Lane and School Street, but aside from that, that was -- Cemetery Road -- it was, you know, a road to the cemetery. And essentially, all the houses were very close variations of each other. The school was a kind of interesting place. It went -- there weren't enough children to have individual classes, so you had, like, first and second grade together, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth. And when I was there, there was a very good principal. And they hired young teachers, mostly from New York City, who were 23:00sort of right out of college. Maybe they didn't even have the necessary certification to teach in the New York City schools. I'm not sure why they came, but they came there to teach. They would live with some family Monday through Friday, and they would tend to go back to the city on the weekends, 'cause it was about fifty miles and you could take a bus. But the thing was, this principal was able to get these very young teachers and engage them in the most progressive forms of teaching. So, we did all kinds of terrific things. They were worried that we would be kind of like hicks, you know, so every year we went to -- we had these field trips, and we would save up money and have bake sales and carnivals and so on, and then they would charter a bus and take us to New York or Philadelphia so that we should go to all these cultural things and 24:00see museums and a Broadway show and -- all kinds of things like that -- Chinatown. All those things I saw through my class trips. They were always putting on theater productions. There were always these projects. When my kids were young and we lived in Northampton, they went to the Smith College Campus School, which was considered a very cutting-edge kind of elementary school. And so many of the things they did, I remember thinking, Oh, we did that when I was in elementary school. You know, that doesn't seem so unusual to me. And then, the crazy part is, I had this wonderful sixth-grade teacher. And then, the seventh- and eighth-grade teacher was the principal. He was a teacher and principal -- it was a small school. He was good, too. But he was married. He went home every weekend to his family -- somewhere else; we never saw them. And 25:00then, my sixth-grade teacher and the principal ran away together. And then, that was it -- we never heard from them again. It was just after I graduated. So, there was this melodrama that went on there, as well. But near the school, there was also this grocery store -- general store -- with a little soda fountain attached to it: a kosher butcher on one side of the store, then the grocery store, and then this little soda fountain where you could get an ice cream cone or things like that. And that was kind of a center of community life, as was the post office and the so-called Borough Hall, 'cause this community was 26:00incorporated as a borough -- and Borough Hall, where some events went on, and so on. But it was -- there was such a kind of intimacy that when you graduated from eighth grade -- there were, let's say, twelve kids in my graduating class -- the whole town came out. There were three hundred people at the graduation. Everybody came. That was the social event of the season, you know? And so, there was a kind of very special spirit. And very -- like a lot of immigrant communities, the children were the ones who got the education, who became the professionals, who went on to be, you know, doctors and lawyers and so on -- and teachers. But I think that most of them really had a kind of special place in their hearts for this little town.

CW:Did it feel very Jewish with that being the majority of the population?

PG:It felt very Jewish. In my class, there was one non-Jewish kid; in my sister's class, there was one non-Jewish kid; you know, and so on -- or maybe there were two in my class. It felt very Jewish. Not religious. A lot of Yiddishkayt. My parents and their friends spoke a lot of Yiddish as their kind of natural language -- first language. They were very active in the Farband, which is a Labor Zionist organization, and most of the meetings there went on in Yiddish. There was a synagogue, but it was -- it wasn't widely attended, except on holidays or for bar mitzvah. They brought in a teacher to be the shule 28:00[secular Yiddish school] teacher there -- to -- it was, you know, like a -- you know, kind of a Yiddish cultural education. They weren't great. It was also somebody who would come and board there for the week and then leave. And that's mostly what we had for our education. But the spirit of the place was very Jewish. And that's all everybody knew, you know? So --

CW:So, when did you leave? Or how did you leave? Or --

PG:Okay. We left in -- I was born in 1939 -- we left in 1953. My parents had been working in various garment factories in nearby communities. They would 29:00commute to -- the last job they had was in Freehold, New Jersey and it was in a -- they were members of the International Lady Garment Workers' Union, and they worked in this women's coat factory. That's seasonal work, so in the offseason, my mother would stay home and my father would go elsewhere and find some other kind of work. But the unions were losing their strength; that work began to be more and more difficult, and it was harder and harder to make a living. And so, a big incentive to leave was that my parents bought a small business -- they bought a cleaning store, a cleaning and tailoring store -- in Elizabeth, New Jersey. A second incentive was that my father, increasingly coming back to being 30:00more religious, wanted my younger brother to have a better Jewish education than he could possibly have in this little town. So, that was kind of a second incentive. And so, they bought a store and moved to Elizabeth, New Jersey. And I was just finishing -- I had just finished ninth grade when we moved. And so, I did high school in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where it was a very different kind of Jewish community -- different kind of community, period. It was a small city, probably beyond its heyday -- industrial city, beyond its heyday -- with a lot of poverty. I mean, there were some very nice neighborhoods, but also a large 31:00poor population. Everybody in one high school -- well, everybody in two high schools -- I think it was about the only public schools with sex-segregated -- so it was a girls' high school that I went to; there was a comparable boys' high school. And there was a large Jewish community. Very powerful Orthodox rabbi there, Rabbi Teitz, who ran this big yeshiva and multiple synagogues. And so, the organiz-- there was also a Conservative synagogue, not nearly as strong, and I don't know if there was a Reform synagogue -- maybe. And so, the organization of Jewish life was much more around religion, whereas earlier in my childhood, 32:00it had been much more around culture and Yiddishkayt and Labor Zionism. So, it was different. It was very startling for me when I first came. I thought -- it took me a while to kinda get my bearings in this large high school, all girls' high school -- just a very different scene, you know? And -- but it was okay. It was all right. We managed.

CW:Yeah. Who were your friends?

PG:When I got to this new place?

CW:Yeah.

PG:Well, that first summer, I thought I would never have friends again. Then, I went to school and my friends were these young gals -- perfectly nice. They weren't the most prestigious crowd. We were, I would say, sort of the second 33:00tier in the school. We were in all the honors classes and all that kinda stuff -- together with the more -- almost everybody in these little groups were Jewish, but there were the sort of more select, elite group, that we were friendly with, and then there was this other group that I became friends with. I was so happy to have friends (laughs) when I moved there. And it was absolutely fine. In the more select group, a person that I was sort of friendly with turned out to be a young woman by the name of Judy Sussman; she later became Judy 34:00Blume. And many years later, when I was working at Hampshire College, she came to bring her son as an applicant to Hampshire. And at the time, I didn't realize that Judy Blume, whose -- who I knew who Judy Blume was; I just didn't realize that that was Judy Sussman, the gal I had gone to high school with. So, she called me up -- she had seen my picture in the catalogue and she called me up the night before and she said, "Hi, Penina. Do you remember me? Judy Sussman, now Judy Blume. Well, I'm bringing my son tomorrow for an application. I was wondering whether we could get together. I saw your picture in the catalogue." "Sure, no problem. That would be great." We make up a time. I went to work the next day. And Kelly was, you know, my assistant at the time. And I said to 35:00Kelly, "Look, I'm going to teach my class, but a woman is coming here to visit me. I think her name is Judy Blume. Wait a minute -- I'm not really sure what she said her married name was, but I think it's Judy Blume." And so, the people around her said, Judy Blume? What do you mean? Is this Judy Blume coming? I said, "Well, I don't know. Her name was Judy Sussman, and it might be Judy Blume, and I don't know if it's the right Judy Blume, but just tell her to wait." By the time I came back, there was this crowd gathered around and they were all giving her their books to sign. (laughs) I don't know how they got in so fast, but -- it was kind of a funny brush with celebrity that came out of my high school. Not too many brushes with celebrity came out of that high school. But it was okay. And from there, I went to Douglass College, which was the 36:00women's college of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

CW:So, since you sort of gave me that link, can we talk a little bit about how you got into the work that you ended up doing for most of your life, in education and --

PG:Teaching and administration? Sure. I'll just tell you one other thing.

CW:Yeah.

PG:That -- when I was in elementary school, I was (laughs) a very good student. And I had mentioned this teacher-principal, Mr. Naradino. Well, he called my mother in and he said to her, "You know, your daughter is very, very" -- I don't know what word he used -- able, smart, something, you know -- "and so I think 37:00that she could really have a good future as an administrative assistant." So, I never (laughs) thought about it much, but what a weird thing to say, huh? But he did say to my mother -- and about my sister, also -- he said, "You should try to make sure that your daughters go to college." That was not necessary to say to my parents. However much they struggled, they were absolutely committed for us to go to college. It was still an era where, in many families, if you didn't have much money, you sent your son to college or university, and the daughter maybe could do something else -- be a secretary or an administrative assistant or something like that. But we did. We went to college. And I absolutely loved 38:00it. I mean, it was just such a spectacular time for me. And I thought that I was going to be a high school teacher. That's what I had planned in my mind, that I was gonna be a high school teacher. In my senior year, I won a fellowship to go to Rutgers and get a master's degree, and I did that, and then I was going to be a high school teacher. And I taught high school for one year, and I hated it. It was kind of a devastating experience. I just absolutely hated it. I taught in a school in a place called South Brunswick, New Jersey, which was a very -- by that time, I was married -- I forgot to tell you that -- I graduated in 1960 -- 39:00fifty percent of my class was married by Labor Day, including me. And it's just sort of shocking. I think of my students -- What do you mean, you got married when you were just, like, a baby, just graduating from college? (laughs) You didn't even live yet. But everybody did it. Anyway. I was teaching in a place called South Brunswick. And it was a small town between New Brunswick and Princeton. It wasn't a town, it was like a township -- it was like an area, a rural area -- where there were a lot of old-line rural families and a new housing development of kind of junior executives. It was becoming the suburbs, so it was kind of junior executives working in New York and commuting to New 40:00York who were ambitious for their kids and so on, and these rural families who felt, Look, I never learned to read that well, so why does my son have to read that well -- kind of attitude toward education. And all these people were piled into the same class. And it was just mind-boggling for me to try to manage these young, bright teenagers and these other kids, who were nice enough, but they were so rural, they were so provincial. They lived one hour from New York City and they had never been -- never been even once. It was just sort of really striking. Anyway, there were all these classes, and you had to have so many preparations and try to get somewhere with these kids. And I was just 41:00overwhelmed. And I really hated it. So, I said, I can't do this. So, one of my professors from when I had gotten my master's said, "Well, why don't you come back and do a PhD?" I said, "Well, that sounds like a good idea." So, I did. It was interrupted a couple of times. First, because Mickey, my husband -- he was getting his PhD at Princeton, and we left and went to Chile for -- we went to South America for about sixteen months while he was doing his dissertation, and I worked with him on it, so it was interrupted. And then, I came back. And then, we moved up here and I worked on my dissertation, and ultimately, I finished it. And Mickey was teaching at Smith College and then went to do a year at a new 42:00college that was part of Rutgers. And I was looking for a job -- I finished my dissertation. And it wasn't so easy to find a job then; it was really discouraging, as a matter of fact. And so, I said, "Gee, I heard about a new college that's opening, and it'll be a fifth college in the Valley. If you go back to Smith, maybe I can get a job there." And that's what happened. He had an offer to stay at Rutgers or come back to Smith, and we came back here. And I did get the job at Hampshire College, where (laughs) I stayed for thirty-five years, as a faculty member and then as dean of the faculty and then later as a faculty member again. And that's where I first knew Aaron, and lots of other people who were involved in the very early days of the Book Center. And that's where it 43:00became one of my great loves.

CW:So, can you talk about your introduction to the Book Center -- and to Aaron? (laughs)

PG:Well, I knew Aaron as a student, but he never studied with me -- he never took any classes or anything with me, although whole bunches (laughs) of his friends did. I was teaching U.S. History. And I was also interested in things Jewish -- later on, I taught American Jewish History and -- some other -- Jewish Autobiography, stuff like that. But I just knew him -- I knew who he was, he knew who I was -- I just knew him to say hello to, really. And then -- but 44:00later, I was -- when he was organizing the Book Center, Rich Alpert was one of the people that was working closely with him, and Len Glick. And I knew them both very well. Rich and I were working together; he was the associate dean and I was the dean of the faculty by that time. And he said to me, "This is gonna be such a great thing." And he was the little -- sort of the interlocutor. (laughs) You know, he said, "Oh, you really should get involved in this. It's such a great idea." This is when the Book Center was still a very fledgling organization. And so, I did. And I don't remember what year I first came on the board, but that's a knowable fact we can find. And so, I came on the board 45:00fairly early on. And subsequently, I chaired the board. And that was a very volatile time in the history of the Book Center. First of all, finances were so scarce. I mean, it was -- just, the whole thing was being run on a shoestring, and at one point, we all just had to put up loans just to keep it going. And also, just the shape of it was still unclear. And it was the time that there was the first effort to put together a program in education. And it didn't do very well. You know, just -- the infrastructure wasn't there. So, there were various attempts to do things, and some of them were okay, but it didn't really take off 46:00in the way that we had envisioned. But other things took off. And then, slowly, the -- you know, the book collection and the national membership and some events and some programs that, you know, got a tremendous amount of attention -- and it became a kind of more solid place. So, then I stopped being the chair of the board and went on to being a board member. And then, some -- oh, and there were just these different characters who would appear, and they were just sort of amazing people. There was this man by the name of Sidney Berg. He just showed up one day and he said to Aaron, "You are the answer to my dreams. This is what I 47:00have been dreaming about for my whole life." And he became very involved with the Center, and he tried to help in all different ways that he could. And he had some money, so he gave -- I mean, I don't know if he was hugely rich, but he had more money than most of the people on the board at the time, and so he gave some money. But he was also -- like, his life's blood -- it was the most amazing thing. And other people also showed up like that. And so, it was a very kind of emotional time in the history of the Book Center. Well, years went by, and every time, I said, Well, you know, my term is long, long over on the board. And every time, they would say, Well, you're the only one who has the institutional memory on the board, who sort of remembers the past, who can sort of tell us where 48:00things came from. And so, I ended up staying on the board. You know, by now, I must be on there five times as long as anybody else -- with the possible exception of Ruth Stark, who came on after me but also has been on for a very long time. So, it's been an adventure. It's like growing up together, you know?CW:Yeah. Can we go back to the Hampshire part? I'm wondering what it was like as a woman at that time in academia.

PG:This weekend was the fortieth anniversary of Hampshire College. It was a big reunion, which was fabulous. And I was on this panel on the history of feminism at Hampshire College, so (laughs) I actually have collected my thoughts on this. When we arrived, there were -- all the leadership was male. Everybody. The 49:00president, the vice president, the four school deans, all the senior faculty, the treasurer -- anybody you could think of -- there was -- the first house master, which was a position particular to Hampshire. And a few young women, scattered. It -- there was no -- I don't think there was deliberate or systematic discrimination; this just seemed natural to them -- that, Yeah, of course. I mean, you look among the leaders, the higher people, and these are the people you find. And sure, we're happy to take on these young assistant 50:00professors, who -- as faculty members. But this was the moment of the emerging women's movement. And there were a couple of people who said, Wait a minute. This school is supposed to be so forward-looking and so experimental and so at the cutting edge, and yet we have the same look gender-wise of the most retrograde schools. So, they -- we -- kind of organized. And the first thing that came up was that we said there was going to be a second house master -- that was the person who oversaw each of the two dormitories that there were at the time -- and -- but it was supposed to be intellectual and cultural as well 51:00as student life -- more like a dean, almost. And so, we said, Well, this has to be a woman. And so, there was a big search, and we got this woman, Miriam Slater -- who's a friend of mine -- who was terrific and who also saw that structurally, things had to change in terms of gender. And then, they began to hire more women -- and especially women in science, who began to think about what it meant to have women in science, not just be women who did science. And then, we said, Okay. If gender is a category of analysis -- which was the high point of the women's movement -- then what do we need? What do we have to analyze here? Well, we have to analyze the curriculum. And so, there was a very 52:00-- an effort to get the study of women into the curriculum. But we made a very fundamental decision that we did not want a Women's Studies department or separate unit -- we didn't have departments -- separate unit. We wanted it to permeate the curriculum, and that that was crucial for an interdisciplinary curriculum. That was a really smart move. I don't think we understood at the moment (laughs) how smart it was, but it turned out to be very crucial. Because in a lot of schools, the Women's Studies department, which they fought hard for, got marginalized in a variety of ways -- they didn't have their own tenure track, their own budgets. It wasn't good. But here, that didn't happen. And so, Miriam Slater and a woman named Gayle Hollander and I gave what was one of the 53:00very first interdisciplinary courses in the country on women in America. And then -- so that was one thing, you had to influence the curriculum. The second thing was, you had to influence working conditions. So, we fought hard for a day care center and maternity leave and things like that. And then, you had to influence the student experience, so there was a lot of organizing for a women's center and ways in which students could deal with these issues. And then finally, we became convinced that you also had to be part of the production of the new scholarship. So, quite a few of the faculty began to be interested in that. And the first thing that I did -- well, I published one article, but then 54:00Miriam Slater and I published a book in 1986 called "Unequal Colleagues: The Entrance of Women into the Professions." And other people did other things -- the women in science began to do all kinds of things, from being active in national associations to finding all kinds of ways to encourage women in science and to write about it and there were just a lot of things that went on. So, that's a very short and quick history of what happened (laughs) with gender at Hampshire College. Well, no -- then -- the thing that happened in the late '70s is that Adele Simmons showed up as a thirty-six-year-old woman, nine months pregnant -- she showed up for her interview -- and even this very conservative 55:00chairman of the board said, "Okay, let's try it." So, she came here with two children under two to be president. And I was the dean of the faculty. I think we were the only co-ed school in the country that had a woman president and a woman dean of faculty. Or -- it may have been the only co-ed school that had a woman president, period, at the time. Now, of course, it's very different. And it was fine. You know what? Nobody died. They all saw that it could be done -- and done well. She was just here for the fortieth reunion, Adele. And she told the story that she came here from Princeton, where she had the -- she was dean or associate dean, I think, and that was the highest administrative position that a woman had at Princeton. And so, a group of alums -- who, she pointed out, included Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court justice -- organized to have students 56:00follow her all day long -- I mean, except when she was in private meetings -- trying to see if they could get her to slip up in some way, if they could sort of get something on her. So, she said, "I had this little group of students following me all the time." And one time, at lunch -- according to this story she just told -- she -- her tray dropped or something dropped. And just, you know, reflexively, she said, "Oh, shit!" The next day in the paper, it says, "Dean Simmons Curses; Must Be Fired," or something like that. So, you know, in some ways we've come a very long way. Not always, but in some ways.

CW:Yeah. Did Hampshire feel -- I mean, I don't want to ask this in a leading way -- what did Hampshire feel like at that time?

PG:It felt like -- kind of a remarkable thing. I mean, on the one hand, I remember driving up that driveway for my interview. The campus was half built. I turned around, I looked at those hills. Across Route 116, right in front, were two -- they're no longer there -- two beautiful trees. I thought, Oh, this is like the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. This is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. The clouds were sort of lifting over the hills. And so, it felt very beautiful and new and absolutely crazy -- in certain ways. The first 58:00week, there was this orientation program. And the theme for orientation was, What is relevance? And I remember going home and saying to Mickey, "You know, in some places, you creep up on that question for your whole life. But don't worry about it, in Hampshire, we solved it in a week." So, there was these huge questions, and then there were these very animated discussions about where we should put the pencil sharpeners -- you know, there was that kind of sense of something new where things weren't completely sorted out. But I loved it. (laughs)

CW:Yeah. (laughs)

PG:It was really great. It was very spirited. And people were trying out all kinds of things, and sometimes pushing the envelope (laughs) beyond where you might have thought it should go. But fabulous kinds of work came out of it, and 59:00terrific people. And it was really a very exciting place to be. Yeah. I don't know if that answers your question.

CW:Yeah. (laughs) I'm wondering how your Jewish identity has changed in --

PG:Over time?

CW:Over time.

PG:Well, my family was always very Jewish. As I said, both of my parents were immigrants. They both came from -- sort of steeped in Judaism in certain ways. My mother, from a religious family, but also from a very Zionist family; my father, more from a kind of kheyder [traditional religious school] background, but he also became very involved in Labor Zionism. And steeped in a lot of Yiddishkayt: we always had a Yiddish paper -- a newspaper -- in our house, and 60:00certain magazines, like the "Tsukunft" and magazines like that, and my parents were always part of these organizations. And we had a very strong sense -- our home was kosher -- we always had a very strong sense of holidays and sort of special things that went along with the holidays. On the other hand, we didn't have very much formal education -- and I said we had a shule, but it wasn't so much. My brother had a strong yeshiva education, and he's really different from my sister and me. So, but being Jewish was just a kind of hugely central part of our identity -- a very large family in Israel, and so on. When I was in college, 61:00I was very, very active in Hillel, and that was very important to me, too. And as -- a lot of what I learned about Judaism, I learned as an adult. I learned to -- I certainly learned to master the service, you know, the sort of synagogue service. I learned about all of that. I learned about Jewish history. My Yiddish -- I always had a kind of pretty good comprehension of Yiddish and not very good speaking. After my grandmother moved to Israel, I sort of would labor to write her these letters in Yiddish that my mother always corrected, but I can't really 62:00say that I'm literate in reading and writing Yiddish, although I have a pretty comfortable feel for comprehension. My Hebrew is -- I'm taking a Hebrew class now -- my Hebrew is not so great, but I'm struggling along with it. I have a son and a daughter-in-law and three grandchildren who live in Tel Aviv, so I have a strong incentive to (laughs) want to speak modern Hebrew. And again, my comprehension is better than my speaking, but I'm workin' at it. But my general knowledge of Jewish history and culture is not bad. And I learned that all as an adult. That is, I brought with me this kind of feel for it that my family had, 63:00but I didn't have, really, a lot of training in it. And I had to develop that on my own. And I did. I remember going -- being in Israel with my father, and -- have you ever been to Israel? Well, every street there is named for some person in either Jewish history or Israeli history. So, I just said to my father -- one time, I -- "Who is this?" He said, "You don't know who this is? How could you not know that?" You know, and I remember thinking, Boy, I better read up on these things. I better find out who these people are. And I did. I did. My father was a shy and kind of reticent person, but if you were to ask my husband what does he remember about him, one of the things he would remember for sure is 64:00that when we used to go to visit -- we already had a family, but we would go to visit my parents, and my father would say, "I saved you this article from 'The Forward' because I really wanted you to know about this article" -- this is the Yiddish "Forverts." And he would then read it to us. He would read us the whole article aloud, so that he could -- and occasionally doing a little translating if we got stuck somewhere -- just so we should know about it. You know, about somebody who traveled to the Soviet Union or some play, just something that struck his fancy. And he would read us these articles. And so, we began to look forward to it. As he got really older, sometimes he didn't do it, and then Mickey would say to him, "Well, dad, what have you been reading in the 65:00'Forverts'?" "Oh," he said, "well, since you asked" -- he would, you know, get the paper (laughs) and read us an article or something. And it was almost his way of relating, you know? One thing I didn't tell you about my family is, my father came here -- I mentioned that early on, but his mother stayed in Warsaw with her husband. And the last communication from them was in about 1942, saying they were in the ghetto, send anything -- it was a postcard -- send anything you can. If you can possibly get us some clothes or some money or something, that would really be important. And that was -- that was the end. Probably, they were 66:00old, so probably they died in the ghetto, although it's not known. Nobody knows for sure where they died. After that -- after the Holocaust -- some people -- you know, there was a whole "death of God" movement, a feeling of, Well, where was God? You know, God was out to lunch. But other people, including my father, became very religious. So, he made a very big switch. And I was still very young -- I was just a little girl. So, I had that experience of him becoming increasingly, increasingly religious as I got older. And that was his way of -- I don't know -- coping with that, you know, terrible, terrible loss. That was also a very huge thing in my family, you know, that was very big. I lost track 67:00of what question we --

CW:(laughs) Well, I -- we were talking about how things have changed, but I'd like to ask now about your involvement in the Jewish community here. And you've written -- you and Mickey have written a book about it, so --

PG:Right. Well, we are very long-standing members of Congregation B'nai Israel in Northampton. And we like that community a lot. It's a very interesting synagogue. For many, many years it was the only one in this area, so it had to be all things to all people. Now there are others. But nevertheless, it still has something of that flavor of trying to accommodate, through push and pull, more traditional people, various people who come to this valley -- intermarried 68:00families between Jews and non-Jews -- and just everything you can think of in between. Gay, straight families -- just the whole -- the whole number. Which, in a Conservative synagogue, puts it somewhat on the cutting edge -- but in a very good way, I think, and it makes it a very dynamic place. So, we are very active there. I talked to you about my involvement here; I'm also on the board of the Jewish Women's Archives, which is an organization in Boston, or that comes out of Boston, which tries to bring materials about Jewish women into the center of people's understanding of life in America, Jewish life in America, which has sometimes really been submerged. And they have developed really pretty 69:00impressive programs and archives. So, I'm just finishing my term on the board there, which I did for quite a number of years. So, those are my formal affiliations. And when Northampton was having its 350th anniversary, our friends said that they were going to do a series of small books and would we like to do one on the history of the Jewish community in Northampton. I had just told my husband -- we had done several books together, and I had just told him I wasn't doing any more books. So then, I went to him and I said, "Listen, Louise is on the historical commission, and what do you think about doing a book on the history of the Jewish community of Northampton?" And he said, "I thought you had just been telling me very affirmatively that you're not doing any more books." I 70:00said, "Well, yeah, but this -- it's different. I mean, after all, it's only the Jewish community of Northampton, not New York or Los Angeles. How hard can it be?" So, we did it. And -- well, of course, it's harder than you think, but it was a load of fun. We really enjoyed it a lot. And we tried to bring -- it was also the hundredth year of the synagogue, the hundredth anniversary -- so that was also kind of an important milestone. And we tried to bring together the history of the community, from the time that Jewish peddlers came here and settled to -- together with the history of Jews at Smith College as part of the Northampton experience. And I don't think anybody -- well, I'm sure nobody had 71:00done that before. So that, I think, was a really exciting experience for us. It sometimes led to dead ends -- where we tried to find things. You know, most of the Ivy League and Seven Sister colleges were quite anti-Semitic until well into the modern period -- you know, the postwar period -- but Smith College happened to be different. Because they had a president named William Allan Neilson in the '30s, who was a Scotch Presbyterian minister, but he was a very forward-looking and -thinking man. He understood that very bad things were going on in Europe, and he brought Jewish scholars and students to Smith (UNCLEAR) in various ways 72:00or gave them jobs if they came here. But he also was very active in the anti-fascist movement. And after -- he gave a very important speech in the center of Northampton after Kristallnacht in 1938, when there had been this terrible, wanton destruction. And he, together with some other people in the community, spearheaded a movement to bring twenty-five children -- twenty-five German Jewish children -- to live with families in Northampton. And this was part of a national movement to try to bring children here. That -- and Mrs. Coolidge, who was living in Northampton at the time, Calvin Coolidge's widow -- was very active in that movement, and other people. They collected the money. 73:00They collected the twenty-five families. They were sending endless telegrams to Washington. We're ready. We can receive these children. We have homes for them. And nothing happened. And what happened was, actually, that -- we're talking now less than fifteen years after the anti-immigration -- immigration was closed, and the congressional people who were really dead-set against immigration put the kibosh on the whole national movement to bring children here. First -- and the person who has written about this a lot is David Wyman, who's a professor emeritus at UMass. First they said, Oh, you can't take children from their parents. What would it be like to separate them from their parents? So then, they said, Okay, fine. Let the parents come, too. No, no. That wouldn't be good either. And so, they managed to tie it up in such knots -- as we see that 74:00Congress is able to do. And the whole movement died. But when we were doing this study, we were dying to know: Who were the twenty-five families that agreed to do this? Were they Jewish families? I don't think so. Were they Quaker families? Who were they? We just tried to turn over every stone, and we could never find out. There's no record. We asked the oldest people in the community that were living then. We asked Leonard Alberts -- he was in his nineties -- he was in college then; he had no memory of it. And tried other people and other places. It's just lost to history. We have no idea who they were. So, sometimes it was frustrating. But mostly, it was a very fun project. We liked it a lot.

CW:Well, I just -- we're getting to the end of our time, but I'm wondering if there are any stories that you want to tell, being here or --

PG:I'm feeling like I should tell some stories about the Book Center.

CW:Or, you know, or anything that comes to mind -- that you --

PG:I don't know. I guess I got talked out. (laughs)

CW:(laughs) No, that's fine. Is there any -- I guess I'd like to ask a question: if you have any words of wisdom in all of your -- all of this amazing life experience that you have?

PG:Words of wisdom? Well, you know what I used to tell my students is that you have to remain engaged. You have to try things. You have to keep up the good fight -- as if it really, really matters. Because it's so easy to get 76:00discouraged in this life -- to think, Oh, what does it matter anyway if I do this or not? But it really does. And so, I appreciate your doing this project. I think it's a great thing. And you never know where it's gonna lead.

[END OF INTERVIEW]