ADINA GORDON ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney, and today is November 4th, 2011. I am here at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, with Adina Gordon, and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Do I have your permission to record this interview?

ADINA GORDON: Yes, Christa.

CW:Thank you. So, to start, can you tell me briefly what you know about your family background, where they came from and how they came to this country?

AG:Yes, I certainly can. As a matter of fact, I have researched most of it and have it in archival material, the manifests, the ships' manifests, and so on. My 1:00mother came to this country with her mother and four other children in 1920. Her father had been here in America during the war, the First World War. And their journey from the shtetl [small Eastern European town with a Jewish community] of Grodzisk to -- through Kraków, Warsaw, Gdansk, Liverpool, and New York was always told to me in wonderful tales, wonderful tales by my mother. But more importantly, when Ellis Island opened up as a national site and we went there, very early on, for the first time, it amazed me that my mother could pick out from a series of pictures all the way up on the wall far away the ship that she came on, without seeing the name. That when we got into the room where it showed 2:00immigrants coming to Gdansk, she could point to some barracks and say, "We lived there. We lived there, waiting for the papers." And then, in Liverpool, the photos in the museum at Ellis Island, she, without walking up close, without use of her glasses, pointed out the place they waited on the dock for the ship. Mother was a treasure trove of stories. Mother was a treasure trove of folk songs. Mother was a treasure trove of Yiddish, of German, of Polish, of English -- of passion. And her stories, and living the life of her family in Brooklyn, was part of the warp and weave of my life. It isn't just the mother. It's the Yiddish; it's the Jewish life; it's the shtetl life that was so ingrained in me. My father, on the other hand, came by a very strange route to America, but by 3:00chance, also in 1920. My father was sent to Vienna as a young boy to study in the gymnasia with a wealthy uncle who was a wholesale grain merchant, a Grauer. And my father's mother was a Grauer; his father was a Teitelbaum. And their yikhes [ancestry] was so important to them. It was, after all, a descendent of the Satmar rov [rabbi of the Satmar Orthodox sect], the Yismach Moshe, the great, the holy. And my grandfather was not a follower, just a descendent of. But my grandfather had in his youth been very cosmopolitan, very learned. He knew English before he came to America. He came first-class, with a vest and a watch chain, gold watch chain, and a picture of him on the first-class deck with his companions after having had lunch with the captain! The man was so 4:00knowledgeable. He was so capable. Later in life, he became very Orthodox when I knew him. He helped the Satmar rov to come to America in 1946, because he was his cousin. And their yikhes, being descendants of this important rabbinic dynasty, was so, so important to them, and overrode almost everything. But my father, the oldest of five boys in the family, had not come the way his father had come, at all. So totally different. Sent back from Vienna because the war broke out in 1914 to his mother in the town of Rzeszów -- a town, not a shtetl at all. He stayed there until the Austro-Hungarian Empire army took him from his 5:00mother's house and sent him to the Italian Alps. And he always told the story: He held the gun up, and he shot the way they told him to do, and the bullet came in this way and went out this way. And he had a wound. They sent him to a field hospital in the Alps, and he's lying there on a starry, snowy night with the wound, saying, "They'll send me back; it's not enough." Left the bed, walked out, started walking across Europe. Walked to Berlin. He was a deserter from the Kaiser's army, after all. And he went down into the sewers of Berlin, where Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were hanging out, waiting out the war. And he, with many -- probably other deserters, (laughs) young men of about eighteen, starving during the day, went up every night, found bars late at night where he 6:00could wash dishes for the food that was left over from the bar food. You know, in Europe they always had food at the bar, hard-boiled eggs and bits of meat and rolls and things like that. And in the course of time, heard the name of a cousin that he'd known in Vienna who actually came from Antwerp, Morris Grauer. And he discovered, listening to the gossip, that Morris Grauer was a dealer in black market currency. And when he finally found through the gossip that Morris Grauer was in town, he went up to his hotel, knocked on the door. Nobody answered. Knocked again. Morris Grauer finally -- "What is it?" "It's me, it's Benny. Let me in." Morris wouldn't do it. He wouldn't open the door. Benny said, "You have to; it's my life. You must!" Morris Grauer opened the door, finally. My father said, "Ongeshtopt mit gelt [Overflowing with money]!" Money falling 7:00out of his pockets and from the suitcase under the bed. And he begged and begged Morris for money to survive until the war would be over, and Morris refused him. His first cousin! And he refused him. My father said, "The war was over. I made my way to Antwerp to my aunt. I got up into her apartment, and I told her the story. And she went to the mantle, and she had a shifskart [ship's passage] and a visa and money and gave -- and a passport -- and she said to me, 'This is Morris's. He's preparing to go to America. You go! He'll pay for it.' And I came here as Morris Grauer." Well, you know, I researched all of this, and I helped him in court in 1959 to straighten out the whole mess and declare that he had officially arrived under his own name. So, I know that it happened. And four 8:00months later, what do you think? There's another Morris Grauer on the manifest. I had both manifests. (laughs) But the Morris Grauer who first came said that his birthplace was Rzeszów. And the Morris Grauer who came the second time, birthplace Antwerp. Of course. The two -- the first cousins. That's how my mother and father came to America. Their fathers were here. Their fathers -- my mother's father -- you might call it high art and low art -- the poor one. And my father's father, the rich one. Strangely enough, I spent my childhood in Brooklyn, constantly at their homes --

CW:Before we get to that, I want to ask, did you have a sense of what life was 9:00like before they came here? I mean, were there any great stories about growing up in these -- the shtetl and the town in Eastern Europe, from your parents?

AG:Absolutely. Absolutely. My mother told how her father was -- I mean, I knew my zeydes [grandfathers]. They were alive up -- before my wedding. I knew my zeydes very well, and my bobes [grandmothers]. They're an important part of my life. To mother and dad, what had happened in Europe was still a living part of their lives. My grandfather, zeyde Menashe, my mother's father, Einseidler -- comes from the name Einsiedel. This was in Saxony. There was a duke of Einsiedel at the beginning of the nineteenth century. I've been trying to find the connection of how this family took that name. But anyway. He was just a tinker. 10:00But he worked for the braumeister. I don't know how -- the brewery master. My mother always said he worked at the Brauhaus in Grodzisk. It's east of Kraków, about sixty kilometers, and at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains. They had, in a way, an almost idyllic childhood until he left for America. My mother was born in 1904, and he left for America in 1912. He worked for the braumeister and there were many -- three or four brothers -- three brothers living in the town, and the father and grandfather, his father. My mother always described him as -- Shimon Yehuda -- sitting -- so cold, because he was an old man -- he would sit 11:00by the stove. Mother meant the white tile stove that was in the corner of the house. The bobe Freida and Shimon Yehuda, and the names continue through the family in all the generations, and every one of the children named children of theirs after those people. So, my zeyde Menashe's mother and father lived in the same town. But he was a tinker. It meant that he was repairing the copper tubing and pipes of the brewery. And as long as he had that job, they were fairly well off. They lived in a two-part house, a duplex, I believe? No, side by side. They lived in half the house. My mother described the pogrom of 1909, where they went running into the cellar of the house. And the Cossacks came through and threw 12:00everything about in the house. Mother said they came up from the basement, and bobe started yelling, "Ganovim, ganovim [Thieves, thieves]! Hot mir geganvt -- di gantse -- ale zakhn [They stole -- the entire -- everything]!" And she did not -- she was distraught becau-- I shall tell you why mainly, what was important to her. But in order to vent her rage she went to the local priest, and she said to them, "How could you let the people do this?" And he said, "It was the Cossacks." And she said, "No. It was the Polish peasants who came after the Cossacks. I heard the Cossacks. And then I heard them. I was in the cellar." All of this in Yiddish -- I'm sorry I'm not telling it in Yiddish. The priest got up and made a sermon that Sunday. And would you believe it? Bobe's silver candlesticks came back to her, and her linens. I inherited the candlesticks when 13:00my daughter was to marry. I went to a very wonderful silver restorer, and he repaired them. They were dented, bent, hollow, Polish mid-nineteenth-century -- typical Polish silver candlesticks. He repaired them, and he filled them, and I gave them to my daughter Miriam. She has them to this day. Bobe's stories and bobe's life were so extraordinary that -- I must say it very quickly. Her mother died when she was very young. And the man -- and her father married a woman who didn't want this child. So, they gave her to a rabbi in Rozwadow, a rabbi who had a large household, who was wealthy and had daughters. And they put her to work in the kitchen. She became a kitchen maid. But the rabbi also had a fine 14:00cook. And the cook taught her not just to cook but to bake and taught her fine pastry baking. When she was sixteen, those daughters had made a trip to Odessa, and they brought back linens as a dowry for her, and they gave her a kest -- a dowry chest -- she always said "kest." With the linens. And when she married, the silver candlesticks were her gift from the rabbi. So, that's why it was so important to her. When they left Grodzisk, finally zeyde had sent the shifskart and the visas at the end of the war -- 1918, I guess, or '19. And they started their journey to America. Bobe had no suitcases. She wrapped everything up in 15:00the sheets and knotted them. Mother and her two younger sisters were mortified to travel that way on the cart. They said a balegole [coachperson] came along, and they got on the back of the cart and went to Kraków to visit the rich uncle Urish who lived in Kraków and had children who went to university. And they went up to his apartment and stayed to pay a last visit. And then, they made their way to Warsaw and then to Danzig. When they got on the ship at Liverpool -- at night they were in steerage -- mother and her sisters would open the sheets and throw things out because they didn't want to come with shmates [rags] to America. They were coming to the land of gold, milk and honey. And they thought they would have everything, (begins to cry) beautiful things. And bobe would get up in the morning and say, "Ganovim! Hot mir geganvt di gantse -- ale zakhn!" (laughs) She noticed that the packages were getting smaller and smaller. 16:00But didn't matter. They got to America. They got to Castle Hall -- Castle Garden, sorry. And they were sent, because they were poor immigrants, over to Ellis Island. And zeyde came to pick them up. And he was standing at the cages up above, and he looked down. Finally, in the long lines of immigrants standing at the tables in the main hall he saw her, and he said, "Rivke, Rivke! Vi zint der kinder?" "Where are the children, Rivke?" And she has five of them, after all. "Here!" And he said, "Azoy ying?" "So young?" He expected them to be grown up and to work, to help him out. But they wouldn't let him take them because she didn't have a marriage certificate; she only had a ketubah [Jewish marriage certificate]. So, they said she wasn't really married to him. They took all the 17:00children and her and him into a separate room, and they had a justice of the peace, and the children watched while the parents were married. That's how they came to America.

CW:Wow. Well, I'd love to turn now to your own childhood. And I wonder if you could start by just describing what your home looked like growing up.

AG:Well, you know, in Brooklyn, in New York, (laughs) in the '20s and then in the '30s, people moved a lot. Because you would get a new paint job and a new floor, new linoleum on the floor, if you moved into a new apar-- another apartment. I don't know if that's the reason that they moved several times or not. But my father had opened a grocery and dairy store. And when he changed 18:00stores we moved in location. So, I can describe several of them. (coughs) I'm sorry. I have memories of several of them. But let me describe the one I lived in for a long time. It was on Pitkin Avenue in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood we called City Line. No, no, I'm sorry. I must go back. I must go back to when I was really a little girl, and we lived in Crown Heights, on Franklin Avenue -- 883 Franklin Avenue. We lived on the third floor of that apartment house. Down the street, a block and a half down, there was a hill, down Franklin Avenue. My 19:00father had a big store called Ben and Sol. He was in partnership with his favorite friend, Sol Willick, and they had a grocery/dairy. Up the street, nearer to Eastern Parkway, by Kings -- on the other side of Franklin Avenue, on the corner was Sol and Ben. That was a delicatessen. And they were quite famous, Sol and Ben and Ben and Sol, in their day, because the fans came out of the subway at Franklin Avenue and Eastern Parkway, and they walked down the hill to Ebbets Field to go to the games. The Dodgers, after all -- their home base was Ebbets Field. My father's store was on the way. And they would come into the store. And very often -- it was in the '30s, in the Depression -- they could not afford the hot dog at the stand in the ball field, but they could afford to get 20:00a kaiser roll, the big kaiser roll, from my father. They would say, A roll and a piece of store cheese, and they would point to the store cheese in a big wooden tub, and butter, the big tub of butter that he had turned upside down, taken a huge steel tong that had a wire across it, put it like that over the butter, and pulled it, and he did that, making slices through it about that high. So that when it was back in the tub and in the case behind him, in the refrigerator case, if they asked for a piece of butter, he would cut like that, push the knife in, pull it out, and have a piece of butter to stick onto the kaiser roll and slice with a huge knife -- slice a piece of store cheese -- that was really 21:00New York State cheddar, we call it today, but it was called store cheese in those days -- and put the roll together, put it into wax paper, and they'd ask for a bottle of milk. And they'd pay for it, and it would be much cheaper than buying something in the ballpark. I remember sitting on the stoop of 883 Franklin Avenue and watching the fans go down to Ebbets Field many, many, many times. My mother thought that we should be more cultured, more educated. And she enrolled us in the Brooklyn Museum's children's program for Saturday mornings. And they would give us a paper bag of lunch. My brother was less than two years older than I, my brother Shim -- Seymour, his Hebrew name was -- Shimon Yehuda. Of course. The great-grandfather. And we went to the art classes at the Brooklyn 22:00Museum on Saturday morning. After class, I remember building a little pueblo village, a model pueblo village, and learning about the Pueblo Indians. After lunch, we went upstairs to the great court. It was rimmed with plaster casts of famous Greek statues: the discus thrower and Hercules and so on. And in the atrium part of the great hall, the great marble white columned hall, we would sit on the marble steps. They would have chamber music group playing a noontime concert. And we would eat our lunch and listen to the concert. Of course, we were being enculturated with something that mother greatly desired and didn't have, and she thought she'd give it to her children. But at home, she was always singing Yiddish folksongs, German songs, and she was learning Hebrew songs 23:00because she was a Zionist. She joined Pioneer Women, which was -- later became AMIT Women in its earliest days. So, life at home was full of the bustle of school. The school class took us to the botanic gardens to learn to plant things and to appreciate the flowers and the plants. And I would say that time in Brooklyn was a wonderful time, wonderful. That four-room apartment was something idyllic in my mind. In summer we would go up the hill, up Eastern Parkway, to Nostrand Avenue. There was a big Loew's movie house. And on the top was a roof garden, and you went dressed up. Mother wore gloves, white gloves, and high 24:00heels. And they had outdoor movies on the roof. And they served lemonade and delicious sugar cookies. And we watched movies at night under the stars on a big screen. It was delicious. And Prospect Park was a wonder on Sundays. We went to Prospect Park on Sunday mornings for a walk. And then, of course, we took the trolley car and went to the grandparents for the rest of Sunday.

CW:Yeah, can you describe a little bit about sort of that street and the -- that your grandparents lived actually across the street from each other, right?

AG:Yes. They each had lived in different places in Brooklyn. But as the years went on, the zeyde Mendel -- Teitelbaum -- my father's father -- bought a house 25:00on Prospect Place. He bought a three-story house and fixed it up. It was not very old, I don't think, and made a beautiful garden in the back where my grandmother grew roses and laid out her garden with a path, with a bower. It was a treillage -- a trellis. And they grew grapes over that. Because zeyde Mendel liked to make wine. His wine was not very good. And she couldn't cook. They were not your typical -- they were really higher-class Jews who had been raised far better in Europe. But this was what they had. And zeyde Mendel had done quite well. He was a partner of Sam Ash in the music business when he first came to America. Why he went out of that partnership I don't know, because Sam Ash did 26:00very well. (laughs) But he became more and more religious as he lived there, became more of a Talmudist and a student of the Talmud and sat at home learning and no longer worked, and people came to him with questions, and people came to study. So, his dining room was ringed with bookshelves and all his sforim [religious books]. And this was very, very important to him. Bobe liked business. The other grandparents managed to rent an apartment across the street from them, by chance, on the second floor. So, when bobe Rivke was making the beds, she would open the windows and put the kishenes, the feather down pillows, on the windowsill to air, bobe Khatye would be sitting very quietly, reading 27:00near her window, and look across the street and see her. Very austere. Do you know what bobe Khatye told me one day? When I was grown and took my son Mark to visit her, years later, all her life later, she said to me, "Etel?" I was named for her mother. She said, "You know, I lived in Vienna when I was young." "Bobe, I didn't know." "Oh yes. I lived with my uncle, the one I sent your father to." "Really?" She said, "Yes. And they decided they would take me to the ball for a coming out." She told me all of this in Yiddish in 1957 or '58 -- that when she was sixteen, she was -- they brought a dressmaker to measure her, made her a ball gown. A coach and four came to pick her up with her aunt and uncle. They 28:00came to the palace. And they entered Franz Joseph's palace, and a footman banged like that, she said, and announced her name! And she came into the ball, and she danced. She had a dance card, and young men signed her card. I said, "But bobe, it sounds like Cinderella and the fairytale princess." She said, "No, no, no, it's not Cinderella. That's how I was living before I married your zeyde." I could not believe this woman, who -- no wonder she couldn't cook. Look how she was raised. (laughs) Whenever we came up the street, Shim and I, my mother and father holding our hands, saying, We're coming to the bobes and the zeydes, they would always remind us, You must take one of the khikhn [cookies] from bobe Khatye, otherwise she'll be insulted. When I came with my husband to introduce 29:00him to my bobes and zeydes, I said, "When we go to bobe Khatye and zeyde Mendel Teitelbaum, don't drink the wine, eat the khikhn, and keep your mouth shut. When we go across the street, you can eat the cake, and you can drink the wine." (laughs) Because they both cook it -- they bake, and they make very good Russian Givon very, very well. I think it's the difference between people who were townies and people who were born in the shtetl and were able to translate that entire life into that one street. They both belonged to the same shtibl [small Hasidic house of prayer]. Zeyde Mendel, of course, was the president. Why not? But bobe Khatye was a president of a lady's aux--- bobe Rivke, my -- the poor one -- was the president of a lady's auxiliary. Because she was such a busybody. 30:00She knew everybody. She always had a guest at her table for dinner -- for Shabbos, for sure, she had to have at least one, if not two. Because it was a mitzvah [good deed]. And she did mitzvot. She was raised in the house of a rabbi. Her whole life was doing mitzvot. Her whole life was baking. She raised her children in that shtetl, and when zeyde left she had to support them. What do you think she did? She baked for the whole Jewish community. She made the koyletshes [challahs]. She made the -- oh, there's a Yiddish word. I've (snaps fingers) forgotten it. Oh dear. Oh dear. It's all the cakes you have with the bronfn [liquor], with the schnapps. Uh --- lekach [sponge cake]! And honey cakes, and sponge cakes, and strudels. And by her, the cake was under the bed and over the bed and on top of the chifforobe and on the dresser when you came 31:00before a holiday. And she had to give out to everybody a plate of this and a plate of that. Life in her house was a constant round of cooking and baking. And there was a man from their shtetl, from Grodzisk, who worked or wrote for the "Forverts," and sometime in the '40s, he wrote the story of this woman who had her children baking and with her during the First World War, of how she would wrap each one of the three girls in a white apron and turn them around and around and tie it and put them at the table to knead the dough for the challahs that she made for the whole town. Whenever there was a simcha on Prospect Place, bobe Rivke would bake the koyletsh for them. Of course with the great big raisins, the great big golden pitted raisins, with braid over the top and braids -- oh! She was (whispers) such a baker.

CW:Did you have a favorite cake that she used to make?

AG:Oh yes.

CW:Can you remember (UNCLEAR)?

AG:I loved her honey cake. There was nothing like her honey cake. There was nothing like it.

CW:When did she cook it? Or when did she bake it, sorry.

AG:Bobe made honey cake for Rosh Hashanah. She made honey cake -- almost every Shabbos there were one or two cakes. Sponge cake was special. It was Pesach. Honey cake was almost all the time, I think because it stayed quite well. Apple strudel -- strudels of all kinds, actually. Fluden, which is a very small kind of strudel with dried fruits and nuts inside. Bobe could, of course, make all the yeast cakes, you know, the little shnekn [sweet buns, lit. "snails"] -- the little yeast cakes with the honey on the top. And I can't remember all the names of them, but I can see them and taste them.

CW:What did they taste like? What did the honey cake taste like?

AG:Dense, dark, a little bit of walnut here and there. The dark raisin. She used the golden raisin -- the big golden raisins, sultanas, kind of a very big one -- for the challah that never appeared in any other cake that I remember. The golden raisin in the fluden, the dried golden. But in the apple strudel, she preferred to use the pale golden raisin also. But the dark one was in the honey cake. Oh, it was very good.

CW:Did you learn how to make any of these?

AG:Well, I went with my mother and my aunt Frida (pronounced as "Free-da") --- Frieda (pronounced as "Fry-da") -- the great-grandmother. Of course, all the names repeated themselves in every family, everyone. In every Einseidler family. And I went with them around and around the clock about bobe's honey cake recipe. 34:00We tried so many. We tried to duplicate it. We tried everything we could. Not quite, because bobe didn't have a Mixmaster. Bobe had a big crock and a wooden spoon. As a matter of fact, when I was in the country with them, they said -- they put me on a train to go up to Ferndale because bobe went away for the summer. She couldn't afford much, so she lived in a kokhaleyn [bungalow, lit. "cook-on-your-own"]. A kokhaleyn was a place where you had one room, and everybody -- and there was a communal kitchen. And everybody had a two-burner stove for small things, but there was a great big stove, wood burning stove -- the wood was down below, and there were -- and you used a metal tong to pick up the lid, and it was really a dangerous place for a young girl, because it was very, very hot. Anyway, zeyde met me at the train station. He always wore a 35:00white shirt and black pants and his beard, tsitses aroys [prayer shawl tassels hanging out]. And we went up the hill to the kokhaleyn. And then, he took me early in the morning Friday morning down to the farmer, and I watched him milk the cow. Zeyde had a milk pail. We came back up, and bobe let it stand a while. And she baked that morning. She had set up her dough. She baked a koyletsh for Shabbos. And I watched her take the cream off the top of the tin milk pail and put it in her bowl and sit there and churn it and churn it until she made butter. And that was butter for the rest of the week. She hung some of the milk in a cloth, and she made her own cheese. She made everything. Zeyde went to get 36:00chickens -- I always remember Prospect Place, he would walk from the house to the next block, Prospect Place -- the next street up Prospect Place was lined with pushcarts on both sides, until the city had an ordinance sometime in the '40s and made them have only one side pushcarts so they could clean the other side. There were shops in the street, food shops, and the pushcarts. And there was a big poultry house. It was like a huge three-story open-air open place with cages full of poultry: chickens, duck, geese. And bobe had gone there and picked out her chickens. And the shoykhet [ritual slaughterer] had them ready. And zeyde would come there -- and her chickens that she picked out for the yontev [holiday] would -- or the Shabbos -- would be ready there. And zeyde would have them shechted [slaughtered according to Jewish ritual law]. And I remember 37:00seeing zeyde walk down the street holding the chickens by the legs with the blood dripping, coming to the house, up through the hou-- up the stairs, past Mrs. Goodman's downstairs apartment, in through the apart--- bobe's kitchen, and on a stepstool up on the radiator out the kitchen window where the fire escape was. And she had a benkl -- a bench -- set up there. And he would sit on the benkl. There were newspapers laid. And he would pluck the chicken, which was still warm with its blood! And then, bobe would clean it, of course, and make all kinds of wonderful things -- marvelous, wonderful things out of it. Because she used the shmalts, and she made grivn [cracklings]. Because she used the legs, and she burned them over the open fire on her stove, and then she rinsed it and peeled it, and she used the legs in the soup and all the parts in the 38:00soup. You know, when they would all come together, the sisters and the brothers, and everybody was at the table -- and the boarder -- he was just a boarder for eating, not for sleeping -- the boarder would sit at zeyde's right-hand side. The women weren't seated. The men were seated. I was given to serve. But I was never given the soup to serve; that was too hot. But the first one to be served was der zeyde. And then, the boarder. And the last -- and Frieda and Rose and mother always used to sit around and argue and say, Oh, when bobe served out the chicken, I got the pupik [gizzard]. She said, "No, you got the fligl [wing]; I got the pupik." No, no, no, they never got the white meat. In Europe when there wasn't a man in the house, they still never got the white meat because the boys got it, Uncle Sam and Uncle Irving. But at the house in Brooklyn on Prospect 39:00Place, no. The white meat was given to der zeyde and the boarder, and then came my father -- der eydem, the son-in-law, who was doing well. He was honored next. And their sons, of course. It was quite a life. It felt like the shtetl. In that house, it felt like the shtetl.

CW:Well, I'd like to ask a little bit about Yiddish specifically. But first, what were the languages that were in the home, in your home and also your grandparents'?

AG:In the home of the bobes and the zeydes on Prospect Place, it was always Yiddish first. There was plenty of English, but it was always Yiddish first. They knew that I understood them. I understood them from birth. There was no 40:00question. In other words, they didn't speak a few words of Yiddish and lapse into English. On the contrary: they spoke a lot of Yiddish and occasionally an English word if they thought I wasn't getting it. At home, Yiddish was sort of the banter language. Mother and dad would speak in English, lapse into Yiddish, then really make a joke or speak of something serious, and all of a sudden out would come Polish, or German, because they thought we were listening too well, and we were understanding very well. So, Polish was the next language. That one really stymied us. We never could get that. German was kind of -- how shall I say -- an exchange about something important we might get or we might not get. But since they were both schooled in German, it was easy for them to talk about 41:00literature or a book in German. They liked the language, but they didn't love it the way they loved Yiddish. Yiddish was simply natural for them.

CW:And what -- you've mentioned folksongs. I wonder if you could (Gordon laughs) talk a little bit about when your mother would sing and sort of what role music played in your house growing up.

AG:My mother and father loved to listen to WEVD, which was the Yiddish-language station in New York on the radio. And on WEVD, one would hear Yiddish singers all the time. It was indiscriminate in terms of the time. It came on at many times during the day. And often mother would sing along. I remember as a child 42:00she would sing along with whoever was singing on the radio. When my brother and I -- my brother joined Hashomer Hatzair when he was about twelve or thirteen years old, and I at that same time, two years later. The young people would come to the house after a meeting or before a meeting, and we sang constantly. My mother had been singing Yiddish songs to us for years. My mother had been reading Sholem Aleichem to us in Yiddish. She got it. I suppose you've had other interviewees tell you that the "Forverts" gave out a set of Sholem Aleichem if you sent so many and so many -- I don't know what you sent -- coupons, money, or something, and they came out a volume at a time. I think there were four or five volumes of the Sholem Aleichem, the complete works of Sholem Aleichem in Yiddish. Mother got it. As soon as she got the first volume, she started reading 43:00to us. She was always busy translating some Yiddish into something else or some German. She was learning Hebrew on her own. She was a real -- an early ardent Zionist. And she was trying to learn modern Hebrew. And in the course of all of this, she would sing. She learned the songs that were current at the time but discounted them. She really liked the youth movement songs, and she really liked the songs from the shtetl better than the Yiddish theater, the Yiddish stage, which was very popular at the time. And they went to the Yiddish theater once in a while. And my earliest introduction to theater was with her, at age eleven, a Yiddish play, a musical called "Yes, My Darling Daughter." She took me to Second 44:00Avenue. But, you see, she was singing, but she didn't like those songs as much. She liked the folksongs. She liked one in particular. (sings) "In a koven bay dem fayer/shteyt a kovel un er shmidt/fun di fayer finken flien/un er zingt er bay a lid/fun dem frayhayt vos vet kumen./Zingt er mutik, zingt er hays/un er filt nit vi es gist zikh/fun zayn ponim taykher shvays/un er filt nit vi es gist 45:00zikh/fun zayn ponim taykher shvays [In a forge by the fire/a blacksmith stands and hammers/sparks fly from the fire/and he sing meanwhile a song/about the freedom that will come./He sings bravely, he sings passionately/and he doesn't feel as/sweat pours down his face/ and he doesn't feel as/sweat pours down his face]." I'm sorry. It makes me miss my mother a lot. You know -- (clears throat) just a minute. (pause) She wanted to go to Palestine. My brother ran away to join the Haganah when he was seventeen. And she missed him terribly. And she left us to try to go with the khalutsim [pioneers] to Israel. It didn't work out. It's a long story, but I must say, she was a very independent spirit, 46:00raised in a time in Europe when women had little expectations. But coming to America offered her a great sense of hope that she would live a more fulfilled life. And I give her credit for her spirit, and I think that -- the Jews who came from Europe had this great sense of survival -- of revival -- coming here. She said to me when I wanted to go to Poland and Russia in '66 with my husband, "Why do you want to go there? What do you want to see? You'll see the balegole in the street. You'll see the women with the babushkas. You'll see mud. They won't have anything. It's not for you." And I said, "Mother, I'm sure it's not 47:00so. I'm sure it's modernized." She said, "The Polish peasant --" -- you see, she had that attitude -- "-- the Polish peasant is going to be the same no matter what." America wasn't paved with gold for her, but America was the place to be if you wanted to be independent and free. And that's what it -- freedom was important to her. And when she realized that Israel was a possibility, that became the most important thing for Jews. And for her, what was good for the yidn was good for her.

CW:Looking back on that, on your childhood, what values did you get from your mother?

AG:Independence! (laughs) And the family. You know, kinder kirshn kirkhe [the children's cherry church?], the typical. She wasn't very religious. The religion 48:00I saw at my grandparents', all of them. I walked between bobe Rivke and bobe Hadja to shul. I carried their glasses and whatever else, and I sat on the balcony up above and looked down on my zeydes down below davening with their great big taleysim. I saw their fervor. Bobe Rivke was an orphan. She was illiterate. But she knew how to read the siddur. She knew every word. I could see that she was reading -- I learned Hebrew; I studied Hebrew in Thomas Jefferson High School. I learned for three years. I was the president of the Hebrew club. At this point, I was a farbrente tsionist [ardent Zionist]. She was not a Zionist. She was just a Jewish woman. And when she prayed to der eybershter [the Lord], for her, it was real! This was reality. She was really 49:00praying. God was a living presence in her life. She believed in the rabbis. She took her -- she went back to her rabbi, her mainstay in life, the year I was born, in 1929. And she went again in 1931. She took a cousin who was barren to the rabbi to have her blessed because she believed in the power of the rabonim [Orthodox rabbis]. There was something incredibly -- elemental about religion in their lives. Not the rituals. The rituals you see today, from my point of view, look like cardboard emptiness, really and truly. It was part of the every day, 50:00every minute of their lives, the way Sholem Aleichem describes the Reb Aaron going to the sink and (speaks in accent) "vashing der hant [the hands] and vashing der hant and daven and daven and daven." Bobe Rivke, zeyde Menashe Einseidler -- and bobe Hadja and zeyde Mendel -- to them, these things were not rituals; they were just part of life. You got up. Bobe would say to me --- bobe Hadja -- "You say the shimenesre [silent daily prayer]." Whatever it -- and she would tell me the words, and I would recite them. She wouldn't let me get out of bed before I recited the words of the morning prayer. It was natural for them. Life was natural progression. From birth to death, it was a natural progression of living within the religion. It was easy.

CW:And now, what about for you? What was Judaism as a religion for you -- as a 51:00child and then as sort of a teenager alongside Hashomer Hatzair, what was the role of religion in your own identity?

AG:I decided when I was a teenager that I was -- my identity was Jewish, one hundred percent Jewish. Although I thought Americanism was great. I thought America was wonderful. I was in a New York City school-wide contest that Fiorello La Guardia established, that all schoolchildren should write an essay on I'm an American Day on what it means to me to be an American. And I won the contest. And I was taken by my teachers to the steps of City Hall and given an 52:00award (laughs) by Fiorello La Guardia. (laughs) I was certainly patriotic. I certainly loved America in every fiber of my being. And it thrilled me very much from coast to coast in every way possible. But, you see, Yiddish and Judaism was my root, was the root that really -- that fed the rest of me, the American part of me. To me, it was never a struggle, one against another. They really went hand in hand. And then, with the notion that there should be a State of Israel, the very idea that the Jews should have a homeland, that made a lot of sense to me, and I was willing to dedicate my life to that. It wasn't because I was -- did not want to be an American, at all. Not at all. It was simply that that was 53:00a stronger power. Not the religion, the Jewish identity. And I made up my mind when I was a teenager and never lost that belief, never lost that identity, that for me to be identified with der yidisher folk [the Jewish people] -- (pause) it was simply who I was. All the history of the Teitelbaums, the Einseidlers, the families going all the way back, the pride in the forebears, I think on the one side, on my father's side, and the sense of -- on the other side, of having within your consciousness the memories of the grandfathers and the 54:00great-grandfathers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers who came before you. Those memories were as though they were alive as long as you were alive, as long as you remembered that bobe Rivke was five foot tall -- high and five foot wide and that she had this great force of charity within her. An orphan with nothing who made it her business to survive through a war with five children; who made it her business getting to America to establish a home where she gave to others; a woman whose husband became -- had a stand outside a store on Prospect Place and sold ladies' garments brought to him from the garment center where his son was working that he sold, ladies' blouses; who when I married and came to her 55:00house to change before going away with my husband, took out of her apron some money and tried to give it to my husband -- "Tatele [Daddy], take a taxi; it's snowing." He said, "Bobe, I have money; it's okay, bobe." (begins to cry) "No, tatele, take the money!" You see, that was bobe. (pause) The caring for the family is something -- the Jewish family. You can see it in the Chinese family --- really, you can. Really you can see it in an Hispanic family. You can see it all over the world. Family is very important. But for me, it was a Jewish 56:00family. It isn't unique in the world, I'm trying to say, but it's very special for those of us who were raised in Jewish homes like that. I think more than the so-called people of the book, frankly.

CW:Well, I want to talk about the people of the book in a little while. But I'd like to now sort of transition a little bit. We've been talking about your early life. And I wonder if you could just give a very brief snapshot of your life today. So, your career just briefly, and -- yeah. Your adult life. And then, we can go back to some other topics.

AG:When I said to my father -- I graduated high school very young -- that I 57:00wanted to go away to college, he said, "For a girl, I don't spend money on education." I suppose it was like posing a challenge to me so that -- I did go to Hunter College, but the kibbutz -- I was a member of a kibbutz aliyah at this point -- decided that I should go to work at the office of -- for the illegal shipment of arms to Israel at the beginning, in 1948, in preparation for the war that would likely come when the British pulled out and the State was formed. So, I had not gone to college. And later on, when my husband and I were well-established, married, and my children went to school full-time, I had met 58:00one of the great archaeologists of Israel, Ruth Amiran, and had helped to raise money for her dig at Arad. She was the chief archaeologist of Arad. And I helped to raise the money for the last five years of her dig, of her excavation, and to create a national park there, which is (UNCLEAR). I went to school, to Columbia, to study biblical archaeology. It didn't work out that way, but in any case -- (laughs) therefore, I got a bachelor's late in life. I graduated Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude, from Columbia, and had studied biblical archaeology and antiquities, classical Greek and Roman and -- as well as American art and -- with wonderful professors. Absolutely marvelous. It was great education. Too bad I didn't have it when I was younger, but boy, did I appreciate it as an adult. 59:00And then, I decided to go to the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU because they had a broader-based master's degree program in art history. I thought that I would have to be too focused at Columbia. So, I was accepted, and in the course of the master's I learned that Egyptology was my passion. And I studied with Bernard Bothmer and did quite well, and I got my master's in Egyptology. However, I had also studied with Pete Janson, H.W. Janson, who wrote the "History of Art." And he encouraged me after -- I seemed to have a penchant for discovering things, art, finding art that did not exist or was not known or had been lost. I published in several places, disparate kinds of art -- a drawing -- a painting 60:00-- by an early nineteenth-century French artist, Horace Vernet, I published it after finding it in the basements of the New York Public Library, in the aqueduct, in the old aqueduct under the Forty-Second Street library. And I published that in "Arts Magazine," 1980. I then published it in a show on drawings for sculpture. The drawings for Congress -- submission to Congress congressional committee on the raising of a monument to a Civil War hero, McClellan. I found the original presentation drawings that Frederick MacMonnies had sent to Congress. And they had never been shown, and we exhibited them at The Drawing Center in SoHo in our drawings for sculpture show. And because of 61:00that, Janson suggested that I do a dissertation on Frederick MacMonnies, a Brooklyn artist who had gone to Paris to study and who had remained there for thirty years and had a summer -- a home in Giverny about a half a mile -- kilometer -- from Claude Monet's home and gardens. And the second largest set of gardens in Giverny. So, it came out that for my PhD I did the catalogue raisonné of the sculpture of Frederick MacMonnies. And in the course of that, living in Paris, doing my research, I did discover some things that had been lost or never known to exist. They were quite exciting. Climbed into the turrets of castles, down into cellars, out into sanitation department dumpsites where I 62:00found six-foot bronze horses that are in front of the museum in Vernon now. Many, many wonderful things. Marvelous connections. And got very friendly with the family who owned the estate in Giverny and still friendly with the children, very close friends, and with the curators of the museums there. And found my second home in France -- I had traveled extensively already in France with my husband, but I found my second home there, after Israel. So America, Israel, and France. And my professional life has really centered around the writing of the catalogue raisonné and then the catalogue raisonné of the sculpture of -- of the paintings of Frederick MacMonnies. He was also a painter, and of his wife Mary Fairchild MacMonnies, later named Mary Low. She married an American muralist -- second husband -- Will Low, and came to live in Bronxville, New 63:00York. And as such, I'm very active in the Association of Historians of American Art and the Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association. And I don't work at it steadily -- I'm an independent scholar -- but I do appraisals and authentications of works of MacMonnies and other artists who lived and worked in Giverny. Since my husband died last year, I found living in the suburbs very isolating, and I moved into New York City. It's a hubbub. It is the culture vulture center of America, (laughs) there's no doubt about it, and has me, in a sense, reeling from a surfeit of things to do. But I'm finding my way: in Jewish 64:00circles, in Zionist circles, and in art historical circles, slowly but surely. I've never really lost my way. (laughs) There have been so many ways to go. I keep in close touch with Barkai, with my kibbutz in Israel, and with my friends all over the world.

CW:Well, I'd like to ask a little bit about Barkai and your time in Hashomer Hatzair. How did you -- you mentioned your brother joined before you. What was the impetus to join Hashomer Hatzair?

AG:For my brother, it was the -- the Teitelbaums' overbearing insistence that he 65:00become a rabbi. Sending him to yeshivot that he did not wish to study at, where he ran away and became a delinquent truant and was beaten and forced to go back time and time again. And I believe when he met people from Hashomer Hatzair in high school, in Thomas Jefferson High School, he was so taken by this -- the free spirit and by the independence of these people from religion. And the notion of, really, of Palestine as a land -- home for the Jews. I believe that his Jewish identity was as strong as mine, if not stronger, but perhaps more intellectual. He was a genius. He was very, very, very bright. Musicologist and 66:00a raconteur and a linguist. He went with his friend, Charlie Parrish, Chetzy, down to the Edgies. You know what the Edgies was? The Educational Alliance down on lower Broadway, Two Broadway, I think. I think the Education Alliance still may exist. Anyway, they were very, very big force in Jewish life at that time, in the '30s and '40s. And they went there to take a course in Arabic. The two of them, fourteen -- fifteen-year-olds -- fifteen-year-olds -- learned Arabic. Can you imagine? (Whitney laughs) They thought it was a lark. They liked to shout Arabic curses at each other that nobody else would understand. Little did I know that there was an entire group of Jews who spoke Arabic. I didn't know much 67:00about the Sephardic Jewish community. I learned a huge amount later on -- another part of my history. However, he was in Hashomer Hatzair, and his friends, his khaveyrim [comrades], his -- the people in his kvutzah, his group, were always coming home because my mother was a very good cook and baker, and there was always a lot of food in the refrigerator, and we had a finished basement at this point. We lived in East New York on Hemlock Street. And there was a big playroom that not many people from Brownsville and East New York had in those apartments. So, they loved to come because they could play; they could hang out there. And of course, as I said, there was always good food. She always made sure there were meat pies, apple pies, plenty of milk in the refrigerator was the minimum. It wasn't leftovers. She prepared for the kids for the weekend. (laughs) All homemade food, of course. The fact that my father had a food store 68:00made things easier, especially during the war, because of rationing. But anyway. All his buddies came, and they always called me the kid. And I was not allowed to come down, but they would say to him, Why don't you bring her to the ken [Hebrew: organization, lit. "nest"], to the branch of Hashomer Hatzair?" And he'd say, "She's just a kid." And they would say, Come on. Bring her along. So, it was his friends who brought me, despite his protestations; he didn't want his kid sister hanging out with him. And they became good buddies of mine. (laughs) And I developed my own friends and groups and so on, and many of them are still my friends today. His friends and my friends from the movement are still friends 69:00today. Strong friends. Wonderful friends.

CW:I'm wondering about your arrival in -- at the kibbutz. What was that experience like, actually arriving there?

AG:I didn't go to live in the kibbutz because we went to live in a bayit, a communal house, in Williamsburg. The Kibbutz Sasa, which was the first established all-American kibbutz, were our leaders. They had had the communal house in Brooklyn. The reason they had communal houses, batim, the reason they had to have it is because during the war the boys were in the Army and Navy and so on, and they could-- and there was no immigration to Palestine. There had been before the war but not during the war. So, they could not go. And as they 70:00got older, it was untenable for them to live at home. They lived in groups according to their age group, their shichvah, their level. So, that kibbutz, Sasa Kibbutz, aliyah-hey of Hashomer Hatzair, left in '46 -- in '47. And they went through Le Havre usually, down through Paris to Marseilles to the DP camps, and got on the boats that were running the British blockade to get into Palestine. Most of them got to Palestine that way. As soon as the war was over -- well, I mean, the War of Independence -- and the State of Israel was formed, it was different. But up until then, until May of '48, that's how they got into Israel. Not like Trumpeldor, whom my father-in-law had seen off at the train 71:00station in Russia -- I think he describes it in his journal -- who went by train and down through Turkey into Palestine. That was different, years before. So, in any case, the -- our kibbutz took over that bayit. And when my husband and I started living together right after we were married by a justice of the peace in August '48, we moved into the bayit. We were then married in February '49, when our parents could arrange this big yidishe khasene [Jewish wedding]. And we were living in the bayit then. And we were working -- I was working at the first -- at American Israeli Shipping Company. (coughs) Excuse me. And so was Yitz. That 72:00was the beginning of the shipping line for the State of Israel, but it had been formed in order to charter vessels to carry illegal arms to Israel to prepare for the Arab-Israel War that would develop when the British pulled out of Palestine. It was quite sure. All the Zionist leaders were sure that would happen, and it was quite evident that the Arabs did not want that State to exist. And I was sent by the kibbutz, the kibbutz in New York, to work there. They called the office of Hashomer Hatzair and asked for someone who would be able to keep a secret and who could work as a secretary. Well, I couldn't take shorthand, I couldn't type, but the kibbutz said, You will learn. It's good pay. So, I went. And I went to Fourth Avenue where the secondhand bookstores were, 73:00and I bought a Pitman shorthand book, and I bought a book on typing, and at home over the weekend I studied. (laughs) And I worked at that job until 1950 -- until 1950. From '48 to '50 -- '51. Sorry. And I left because Yitz and I were in the same office. I had gotten him a job immediately. And he was earning also good money. And the kibbutz was very much in need of money in order to make a trunk for each oleh [Hebrew: migrant] who was going to Israel. You needed $150 to buy the trunk and the number of jeans and work shirts, underwear, and sweaters that were necessary to outfit a chalutz. And that's what money we were 74:00earning running the bayit and outfitting people for aliyah. And they kept saying, You will go, you will go, and we said, No, we want to go to the training farm; we want to go on aliyah. But they kept refusing us because my husband was in the educational movement, and he was the head of a whole branch, and he was very important to them, to the leadership in America. And they said, Well, you have to stay. So, eventually we decided -- we were offered by Raphael Recanati, who was the head of American-Israeli -- we were offered that if we went with them, with the shipping company to Haifa, Yitz would train people, Israelis, in shipping methodology, and then we could go and join the kibbutz later. And we thought that was a good plan. So, we left. That's what happened. I subsequently 75:00went to work for El Al when they started the first airline office in America. And in time, learned enough Hebrew to get the job of executive administrative secretary to the CEO of El Al in New York. That was my good fortune, both in friendship to him, to a great man, Dror Galezer, and in connection to Israel and connection to be able to go to Israel in 1952, very first trip, because I was given the Histadrut conditions, which was a free ticket in the second year of -- after second year of work. And I had three -- eventually three free tickets from El Al and was able to go to Israel three times then --

CW:Wow.

AG:-- before we were on our own.

CW:And what was it like when -- the first time you went to Israel?

AG:Oh, it was amazing! Zeyde Mendel said to us -- my Teitelbaum zeyde -- he had bought his sister an apartment in the Mea Shearim -- his only sister -- when she left Europe in 1922. She married a man called Mandura, and she -- Dvora Mandura, her name was -- and she went to Israel -- to Palestine. And zeyde Mendel sent her the money from America for the apartment. It was the Ottoman Empire times. They built this huge apartment complex-- large, not huge -- apartment complexes with very thick, thick walls and tiny windows, so the ledge was about a foot-and-a-half deep going out to this window -- a one-room apartment that her 77:00son, her only child, was living in. He had inherited this apartment. So, zeyde said to me, I must visit his relative, his nephew, Moshe Mandura. And that was -- remember, we had not yet had East Jerusalem. There was a partition. The only place you could go -- there was a Mandelbaum Gate. The only place you could go was into the Mea Shearim. You could not go to the Kotel [Hebrew: Western Wall] then. Not in the same way, nothing the way you know Israel at all. There were Bedouin camel caravans on the roads. In the Mea Shearim, the very, very religious Jews living in the yeshivot and in apartments and studying, learning, 78:00all day long. And we came to this cousin of my father's, this first cousin. He was amazed because his uncle, my grandfather, had been helping him to survive all these years. I did not know my grandfather was supporting them. Not completely, but to a great extent. He was still learning. He'd had two children, and he was spending a lifetime learning. I was appalled. I was happy to see him, but I was appalled. When his daughter came in, my husband was amazed. He said, "You look just like her." She had two long tseplekh [braids] like that, you know. I didn't. I had a modern hairstyle. But that was the life of those people there. The kibbutz was -- still had a big watchtower and had to watch out for 79:00Arabs coming across the border. They were right at the top of the West Bank -- still are. And they had -- the local Arabs were stealing cows at night. Nothing much more. But they were living in and among Arab Israelis and on the border of the West Bank and crossed freely into the West Bank very, very often in those days. It was a very different time than now. What was more impressive were the mahagarot, the refugees, the Arab refugees. And the Jewish refugees. (laughs) There were still Jewish refugees coming, and they had usually tent cities. And on the hilltop you would see the real town being built by the State, with all 80:00the people who were living down below in tents. And as they say on the road -- in northern Israel, not just in the Negev near Beersheba, but in northern Israel -- there would be camel caravans that would stop and ask for baksheesh. Usually if you gave them three cigarettes the sheikh would be happy, and they would go onward. We took a bus to go up to Sasa to the Lebanese border from Haifa. On the bus, people got on with crates holding chickens, carrying a sewing machine, carrying clothing in their hands, throwing things up on the top of the bus. And some people even trying to climb in the window, but the bus driver told them to go off. And we stopped -- every place along the way, we stopped. There were different kinds of villages. There were Druze villages along the way going up north. It took about five hours from Haifa up to Sasa in those days to get up 81:00there to visit our former leaders from Hashomer Hatzair who we had grown up with. Going to our own kibbutz, as I said, was a rare treat. They were beginning to have children. There were a few children in the kibbutz. And they were living in very, very simple quarters. So simple that years later when I came -- and my son was thirteen -- when I came to the kibbutz, they were -- the guest rooms that they gave out, those original quarters were no longer lived in by the kibbutzniks. But it was quite a treat to meet people that I had grown up with.

CW:Well, you have really painted a very rich picture of the Jewish life that you grew up in. And I'm wondering when you started your own family, how did you pass 82:00this on to them, pass on a Jewish identity to your children?

AG:Christa, it's so interesting that you ask that, because Yitz and I -- Yitzhak Shmuel was my husband's name. Irving. Yitz and I were certainly conscious and aware of our traditions, of our background, of our responsibilities as Jews, of our need to have a Jewish home though we weren't religious. So, there is a difference. A Jewish home is not necessarily a religious home. That means that you have to understand Jewish identity. That means that you have to understand what is the value of Yiddish and Hebrew literature. That means you have to understand not only the value of the languages and the value of the Sephardic communities and their background that came with the various exoduses of the Jews 83:00throughout millennia. It means that you have to think hard about you can transmit this. We said to each other when Mark came along -- we're talking over this infant's head -- How can we recreate Prospect Place? How can we recreate Henry Street, where his grandparents' synagogue was? How can we recreate Suffolk Street, where bobe and zeyde -- his bobe and zeyde -- lived? Wonderful people and marvelous background and interesting times that they themselves went through. We can't. Our children can never -- what are we going to do with this child here in New Milford, New Jersey, where eight years ago, the Brownshirts were marching in the street just before the war? A town that was really fascist. It didn't have Jews before the war. Now they had a Jewish community center. It 84:00was the shul and a community center. We joined it. We said to each other, Well, we can't be false to ourselves. We're not going to go every Friday night and Saturday and pray because it's not our -- we're from Hashomer Hatzair, socialist Zionist youth group. What shall we do? So, we joined the Jewish Community Center of New Milford. I said, "You know what? I'll get involved." I went down to see what they had, and I saw they had nobody teaching a kindergarten in the Hebrew school. So, I volunteered. I said, "I'll teach the kindergarten. After all, I can sing all the little Hebrew nursery rhymes. I know them all. I know a few Yiddish songs. Everything else you do with little children is the same as you do with little children all over the world." So, Yitz's task was to watch the child 85:00on Sunday mornings, and for me to go and teach in the Hebrew school. That was the beginning. Of course, I became involved in the women's auxiliary, became its president, taught the ladies how to make gefilte fish by demonstration. The electric frying pan had just come out, just been invented, in those years, in the mid-'50s. And that made it easy to set up a kitchen demonstrating table in the Jewish Community Center and show them how to make real gefilte fish. I make it to this day. I must tell you, bobe Rivke had a carp swimming in her bathtub. If I came there before the yontev and I had to go to the bathroom, I was afraid to go make pee-pee because I didn't want my bare tokhes [person's buttocks] next 86:00to the carp swimming in the tub. Mother had to stand between me and the carp, otherwise it was a struggle. (laughs) I would watch her flay it, open it, skin it. And oh, the things she made -- not just gefilte fish -- the knobl [garlic] carp. The -- oh, the wonderful dishes that were just out of this world. Gefilte fish was built into my bones. Holeptses [Stuffed cabbage] was built into me -- in the other bone. You know what holeptses are? Stuffed cabbage. And when I came to know my in-laws -- (laughs) my mother-in-law and I didn't get along very well. They were upset because I was a galitsyaner [Galician], and they were Litvaks. And, you know, when she said "fish" she said (pronounces as "feese") "fis." And my grandmother said (pronounces as "feesh") "fish." And she said -- well -- and pop -- oh, and my father-in-law, with his wonderful Litvakishe 87:00[Lithuanian] Yiddish that I had to learn all over again. My Yiddish is completely gemisht [mixed up] now because of this marvelous long history with in-laws who I came to love so much and who came to love me, of course. And I learned a lot of cooking from my mother-in-law as well. She was a wonderful cook. She had a hotel in the Catskills, a Borscht Belt hotel. And she made a lot of authentic, wonderful Yiddish dishes that are lost today, really lost. You don't see the kind of fricasee she could make, on top of mamelige [polenta]. (laughs) I think I strayed from your path.

CW:Well, I wanted to ask -- I mean, you've -- you're starting to talk about -- a little bit about how you transmitted this rich culture to your own children, and now grandchildren. How does it pass down between -- to the next generations?

AG:For my children, when they were growing up, we had the Hebrew school. We had, at home, singing and dancing, Yiddish and Hebrew songs and dances all the time. I sang and danced with them all the time. I sang them German youth movement songs. My husband and I (laughs) sang songs of the Spanish Civil War. Folk singing was important to us, American folksong. Yiddish folksong. German folksong, French folksong, whatever we found. And of course, all the Hebrew songs -- we had been members of a choral society of Hashomer Hatzair. We had sung for the Hadassah ladies all over the New York area. So, singing was a natural thing for us. And we both sang. We sang in the car, on all the car trips 89:00we sang to them folksongs of all the languages. And we took them traveling. But of course, they still had grandparents when they were growing up. And it was a very warm, rich life with the grandparents. All the holidays -- of course, holidays were -- are the motherlode of our contemporary Jewish life. The Rosh Hashanah, the Hanukkah, the Pesach. So, my home became the home for a very big Pesach seder. Pop was -- my father-in-law had a beautiful voice. He sang the entire Haggadah. It was wonderful to hear. He never skipped a beat. Sometimes he said express train, but he pronounced every word, and he went very, very fast. In the early days, I guess we were more at home because we didn't have to share 90:00it with other families. So, our children became accustomed to the big preparation for the Rosh Hashanah and for the Pesach and for the Hanukkah. And the Hanukkah parties and the dreidel and the latkes. But everything else that went with it we shared with their cousins. We involved my sister-in-law's family, four children, in all of this. And we tried very hard to keep my brother's child involved as well. And then, we would invite a lot of other people because it was very freylekh [joyful]. And I think it gave the children a good sense of Jewish identity. The fact that we were very Zionist and very connected to Israel, that we were -- we became patrons at the very beginning of 91:00the Israel Museum. We had friends from Israel who came to stay with us, and one was an executive of the museum, the first public relations officer of the museum. Friends from -- not just from the movement, but our connection to the Russian relatives who survived Siberia, came back to Lithuania, and with whom we were writing all along -- corresponding. When my mother-in-law died, she asked me -- she made me -- she asked me to promise to take care of her brother who had survived the war and was living in Vilna. He had come from Kovno but he couldn't live there anymore. There were no more Jews in Kovno. I promised. And a promise is a promise, the way Sholem Aleichem would say, "A gang iz a gang [A task is a 92:00task]." So, when my husband had to go to Warsaw on business with the Polish shipping division -- the communists were in Poland, of course. This was still the Cold War -- and he said, "Do you think you'll want to go to Warsaw with me?" I looked him straight in the eye and said, "Only if you get us to Vilna to find your uncle." We were corresponding in Yiddish, and uncle was writing -- in Yiddish only -- and he was writing in code because he'd written that way to his sister. If he said, "We're as well off as Moyshe" -- because Moyshe was dead -- he meant they're in dr'erd [hell]; they're in terrible trouble. And I was going to the Lower East Side, buying the makings of suits -- all the findings and the fabrics, as she had, and making packages because if he had three suits, the makings of three suits, he could trade with other people who wanted a suit made 93:00for themselves for goods that they had available. (sighs) So, Yitz said, "Okay. We'll do it. Let's see." But I did it, not he. I did all of it. It was very hard. It was '65, they opened the border between Poland and Lithuania -- the communists allowed Americans to come into Lithuania the first time -- and we were there in 1966. And we got there, and we found uncle. We were tracked by the KGB all along. On the train from Warsaw up to Vilna was an odyssey of a nine-hour ride with changing of the track, changing the train, and being examined at the border. It was quite an interesting experience. I was wearing a 94:00lot because I was bringing clothes that I would give to tante [aunt]. I bought a Mouton lamb coat that they could trade for something. I was wearing this heavy thing. (laughs)

CW:And what was it like when you arrived in Vilna?

AG:In Vilna at the train station tante and uncle were waiting for us. And the Intourist agent, who was really looking over our shoulder and into everything. What we did not know -- there was a crowd at the station, like onlookers, like a Greek chorus-looking crowd. What we didn't know is that Yashe and Sonya, Yitz's first cousin and his wife, were in the crowd. Yashe was told by his boss, "If you approach the Americans, you'll lose your job. If you say hello, you will lose your job. If you visit them, you will lose your job." So, he had survived 95:00the war in an orphanage in Russia. The Lithuanians set fire to the cabins in the forest where they were outside of Vilna -- of Kovno. And he and his brother had been sent to summer camp. They were each in a different cabin 'cause they were different ages. The Germans marched across the border into Lithuania. And the Lithuanians went on a rampage, killing Jews. And the Lithuanian counselors boarded up the windows of the wooden cabins and set fire to them, where the Jewish children were. And the counselor of Yashe's bunk was feeling some remorse and came to the back and pulled off the wood, and he yelled to the boys, "Run into the woods!" It's a huge forest, well-known; the partisans hid there. And the boys ran into the woods, but his brother Aba was in a different tzrif -- 96:00cabin -- and he was burned alive. Yashe was picked up with his friends by the Russians in the forest and taken to an orphanage and spent time in the orphanage there. A second cousin was a major in the KGB because he knew nine languages and he was doing translating for them. And Lovitt found his name in an orphanage list, and he knew -- he recognized immediately a (UNCLEAR) uncle who had come back from Siberia with his wife in Vilna, and said, "Here's Chaim's son." They got the boy, and they brought him to uncle, who adopted his nephew. And that was Yashe. Yashe was a hooligan of a -- terrible teenager, but he straightened out, 97:00got a PhD in physics, and had a very good job. And he couldn't see us. So, when we said, We're going on to Moscow, after three days in Vilna visiting them, speaking Yiddish all the while because they really didn't have any English. Uncle could understand English, but tante not at all. Not her son. A daughter was living with a husband in a scientific community outside Moscow. And tante said, "She'll come with us to Moscow. We will --" -- she said, "I'll be able to visit Lova there," this second cousin. So, we registered at the airport, and she said to us on the side, "Yashe and Sonya are going to be on a bench as we walk 98:00to the plane, but don't look at them, just walk by. They want to see you up close." And we walked past them. (begins to cry) They were crying, and we were crying. He looked a lot like my husband. We had known about them, but we had never known them. It's wonderful now to have them in Israel and be so close to them. But it was very hard for them. They were refuseniks. When we got uncle out -- well, it was a long procedure. I got in touch with Senator Church, and I put him on the list of Jews who should be released -- this was at the -- there was a big convention for getting Jews out in Belgium. And I got in touch with -- oh, with a lot of people. Aliyah-bet and we -- it was a long history, long history. 99:00Anyway, we succeeded. He came out in 1972, and Yashe in '74. It was wonderful.

CW:Well, we don't have much time, but I'd like to just ask you one closing question. It's hard to wrap up this wonderful interview. But I'd like to just ask, what advice do you have for future generations?

AG:(pause) Children always learn from their parents. They don't do what you say, but they learn. The culture of the house becomes almost the culture of the children. Their peer group adds to it or becomes the be-all and end-all of it 100:00when they're teenagers, and then when they go to college. So, you're really competing with a very dynamic future of your children when you have them at home because things change when they become teenagers. You have to realize what a brief time it is you have with your nuclear family, and you have to make it as rich an experience as possible. If Jewish identity is important to you, read, explore, develop a broad base in it. Don't rely on the Hebrew schoolteacher to make a Jew out of your child. It won't happen -- at all. If your family life is not Jewish, your child will not be Jewish. If your family life -- if you don't 101:00know how, join a group! Go to your local JCC or synagogue and join the activities there and build a base around those activities, if it's important to you. And believe me, any child who is that rooted is going to be more stable. I don't care what culture they're rooted in; if they're rooted in their culture, they feel comfortable in it, and they feel that they love it and that it loves them and gives them something. It gives them their history. It gives them their identity. They'll feel proud of it. And it gives them something to last all their lives.

CW:Well, a hartsikn dank. Thank you so much.

[END OF INTERVIEW]