HELEN KURZBAN ORAL HISTORY

MARK GERSTEIN:Okay. This is Mark Gerstein, and today is March 12th, 2013. I am here in Boca Raton, Florida, with Helen Kurzban, and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Helen, do I have your permission to record this interview?

HELEN KURZBAN:Absolutely.

MG:Oh, thank you. I thought we'd start out talking about family background and about your parents and their experiences and journey to America. So would you like to tell us about that?

HK:Surely. First-generation American. I was born in Brooklyn, but both my parents came from a shtot [city] -- not a shtetl [small town in Eastern Europe with a Jewish community] -- called Brest-Litovsk, which at times belonged to 1:00Poland, at times belonged to Russia. They did not know each other while they were there, but when they came to America, there was a landsman [fellow countryman] club, and the young people from that city would get together, and that's how they met. My mother came here -- I'm trying to figure out -- she was born in 1920. She -- her father left Poland in 1913, 1914 -- left his wife with five children and came to America to make parnose -- to make a living -- and then to bring them over. And World War I broke out, and my thirty-one-year-old grandmother was left with four children, wandering all over Russia with very 2:00little to eat. And my grandfather had no way of getting through to them. Ten years after he had left, he finally was able to bring them across. And my mother said she did not come in steerage; he had saved up enough money so that they had their own room on a Holland American boat. And at -- she came here, she was sixteen years old, and within two weeks, she had a job in the garment industry and was enrolled in night school to learn English. The worst thing that you could say to my mother was "d'bist a griner [you're a Greenhorn]" -- you know, that you're a new immigrant. She loved America, she loved education. My father has a much more convoluted history. At age seventeen, he and his brother -- his 3:00brother was two years older than him, but on their passport, he was only six months older than my father -- their sister had sent them money for passage so that they would not go into the Polish Army. And here were two teenagers who left -- they went to Bremen, where the ships left for the United States, and the -- they had already set up a quota in the United States. And they got there at the end of the month, and the quota had been filled. And somebody said, "There's a ship there for South America." And all they heard was "America," so they got on that ship and wound up in Argentina. They worked in a place that made furniture, learned how to do furniture finishing. Their father had been a carpenter, so they had certain skills there. Their sister finally was able to 4:00accumulate enough money to get the older -- my uncle -- there. And here is my father, left in this country where he knew nobody, his Spanish was not very good, there was no one for him to speak Yiddish with, and he must have gone into a depression. He was one of the most honest people I know, but he went to a lawyer who -- and he says, "I have to get to America by any means." And so they took the name of a person who was in the cemetery who was the same age as my father, made a passport with that name. And I wrote down the name that he came under, 'cause it's a -- it was Louie Francisco Maglioso. That was the name that 5:00he came into the United States with. He married my mother, he had that name. And my mother was very unhappy with that name, so they went to have their -- the name changed. And my father was a very shy man. My mother was very intelligent and very vocal. And she said to the judge that she wanted him re-named Benjamin Shwartsman, which was his original name. And the judge looked down, and he says, "How did you get from this name to that?" She says, "Well, my father was a very religious man, and that's not a Jewish name. And Benjamin means 'son of Zion' -- his name was really Ben-Zion." And he says, "And look, he's got dark skin, and in Yiddish, "dark" or "black" is "shvarts," so that's Shwartsman." And the judge 6:00sort of winked, you know, and I have the change of name papers here that were issued by Kings County clerk's office, and it changed his name, and it changed my mother's name, because she was now married to him. And on the certificate of marriage, it had the Hispanic name.

MG:How many years was he here before he changed his name?

HK:Well, he got here in I think '27 or '28, they got married in '29, and the change of name was like six months after they had gotten married. I did not know 7:00this story until I was married and had children of my own and my parents were moving to Florida, so they gave me all of their papers and said, "Keep in your safety deposit box." Well, I wasn't going to just put it in without looking, and that's when I saw this and called them and got the gantse mayse -- the whole story. It was very interesting. At school, every year, they used to do a census of where the parents of the children in the school came from. And the teacher would say, "When I say Italy, if your father came from Italy, raise one hand; if both parents, raise two." When she finished, she had an odd number of hands that went up. And she says, "Is there anyone here who doesn't have a mother or a father?" No. "Is there anyone who only raised their hands once?" And I raised my 8:00hand. And she says, "Why?" I says, "You never mentioned Uruguay." She says, "Who came from Uruguay?" So I says, "My father came from Montevideo, Uruguay." I had been instructed that that was what I was going to say. And I was a typical little Jewish girl, and the Irish teacher looked at me like I was really very crazy. After I found out the whole story, then it fit. My father's greatest fear was that somebody would discover that he was an illegal immigrant and that he would be sent back to Argentina. He did not actually leave this country for any reason until he was in his eighties, and he went to Israel. He figured by that time, nobody was coming after him.

MG:He got citizenship papers, I assume.

HK:And he -- I have his citizenship papers also, and he was the most flag-waving 9:00immigrant that I've ever met.

MG:So your father had a brother who he came over with?

HK:Yes.

MG:Okay. And he had a sister here already?

HK:Yes.

MG:Did he leave relatives behind?

HK:Yes. His father and his mother, a sister and a brother, and their spouses and their children. They wanted to bring them all over here before World War II, and his father said, "Ikh gey nisht. S'iz a goyishe land [I'm not going. It's a non-Jewish country]." And there was nothing they could do. A cousin of mine went back with a son of his on a roots kind of trip and found out that in October of 1942, the Germans marched twenty-five thousand Jews to the river and shot them all, and that the water ran red for weeks and weeks. Brest-Litovsk was not a 10:00shtetl. It had fifty-five thousand people and thirty-five thousand were Jews. And it was an industrial city where the trains came from the west and the east. They were different gauges. They stopped in Brest-Litovsk and were transferred from one to the other -- produce, people, et cetera. And it was a very well-kept city. It was a rich city. When my cousin came back with his son, there were five hundred Jews left there.

MG:When were -- when was your parents or yourself aware of what happened -- what had happened to the --

HK:It was a long time. My father and his sister and his brothers kept sending messages. Now we had -- he had a first cousin whose family wound up in Israel 11:00after the war, and we asked them, "How are you alive?" They came from the same area. And they said that when the Russians came into Poland before the war, they asked for everybody's passport. My grandparents had a passport. This family didn't, so they sent them to Siberia, and that saved their lives. My father used to say, "In a shlimazl, darf men hobn mazl" -- in an unfortunate situation, you have to have luck.

[BREAK IN RECORDING] And when they came back to Brest-Litovsk, they couldn't come to the United States -- there was again a quota. So they wound up coming to Israel. And we're in touch with them, and we've helped them out all along, so --

MG:Okay. Let's go back to happier times, if we can -- back to your father and 12:00your parents. What did your father do for a living?

HK:My father was a carpenter. He went into business for himself with an Italian partner in 1945. They built storefronts. I worked for them for three years full-time, and I was only fifteen at the time. And my father came home with a typewriter, and he says, "Here, d'binst [you're] a bookkeeper." Because that -- that was everything. And I looked at it, and I said, "What is it?" And he says, "M'shraybt briv" -- "We write letters with it." And I taught myself how to use it. Years later, I looked at the documents. I didn't know how to make the margins or anything else, but at that time people would sign anything if they could get work done, 'cause it was right after the war.

MG:Let's go back to your childhood first, okay?

HK:Okay.

MG:And you were born where?

HK:In Brooklyn. My first language is Yiddish. I -- when I -- because my mother's 13:00parents lived across the street from us in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and so everybody spoke Yiddish. And at five I went to kindergarten, and the teacher was an Irish teacher, and she said to me -- she looked in the records, and she said, "You were born in this country. American children speak English." Now it would be politically incorrect to say that. She says, "And I don't want to hear any other language." So I went home and I said to my mother, "I'm an American, and American children speak English, and I'm not speaking Yiddish to you anymore." And she said, "All right." So at that point we started speaking English. My grandmother had died when I was two and a half. My grandfather was still there -- he was a house painter, and he learned enough English that we could communicate. When I was ten, a IWO shule opened in the area.

MG:Can you explain to us what the IWO is?

HK:The International Workers Order. It was a socialist organization. McCarthy did a good job of getting rid of them. But they opened up this school -- there were also Sholem Aleichem schools and Workmen's Circle Yiddish schools where kids could learn Jewish. They were open for one year and then they closed because of finances. And I learned how to read and write on a first-grade level. But the conversation came back. And then when I was fourteen, it re-opened. And I didn't say anything to anyone, and I went there, and I said, "I want to be part of the --" They said, Well, what grade were you in? I said, "I was a 15:00senior." And I bluffed my way through, because I didn't want to be with the eleven-year-olds -- I was already in high school. And so I always say I graduated as the valedictorian of the class -- there were three of us graduating, and the other two were boys who were eleven and weren't really interested. And that was it. And I really didn't use my Yiddish for a very long time -- though we used to go to the theater on Second Avenue and there -- Maurice Schwartz's stuff was really a tifn yidish -- a deep Yiddish. And I would translate for my husband, for my friends, et cetera. When I --

MG:Can you tell us more about that -- the theater -- what was it like?

HK:Oh, the theaters were wonderful. We went to -- on Second Avenue, there were maybe three different theaters: Menasha Skulnik was there, the Adler family, and 16:00it was -- it was wonderful, it was just -- that was the first theater that I had any relationship with.

MG:These were dramas, comedies --

HK:Both.

MG:-- musicals?

HK:Both. Both. There was one that Maurice Schwartz did that was a takeoff on Shakespeare -- the one that has -- "The Merchant of Venice." And he did it in Yiddish. But it was really very high-class Yiddish. And I was there translating for all of them. And they had his -- his famous speeches translated into Yiddish.

MG:He was playing -- he was playing Shylock, I assume?

HK:Yes, yes. He played Shylock. And it was really very -- there were also Yiddish movies. And when they -- when new ones came out, we would go to see those also. My father, though he was not well-educated, was well-read. And when 17:00he and my mother got married, a group of friends chipped in and bought them the complete Sholem Aleichem books in -- done in leather. And when he would come home from work, a hard day's work, he would eat his dinner, and then he would read to me from Sholem Aleichem. So I grew up with that. Or he would read from the newspaper -- the "Bintel Brief." And so this was all part of my background. When I retired, I was looking for something intellectual to do, and somebody suggested that I join Brandeis University women that supported the university at 18:00Brandeis. And their newspaper came out, and there was a little ad. And it says, "Needed: people who speak Yiddish to work with senior citizens from Russia." So I said, "That sounds like fun." So I put in my name, and I worked with them for about two years. We were still snowbirds, so I only worked with them when I was here. And my mother would come with me. And she could speak a little bit of Russian, and it was a very interesting experience. They thought that Reagan was wonderful, because he made it possible for them to come here. They got SSI. They were taken care of. And I said to one of them, "What are you doing in Boca Raton? All the Russians are in Brighton Beach." Well, their children had come 19:00over before -- they were work-- their children were working for IBM when IBM was a presence, so this is where they came. And I wound up teaching other courses for Brandeis. I did "Sholem Aleichem: The Man and His Times." I did "Bintel Brief." I did "Yiddish Humor." And I got to be known as the Yiddishist in Brandeis. And -- and then I had a conversational Yiddish group that I ran for about five years. And that, I think, was the most fun. I developed my own curriculum, and then I got a call one day from the bookstore that Brandeis owned down here, and they said, Something came in. It's Yiddish. Come down. And it was 20:00a loose-leaf book that had lessons. It had grammar, it had dialogue, it had vocabulary. And it was all set up. And it followed, one after the other. And they had a sale -- they had marked the book for five dollars, and it was a fifty percent off. So for two dollars and fifty cents, I got all my lesson plans done. And people who understood Yiddish but would not speak, by the end of two years were speaking fluently. And my mother was like my assistant. And her Yiddish was very, very good. And my favorite story about that is, for her ninety-seventh birthday, we took her out for a lobster dinner, and she got an attack of indigestion, she was in the hospital. And the doctor said to her, "What is a nice Jewish lady like you doing eating lobster? You should eat gefilte fish." To 21:00which she says, "I hate gefilte fish." So he says, "Look, I promised you that you would live to be 100, but not if you eat lobster." So she turned to shrimp. She lived to be 103. Okay, with that. Now, we wanted to tell that story in Yiddish to my Yiddish conversation group. The word "lobster" was not in my English-Yiddish dictionary, and my mother said, the word is "rok." I've since found out that it really means shellfish in general. So I said to her, "How did you know the word 'rok'?" She says, "That was what my father used." I says, "My zeyde [grandfather] knew from lobster?" She says, "He didn't eat it. He knew what it was." He was a caterer in Europe, and so he catered for both Jews and non-Jews. And so that was the way we did it.

MG:There's so much here. And I want to go back, but before we do that -- okay, you said you taught Yiddish humor.

HK:Yes.

MG:Can you share with us some of the things that you related to people?

HK:Well, one of the things that I talked about was that Jewish humor always made fun of itself -- of authority, maybe, but, uh -- like, slapstick is not Jewish humor, even if it's done by Jewish comedians. And so all the Borscht Belt people who were comedians -- their humor was -- they made fun of themselves, they made fun of their situation. Seinfeld is Jewish humor, because he talks about things that happen -- he makes fun of his parents, of himself, et cetera. And so we 23:00would do it from that point of view. We talked about Jewish humor in literature, in the movies, on television, et cetera. And a lot of the people were not very happy with some of the -- the, uh, what's his name? He was a rabbi, and he always -- he spoke with an accent.

MG:Jackie Mason.

HK:Jackie Mason. They didn't like Jackie Mason, because he made fun of the Jews. And m'redt nisht azoy far di goyim -- you don't speak like that about Jews in front of Gentiles. They have enough to be anti-Semitic, you don't give them more. So it was a very interesting course from that point of view. There was a book put out by a professor at Brandeis, and I think it was called "The Big Book of Jewish Humor," and I got a lot out of that. Sholem Aleichem was translated -- 24:00most of his stuff was translated. Some of it could not be translated -- there just weren't the Jewish words -- the English words for some of the Jewish words. But that was a wonderful course. We -- I had the translation. I had bought two books that were translations of Sholem Aleichem's works. And each session we read one or two, and then we discussed it, you know, as far as that went. And I think my favorite were the ones that were the Tevye stories. There was "Tevye the Dairyman," "Tevye der milkhiker," on which they based the show "Fiddler on 25:00the Roof." My father went to see "Fiddler on the Roof," and he was very upset. He said, "They didn't do a good job. They made fun. Zey hobn gemakht hoyzik." He didn't feel that it was a serious kind of thing, because Sholem Aleichem was like his idol. I also did lectures for other Yiddish groups. And one day, I was doing the one on Sholem Aleichem. And I ended by saying that he was not really a religious Jew, he was a secular Jew. And in the Library of Congress, they have what he called an ethical will. And in it, he said that on his yortsayt -- on the anniversary of his death -- he would like people to get together and share 26:00his stories. The funnier, the better. Now, he died in 1916. And about ten years ago, I was giving this speech to a Yiddish club that was in Delray, Florida. And a young woman raised her hand. And she said, "I'm married to Sholem Aleichem's grandson. And last year, on his birthday, in New York, we had 250 people who gathered together to read the Sholem Aleichem stories." So I got as much out of that lecture as I hope the others did. My favorite, however, was probably the "Bintel Brief." Those were letters to the editor of the "Forverts." And people came over as immigrants. And in Europe, the value system in the shtetl was the 27:00same. And if you had a problem, you went to the rebbe, and he solved your problem. They came to the United States, and they didn't have this. So they wrote letters to the editor of the "Forverts." And he saw that there was a human interest story there. And so he started publishing them, and he would answer that. And what I did is, somebody would read a letter -- they had been translated -- and then the audience would try to solve it. And then we would read the solution that the editor did and compare it and why it was different. And that was a lot of fun to do.

MG:Let's go back.

HK:Okay.

MG:I want to hear about growing up in Brooklyn --

HK:Okay.

MG:-- in the 1930s. Let's start with your household. I mean, obviously, you -- everyone spoke Yiddish, you said?

HK:Yes.

MG:In what other ways was it a Jewish household, would you say?

HK:Okay. My grandfather was not a Hasid, but he was Orthodox. And so my mother kept a kosher home. My father, I told you, was not religious. The minute he walked into the kitchen, my mother would come in and say, "No, that's the milkhedike meser -- it's the dairy knife, you can't cut meat with it!" And she did that because she wanted her father to be able to eat in the house. And -- but my father on Yom Kippur went out to eat Chinese food, while I went to synagogue with my grandfather. And my father used to refer to me as "mayn tokhter di rebetsn [my daughter the rebbetzin]" -- and it wasn't meant as a compliment. It was a put-down.

MG:Translation would be?

HK:Be, "my daughter, the rabbi's wife." Okay? And that was the one thing that my 29:00father and I did not agree with. Williamsburg at that time, the area that we lived in, were all brownstone houses. Further down were the apartment houses, we used to look down our noses at them. Half the population was Jewish, then there were Italians and Irish and a few Germans in that area. The -- going to school and getting a good education was the value of all of the families there. And when they set up a class of intellectually gifted kids, I would say that ninety percent were Jewish kids. We had a neighbor who had a Jewish Polish maid who 30:00worked for him. And she was not well-educated, but her one dream was that she was gonna be an American citizen. And so that was my first teaching assignment. I would come after school or on the weekend, and I would work with her to prepare her for her citizenship test. And she finally got her citizenship paper. My next teaching job was when I was in second grade, my mother wanted to better her English. And so if I had a spelling test to take, I would give my mother, the night before, the spelling test, and then I would mark it, you know? And so 31:00she was 103 when she died, and she was in hospice at a nursing home. And I got a call from one of the aides. She says, "This was the first time I met your mother. And when I saw her, she reminded me of my grandmother, so I started speaking to her in Yiddish. And your mother sat up indignantly and said, 'I'm an American. I speak English. And by the way, your Yiddish is terrible.'" So I don't know what else --

MG:The neighborhood. You said you were -- when you went to kindergarten, you spoke only Yiddish. Did you speak any English at all?

HK:I must have spoken some, because there were kids that I played with. But my cousin, who was two months older than me -- we were a pair there -- he and his parents lived with my grandfather, and we lived across the street, so he was my 32:00companion all the time, and we used to speak to each other in Yiddish. He as a grown-up lost all his ability for Yiddish -- you know, which was a surprising kind of thing. But somehow, I held onto it.

MG:What was the neighborhood like -- growing up in Williamsburg?

HK:Well, it was brownstones. In the back was a yard. My father had a vegetable garden there, and he raised roses and everything. And everybody knew everybody else. Nobody locked their doors. We had an Italian family on the block who spoke Yiddish, and that was, you know --

MG:And they spoke Yiddish because they were close to --

HK:Yes.

MG:Yiddish speakers?

HK:Yes. And my father worked for a contractor who employed like a United 33:00Nations. Nobody spoke English, but somehow they understood each other. And they all had in common a pride in workmanship. And when they'd come together, they would present each other with a problem: "This is what happened. How would you have solved it?" And each one would try to solve it in a different way. And I used to listen to all of that, and marvel at the fact that they communicated even though they didn't have a language in common.

MG:You said your household kept kosher in your household, and your father was not religious. Were there any other kind of customs -- celebrations, holidays -- that were kept in the household, that you remember?

HK:Oh, yes. Passover had at least twenty-five people. My -- we never knew how many people. My mother and her sister used to do all the cooking, set everything 34:00up, and my grandfather would first go to synagogue and come home with anywhere from two to five strangers who then shared the seder with us. My grandfather's gefilte fish was the best that anyone ever made. Thursday night, he would make gefilte fish for the weekend. I would take a gefilte fish sandwich to school for lunch --

MG:Was this from -- did he make it from scratch?

HK:From scratch. In fact, next door was a fishmonger. And he would tell him exactly what he wanted. It was like a chemistry thing, of putting everything together. And Mr. Rosen used to bring the fresh fish so that it was always maybe a few hours out of water. And he and my mother and my aunt would make the 35:00gefilte fish. When I took the gefilte fish on Friday for lunch, Marjorie Mahoney, who was Catholic, could only eat fish for lunch, so she took my sandwich and brought me a ham sandwich. If my grandfather knew, he would have been very, very upset. So that was a big secret that we never told.

MG:Was there a certain political atmosphere in your house? And your father --

HK:Yes. My father was a socialist. He was very pro-Russian. But if it was a choice between the United States and Russia, the United States always won. He was an ardent Democrat. He supported FDR -- Franklin Roosevelt. When the 36:00president had his fireside chats on the radio, we all sat around, and my father would say, "Sha! D'prezident redt -- the president is talking." When he found out that Roosevelt had not been very kind to the European Jews -- he sent a shipload of Jews in 1939 who were trying to escape, he sent them back -- I think it broke my father's heart.

MG:But he was still an ardent Roosevelt supporter despite that.

HK:Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It was very hard for him.

MG:Now, you said -- you -- I believe you went to a IWO summer camp for a while?

HK:Yes. Yes. And --

MG:What was that like?

HK:It was horrible. Because the counselors were all the old socialists. They 37:00really didn't know what to do with children. They spoke to us completely in Yiddish. And it wasn't any fun. I went to one two-week session, and I would never, ever go back again.

MG:And did they try to convey to you socialist ideology while you were in camp, or --

HK:I don't remember that, but they did push the fact that we should be speaking Yiddish, and -- you know, and understanding it. They spoke to us completely in Yiddish. And I must have been about ten years old. It was not fun.

MG:Now, you mentioned Yiddish theater. Also, did you listen to Yiddish radio?

HK:Yes. Yeah. There was one program that was called "Tsures b'laytn" -- "Problems that People Have." And people would call in with their problems, and 38:00whoever was the narrator would try to answer it. Also, the newspaper -- the "Freiheit" was the socialist paper, and the "Forverts" was like a workman's paper. And then there was the "Morning zhurnal" -- the "Morning Journal" -- that was more conservative. And my father used to love to read the want ads. And he would read me the want ads where they were advertising their daughter for marriage. And he would say, "If you're not married by the time you're twenty-five, I'm gonna put an ad in the paper here for you." Well, I got married, I was just a little over eighteen years old, so he never had to do that for me.

MG:You were growing up as a young girl during the Great Depression, in the 39:001930s. What memories do you have of that period?

HK:Well, it was very interesting that we were poor, but everybody else was poor, and we didn't think of ourselves as poor. My mother went back to work. My mother worked in the garment industry. She was a charter member of the International Garment Workers' Union. And I was three. And she would leave me with a neighbor, and pay that neighbor a minimal amount. My father, when I was three, was on strike. He was a charter member of the Carpenters and Joiners Union. And they were on strike. And rather than spending money for a babysitter to take care of me, he took me, and I walked with him on the picket line. I cannot cross a 40:00picket line now, regardless of what the issues were. They were like in three groups -- each group would picket for an hour, and then go inside a store where they had a big samovar with hot tea, and they would sit for two hours while another group went. And as a teacher, I was the chapter chairman of the UFT, which was the teacher's union. When I became a principal, I joined a comparable one that represented the supervisors and administrators. So that the unionism was part of who I was and how I grew up.

MG:You were coming of age -- or a teenager, actually -- during World War II. 41:00Okay, you know, the years there. What memories do you have of World War II?

HK:Well, a lot of the young men weren't around. My uncle -- my mother's brother -- was in the army. I had a teacher who I had in 5B, Mr. Sullivan, and he -- and then I had him again in 8A. And he got drafted into the Navy. And for the four years that he was in the Navy, he wrote to me and I wrote to him. He changed my life. He went around the room and he asked everybody, "What are you going to be when you grow up?" And when he got to me, I said, "A secretary bookkeeper." And he looked like Ichabod Crane -- he was very tall and skinny, had buck teeth -- and he banged on the desk, and he says, "No, you are not. You're going to 42:00college." So I went home and I told my mother, "Mr. Sullivan said I'm gonna go to college." She says, "Girls don't go to college." I says, "But Mr. Sullivan said." And he was like an idol in the house. And that changed my entire life, of who I became as a grown-up.

MG:Were you -- during the war, were people in your household aware of what was happening to the Jews in Europe?

HK:I don't know. It wasn't talked about, so I really don't know. But I know afterwards, you know, the talk was there. I think that communications were cut off, and they tried their best to see if they could contact the people back in Europe, and they were unable to do that. So they had no idea of exactly what was going on.

MG:Looking back at your childhood, what values or practices do you think your 43:00parents were trying to pass on to you? Were there any in particular?

HK:Education. The importance of education. The importance of being a Jew -- even if you weren't a religious Jew, that you were a cultural or secular Jew. That you were honest. That you worked hard. That you didn't cheat anybody. That you weren't malicious. So these were all the things that really made me the person I am today.

MG:Let's do a transition here. And then we've talked a little bit about this already, about your later life, so if you could just fill us in about the occupations you had, and sort of your careers and so forth.

HK:All right. I graduated high school in 1948, in January. I was married in November of 1948. That was also the year that Israel became a country. So that 44:00was all that. My husband came out of the Army in 1947, and he went back to college under the GI Bill. So I worked -- and I worked for my father for the three years until I became pregnant with my oldest child. By that time, my husband was working as a teacher. And the interesting thing was that the IWO had the first of what you would call a health plan. They had doctors who would take two dollars for a visit. They would do a house visit, and you paid a certain amount a year. Now, when my hus-- and we joined it, because this was wonderful to have --

MG:You were a member of the IWO at this point?

HK:My father was, but --

MG:Your father was.

HK:-- and I knew that we were covered by that, so when we got married, my husband and I joined. But then when my husband was looking for a job, one of the things that they asked you to sign was a statement that you did not belong to a sub--

MG:Subversive?

HK:-- organization. So we cut off our membership on that and wrote no. And in a way, it was -- they were ahead of their times, as far as the medical plan goes. I was eight years old and I had a pain in my stomach, and the doctor came to the house and he said, "She's having an appendicitis attack." And he put me in his car and drove me to the hospital. And I think that the whole operation cost, like, 100 dollars through the IWO. So that was an early time to realize that 46:00this was what people needed. And so when my husband started teaching, the teachers had no benefits at all. If he had a temperature that was less than 102, he went in to work, because we could not afford to lose the day's pay. And so after the first big strike that the UFT had, we were given medical benefits, days off for sickness, and a lot of the other benefits -- pension rights -- that have made my life as an adult much easier.

MG:What led you to become a teacher?

HK:There weren't many choices for women at that time. You became a nurse, a librarian, a secretary, or a teacher. That was it. So I became a teacher.

MG:And you started teaching when?

HK:Well, I graduated high school in 1948. I got my diploma -- my degree -- from Brooklyn College in '69.

MG:Sixty-nine?

HK:Sixty-nine.

MG:Sixty-nine.

HK:Eleven years. I went at night. My children were at my graduation. And then I started substitute teaching, and on the elementary level, and then teaching. And somehow, without planning, I fell into being an acting assistant principal. And I took -- I started taking the courses.

MG:So you were teaching and being an acting principal during the seventies -- 48:001970s --

HK:Yes.

MG:-- and 1980s?

HK:Yes.

MG:Okay. What was that -- what was that like?

HK:Well, it was a very exciting time, because we had Al Shanker, who got us a lot of benefits. And it -- the people who were teaching, especially the women, were the top, because there were no other -- very few women went into medicine or business or law. So the best of the best went into teaching. And I -- and the New York City school system was -- they called it the Harvard of the poor. All the colleges -- the free colleges that you had. The finest teachers that you ever, ever could want. And so teaching was wonderful. It was a wonderful profession. And the fact that my husband and I were both teachers meant we had 49:00our whole summer off. We were home when the children were home. And there was a great deal of satisfaction. I'm still in touch with some of the children that I had -- they're now fifty-two, fifty-three years old. I play games with them on the computer. And so that's --

MG:That's great. You had mentioned that you had wanted to tell the story -- I don't want to forget this -- about -- I think it was back when you were in high school, perhaps, about German class --

HK:Oh, yes.

MG:-- and Yiddish?

HK:Well --

MG:I don't want to -- I don't want to forget that.

HK:Yeah.

MG:I know we're jumping around here, but --

HK:The first year that I took German, the course was taught by the music teacher, who was born in Vienna. And we had vocabulary that we had to learn each night. And I came in one day, and I hadn't studied it, and instead of using a 50:00German word, I used a Yiddish word. And the teacher said, "Man spricht nicht Jüdisch in meine Klasse! Araus!" -- "We don't speak Jewish in my class! Get out!" And I was standing out in the hall, humiliated. At the end of the class, she came out, and she said to me, "Fräulein Schwarzman, don't ever do that. I used to do that when I was in school, so I'm wise to you. I speak a perfect Yiddish." (laughs)

MG:That's great. (laughter) That's wonderful. You were living, of course, during a very, very dynamic period in American history, the 1950s, 1960s. Could you tell us anything about that period that had an impact on you? Maybe as a Jew or not, in terms of events of that era, or --

HK:Well, we became very Zionistic with the advent of the nation of Israel. We -- 51:00I traveled there five times. My younger son spent a year and a half on a kibbutz. It -- and it was a very exciting time. Theater was exciting at that time. That was the time "Fiddler" was there, "Oklahoma." You know, all the theater that when you walked out, you could hum a song, which you can't do anymore. And the culture -- it didn't have to be Jewish culture, but it came from Jewish roots. I mean, even in the Warsaw ghetto, they were playing music to the very end. That was part of the Jewish background. So whether I was 52:00participating in it in English or in Jewish, it didn't really matter. The value came from the -- from the Yiddish.

MG:Okay. I know you've sort of touched upon this already, but how has your relationship with Yiddish itself evolved over your lifetime, would you say?

HK:Well, I told you. I mean, most of my friends were Yiddish, up until high school. And then high school was a mixed bag. And I went to a school in Manhattan -- even though we lived in Brooklyn -- that was set up for intellectually gifted girls. It's called Hunter College High School. And I met a lot of very bright people there who are still my friends. It was probably one of 53:00the schools that you really didn't have any anti-Semitism at all. In 1942, my father got a job in Washington, DC, building barracks. And it was just too much for him to come on the weekend to visit us and all, so my mother decided that we were gonna move down to Washington, DC. So she went first with my brother, who's six years younger than I am. And then my -- after a while, my grandfather put me on the train, and said, "Don't talk to anyone." And I -- my father met me in Washington, DC. And the first thing that I saw when I got off the train in Washington were bathrooms that were marked "white" and "colored," water 54:00fountains marked that way. And that was not what I came from Williamsburg. Because everybody got along well, I didn't know what anti-Semitism was. And I started in a junior high school. And the first day at lunch time, some kids were ready to beat me up and called me a goddamn Jew. And I had never experienced that in my life. And one of the Jewish teachers really rescued me and drove me home that day, 'cause they said, "We'll get you after school." And about two months later, my father got a telegram from his boss in New York saying, "We'll match what the federal government is paying you. Come on back." And I laughed the whole way going back. I came back, I was like a heroine, because nobody went any place. You were born on that street, and you lived there and when you got 55:00married, you continued living there. I was the only one who had gone -- it was almost like to a foreign land.

MG:How long were you in Washington before you --

HK:Two months.

MG:Two months. Two months.

HK:That's it. It was the two longest months of my life.

MG:And after your anti-Semitic encounter, how many more days or weeks were you there before you went back?

HK:Oh, yeah, the two months. And I mean --

MG:Two months? I mean, it was the very first --

HK:And I mean, but --

MG:Okay.

HK:But the teachers were very protective of me. And at lunch time, instead of going out to play, I stayed indoors, where they could protect me.

MG:You were the only Jewish student?

HK:There were maybe eight in the whole school, and here I came from a school where seventy-five percent of the students were Jewish children. So there was no reason for anti-Semitism in Williamsburg, but I suppose there was in Washington, DC.

MG:Wow.

HK:Yeah.

MG:Are there any other stories or thoughts that you might want to share with us? That was a great one. I was -- I was -- (laughs) that was very, very interesting.

HK:Yeah.

MG:About your life in the -- you were -- you said you were a member of the IWO.

HK:Yes.

MG:And then, of course, what happened to that, with McCarthyism, and --

HK:Yes. Yeah. They were on the list with a bunch of other blacklisted organizations.

MG:What were your thoughts about that?

HK:I thought it was awful. Because I came from a very liberal background, both at home and in school. And in the neighborhood. I mean, nobody even thought about that. And McCarthy said that it was a communist organization. It wasn't. It was a socialist organization. And there were a lot of benefits, you know? I 57:00got a Jewish education through them. I had the medical plan through them. They ran camps. I mean, it -- it was a lot of things that were good for people. At one point, you asked something about growing up in the Depression, and we never thought of ourselves as being poor. You're poor, I think, only if you think of yourself as poor. There was always food on the table, and my parents owned their own house, and at that time the banks didn't foreclose. They said, "Just pay us the interest on the mortgage, and when you'll have the money, you'll pay the balance." And so we lived in a -- in a very nice apartment. My father had 58:00converted this brownstone into three apartments. We had tenants below us and above us. And my mother prided herself that she -- if she put out a sign -- a To Let sign -- within 24 hours, the apartment was rented, even though they charged a little bit more than other people did, because she was a good landlord. And so I -- it was only afterwards, as a grown-up, that I realized that we really were, you know, poor people, economically. But we weren't poor in soul. That was the difference. And my mother sewed and made all my clothes. And I went into school one day, and the teacher said to me, "Where'd you get that outfit? That's a Saks 59:00Fifth Avenue outfit." I didn't know what Saks Fifth Avenue was, but when I went home and I told my mother, she says, "Yeah, I copied it from an advertisement." She cut her own patterns and the dresses and everything else. And so I was always well-dressed. And she really spoiled me. When I had to go out and buy clothes, they were -- the clothes that fit her quality were too expensive for me to buy. And she sewed until she was maybe ninety. Yeah.

MG:What does Yiddish mean for you today?

HK:It's a connection. It really is a connection. I know that I can go any place in the world and probably find somebody who speaks Yiddish. The first time we 60:00went to Israel, I had the relatives that were there. My husband understood Yiddish, but he didn't speak. My father's cousin only spoke Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew. And my -- no English. And my husband wanted to communicate with him. And all of a sudden, Yiddish came out that I had never heard him speak before, and he was able to communicate with them directly. Their son knew English. In order to graduate high school in -- at that time, Palestine was owned by the British -- he had to pass an English comprehension test, so he spoke English. But even now, I speak to him on the computer -- on Skype, and everything -- we always mix 61:00in Yiddish words. Any place that we went, we could always find somebody that was Yiddish-speaking, and there was a connection of being part of a very important group of people.

MG:Do you have a particular Yiddish phrase, expression, song, or whatever, that you'd like to share with us, perhaps?

HK:No, I don't think so.

MG:Anything that just pops out, meaningful for you, or -- (pause) It's okay.

HK:It's okay. (laughs)

MG:You don't have to have one, I just was interested and sometimes --

HK:It may come to me later.

MG:Okay. Okay. What do you -- we're nearing the end of our time, so I want to ask you, are there any other topics that you'd like to touch on at all?

HK:Yeah, I -- my father's pride in the fact that he was American and that he had 62:00American children. If he wanted me to do something and I would say, "I don't know," he would say, "A smart American girl can do anything." And I grew up with that from him. And when I was in high school, I was very much enamored in biology with Darwin. And I started talking to my father about it, and my father was giving me information. And I said to him, "How did you know that, pa?" And he says, "I read Darwin." I says, "You read Darwin?" He says, "Darwin was translated into every written language in the world, and I read it in Yiddish."

MG:He read it here in the United States, in Yiddish?

HK:When he was in the United States.

MG:States, yeah.

HK:You know.

MG:That's amazing. (laughs)

HK:Isn't it amazing?

MG:Darwin in Yiddish. Okay. What values or what things do you think are important, perhaps, to transmit to future generations of Jews?

HK:Well, the ones that I spoke to you about. Education -- and I know that my children have that, and my grandchildren have that. I have a granddaughter who's eighteen who has just been accepted into MIT. My youngest son has a Ph.D. in biochemistry. My older one is a college graduate. They both celebrate all the holidays. The value of family is very, very strong. Of helping one another. Of 64:00being there when you're needed. Tsdoke -- charity -- is a value that is very strong in Judaism. Helping one another, I think, is really one of the strongest. And even though my children don't speak Yiddish, they have those values. My younger son spent a year and a half on a kibbutz in Israel. At his bar mitzvah, he made a speech that said that all Jews should be living in Israel, and the president of the congregation didn't want to give him his gift. He says, "You're taking my whole congregation to Israel." You know. So I think that my children have those values. The younger one belongs to a Reconstructionist synagogue. The 65:00older one stayed on until his youngest child was bar mitzvahed. But there was one time -- the neighbors in New York that we had were really very anti-Semitic neighbors. They were Catholics with nine children. And one day -- my oldest son must have been ten or eleven -- and one of those kids called him a goddamn Jew. And my kids were not physical fighters, but they both have a mouth. And he turned to this kid, and he says, "You know, Willy, you shouldn't say that. The man that you worship to, Jesus, was a Jew. He lived as a Jew and he died as a 66:00Jew." And Willy said, "You're lying. That's a goddamn lie." So Steven said to him, "Go and ask the nuns at school." Willy never came back at him. They have a pride in their Judaism. My -- the favorite story. Steven was taking an honors English course, and they were doing Shakespeare. And the teacher -- the son in the play was leaving home, and the father was giving him advice, "To thine own self be true." And the teacher asked the question, "If you were leaving home, what advice do you think your parents would give you?" And Steven and another Jewish boy were sitting in the back, and they said, don't marry a shiksa. (laughs) So the learning went there. And the values were there. And I think 67:00they're good values. I think that if the whole world had those values, we wouldn't be at war.

MG:Well, Helen, I really enjoyed --

HK:Thank you.

MG:-- you sharing your stories and memories with us today.

HK:Thank you.

MG:I thank you so much -- a sheyenem dank.

HK:A sheynem dank -- I enjoyed this very much. I was looking forward to it, and I really thank you for doing this. I think this is an important project.

MG:Well, thank you.

HK:Okay.

[END OF INTERVIEW]