ANNETTE EPSTEIN JOLLES ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney, and today is March 18th, 2015. I am here at the Yiddish Book Center with Annette Epstein. And how do you pronounce your last --

ANNETTE EPSTEIN JOLLES: Jolles.

CW:Annette Epstein Jolles, 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?

AEJ:Absolutely.

CW:I'd like to start by -- can you tell me what you know about your family background, as far back as you know?

AEJ:I know that my family came to D.C. around 1903. I know a lot more about my father's family. My mother's family was pretty much -- of a mystery. My 1:00grandmother, my mother's mother, sort of stepped out of the Bintel Brief with her life. And she was an anarchist. She came to Washington. She was a young woman. She got married. She had my mother. When my mother was eight months old, she became pregnant again and her husband left her, never to return. So, she decided that she would have an abortion. And she died from sepsis, and I continue to donate every year to Planned Parenthood in her memory. She died in 1913 and was the first person buried in the Arbeter Ring cemetery. She was buried under a tree because they were very poor, and she only had one sister 2:00here. And they wanted to try to remember where she was, just in case at some point, somebody could put up a stone for her. The tree is still there. The roots are there. The tree is long gone, since 1913. Her sister died a couple of years later, and the sister's children put up the stone for these two women. We never knew my grandmother's maiden name. We didn't know a whole lot about her. When she died, she took her sister's husband's name, her sister's married name, and the only name that we have is Dennison, and I've not been able to find out too much. We visited -- my mother took me once to visit a girlfriend of my grandmother's who was a very, very old lady. And she told us a story about what my grandmother looked like and how she sounded and how she was very passionate 3:00about what she did and her politics, and how sad it was when she died. And this woman says, "And I took care of the baby so that everybody else could go to the cemetery." At that point, my mother couldn't handle it anymore and we left. One of the families, and this is the connection with Yiddish and the community -- one of the families that knew my grandmother, both through politics and through their Yiddish literary connection, decided that they would take my mother, and they raised her, and she became their child.

CW:Can I just interrupt?

AEJ:Sure.

CW:Do you know anything about -- any stories about the family before they came to the US?

AEJ:I know about my father's family before they came. And the reason that we 4:00know -- they never talked too much about it. But I have a Shana Teyva [New Years card] from 1914 from the eldest brother. And I have a picture with some writing on the back, which is in Russian, from one of the nieces that -- and they last heard from her in the '30s, and I'm sure that she was killed in World War II. She had moved to Leningrad, and was really a -- many, many people died from starvation and all. They lived in a town that had about six thousand people in it, and it was called Cherikov, and it's in -- it was north of Gomel, which is still a thriving city in Belarus. They did have pogroms there, and they decided 5:00that some of the family would move to the United States. They had had a store there. Their one son, the one that had come a little earlier, he had had rabbinical training, but he was also a professional musician. He was a violinist and played with a symphony in the United States, which I think is quite interesting. They had one other son in their family. He was a medical student, and also a musician. And he was in Odessa and decided, when his family came, that he would meet them in the United States, also. My grandmother and my grandfather married in Liverpool. My grandmother came and she brought her mother, who they never mention too much about. The mother had been widowed. This 6:00is my great-grandmother. Her husband, I know he was a scholar and he did other things, but he was also a musician, and the family story was that he had had a gig or whatever you call it in Yiddish or Russian, and he was overheated, he stepped outside in the cold air. He got sick, he got pneumonia, and died, okay? Well, these Yiddish stories frequently are kind of simplistic. Because he was no longer there, they had one sister they left in Russia, because she had some -- she was married and her children were married to Russians. And she decided to stay. My grandmother and the mother, Mariashe, who must have been in her sixties by then, maybe a little older than that, and my grandfather, decided -- they 7:00came to America, and --

CW:So, how long were they in England, then?

AEJ:Not very long. That was a stop. Yeah, Liverpool was a stop on the way. Once they made up their mind to leave, they just kept on going. They came in through the Port of Baltimore, and we have no Ellis Island connection whatsoever, which is kind of interesting as well. They stayed in Baltimore almost two years and then moved to Washington. My grandfather was a cabinet maker in Russia, and he had been trained, and he brought his tools with him. And there's another story that will connect to that later on in his life. He brought his tools with him. He could not get a job as a cabinet maker, but he did work as a carpenter in 8:00D.C. Their children were born -- their first son was born in Baltimore, and the rest of the children were all born in Washington, D.C., which was a very small Jewish community. I tried to find some statistics, and it said that around, I guess, in the '30s, there were twenty-seven thousand families. However, half of them were in this ten-mile part of the district, and the rest of them were in suburban Virginia and Maryland. So, it was a small community. Washington was very Southern.

CW:Are there any other favorite stories from the immigration period or the European epoch of your family history?

AEJ:They never liked to talk about it, and they never spoke Yiddish to the 9:00children, either. They were very patriotic. They absolutely wanted to be American. They wanted to be modern. And so, they left that part of their life in Europe, and that was it.

CW:So, you grew up in the '40s, basically, in D.C.

AEJ:Right.

CW:So, can you just, first of all, describe -- did you live in the same home during the time when you were growing up? I mean, were you living in one home or did you move around?

AEJ:We didn't move very much. The Jewish people that first came, the Russian Jews that first came around the turn of the last century, a whole group of them lived in -- a small group, I guess, lived in Southwest Washington. And they 10:00lived close by and they knew each other. Al Jolson's family was one of them and was their neighbor. As they moved, they moved -- and the street doesn't exist anymore. As they moved, they moved up the Georgia Avenue corridor, which is like the -- it sort of bisects Northwest Washington, and they moved farther and farther north, and the housing was nicer. My grandfather worked on the house that he lived in, but it was restricted and he couldn't buy it. Later, when they took the restrictive covenant off, that's when he bought it, and he lived in it for the rest of his life.

CW:So, can you describe the home that you grew up in, then?

AEJ:D.C. was interesting, because they were fairly small, semi-detached houses. The community was considered one of the Jewish neighborhoods, but I never had 11:00more than three other Jewish kids in any of my classes ever, which is sort of telling. We were very connected, though, and part of the reason I think we were connected was because there was an undercurrent of anti-Semitism in the city. The city itself was segregated, and so you connected with people that you felt safe and comfortable with.

CW:And so, what did the house, what did it look like physically? Can you take yourself back there and describe it for me?

AEJ:Oh, sure. It was a semi-detached house and it was a two-story house with a basement. We happened to live on a corner, and in those days, people had to go to the -- they went to the store almost every day. So, people always had to pass 12:00our house to go up to the main shopping area. And there was a lot of connection among people that -- the women who would see each other in the grocery store all the time. It was not a religious community. Yeah, it just wasn't.

CW:And so, what languages did you hear in the home, in the community?

AEJ:Primarily English. They told secrets in Yiddish. Most of the families, because it was South, had what we always called "the maid." She was like a housekeeper, African-American, would come to the house five days a week or whatever and help with the cleaning and the cooking. But she also basically 13:00raised the children, and she was definitely the boss in my life. She and I both probably had the same knowledge of Yiddish. And there was a whole culture of people who either worked in people's houses or worked in their businesses or whatever, who were reasonably well-versed in Yiddish, because it was survival. And we never let anybody know how much we knew, because if you did, you'd blow your cover and then it would be a problem. So, she did and she could cook Yiddish food and whatever, and it gave my mother a lot of freedom, because she could go out. My mother was always very involved in the community.

CW:And what was the helper's name?

AEJ:Her real name was Gwendolyn, but her name was -- her family called her 14:00Billie. And she was with us in various capacities for forty-seven years.

CW:So, can you describe -- I know you mentioned there was a political atmosphere in the home with your -- maybe the influence of your anarchist grandmother, but can you describe, was there a political sense when you were growing up in your family?

CW:Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's funny, because we didn't -- my father was the one who had the family that we interacted with and remembered. My mother had been fostered by this other family. And there definitely was a sense of politics. When my mother was a baby and went to live with this family, the oldest daughter in the family, who was a teenager, more or less adopted my mother. And she spent 15:00a lot of time raising my mother. She was very political and very involved in the community. And actually, the connection with my grandmother and this orphan came through their politics. My aunt came to live with us around 1940. And she had never married. She was an extremely bright woman. Very well-read. She was an autodidact. She taught herself. And she more or less was a communist, but she was more communist socially, I think, than ideologically. And she would take me with her to different things. So, she was a very fine musician. She would take 16:00me to concerts with her, or she would take me to meetings sometimes. I was like her crony. And she got very involved with the politics of the Spanish-American War and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. I went to kindergarten with a button from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and I still remember what it looked like. And I was four and a half when I went to kindergarten.

CW:What did it look like?

AEJ:It was a Liberty Bell, a cracked Liberty Bell, which is interesting, I mean, that I would remember that. We used to have milk parties to collect canned milk and raise money to send to these children in Spain. And I had a real feeling for it, and here I was -- little kid. When the Spanish government fell and Franco 17:00took power, the Spanish ambassador had a reception for the people who had helped him. He was a humanist and a socialist. And he eventually went up to New York and he taught law there for ten or twelve years till he died. My aunt took me to the reception in the Spanish embassy. And I just remember it, and I remember that this man was very sad, and that he left, and that it was really a very sad time. She probably, during McCarthy times, she probably -- she worked for the government. She would have lost her job, and people that she knew did. But that's where social conscience and a sense of the importance of politics really 18:00came to me.

CW:So, you mentioned you were really a secular community. What felt Jewish about your community and family growing up?

AEJ:Food. Music. My father's family, the aunts and uncles and all were -- they were musicians. They always belonged to Jewish organizations, and that was always important. My zeyde [grandfather] went to -- my grandmother, his wife, died fairly early. He always went to Yiddish lectures. They were very involved in the Zi-- they converted to Zionism, we'll put it that way. They were very 19:00involved in Zionist organizations, and there were a whole group of people that, having grown up there, that we knew. They knew my mother as a child, and then they knew me. They were a group of businessmen that my father was part of that were Jewish, and they were all in one neighborhood in the center of the city. They used to meet for lunch. It's funny, the owner of the deli where they would meet, name was Percy Solomon. He was a British Jew, which -- but that was sort of part of it.

CW:So, what foods do you remember growing up?

AEJ:This is kind of interesting, too, because I thought that the food was Jewish, but it was more Russian. So, we had borscht, summer borscht and winter 20:00borscht. We had in the summer it was beets, and then the shtshav [cold sorrel soup], which was made with sorrel, which -- I never liked it. We had it in the wintertime. The kind of bread that we had was like a heavy black bread. We were not kosher, and my mother's family was never kosher, 'cause they thought that was bourgeois, as it were. In fact, they told people they weren't married 'cause they thought that was bourgeois, to be married. I mean, they were interesting people, and it -- part of the fact that they were interesting was the fact that they had more or less adopted my mother and raised her -- showed that they had a social conscience and a good heart. And I think that's very Jewish. There were lots of Yiddish lectures. My parents went to shule [secular Yiddish school], and 21:00my --

CW:Can you explain what shule is for someone who might not --

AEJ:Shule was the Yiddish school. If you were religious, then you went to kheyder [traditional religious school, which was part of synagogue. If you weren't, you went to shule and you learned Yiddish and you learned about Yiddish culture and music. My mother was very proficient and was very literate in Yiddish. And she could read and write, and spoke it beautifully, and even did some Yiddish calligraphy, her whole life. My father, who was about a year -- a couple years ahead of her in Yiddish school -- was sort of like Fonzie. (laughs) And he spoke an awful Yiddish. It was like ebonics. And that was never his thing. I also have a picture of one of the conventions of the Young Poale Zion, and -- which is -- was the -- and they were partially Yiddish speaking, as well, 22:00the young Zionists. And I kept looking -- my mother was grounded that day, which she always reminded me. It was in 192-- September 1929, and she never got over it. My father, I kept looking for him and looking for him. He was always standing in the back, not part of it. And these young people were all their friends and their schoolmates and all that. That was kind of interesting, but --

CW:And you mentioned there's a story about how your parents met? When they met?

AEJ:People didn't get babysitters, and they would have lectures. And the lectures, people would come for these lectures in Yiddish, and they had visiting lecturers that came. And so, they would put their kids someplace together, and 23:00that's how my mother and father met. My father used to imitate my mother, 'cause she said poetry in class, "der zeyders tabik pushke [the grandfather's tobacco tin]," and he would always imitate her, with what she did. But that's basically how they met.

CW:(laughs) And do you remember, did anyone that you were around ever go to shul, go to synagogue?

AEJ:I had friends from school that did, sometimes, and sometimes we would all go. We were observant of Jewish holidays. My zeyde, who had grown up observant in Russia --

CW:Which one was it?

AEJ:This is my father's father. He's the ultimate zeyde in our family. When he 24:00came to America and he was comfortable enough that he could do something on Shabbos, he figured out that going to shul was okay, but the cowboy movies were much better. (laughs) And he would get dressed up in his three-piece suit, and I remember he always had a jar of lemon drops and stuff like that, and he would go to the cowboy movies instead of going to shul. And it was interesting, because these cowboy movies were produced by Russian Jews, and they had sort of an undercurrent of pogrom to them. But the good guys always won, and he liked that. He felt it was very American, and it was modern, and he liked doing that instead of going to shul.

CW:So, he would go to the theater? The cinema, actually?

AEJ:He would go to the movies that had -- and they only had cowboy -- well, Saturday was a big movie day. But the cowboy pictures were only in certain theaters. And he was always well-dressed, wearing his three-piece suit and everything. And that would be his Shabbos.

CW:And do you remember seeing Yiddish newspapers around the home?

AEJ:Oh, yes. And my mother would read things from the "Forward." One of the things about -- and I believe this was the "Forward" -- is that in order to sell papers, sometimes you have to have a kind of an interesting, intriguing headline. And they always had something about so-and-so is Jewish. Well, Frank Sinatra's not Jewish, and some of these people -- I mean, it was kind of 26:00outlandish to say it, but it certainly would sell papers. My mother would read the Bintel Brief, and she would read the -- and translate it for us. And she would read the "In Search Of" ads, and we --

CW:Can you explain what the Bintel Brief is first?

AEJ:The Bintel Brief were letters that people wrote about tragic occurrences in their family or issues they had that were really challenging about American life. They also had a section at one time about missing husbands. And that's why -- and this grandma, my mother's mother, was like she stepped out of the Bintel Brief. It was high drama, unfortunately. The "In Search Of" ads, I thought that was amazing, that -- why would anybody put that in the newspaper? Except they're 27:00in the "Washington Post" now, as well. And it would be ads like, So-and-so is a widower and he's with the two children and he makes a living and he would like to meet a nice European woman who can cook and clean and stuff like that. And we always thought that they were kind of funny and interesting, yeah.

CW:So, your mother would translate the Bintel Brief for you?

AEJ:Yes.

CW:Oh.

AEJ:Yes. But they did not give us a whole lot of Yiddish education, because that would have messed things up. They couldn't tell secrets over our head.

CW:(laughs) And were there any other newspapers other than the "Forward"?

AEJ:I think that my grandfather sometimes would get the "Tog," which -- I think that was more radical. My aunt would get "PM," but that wasn't really Yiddish. 28:00That was just communist, I guess, yeah.

CW:And did you, as a kid, did you have a favorite holiday?

AEJ:I still like the pagan holidays the best, yeah.

CW:For example? (laughs)

AEJ:I never -- well, like Shavuos and, well, let me see. Yeah, Shavuos, I like, a lot, 'cause that's when we got the law. I never liked Passover, and I'm probably one of the few Jewish people you'll ever interview that didn't like Passover. And being this youngest grandchild -- and that there was nobody else around, I would have to say the Four Questions. So, I'd have to get all dressed up, practice them, and always did it in English. And this is before I could 29:00read. Once I could read, it wasn't that big of a hassle. Would sit at the end of this big, long table with my youngest uncle. And if there was a cousin that was younger, my grandfather would read rapid fire. It seemed like hours until you could eat.

CW:Did he do it in Hebrew?

AEJ:Yeah, he was very well-versed in Hebrew. And it seemed like you had to wait a really long time, and then you had to -- and there was nobody else to do this, and whatever. But there was one consolation for me, and that is they used to use these old hens that they made the soup from. And the hens had these little -- they used to call them eyelakh, these little eggs that were just -- the yellow 30:00of the egg that I think was like the inside of the hen. And my father's stepmother and my grandfather married later on. She would make it, and she would always save them for me. So, I mean, that was part of it. But that was it. But otherwise, Passover was always a very challenging holiday for me.

CW:And now, what did you like about Shavuos?

AEJ:It's spring. I like the -- they read the Book of Ruth, the giving of the law. The food is nice, and it's loose and fun.

CW:Yeah. And so, I want to go back to the food for a second that you've mentioned. Can you just describe the scene in your kitchen on a -- who was 31:00preparing the meals, let's say, when they were making the borscht? Were you ever around, seeing people cook?

AEJ:Oh, sure, sure. And, I mean, my mother was a good cook. And she would make a lot of -- actually, my aunt was a very good cook, too. And Billie, our housekeeper, was a good cook and cooked Jewish food. So, I mean, that was a given. My father's mother died and left -- her youngest children were like twelve, fourteen, whatever. There were, from this family -- and their name was Schklaroff, that was my grandmother's maiden name. There were sixteen first cousins, from the children. There were fifteen boys and one girl, my aunt, Ada. 32:00There really weren't people around to help her to learn how to cook and to do some of the other things for a while. It was tough -- one of the tantes [aunts] really stepped in. Her mother's sisters stepped in and tried to help. I have this Crisco -- I brought a Crisco cookbook that was partly in Yiddish and partly in English, so somebody who couldn't really read English very well could teach a young woman how to cook. And the cookbook, it's spotted, so it was used quite a bit. I looked over the recipes a while ago, and they're Yiddish recipes. It's not really American food. This one aunt who was the only niece from the whole 33:00family, several years ago, she was dying. I went up to say goodbye to her, and I went with her son to get something to cook for them for dinner. And I made something that she said she hadn't had since her mother was alive, and they call 'em kakletn. And people have different names, and I don't know if that's Yiddish or Russian. But they're small little hamburgers fried in onions. And somehow, I remembered it, and I just thought, This is what I need to make. I don't know where that inspiration came from. And it was very nostalgic. So, the food means a lot.

CW:And do you know who originally owned the cookbook?

AEJ:Who owned --

CW:Who bought it, or who had it originally?

AEJ:I think they didn't buy it. Crisco sent it to all the Jewish women.

CW:Nice. So, can you describe a little bit more about the neighborhood that you grew up in?

AEJ:Our neighborhood was not -- it was considered a Jewish neighborhood, but that meant that there were only maybe three or four Jewish families that lived in it. Like I said, Washington was very Southern, and part of it was that you -- and segregated. And part of it, you knew that when you went to school, you kind of -- you stayed low key, you behaved, and you did your schoolwork. And you did not call attention to yourself, because, I mean, you always sort of felt you 35:00were slightly on sufferance, being Jewish. And I don't think that people understand that as much now. And we had this close connection with the African-American community because it was similar for them. And it was similar for them in a lot of different ways. But they also were like our support system, too, in some ways. And that's why there were many of them that knew Yiddish.

CW:And you mentioned when you went on in your schooling that there were also Jewish sororities and fraternities? Can you explain about that?

AEJ:Yeah. It was very important that we socialize only with other Jewish kids, 36:00because it was a concern -- intermarriage would have been a concern, and that was very serious years and years ago. So, we were organized into clubs and sororities and fraternities, and most of the Jewish kids belonged to one or the other. What was interesting was that -- and you look at the Jewish women's organizations now, how these women know how to raise money and organize and do things, and we did, too. It was a wonderful learning experience. I remember that I was chairman of a luncheon. I was seventeen years old, and I went to the Washington Hotel and signed a contract for a luncheon for fifty women. I mean, where would anybody, first, sign a contract with somebody who was seventeen or a seventeen-year-old kid even know what to do or how to do it. But that was what our life was like.

CW:Looking back, I want to sort of move forward in your life, but before that -- 37:00I mean, you grew up also in the '40s, the -- was the war.

AEJ:Yeah, and then into the '50s.

CW:Yeah.

AEJ:Yeah, well --

CW:So, do you remember news of what was happening in Europe? You mentioned the Spanish Civil War, but what about the next period? Were you aware of what was going on?

AEJ:My father was drafted, and he was probably the oldest person drafted in the Navy. And at that point, there were two of us, my sister and myself. And he actually was doing war work, but he got drafted into the Navy, which ended up being a wonder-- he was overseas and it ended up being a wonderful adventure for him. His brothers were in the service, too, and one of his brothers was killed in World War II. And that was really a sadness that never went away. We were 38:00home pretty much alone. We were in our house. It was my mother and my sister was three years old or four. And my aunt lived with us at the time, but she was traveling for the government quite a bit. It was a hard time, but people were connected, 'cause they had a common purpose. I am really murky about when we figured out what was happening to the Jews in Europe. And I don't think the community had a very good response to the people that came afterwards. I think they made it very hard for people who had come from DP camps and all, and they 39:00didn't rally. But what they did do -- it made it very important for the establishment of the State of Israel. And, I mean, my family, they were ardent Zionists. Well, my mother more. My father was kind of low-key with all this. And they worked very hard for the establishment of the State of Israel.

CW:Do you remember refugees coming into your community, or did you have contact with any refugees after the war?

AEJ:This is kind of interesting, because we had a kid who came to school, and we were probably in the eighth grade. And he obviously -- and how he got there, I don't know. He was from Poland, and we thought he had been in one of the ghettos, and how he was smuggled out or got to us, we don't know. But he spoke 40:00Yiddish and he taught all the boys dirty words in Yiddish, which we never would have had the opportunity to learn. Another thing, when my father was in the service and we knew he was going away, we took the train up to Boston to say goodbye to him. My father's aunt, who was like the dean of the family, tante Feyga, who never spoke any English and had her suitcase packed to go back to Russia for most of the time that she lived in this country. We stayed with her, and she wanted to do something that was very elegant for us in the dinner that she prepared. She made gefilte fish. She took the skin of the fish and made a cup out of it, set the gefilte fish in it, and put the fish eye on the top for 41:00the decoration. (laughs) I looked at that, it was like -- Ah! And it was -- but it's funny, because, I mean, I have a great memory of that Jewish preparation for gefilte fish. But that's going backwards.

CW:Well, I mean, looking back at that community that you grew up in, is there anything else you want to say to explain sort of what it was like to grow up then and there?

AEJ:We knew it was a dictatorship that we didn't -- we could not vote, that people didn't have a whole lot of -- there was not much civil rights to speak of, that you really had to kind of stay under the radar, and that whenever you 42:00connected with another Jewish person, it was -- this was something that was special, and that's where you felt safe and comfortable. And yet, our news has always been national news and our newspaper has always been national, as opposed to local.

CW:What do you think you learned from your parents and grandparents?

AEJ:I learned a lot: a real commitment to making the world a better place, and a real commitment to not accepting things as they are, that -- and I'm a social 43:00worker. (laughs) I mean, and that you had to have a real social conscience and that you had to be -- that you were responsible for your fellow man, and that you had to work very hard to be educated and to be a good citizen.

CW:Oh, there's one other thing I want to ask -- was you mentioned that this transformation into Americans. Can you talk about that, how you saw that in your family, from -- how did Yiddishkayt come into your family transforming into Americans?

AEJ:Well, it was, ironically, the language of modernity, and even though many people were not necessarily well-educated or well-versed in English, they could 44:00learn through lectures about it in Yiddish. And that was something -- I mean, my grandfather, my zeyde really treasured that. On my mother's side, the father and the family that had adopted her, he lectured -- I didn't know, he died before I was born, but he was a very well-known lecturer in the community, as well. And he had a wonderful collection of Yiddish books, which we donated to the YIVO because there was no Yiddish Book Center when they donated it. And they had a great respect for international literature and for politics. My zeyde listened to Gabriel Heatter every Sunday night. And you could have had an earthquake or a bomb drop or whatever. He never moved from that chair, that radio on Sunday 45:00night. And God forbid, if you went to visit, which we had to do every Sunday whether you wanted to or not. When Gabriel Heatter came on, nobody was allowed to say a word -- and was very interested in international politics, even though he never voted and never had the opportunity to vote in his life.

CW:Wow. And what was the name of the sort of adopted grandfather who was the lecturer? What was his name?

AEJ:His name was Leon Katzman, and he had friends and connections all over. His family had come from Irkutsk, which was in Siberia. And they were related to a 46:00family that worked for Revillon furriers. But he was allergic to the dyes or whatever, and he had to take on another kind of work. He could never be a furrier. And he used to do home decoration and painting with gold-leaf and things like that. He collected fine antiques, and was not a wealthy man. And he collected leather-bound first editions of literature. They also were friends of "Red Emma" Goldman. And Emma came to visit, and my mother remembers sitting under this gigantic dining room table and listening to them talk. And my mother never mentioned it until she was at least sixty-five. And I said, "Why didn't you tell us? This is so neat!" And she was always afraid that we'd get arrested, even then. But, I mean, that was him. But the fact that he took my mother and 47:00raised her, I think, was something very special.

CW:Yeah. Now, you live in Maryland, but near D.C. And you had a career as a social worker. And how, when you had your own adult life, how did your Jewish identity change, develop into your adult life?

AEJ:Well, once I moved to Maryland, I could vote, number one. And basically, the political shakers and movers in the Democratic Party, I have to say -- because I 48:00didn't know that Jewish people were allowed to be Republicans until -- (laughs) I was pretty old by then. The shakers and movers were mostly Jewish. And if you haven't had it, you can really develop a passion for it and a passion for change and for growth. And our communities were kind of new communities, so you had that option. We also moved to Potomac, Maryland, which, at that time, didn't have too many Jews, either. And there were fifty families that got together to build the synagogue. Now, they have Hasidim in the neighborhood and everything, which is really, still, is always a surprise to me, to see somebody in the neighborhood. But they have more Orthodox Jews, and the Jewish community has 49:00expanded a great deal. I've been involved in -- I have a child who is disabled from a childhood illness and is developmentally disabled. And I worked through the Jewish community, and we developed a whole -- agencies and a whole series of programs that have given support and a good life for several hundred disabled people in the community. And that was also -- you could do it through the Jewish community, 'cause it was easier to raise money. People had a strong social conscience. We kind of knew each other, 'cause we'd grown up together. And it really made a difference.

CW:And so, here we are, right now, at the Yiddish Book Center.

AEJ:Right.

CW:And can you explain what you're doing here this week?

AEJ:I am going to Yiddish school, something that I have wanted to do forever. Last year, I was number one on the wait list, so this year, I was number one on the regular list. I have some letters and things that I really wanted to be able to read. As the senior person in my family and the memory keeper, I feel a very strong connection with these people whose shoulders I stand on.

CW:Can you explain the -- you mentioned about the gutsy Jewish women in your family. Can you talk about that?

AEJ:I think Jewish women are the gutsiest women in the world. When they take on 51:00a project, nothing stops them, okay? And I think that they raise their daughters that way, and they know how to be diplomatic if they have to be, and they don't give up. The first gutsy woman was my mother's mother, who was this young woman, and who -- we still don't know who she really was -- who evidently made a profound impression on the people around her for her commitment to, well, to anarchy, which I think she got. Be careful what you wish for, because I think we're getting close to it now, politically. I have, from my father's family, it 52:00-- I mean, his grandmother: to be in your sixties and to pick up and come from so far away, to a brand-new country where you don't speak the language and you don't have much money or whatever, and just to make that trip because your daughter's coming, your children are coming? I think that's gutsy. The women who fought for the development of the State of Israel. My aunt, who fought for human rights at a time when it wasn't very popular, and probably -- she passed away before McCarthy got really powerful, but would have lost her job from it. And she taught -- made a -- stand up for human rights. So, she was one of them. I have a picture of a Yiddish reading group, and there's one woman and some 53:00pictures of the women from the -- well, they used to call it Pioneer Women, and now it's Na'amat. And there was one woman in the group who weighed maybe eighty pounds tops in her life, little teeny lady, who decided she was going to raise money for Israel, and she didn't care. And she stopped traffic at 13th and F, which was a major thoroughfare in D.C., and sold raffles to the policemen directing traffic. She also would go into the office buildings, because that's where there were a lot of people. And she got picked up for soliciting, which is a double entendre, also. And they had to bail her out of jail a few times. And that's pretty gutsy. The women that were part of it, this development of services for our handicapped children. I mean, we bucked a terrible system where 54:00there was a lot of discrimination from all ends to try to make a life for our children. I could go on and on with it.

CW:And would you say there's a time in your life when you felt particularly Jewish? Is there anything that -- a moment that sticks out in your mind?

AEJ:Well, Jewish is kind of -- it's in my bones. I've been board member of several of the major boards that have made the world change. When I see change and I know that we've done it -- and this really comes from our feeling, and 55:00it's basic to Judaism, that's when I feel the most Jewish. The other time when you feel the most Jewish is when you have a lot of discrimination. And, as a child, we certainly struggled with that. And you just did. One of the couples that's in the -- from this Yiddish reading group had a corner store, during the war. And my mother fell and got a black eye, which was kind of unusual. And she went up to this store, and this man who had known her since she was a little kid, he says to her, "Oh, so what happened to you?" So, she tells him in Yiddish that -- she says, "Well, my husband was away and I decided to take a lover and my husband came back and he found me, and he punched me in the eye." And he 56:00looked at her, he says, "Hm, a Yiddisher?" Like that. (laughs) And it was like, there was always this idea, well, is it a Jewish person that's involved with this?

CW:Now, are there aspects of Jewish culture that you -- art, literature, movies -- that you feel that you have a particular love for?

AEJ:I love Yiddish movies. I love 'em. They're so melodramatic, and they're so interesting. And they're larger than life. And if it's larger than life, then you don't have to worry about it, because it's above all this. The one movie that makes me feel sad for a very unusual reason was "Yidl mitn fidl" with Molly Picon. And I had read about her and that she had gone to Poland to learn 57:00Yiddish. She was not well-versed in Yiddish, and her husband, who was her manager, said, "Let's go to Poland." The people that were in that movie, the extras, the shtetl [small town in Eastern Europe with a Jewish community] where they filmed and all that were Polish Jews, and it was in, I guess, the middle '30s, the late '30s. And I realized when I looked at it, that in a few years, these people would all be gone forever. And that's overwhelming.

CW:Can you tell me a little bit about your work with the Holocaust Museum in D.C.?

AEJ:I started out in a program at the Children's Museum, which closed. And it was called "Remember the Children." And it was a wonderful exhibit, because 58:00children could come and really experience the process of the Holocaust, moving from your nice place to the other place, and could hear stories from survivors, and then could make -- to paint tiles, some of which are on the wall in the bottom floor in the Holocaust Museum, and listen to the survivors' stories. And it's always been very meaningful to me, 'cause the youngest of the survivors are my age. And even though my father was in the war and my uncle was killed and all that, we were still -- it was sad, but we were relatively safe. And most of these people, these children, were gone. When the Holocaust Museum opened, I transferred into that museum, and I was there -- well, I'd worked three years at 59:00the Children's Museum, and there was another nine at the Holocaust Museum in D.C., and would come in -- I was still working then, and would come in every other Saturday and take people through. I got to know a lot of the survivors well, and a lot of the stories, and got to see what -- and the people that came, and how sometimes it really changed them. I mean, 'cause a lot of people that come through are not Jewish and don't really know a lot about the Holocaust. And hopefully, it will continue to kind of prick the conscience of people so that this can't -- hopefully, it will not happen again, certainly not to the extent that it has. We had one kid that came in, his mother came to the elevator and 60:00she burst -- I said, "We don't have any more admission tickets." She burst out in tears. She says, "My son is a skinhead, and he's fifteen or sixteen and I really would like to take him through so that he could see that there's truth to this." So, we made a special arrangement with one of the survivors, who had been twelve or thirteen during the war, who took him through, and we explained things to him. I don't know how much it helped, but I think that there are many people that did -- and it's a very meaningful place.

CW:For you, personally, how do you connect or use your Yiddish nowadays?

AEJ:Well, I found out that a couple words that I knew were not nice words this 61:00week, which -- I'm glad I asked somebody quietly, 'cause I didn't real-- I thought they were kind of just description, but they weren't nice, they weren't politically correct. I would really like to be able to at least read it and maybe write it on a decent level, which is hard. It's hard to learn a language when you're eighty years old. But why not? Just being surrounded by the books gives me such a feeling of warmth and comfort. I mean, there's something that happens here that -- and we've had a wonderful teacher who has given us a lot of words that are about Yiddish culture and history and all that. And I don't have the opportunity for the exposure to that at home.

CW:For you, how does Yiddish fit into your broader Jewish identity, personally?

AEJ:I always feel that it's kind of the glue. The German Jews that I know are not particularly into Yiddish, but the people that come from the Russian and Polish and other countries, they really are. And I feel like this is our connection. And actually, it was the connection of the immigrants who came to Washington, because some of them were Polish and some of them were Russian, and maybe a few Hungarians or whatever. And they could study together, they could organize, they could help each other. My grandfather was working on a house one 63:00time and he found a man that had been sleeping in the house who came to Washington. He was a Jewish man, he had no money, and he came to try to see if he could get a job and bring his family. And they could converse, because they both spoke Yiddish. And my grandfather took him home and he lived in his house for a while until he got on his feet and then moved out. Well, I mean, this is a real connection.

CW:Looking back over the last eighty years, how have you seen Yiddish change? The role of Yiddish?

AEJ:Well, it's interesting that they teach it in universities. That's a total amazement to me. I was raised with this understanding of this high Yiddish culture, so that's not a surprise to me, I mean, that there was wonderful literature and poetry and music and all that. And it's nice to see that there 64:00are people that really appreciate it and that they're making it grow.

CW:What do you see as the future for Yiddish?

AEJ:This week, I'm very happy to see that I think that there's a wonderful future for -- at one time, it seemed like it was a -- it was a dying language. And it was very sad because I don't know how many of the six million were Yiddish speakers. We were trying to figure that out today. And for every person that learns it and helps it to grow, it balances out that horrendous loss.

CW:Well, is there anything else that you want people to know about your 65:00connection to Yiddish and Jewish culture or things that you've lived through?

AEJ:I think that, on some level, even if it's not overt, that the Yiddish culture and the values that are trans-- they're kind of transported through the Yiddish culture and the Yiddish language, are what's -- and made me who I am and have sustained me and supported me in good times, bad times, whatever. So, I mean, there's a soul to it, and it's nourishing.

CW:And I'd just like to close by asking if you have any advice for coming generations?

AEJ:Nobody wants to hear it, okay? Nobody -- (laughter) that's what I've learned, that people are not really that anxious to hear it. But I think people have to -- and I think that this is a real loss in our community -- is they don't have the same respect for institutional memory that they used to. And I think that you lose a lot by thinking that the present and the future are all that count, because understanding where you've come from and how you've gotten there, whose shoulders you stand on, I think, makes a big difference.

CW:And then, just lastly, do you have a favorite Yiddish word, phrase, or song?

AEJ:Oh, goodness. I have a lot of them.

CW:Anything that comes to mind?

AEJ:Oh, it's funny because one of the things that they mention in class, kenst helfn vi toytn bankes [it's as helpful as putting cupping glasses on a dead person]. People have no clue as to what toytn bankes are. I happen to know what they are and I happen to have a friend whose mother used to be the bankes lady from Europe. And they are -- I'm sure you know, but anybody who's watching -- is they were glass cups. And you felt that if somebody was sick that the best way to treat them was to heat these cups and put them on your back or your chest if you had pneumonia, or something like that. And it was a really big deal. I mean, I think it's pretty obsolete, although -- may come back again. One never knows. But I think these obsolete ones are kind of interesting, and that people keep 68:00repeating it, even though they don't really know what it means.

CW:That's great. Well, a sheynem dank. (laughs) Thank you very much for taking time --

AEJ:You're very welcome.

CW:-- and thanks also from the Yiddish Book Center.

AEJ:On behalf of all my relatives who are gone now, who had a great respect for Yiddishkayt, I thank you for the opportunity to be able to do this.

[END OF INTERVIEW]