EE:  This is Elaine Eff, for the Jewish Women’s Archive, Weaving Women’s Words.  It’s August 30, 2001, and I am interviewing Shoshana Cardin at her home in Baltimore County.  Shoshana, first, let me say it’s a treat to be able to share these moments – or however long we might go – with you.

SC:  Thank you.  Thank you.

EE:  I’d love to start in a place that I think few people begin – maybe where they begin, but they soon jump away from.  I’d love you to tell me your story, just coming to Baltimore, if you can get us from birth to Baltimore.  We’ll start there.

SC:  All right.  I’ll be delighted.  First, I want to thank you for coming.  I think this is a very, very exciting project, and women will make history because we’ll make certain that somebody will read it or see it or hear it at an appropriate time.  I was born in a Hadassah clinic, which had opened fairly recently at the time, in between Tel Aviv and Ramat Gan.  My parents were among the pioneers of an aliyah, although they did not come together and did not know each other.  My mother’s family came from Bessarabia in 1913, not knowing that the war was going to break out.  My father came in 1920 from Riga, Latvia.  He was a chalutz, or at least he tried to be for a while, and then found out that the physical work was not what he was cut out to do.

EE:  Tell me what a chalutz is.

SC:  A pioneer.  He was a land-based pioneer.  They were either cleaning the swamps or reclaiming the desert, digging, getting rid of stones, getting rid of centuries, if you will, of desolation and dust and dirt, and trying to bring the land back so it could support agriculture.  If they were working in the swamps to drain the swamps because they were dangerous, they were working in the swamps.  Malaria was, unfortunately, a very common disease at that time.  This was in the ‘20s.  My father came alone.  My mother’s family came as a family, probably because there had already been several pogroms in the communities in which they lived in Bessarabia.  My mother was then one of four daughters and two sons.  They all came here with my grandfather and grandmother, looking to live in the Holy Land, but their start in the Holy Land was not fortuitous.  They did not have a place to live, although there was the concept that they had bought from an itinerant rabbi a piece of land.  They had no basis for going to people because they didn’t know anyone in Israel, then Palestine, and so it was a life of hardship.  None of the daughters finished school.  They all left about the age of twelve when they could begin working.  In those years also, unfortunately, there was a famine; there was a drought; and there was an invasion of locusts.  So the climate and the food and the general sense of living was far from what was anticipated in Eretz Yisrael, as it was called then.  Because it was a settling process in the truest sense of the word, the Hebrew word for that area – because Jews did not use “Palestine” other than if they had to in a formal sense.  The Hebrew word was Yishuv, Y-I-S-H-U-V, [meaning] the settlement.  But it meant “settling of Eretz Yisrael.”  My mother went to join to her sisters who moved from a remote village in Tel Aviv to earn some money because they were basically supporting their parents.  It was in Tel Aviv that she met my father, although I never got the story of exactly how they met.  She was living with her two sisters in an abandoned British barrack in the center of Tel Aviv, what is now the center of Tel Aviv, not far from Dizengoff Circle.  It was literally a barrack with no paved roads.  There were very few paved roads anyway.  And what they did, as I understand it, is they simply divided their living area in this opened barrack with sheets and blankets hung on strings from wall to wall.  And that was the way they lived.

EE:  So, in other words, they lived with many other people?

SC:  The three sisters.  Just the three sisters in this one barrack.

EE:  How did they get to this –?

SC:  It was available.  In those days, you had to go – particularly if you had no real income, you had to go what was available.  Here was an abandoned barrack that no one really wanted.  They felt that the two older sisters and their husbands – they were married – could live there until they earned enough to upgrade themselves.  Or to do as they did, which was come to the United States for the time being, and then make some money and then go back to Israel.  None of them were professionals, so they couldn’t go into professional fields.  None of them had planned – they came out of Zionist idealism.  None of them had planned what they would do if it didn’t work out the way they wanted.  

EE:  Can you describe, or do you remember, any stories that they told you about what the Holy Land was like at the time?

SC:  Yes, I do remember the descriptions.  It was very difficult to live in.  There were a number of small Arab – not even communities – settlements in different places where Jews had bought land through the Jewish National Fund and were planning to bring that land to life.  The major industry then was orange trees, planted in the center of the country where the soil is easier to deal with.  Life was difficult, as my mother explained to me, between the drought and the dust and malaria, which a number of people had, and dysentery because water wasn’t purified in many of the areas.  This really was a third world country situation in the truest sense.  They found it very, very difficult.  It was not unusual for chalutzim, or pioneers, to come to Israel out of Zionist ideology, spend some years there, and then decide it really was too difficult.  A number did leave, hoping to be able to make enough money wherever they were going to then come back and live a different lifestyle.  I don’t know how many did.  I haven’t done any research on that.  I know my mother’s two sisters preceded her.  They left Israel before we did.  Her middle sister left as an entire family.  Her older sister’s husband came to the United States to see if he could find a place for himself and make a living and then sent for his wife and two children because that was the best way for him to organize it.  My mother had been ill as a teenager, partially because of semi-starvation in which she ate grass, etcetera, destroyed her gastric system, and also had a severely impacted gall bladder problem.  She had surgery in Palestine.  It was not a very good operation, and she did not recover as well as anticipated.  I, as an infant, evidently developed dysentery because that was the situation.  My father, recognizing that he had two patients, asked the advice of the physician to whom they went and was told that he should go to a country that had more sophisticated and advanced health situations, hospitals with more experienced physicians, and sanitary conditions that were better than the ones with which they were living.  My father then turned to his brother-in-law, who had already left and was in New York, for assistance in booking passage because there was no money.  And with a loan from the brother-in-law, who also had no money but guaranteed it to an uncle of his, he booked passage on the Patria and came to the United States.

EE:  Did your parents ever talk about the other people who they lived among in Israel?

SC:  Not really.  My father, who was very well educated Jewishly, a philosopher at heart, and a teacher, worked for some of the names that are historical, the people who were the pioneers, the professionals – pioneers in the Yishuv at the time.  He worked as a houseman for one family.  He also worked as a teacher, but he had done that – he had tutored when he was in Riga.  His father had sent him to do tutoring in order to earn some money or to live in the community where they had teachers.  He was a tutor to another family and subsequently learned enough English on his own to apply for a position as a clerk in the Palestine Lloyd shipping office in Tel Aviv.  That’s where he was working when he met my mother.  I think it’s because my father was there, in that position, that he was able to book passage on the Patria, albeit it was steerage, but at least he was booking passage and able to leave.

EE:  What do you know about how people communicated, what language they were speaking?

SC:  Well, my father spoke Hebrew.  He was determined to speak Hebrew.  That was one of the reasons he went.  He was a Hebraist before he went there.  My mother spoke Hebrew because she was only six when they arrived in Israel, and Hebrew was the language that the Yishuv was determining to make an important language.  The whole concept of Zionism included Hebrew as the lingua franca of the Jewish people.  So, Mother and Dad spoke Hebrew.  I know her sisters spoke Hebrew, as well as their husbands.  I spoke only Hebrew until we had been in this country for a while, and that was the language that they all used.  My father knew Russian because he had been born in Riga or outside of Riga.  My mother knew some Arabic because they traveled from Petah Tikva up north to Binyamina, [and] then back.  The small neighboring areas had a number of Arabs, so she learned Arabic.  Since my mother’s family was there during the war, she came into contact with Turks as well as the Arabs and needed to be able to communicate beyond the Hebrew language.  I presume that my grandfather and grandmother spoke Yiddish.  I never met them.  They died before I went back to Israel.  But I believe they spoke Yiddish because all three sisters, again, and their husbands, spoke Yiddish as well.  So Hebrew and Yiddish intermittently were the languages.  And then, when my brother was four years old or five years old, it was determined that we would speak only one language at home, and it became English.

EE:  How was it that your mother was reduced to eating grass?  What was the situation?

SC:  There was no food.  There was famine, and the hordes of locusts that ate whatever was trying to grow, and they simply did not have food.  So they went into the field and picked grasses and cooked them.

EE:  Your parents were actually there for quite some time.

SC:  My mother was there from 1913 to 1927.  My father arrived in 1920.  Seven or eight years.

EE:  And how did she reflect on that time?

SC:  She had very negative memories of that time.  It was a difficult time for her.  There was a war.  There were difficulties with the Arabs in the area, even then.  Not serious difficulties in the sense of terrorism but difficulties, taunted or uncomfortable with each other.  No regular position for my grandfather to earn what I would call “a living,” where everyone could benefit.  Two brothers who were supposed to report to the Turks to go into the army and who did everything they could to avoid it.  In one case, one was imprisoned, and he had to be ransomed, in a sense.  Believe it or not, the ransom was food.  So that was the state of the country.  Food was very, very difficult.  They had to import most of it because they really didn’t have enough in those years that were difficult.  Her memories were negative, all negative.  

EE:  That’s interesting that you grew up with those sentiments, and yet here you are –

SC:  Well, it was an infant country and one in which we didn’t even know – and certainly not my parents’ generation – that there ever would be an Israel or a Jewish state.  The effort to create one, even if they were only there ten years or so, was important enough to be part of.  I think that’s what I remember.  I don’t remember it as negative.  I remember it as people who were willing to put into practice their ideology in spite of the difficulties and hardships for however many years they did it.  And then not being able to stay there, having to look for other facilities in which they could live to support all of the efforts that others who did stay were making, which is what they did.  My grandparents stayed there, my mother’s baby sister stayed there, the two brothers stayed there, as well as others whom she knew by that time and supporting the efforts of all of those who were in the Yishuv and working.  They were Labor Zionists in ideology and action.  My brother and I were raised with the Labor Zionist philosophy.  That was our social outlet, as well as our philosophical outlet.  I mean, they were always devoted to Israel.  My mother did not want to live there because of her memories, whereas my father was ready to live there at any time.  But they both supported it to the fullest because it was important.

EE:  Tell me your parents’ names.

SC:  My father’s name was Sraiah, S-R-A-I-A-H.  And my mother’s name was Chana.  My mother’s maiden name was Barbalot.  

EE:  And your maiden name?

SC:  Shoubin.  Which is exactly the way they spell it in the Russian language.  We didn’t change the names.

EE:  Do you know what it means?

SC:  No.  I know what my mother’s maiden name means; it means red beard.  Barbalot means red beard.  I do not know what Shoubin means, but there were a number of them.  There are a number of Shoubins, and my sense is it comes from a small community in which, as you know, the families were interrelated.  Shoubin was the name, and it was not changed by any of those who came here.  They spelled it differently, but they didn’t change the name.

EE:  Tell me about your brothers.

SC:  I have only one brother.  There are only two of us.  My mother, because she was ill, was told not to have more children after I was born, but she was determined to have a son, and she remained ill after my brother was born.  My brother was not a healthy child when he was born, and I can remember a number of different illnesses that he had.  He has a wonderful personality.  He’s still alive, lives in Baltimore, has a wonderful personality.  Great guy.  Wonderful brother.  He was a fantastic son.  He has been in television since television began, basically.  He started at what was then WAAM, W-A-A-M, in Baltimore, and worked there as a director and producer and then was hired to go to, I believe it was, Pennsylvania to work there.  He became a program manager, and as of this date, he is the Vice President for Programming for Maryland Public Television.

EE:  Tell me his name.

SC:  Zvi.  Z-V-I.  For a while there, our names were changed because when we enrolled in school because we were in an immigrant neighborhood, the principal determined that every child should have an English name.  We had Germans and Poles, etcetera, in the school.  It was a very mixed constituency.  She insisted that my mother translate my name and my brother’s name.  My brother retained his English name, I think, until his mid-thirties or forties.  I rejected my English name in high school.  By the time I got to college, it was Hebrew.

EE:  So what names were you –?

SC:  I was called Rose; he was called Harry.  He didn’t mind it, but I resented it.  I had no friends who called me that.  If anyone called me that, that individual was not a friend of mine.

EE:  So this meant that – that’s, I guess, getting us into somewhere else, getting us to America, which I haven’t gotten us there yet. 

SC:  We went by boat.  My father booked passage on the Patria.  We went steerage.  As I remember the story – because I was too young to remember – I was sick most of the trip, and my mother didn’t do too well either.  We did not go to Ellis Island; we went through Providence, Rhode Island.  We went at a time when the Immigration Act had changed.  The United States became more isolationist and passed a very restrictive immigration policy.  You could only come to this country if you had special talents.  Various sectors of the world had other requirements.  But if you came from the Middle East, where we were coming from, you had to have special talents, and my father’s special talent was that he had worked for a chicken farmer in Palestine and knew enough about the names of chickens and their diseases, etcetera.  He was interviewed by someone who was supposed to be familiar with chicken raising because they really checked everyone who came in.  They were going to be that strict.  And evidently, the individual had not done his homework.  I recall my father telling me he really didn’t know much other than what he read.  He did work with chickens – I’m not saying he didn’t – and he knew some of them, but he certainly was not a fully qualified poultry professional.  Nevertheless, this individual did not understand the answers, and my father was able to come in.  That’s how we came into the country.  We went to New York, where my mother’s sisters were, looking for work there.  That did not work out for my father.  While we were there – we were there several months – a message came that there was a place for a Hebrew teacher in Baltimore.  My father did not know where Baltimore was; he had to go to a map to find it.  But the fact that there was a Hebrew school called The Broadway Talmud Torah, and the fact that there was a Zionist community, and Baltimore was a very Zionist community, intrigued him, and he came down and applied and, of course, was hired.  That’s what brought us to Baltimore.

EE:  So now, what year was this that you came here?

SC:  We came to Baltimore in 1928.

EE:  And when did you come to New York?

SC:  The end of ‘27.

EE:  So you were just a mere infant.

SC:  Yes.  I was under just a year of age when we arrived.

EE:  Tell me how you know these stories so well.

SC:  I know them because I asked questions.  There was something very unusual in that, as a child, I seemed to remember what took place when I was an infant in the Yishuv.  I can’t explain it.  I couldn’t explain it then.  But I had memory – I remembered speaking Hebrew, I remembered hearing Hebrew, and I had some recollection evidently of stories that I heard that I cannot explain.  In 1960, my husband and I made a first trip to Israel.  I had not spoken Hebrew for some time, and I found that I was speaking from some deep recesses, the Hebrew that was spoken in the ‘20s and ‘30s, not the Hebrew that was spoken in the ‘60s.  So, I can’t explain it except that I had asked questions, I remembered, and I seemed to have retained something that I absorbed in the short time I was there.

EE:  So, how do you speak Hebrew now?

SC:  Poorly, because I don’t practice it, but it’s updated.  I’ve learned the updated words for the words that I used when Hebrew was still the language to be learned in the Yishuv.  It’s remarkable.  I had an admiration for the words that were created and how one creates a modern language when there already is an existing, ancient language.  My father was fascinated by that.  He was fascinated by languages generally, but particularly Hebrew.  He loved to look at the words and see how they were developed and had great admiration for those who had the courage to write in a language that was not yet accepted.  There were those who had doubts and hesitations that Hebrew would ever become the spoken language, particularly in a country that had so many immigrants from so many different societies and so many other basic languages before they came.  But the dream of Hebrew being the national language succeeded.  It became a reality.

EE:  At what point did your family switch from Hebrew to English?

SC:  My brother did not speak until he was older than four.  I don’t recall exactly.  When they took him to find out why he was not speaking, because it wasn’t physical, not his vocal cords, the doctor determined that he was confused by the multiple languages in the house.  I spoke all three: Hebrew, Yiddish, and English.  My father obviously spoke all three, and so did my mother.  The switching of languages between us was so easy that I don’t think we recognized – certainly, as a child, I didn’t recognize that we were moving from Hebrew to English.  If the word didn’t come to me in Hebrew, it came in Yiddish; if it didn’t come in Yiddish, it came in English.  My brother could not function with what was for him a difficult relationship of languages, and we were told to pick just one.  Because he was four going on five and would be entering kindergarten, they determined the language should be English.  So, we began speaking primarily English.  That doesn’t mean that Hebrew and Yiddish were not spoken.  It means that the language used with the children, with my brother and myself, was to be basically English.  But I retained Hebrew subconsciously as my first language until I married.  My husband did not know Hebrew, and it was uncomfortable for him to hear me speaking in Hebrew.

EE:  How do you relate this to the contemporary issues of multilingual communities or bilingual communities?

SC:  I think it’s wonderful.  I think that as Americans, we’re hampered by being monolingual and not learning other languages, whether it’s French because we have French Canadians or Spanish because we have Mexico below.  When I go to Europe, I’m always delighted to hear individuals who can move from one language to the next so easily and who know so many languages.  Three would be the minimum that they would know.  Or in Israel, where the same thing is common – I have friends in Israel who can speak well four or five languages with no difficulty and no confusion.  I’m sorry that we are so isolated that we really don’t teach a second language to be a fully developed language.

EE:  What I’d love to talk about is your earliest memories of Baltimore, coming here, where your family came, settled, and how they got to Baltimore.  You gave me a little bit of an intro.

SC:  Well, it was the position at the [Broadway] Talmud Torah that brought my father here.  The first apartment was in East Baltimore, on the third floor.  I don’t know how long we lived there.  I don’t remember.  The second apartment had with it a confectionery store, which was not at all a successful venture, but my father was not really a businessman.

EE:  Do you remember where these were?

SC:  Yes, the confectionery store and apartment were in the 1700 block of East Baltimore.  My uncle, my father’s youngest brother, had left Riga and came to live with us.  He went to City College and then to dental school.  He lived with us a fairly long time.  If I recall correctly, it was close to six years.  At any rate, neither he nor my father was successful at the confectionery store, so that was given up.  But we did move because we needed a larger apartment at that time to the corner of Patterson Park Avenue and East Baltimore Street, to the second floor.  See, we were following the immigrant pattern of third, second, first, etcetera, and we did it very consistently.  Not deliberately.  It was in retrospect that I realized we had followed the traditional pattern.  We lived there for several years, and I remember that very, very clearly.  I could not have been more than four.  I remember for two reasons.  One, there was a piano in the apartment below us, which was not an apartment that one lived in; it was a Democratic club, a young persons’ Democratic club.  I presume it was a Jewish Democratic club because my uncle used to be down there.  My uncle was, I believe, eight years younger than my father, and he was single at the time because he was still going to college.  I remember that from time to time he would invite me because I loved piano music.  He would invite me to come in in the early part of the evening and sit on the piano bench while he played piano.  Also, I recall my brother, as I said, was a sickly child and went to the hospital several times with bronchial pneumonia.  We had no one with whom to leave me.  My mother turned to the tenants on the third floor, a couple who had no children but had a dog who was their child, who looked after me when they went to the hospital.  That was several days in a row.  They were wonderful people.  She was Irish.  He was Italian.  They were just wonderful, wonderful people.  

EE:  Tell me how you remember that neighborhood in general if you do.

SC:  Oh, I remember it very clearly.  It was an immigrant neighborhood, as I mentioned.  I went to School 27.  School 27 drew from the German immigrant community, the Polish immigrant community, and the Jewish immigrant community.  

EE:  Where was that located?

SC:  It was on [Monument] and Chester.  I remember that one because of this principal who injected this terrible thing in my life by forcing me to change my name.  At the age of six, you don’t change names.  Second, I remember it because school was my first experience of different people, that is, Germans and Poles as well as Jews.  It was a walk, a seven-block walk, from our apartment to the school, and I walked through what I thought was an alley.  It wasn’t until I was a young teenager that I realized I walked through a segregated alley where the houses ¬–¬ which all had steps going up to them, wooden steps going up to them while we had marble steps in front of ours – were all Black.  I don’t think I saw a child more than twice or three times the entire time, and we lived there until 1936.  The grocery store, etcetera, were all two blocks away, and the quickest way was to walk through this alley.  There was never any fear or anything, but I didn’t realize until later that I didn’t really see people there.  I didn’t realize that I was in a segregated area, and obviously, none were in my school.  I have no idea where these children went to school or what they did because the two or three times that I did see children, they were immediately called into the house.  So I have that very vivid memory of what must have been, for them, a horrible experience living isolated.  It was just one block, and everything around them was white.  I remember the grocery store very clearly because my mother used to send me to get the items that we would buy almost on a daily basis because that’s the way we bought.  First of all, there wasn’t enough income; secondly, you bought what was fresh the day you needed it, much as they still do in Europe.  I remember the drugstore on the corner, which was across from the Democratic Club because I remember some of the members of the Democratic Club taking me over there to get me a three-cent ice cream cone with what we called “jimmies,” chocolate on top.  I remember Patterson Park very clearly.  Patterson Park was our air conditioning.  When we moved from the second floor on the corner building, we moved to 2225 East Baltimore Street, which was a three-story row house with three tenants – first, second, and third floor.  We were elevated to the point where we were on the first floor.  The windows came down to about twelve inches above the floor.  I remember that clearly because in the oppressive summers, we would sleep or lie on the floor and try to sleep in front of the windows to catch the air, most of which came when a streetcar or car passed by because East Baltimore Street was a major thoroughfare, and we had streetcars all the time.  As a matter of fact, it was such a major thoroughfare that President Roosevelt came down East Baltimore Street when we were living on that first-floor level because that was a big deal since almost all the Jews then worshipped him.  I remember the park being our air conditioning.  When it was so oppressive that none of us could sleep, we would go to the park – my father, mother, brother, and I – with blankets at 2 a.m., and stay there until dawn and then go back to the apartment because there was no other way to get relief from the heat and the humidity.  So, I have very, very clear memories of East Baltimore Street, Fayette Street, Chester, and Talmud Torah, which is where I went and my father taught.  We moved right before I would have had him as a teacher.  I remember the Smelkinson Dairy, which was down around the 1600 block of East Baltimore Street.  The woman who ran it was a friend of my mother’s or became a friend of my mother’s.  I have very good, warm memories of that area.  It was a nurturing area in that all of us were in the same financial situation; all of us, basically, were immigrants; all of us had adjusting to do and acculturation.  The difference that I remember is that the acculturation that took place in our house, our apartment, was very different from that around us.  We were Labor Zionists.  None of our neighbors were.  Friends were, but the friends lived five or six blocks away.  We were raised as Europeans are raised, not as American children were being raised, and that was clear enough even when I was too young to recognize the distinction.  The distinction was that the relationship between the parent and child was not as friend to friend; it was as parent and child.  There were parameters for behavior, expectations of behavior, and expectations of responsibilities.  I did not see that in the other apartments or with the other children with whom I met.  I realized the distinction, and it wasn’t until much later that it dawned on me that my family was not anxious to become Americanized.  My family wanted to be the Jewish family it was, located in America, which was very different.  Very different.

EE:  What was the Jewish environment in East Baltimore then?

SC:  Oh, it was a very, very strong Jewish environment.  There were a number of synagogues in East Baltimore; the JEA, Jewish Education Alliance, was in East Baltimore; Hendler Creamery Ice Cream place was in East Baltimore.  Lombard Street was the center for buying kosher food, for having the chickens slaughtered in front of you so you could see that they were fresh and slaughtered properly.  My mother’s best friend was the daughter of a shochet there.  There was a very heavy, strong, close Jewish atmosphere.  It didn’t mean that people were particularly friendly or not friendly, but it meant that the Jewish customs, the Jewish smells, the Jewish language, and Jewish ambiance pervaded the entire area.  

EE:  So you would say that if Lombard Street was the actual hub or the gathering place, the meeting place?

SC:  Between Lombard Street and the JEA.  They were only a few blocks away from each other.  Walking was what everyone did because there was streetcar or walk.  There was obviously a core around which Jews could develop relationships with other Jews and maintain their sense of Judaism with the number of synagogues that were grouped together.  The JEA and Lombard Street were all within several blocks of each other.  Broadway was a Jewish street in the sense that the Talmud Torah was there.  So one could walk from where we lived, which was the 2200 block, down to the Talmud Torah.  The JEA was a block and a half or two blocks away.  Lombard Street was several blocks away.  Within that small environment, all one’s Jewish needs were met.  So, for me, it was a sheltering environment, but not so isolated because in school, I had the other people with whom I needed to identify and work out relationships because there were non-Jews there.  I felt it was very important that I had the opportunity to meet non-Jews as well.

EE:  Was there an opportunity, or what opportunities existed for education within a Jewish environment?

SC:  Well, the education was the Talmud Torah, the school, which was a co-ed school, an afternoon school.  It had a number of girls as well as boys.  It was a comfortable place to be, but it – by educational standards – left a lot to be desired.  But it was obviously a Jewish environment with teachers who cared.

EE:  So, in other words, we didn’t have parochial schools, Jewish schools, at that point in time.

SC:  No.  The first Yeshiva, Ner Israel Yeshiva, I don’t think, was founded until 1933 or 1934.  As I got older, and we moved from there to Forest Park, we did have what is now Ner Israel Yeshiva, but that was on Maine and Garrison, and I knew that was different because it was male only.  Up until then, I didn’t know “male only” because the Hebrew school I went to in East Baltimore was co-ed.  I went to Beth Tfiloh because I hadn’t finished my Hebrew School education.  I had gone through the sixth grade, and my father wanted me to.  I remember going to Beth Tfiloh.  I was the only girl in the class which said something about the difference between East Baltimore and Forest Park – that Jewish girls were not getting the education in the Forest Park area.  When I graduated, or whatever I did at Beth Tfiloh – because I don’t remember a graduation – my father said, “You’re still not finished.”  So, I went to Isaac Davidson Hebrew School, which was in the Park Heights area, which, again, was co-ed and very comfortable.  Very interesting long walk across railroad tracks, and through the woods, etcetera, at a time when society was much safer.  And stayed there until I graduated.  I became valedictorian for the school system.  Because at that time, there was a Community School system, not as there is today, with each synagogue having its own school.  It was a community school system under the Board of Jewish Education with community events each year.  Something that we’ve lost, and I’m sorry that we’ve lost because it brought the various segments of the community together.  South Baltimore, East Baltimore, Forest Park, Park Heights – it made no difference if you were in a Jewish environment; all of the Jewish schoolchildren came together for a fun day at Gwynn Oak Park on day in August, let’s say, and all of the schools participated in a festival – either Hanukkah or Purim – at the Lyric Theater once a year.  So, twice a year, there was interaction between the various communities because each community was almost a self-contained community.

EE:  Now, how would you describe those communities?  What were they?

SC:  They were very different and, for a while, they did not really integrate.  If you were in South Baltimore, you were in South Baltimore, and you knew that you were not with the East Baltimore group.  It took other ideologies to bring one out of the various geographical areas.  Labor Zionists, for example, could live in South Baltimore, Forest Park, East Baltimore, or wherever, but came together because there was a center hall called “the ulam” for the Labor Zionist movement.  I would venture to say that Jews selected their social activities based on their philosophies and ideologies, not on where they lived.  

EE:  Why don’t you tell me what the environment for Labor Zionists was here in Baltimore?

SC:  Baltimore is a very strong Zionist community – and was before we came here.

EE:  Yes, and why was that?

SC:  Well, I think there were a number of Jewishly educated people in Baltimore.  Baltimore was called the “Jerusalem of the West” at the turn of the century.  The reason it was called the “Jerusalem of the West” was that there were a number of highly educated – Jewishly-educated – professionals who took their Judaism seriously.  That’s the Henrietta Szold model if you will.  But there were a number of families who felt that way.  And there were people here who had the courage to be visible and to speak out.  I can think of a Dr.  Herman Seidel, who seemed to be the mainstay of the Labor Zionist community for a long time and the physician to almost everybody who belonged to the Labor Zionist community.  It wasn’t a large community, but it was a very strong community, strong in its beliefs.  As children, we went Saturday night to this “ulam,” which became our social center, as well as the ideological center because there we were taught Labor Zionist principles and philosophy.  There was a camp, which still exists, called the Moshav, or Moshava, which was a Labor Zionist camp.  There were several members of the Jewish Brigade of World War I who were Baltimoreans, which also brought back the sense of what could happen in the Middle East – that there could be a Jewish Homeland.  They, of course, were motivated to speak about this at any occasion.  One was very articulate, Will Braiterman.  Very articulate as a speaker [and] as a writer.  He was outstanding and was motivated.  I can remember what I call “the Veterans”.  It made no difference what prompted the group to get together, but they would speak.  It was always on the subject of the Yishuv, of the Homeland, and what it would be.  Work toward it, and it will happen, etcetera.  So Baltimore had that history, and we came into it, and it was fortuitous because that is what my father and mother wanted.  My mother became a member of the Pioneer Women, and my father of Poale Zion and the Labor Zionist Group.  

EE:  Now, tell me what Labor Zionism is.  Compared with other Zionist Groups.

SC:  It’s a socialist, basically.  Egalitarian, I would call it.  Believing that we could reclaim the land but needed to work the land as well, not re-claim it and have somebody else work it for us.  They were your principles.  They were the ones who were the pioneers and the chalutzim.  They believed that it could be a democratic type of society, that we had a responsibility for Hebrew, as the language, for imparting the values and traditions of Judaism, the values of justice and tzedakah and [inaudible] Hassidim, and the whole system of human values critical to the development of a country.  Following the dream of both Theodore Herzl, which was for a political state, where Jews could be the majority and determine their own fate as Jews , and Achad Ha’am, who believed that the Jewish State should be the cultural center of world Jewry.  Labor Zionism promoted both in that sense.  In specifics, it meant that women should have the opportunity to achieve whatever rank or role they wished in life.  But that women who were mothers needed to be recognized as having a major responsibility.  Taking care of those who could not take care of themselves or offering respite to those who needed it was a hallmark early on of Na’amat, which was the pioneer women’s group early on, before there were major efforts to recognize the fact that raising four or five children in a difficult climate with tremendous political difficulties, meant that you needed some relief.  Na’amat was the first group that I’m aware of that set up a program where the mother was taken from the home and offered a week’s respite someplace so that she could then go back re-invigorated and re-energized.  I don’t think it happened in this country at that time.  We did nothing of that nature.  I’m not aware that it happened anywhere else.  But it did happen in the Yishuv, because women were aware that you couldn’t be all, and everything, at the same time.  There was a terrific sense of bonding.  They may not have known each other, but if one identified as a Labor Zionist, he or she was automatically part of the Labor Zionist group, and, therefore, to be protected, to be shared with, to be educated, to offer whatever one needs to offer to make life more comfortable.  It was a very strong bonding relationship.  I believe it still is.  I believe it still is.

EE:  How was that enacted in your life?  Or in your mother’s life?

SC:  Well, my mother became a mainstay of the Pioneer Women, although she never took a public role.  My mother was not a public woman.  She supported it financially, and we’re talking about people who were, by today’s standard were poor.  She baked for the meetings.  If someone took sick, one of the women immediately came to assist.  We needed some of that assistance later on when my mother took sick, and my brother was sick also.  There was this sense of sisterhood among the women, as well as a sense of brotherhood among the men and a bonding that did not exist in any other framework for these people, so that even though one may have been a jeweler or a number of them were Hebrew teachers and others were accountants or attorneys, they bonded because of the Labor Zionist ideology, not because of their professions.  I can recall guests in our apartment, two who were professors at Johns Hopkins University, who felt more comfortable being Labor Zionist Jewish outside of the Hopkins milieu than they did there.  When they came to our house, they would speak Hebrew, and they would discuss the language and how it was growing, and they would discuss the political situation in the Middle East.  It was a different household than the households around me.

EE:  How did you or your family relate to the other Jewish households, other Jews in the –?

SC:  We related, but we weren’t close.  In other words, I could tell you who lived on either side of us, but they were not friends.

EE:  But they were Jews?

SC:  Oh yes, they were Jews.  I don’t think there was a non-Jewish family in the 2200 block of East Baltimore Street, probably not from Broadway to Patterson Park Avenue.  Patterson Park was a dividing line, however.  Baltimore and Patterson Park Avenue was the dividing line in East Baltimore, and basically, the Jewish community ended there.  From then on, it was either German or Polish, and there were a few Jews who lived along the park, but by and large, the Jewish community stopped at Patterson Park Avenue, which was very interesting, very interesting to see.  It was a geographical barrier.

EE:  How did you relate to the other ethnic communities that were probably just a few blocks distant?

SC:  We didn’t relate to the communities.  The only way I related to them was through the students in class.  But there was no relationship with the communities around us.

EE:  Was there ever any connection –?  For example, your mother – you have kin from Latvia, and there would have been Russians, Poles or Czechs.

SC:  No.

EE:  No connection?

SC:  No connection at all.

EE:  Did you have any memories of any bigotry, any discrimination?

SC:  Oh, sure.  It was clear.  There was bigotry and discrimination in the school.  I felt it with the principal, starting with that principal.  I can remember several girls and boys who were of German descent – and this was before Hitler.  We were Jews, and Jews were just not part of their life.  But they weren’t a part of mine either.  There was no effort to be close or friendly outside of school.  I never invited them to our apartment; they never invited me to theirs.  We lived in our own communities, and there was no effort to live outside of the community.

EE:  Did you make any friendships/acquaintances, during that period that you carried through your life?

SC:  None that I carried through, probably because they called me by the wrong name.  But I do recall I was friends with a family, the Pollacks – Dora and Mitchell Pollack.  And from time to time, I do run into them – I know who they are, and they know who I am.  There was a young woman, Selma Javodick, whom I remember, who lived a few doors down.  I have seen her from time to time.  Yes, I do still see and recognize several from that period.  The family that lived next to us – 2223 East Baltimore Street – was the Steinbach family.  Interestingly enough, I am close to Ralph and Betty Steinbach.  I’ve known them, I knew who they were, although, again, I was never in their house, and they were never in ours.  I knew one of the sisters sang.  They owned the whole house, so I knew we weren’t in their league.  They owned all three apartments.  That was very different from our league.  In 1948 or 49, after I was married and, of course, they were already married, I met them again through Beacon Chapter #60, OES, and we have been friends ever since.  So that’s a relationship that goes back a long way.

EE:  Tell me about the Talmud Torah, where your father taught.  Where was it?

SC:  It was on Broadway.  Broadway near – that’s a good question.  Broadway, north of Baltimore Street, which means you would have turned right on Broadway.  The principal’s name was Tarses, and I believe there was a biblical town named that.  I knew some of the other Hebrew teachers.  I believe my uncle later taught there as well.  I don’t remember any of my teachers, interestingly enough.  I remember them at Isaac Davidson, but not there.  I do remember that the individual who owned the apartment house where we had lived on the second floor, Judge Sykes, had a daughter my age and in my class, and her brother, Melvin Sykes, who is a renowned attorney in Baltimore, would walk us home because the walk was probably seven or eight blocks, maybe even more – have to do the arithmetic to find out.  He would walk us home because we were walking at night.  It was an afternoon school, and we walked at night.  I remember the stairs in the school, and I remember the events that we went to as a community of schools, but I don’t have any other strong memories of the school.  

EE:  This was a co-educational?

SC:  Oh yes, definitely co-educational.  Absolutely.  Absolutely.  And the subjects were basically the Bible, Tanach, and history, as I recall.  I don’t recall the rest.  I don’t recall whether they taught Hebrew or not because, at the time, it wasn’t important for me.  I spoke Hebrew, so I didn’t have to be concerned, and I could read Hebrew and write Hebrew.  And I really don’t remember much else.  I remember very few students – don’t remember who was in my class to any great extent.  I remember more about the elementary school than I do about the Hebrew school, interestingly enough.

EE:  Other than that, what was your Jewish education in the East Baltimore neighborhood? Or your Jewish affiliation?

SC:  Well, my friends, those whom I invited to the house, were Jewish.  The whole atmosphere was Jewish.  I was immersed in a Jewish atmosphere, one hundred percent.  It was there – you could feel it, you could smell it, you could eat it.  You knew if you went into someone’s house, you would have a dish that related to a dish you had eaten in your own home.  It was a hundred percent immersion.

EE:  Can you close your eyes and be on the most congested areas of Lombard Street or the busiest –?

SC:  Oh, easily.

EE:  And describe to me what that was like?

SC:  Easily.  A cacophony of sounds and smells, as I recall.  The bakery smells, which were great; the chickens, which were being slaughtered, which was not so great; the fish, some of which smelled and some did not.  Jostling to walk through the crowds.  The airy ways because the buildings had what they called airy ways, which were parallel to the building and literally permitted light to come into the innermost room, very narrow.  And even there, there were people who were selling things or doing things.  I remember distinctly the shochet, my mother’s friend’s father.  I remember the wooden stalls; I can see the barrels with the chicken blood and the heads cut off, etcetera, and see the barrels outside of the delicatessens, which were fun and great, and there were also cases of pastry and candy where you lifted up the glass cover and reached in, and nobody thought about hygiene or whether that’s appropriate or not.  It was a fun place to be.  It was a fun place to be.  It was natural.  It wasn’t unnatural.  It was a natural environment.  This is what happened.  You saw people with kippot, and you saw people without kippot.  You saw women who were dressed severely in a sense of modesty and women who were dressed just modestly.  It was a mix, and it was easy to understand that not everybody is the same and not everybody believes the same, but everybody’s Jewish.  That was the great thing.  Everybody was Jewish.  It was comforting.  Because everybody was Jewish, I assumed that half of the world was Jewish at that time.

EE:  How observant was your family? [phone ringing] I want to talk about your observance, Jewish observance, and I’d like to just keep it – if you can – while you were living in East Baltimore.

SC:  It didn’t change that much.  My father was an apikoros.  My father was not one who believed that God was responsible for what we did on this earth.  He knew all of the prayers.  As I said, he was a very learned man.  You mention a book, and he could quote from it, and he would give you chapter and verse, literally.  But prayers were not for him in the sense of praying in the synagogue.  We went to shul on the holidays.  We did not go to shul on Shabbat.  We lit candles.  We had traditional Friday night dinner.  We did have the prayers, we made the motzi, and we sang.  Even though there were just four of us, we sang songs befitting a Shabbat.  Saturday morning, in East Baltimore, until I broke a collarbone, was celebrated in bed, the four of us.  My brother and I would get into my parents’ bed, and we would play games, and we would sing, and it was a very happy, loving, warm feeling.  That was Saturday mornings until I was five or six, and my brother pushed me, and I fell.  At that time, the apartment had a marble fireplace, and I hit the edge of the marble fireplace.  Broke my collarbone.  After that, we didn’t jump into bed.  But Saturday morning was a time for us to be together, not to be in shul.  Saturday afternoon – my father, by then, had added what I called part-time businesses because one could not really maintain a family on a Hebrew teacher’s salary then, and I’m not sure they can do it now either, unfortunately.  So, he had a set of lending libraries that he had put into drugstores, and lending libraries suited him because he was still improving his English language.  As I said, he was self-taught with English, and he did it by reading.  He enjoyed that because it gave him access to the books, as well, although I have no idea where the books originally came from.  And Saturday afternoon, we would frequently go to the lending libraries to see which books are out and what has to be replaced, etcetera, etcetera, which was, again, fun for the family.  Saturday night, we were at the ulam, which was a social gathering of the Labor Zionist group.  Sunday, after Hebrew School – because my father taught Hebrew, and we went to school, so the day didn’t begin for us, individually, until after 1:00 o’clock – we took a ride somewhere.  My father loved to drive.  My brother ate best in the car, and my mother was happy when my brother ate.  So that was the way that we spent our Saturdays and Sundays.  Holidays we were always in shul because it was expected, not because it was necessary, internally, or for my mother or father, individually.  As they grew older, my mother did feel more comfortable going to shul on a regular basis.  And particularly when we moved out here because when we were married, it became clear that the Friday night dinner would be here, that we would create the Friday night dinner.  Therefore, my husband’s parents and my parents could be here and our extended families.  And neither one of the women would have to do that kind of work.  My mother began going regularly or wanting to go regularly to Chizuk Amuno on Shabbat.  But, prior to that, it was not traditional in the sense of an observant family.  We kept a kosher home, always, and I still keep a kosher home.  I don’t recall my father or mother ever eating anything treyf, but they would eat in restaurants that weren’t kosher.  My father would have fish, or tuna, or egg salad.  And my mother would usually have lettuce and tomato on toast.  That was her favorite sandwich or something – well, she had stomach problems still, and she watched her diet very carefully.  But we would eat in restaurants in which observant people would not eat.  So, I didn’t have a sense that the observance was a major requirement in being Jewish.  It was being Jewishly educated and understanding Jewish culture, tradition, values, mores, and living them out – that was our definition of Judaism as we were growing up.

EE:  Which synagogue did your family attend in East Baltimore? 

SC:  We attended, I believe, what is known as the Lloyd Street Synagogue.  It was wherever Abba, my father, could get seats.  Because it was difficult, even then, and expensive.  Later on, we went because some friends of his belonged.  And, of course, these are all Orthodox shuls.  We never considered anything but Orthodox.  When we moved to Forest Park, we joined Beth Tfiloh, and we went there for the Holidays.

EE:  Okay.  Let’s see.  Are we ready to move to Forest Park? 

SC:  By and large, yes.

EE:  Do you remember any of the – one thing that was interesting – you said that your father liked to drive?

SC:  Loved to drive.

EE:  When was he able to get a car?

SC:  I think my father got a car within a year of our coming here.  He was gypsy-like in that he wanted to be free and go out in the country.  That was very, very important to him.  After my brother was two or two and a half years old, it became clear – in addition to the speech/ language problem that he had and other emotional problems – it became clear that, for him, the best therapy was a drive in the country.  He felt best in a car.  He ate in the car, where he frequently would not eat at home.  It became a way of life.  So, it really reinforced my father’s sense of travel, which he always enjoyed, just going out into the greenery.  So we went to Glen Burnie when most Jews didn’t even know where Glen Burnie was.  We went out into the Valley – into Worthington Valley.  And, again, most did not know.  A number of his friends were late in getting cars; they did not get cars as early as he did.  But a car was not “whether” – it was “when.”  It was very important to my father.  

EE:  Do you remember any of the meeting places or any of the restaurants where Jewish people would go?

SC:  Oh, sure.  There was a New York Dairy restaurant, and there was Shulman’s.  The New York Dairy was just what it said.  It was a dairy restaurant.

EE:  Where was that?

SC:  On East Baltimore Street.  And, Shulman’s, downtown, which was also, I believe, on East Baltimore Street.  There was another restaurant, but I can’t recall the name of it.  We didn’t go out frequently to restaurants.  Number One, restaurants were expensive, so it had to be either an occasion or a special purpose to go to a restaurant.  My brother’s Bar Mitzvah party, such as it was, was upstairs from Shulman’s.  It was a hall upstairs from the restaurant.  I would say that the guests were all members of the Labor Zionist Movement.

EE:  You mentioned that on Saturday nights, you went to the ulam?

SC:  Ulam.  Yes.  It is the hall.  Ulam is a hall.  It was the Labor Zionist’s house.  I believe the address was 2247 Eutaw Place.  

EE:  And what would go on there?

SC:  Well, the adults were on the first floor, as a rule, in their meetings.  The women were in one room, the men in another room.  They were sometimes together if there was a speaker or a lecturer.  The children occupied other rooms.  There was a group – fourteen and over – for teenagers.  There was a group from, let’s say, nine to thirteen.  It was organized for children to bond together, to meet, to discuss whatever was discussed.  Usually, the subject was the Yishuv, what would be a Jewish State.  We had speakers who came over from Israel.  We had madrichim, leaders who came over from Israel to indoctrinate us in the Labor Zionist philosophy, to teach us songs and dances.  We danced Hebrew dances – Israeli dances, I would call them today.  We learned poetry; we learned what it meant to be a Labor Zionist.  It was a well-defined program, and it enabled us to have a social group with which we were very comfortable and familiar because we had the same general ideologies.  Again, it may have been different depths of interest, but basically, the ideologies were the same.  Even though we lived in very different areas, we all came together on a regular basis for this.

EE:  You mentioned something about summer camps.

SC:  There was a summer camp called the Mosh, or Moshavah, which was a Labor Zionist Camp that had been set up, I imagine, in the ‘30’s.  It was as rudimentary as any camp could be.  I mean, it was really built by youngsters and maintained by youngsters.  It was very simple in its facilities.  But it was, again, a place where the word “ruah,” spirit, just covered everything.  It was the same spirit that existed in the hall on Eutaw Place.  There was a sense that we were engaged in a wonderful, spiritual, meaningful set of programs that we also enjoyed socially.  It was not frivolous.  I mean, we acted as children act, of course, but the basic concept was that this was not frivolous.  This was something that could make a difference in the world.  This is something that could change Jewish life in the world.  I think we all bought into it.

EE:  Where was the camp? Was it a day camp?  An overnight camp?

SC:  It was an overnight camp.  I have to remember where it was.  My brother went there as a camper.  I went there just to visit on weekends.  It has since moved.  I think it was in Parole, Maryland.  Now, that may have been the second site.  But for some reason – Parole, Maryland.  But, as I said, the camp still exists in a different site.  And, not much more elaborate because that isn’t the idea of the camp.  

[END OF CD 1]

EE:  Today is September 4, 2001.  This is Elaine Eff, and I am the oral historian with [the] Jewish Women’s Archives’ Weaving Women’s Words project, interviewing Shoshana Cardin in her home in Baltimore, Maryland.  This is the second tape of her interview.  We’re going to start today, Shoshana, by finishing up what we started last time and talking about your memories of East Baltimore.

SC:  East Baltimore.  I do recall not the details but the general outline or the fact that in the third grade, there was a play which was presented to the entire school.  I don’t recall the play.  I do recall, however, that the characters called for a king, etcetera.  And when I tried out for the part, along with the many boys and other girls who tried out for the part, I was given the part for the king.  I have no idea why I even had the nerve to try out for the king to begin with.  I knew it required pants, which I did not have at the time, so that meant I’d have to negotiate with my mother about buying me a pair of pants that I would wear onstage.  Nevertheless, I did succeed in negotiating with my mother, and I did play the role, and perhaps that gave me some sense of comfort speaking in front of people and assuming a more assertive leadership responsibility than I would have had otherwise.  

EE:  And you’re wearing pants today.

SC:  And I’m wearing pants today.  That’s right.  Today they call them “slacks.”

EE:  Well. I think what we should do is move on from East Baltimore, and of course, if you think of things as we’re talking, feel free to interject, but I’d love to talk about your family’s move out of East Baltimore and not only where you moved, but really what that meant for the family.

SC:  I was not in town when the family physically moved.  We moved from East Baltimore Street to Norfolk Avenue, which was in the Forest Park area.  So we moved from an apartment for the first time into a two-story house, even though it was a row house.  It was a house with a porch, which we had not had before, with a little lawn in front and an area for gardening in back, which my mother adored.  My mother was an avid gardener.  I had my own room for the first time.  Up until the year before we moved, my uncle shared the bedroom with me because we just didn’t have any other room for him to sleep in.  If I recall correctly, he came in after I’d gone to bed.  I don’t recall seeing him frequently.  But by this time, he was up in Cumberland, and we had enough rooms for me to have my own room, and my brother had his own room, and we had a flight of stairs inside the house.  I can remember running up and down the stairs, crying, “My own room, my own room, and our own stairs.”  I think I just went wild for a few minutes and simply ran up and down, up and down the stairs.  My parents and my brother had already been there for about a week or ten days, and my brother had told all of the kids in the neighborhood – and there were loads of children in the neighborhood, two to three per house – that he had an older sister and she was coming back from New Jersey and gave them my name.  When I came in, when my father picked me up at the train station and brought me to the house, the kids in the neighborhood, because it was summertime, knew exactly who I was and all of them began shouting, “Hello, how are you, welcome,” and so forth.  So it was a very memorable, joyous occasion.  It, for me, was a major change because we were no longer in “immigrant Baltimore.”  We were out with people who had “made it,” to the point that they had their own homes, although I confess we rented that house.  We didn’t own it.  It also meant a new school.  I came in August. school started several weeks later.  It meant making a whole new group of associates or friends, acclimating myself to the grocery store and the drugstore, and so forth.  Fortunately, we did have a grocery store at the end of the block, on the corner.  The drugstore was further away.  But it was a neighborhood full of children approximately my age, and that was also very good.  We all lived outside in the summertime, played step ball, played in the street.  Our street was almost a dead end.  That is, there were no houses beyond us in that particular block, so we felt that the street was ours, not the automobiles’.  We had a wonderful time as children just playing and running and laughing.  I was in New Jersey, I think, to get me out of the way.  I was at my aunt’s.  I had a cousin at that time who was just six months older than I, Ruth (Kram?), and she had an older brother, two years older than the two of us.  I was sent there because one, I kept her company since she was an only daughter as I was an only daughter; and two, I think it was easier for my parents to make the transition when they had only 1 child to look after.  And my brother was… I was nine and a half, I wasn’t ten, so that meant my brother was seven and a half.  And it was important to keep him home, near my mother, where they could feel more secure.  It was no problem sending me away because that’s the way I was.  So when I entered school, if I recall correctly, I entered the fifth grade at School 64, and that October, I would become ten.  My father had gone from selling cheese slicing machines or leasing them to lending libraries because he loved to read and he thought others should read.  And the lending library effort was fairly successful, and my parents were able to save enough money to move.  That was their goal – not necessarily to get out of the immigrant community, because they liked the people who lived there and enjoyed it, but to take their children to where there were trees and grass of their own.  If I recall correctly that house cost $1,000 a year to rent, which was a lot of money, but it was enough because you paid it out monthly – anyway for Abba, for my father to meet the rental payments.  I also recall that we were only there two years when we moved one block away to Fairview Avenue, which also was the end of the housing tract there.  The continuation of it was woods, very woodsy, very natural, long, long vines which we called “monkey vines,” and little streams to jump over, and huge blackberries, which grew wild.  We bought the house on Fairview Avenue.  It seems to me somewhere in the recesses of my memory that it cost somewhere around 2,000, but then you could take a mortgage if you bought it.  So, within a very short time, we went from an apartment in a row house to our own row house, which we rented, to our own row house, which we owned.  I thought that was a tremendous achievement in three or four years.  It showed that we had succeeded in America.  We had “made it”, as it were.

EE:  And what was your mother doing?

SC:  My mother was a housewife.  My mother was busy fixing up the house because we didn’t have enough furniture for the house since we had come from a much smaller apartment.  So my mother was fixing up the house, getting to know her neighbors, cooking and baking – as she usually did – and watching after her children.  We walked to school then.  There was no bus route that would have taken us.  We did not come home for lunch.  She was there every afternoon when we came home, like all the other mothers in the neighborhood.  I don’t recall a working mother at that time.

EE:  What was Forest Park like at that time?  I mean, can you describe it both as a neighborhood and what it was physically as well as demographically?

SC:  Forest Park at that time was primarily Jewish.  I recall very few non-Jewish children in my class at school, and my class was typical of all the classes.  The area was a lovely residential area for those of us who were working our way up from apartments.  As I mentioned, there were small lawns and garden possibilities; everything was nearby, that is, in walking distance.  There were two streetcar lines about six and seven blocks away.  The main shopping area was probably a mile away.  That was no problem; one walked a mile very easily in those days.  In the main shopping area, there was everything that one needed: drugstores, children’s clothing stores, a shoe store, a theater, a movie theater, a butcher – all of the needs could be met within that neighborhood environment.  The community and the block that we lived in was not particularly religious in the traditional sense, so people drove and did whatever they wanted to do on Shabbat.  There was a little Yeshiva at the corner of Garrison and Maine, which was not far from us.  It later became Ner Israel.  Beth Tfiloh, the synagogue in the area, was on another corner of Garrison Boulevard.  People of all denominations of Judaism belonged to Beth Tfiloh, and it was a children’s hangout for the holidays.  That’s where we congregated.  I don’t remember any of us spending too much time inside the shul, but we spent a lot of time outside the shul.  It was a very fine social atmosphere, and it was a very comfortable, secure atmosphere because we sort of knew what was acceptable, what was not acceptable, and which children went with which children – because children have cliques the way adults do.   It was comfortable to grow up there.  There was a sense of security, even though there had been a rape about five years before we moved there.  But nobody thought about that.  I recall coming home from high school at Baltimore Hebrew College and what is now BHU.  It was then the Baltimore Hebrew College, but it was a high school. And coming home at 9:30 or 10:00 at night and walking the seven blocks to the house a little concerned but not frightened.  It was a very secure neighborhood as well.

EE:  Now, did your parents join Beth Tfiloh?  What was their relationship?

SC:  My parents had seats at Beth Tfiloh for the chagim, the holidays.  I remember going there for the holidays, but I do not remember my mother or father becoming involved or active in the synagogue.  I don’t believe they were.  We were still involved with the Labor Zionist movement, and that was the social circle.

EE:  Was there a migration of any of the Labor Zionists to that community as well, or were they –?

SC:  None of my parents’ friends from East Baltimore lived in that area, as I recall.  Some of them went to the North Avenue – Bentalou Street area.  Some of them went to the Reisterstown Road/Park-Heights area.  I don’t recall any of them moving to where we were.

EE:  And where were the activities held?  Did they remain in –?

SC:  They remained in the hall in Eutaw Place – 2247 Eutaw Place.  In Ha Ulam – “the Hall.”  That’s where the social activities were.  But by now I was twelve or thirteen, and Hitler was on the move.  And in my family, we knew what was going on around the world.  We were not isolated, nor did we choose to isolate ourselves.  In 1939 or 1940, two young German boys were taken in by our neighbor, who had a little girl and had wanted other children – evidently, couldn’t have them – as foster children.  And though I knew no German, and they knew no English – the house on Fairview Avenue had a back porch as a well as a front porch.  The back porch was a second-floor porch.  We used to meet, they on their porch and I on our porch, at night and talk.  I knew enough Yiddish to get by with their German, and they understood my broken Yiddish sufficiently so we could engage in conversation.  It was then that I found out that the boys came without their parents.  Their parents were evidently well-to-do and well-placed in Germany.  Their uncle had insisted they leave and paid their passage.  They explained to me what was going on in Germany at the time.  And that, along with the information I had from my father, was enough to give me a sense of what was happening in the world as far as Jews were concerned.  It was my first contact with anyone who had had that experience or who had fled because the time had come for Jews to leave.  

EE:  Did you stay in contact with them?

SC:  I stayed in contact with both of them.  One was three years older than me, and one was one year older, I think.  The younger one changed his name from Carl to Dovid.  He moved to Chicago, and I stayed in touch with him.  The older one, Manfred, kept his name.  I think they both became academicians.  Both became professors.  But I think Dovid made aliyah after there was an Israel – because this was pre-Israel – and Manfred stayed in the United States.  I have not kept in touch in the past number of years.

EE:  So, what was the environment at your home during [and] preceding the war?

SC:  The environment was as it was in East Baltimore.  My father received “guests” – we called them “guests” – from overseas.  And, whether they were from the Yishuv, Europe, or whether they were from the German community specifically, they would come, and the adults would have meetings and gatherings, and there would be information sharing.  I was never excluded, but I confess that I wasn’t always interested either, being a child.  So, we – that is, my brother and I – would discuss it with my parents at dinner.  My father would tell me who was there, what the situation was, and what was happening, etcetera.  So, it was a home that never isolated itself from the rest of the world.  My father was always very interested in social justice.  And I remember that once he wrote a letter to the editor of the Morning Sun.  I didn’t say anything to him when he showed me the letter, but I thought: they’ll never print this letter because it’s from my father and my father has no name recognition, is nobody, he’s just another American.  And lo and behold, the letter was printed.  And I was very proud.  It led to a discussion that this was a wonderful country where someone could come from nothing, in essence, and could nevertheless find a place to express concern if he wrote sufficiently well.  In this case there was something that took place in Baltimore and my father was very disturbed at the result of whatever action had taken place and had to write about it.  And he did.  He continued to do that throughout his life.

EE:  But it also suggested his command of the language had really improved.

SC:  Oh absolutely.  He played “Jumble” in the newspaper; he used every opportunity to improve his language.  He read English, as well as Hebrew and Yiddish.  My uncle worked crossword puzzles, and frequently, they would exchange conversations about a word and what does the word mean.  They learned.  They were both determined to learn the language well and they both did.,

EE:  What do you remember about the war? The period of the war?  Am I moving too quickly? 

SC:  No.  I have a vivid memory.  I knew about Kristallnacht, and I knew basically what was happening because of the two boys, Carl and Manfred.  It wasn’t until they graduated Forest Park High School, as a matter of fact, I believe I was Manfred’s date to the prom.  He didn’t know any girl, and he wanted to go to the prom, so he asked me.  I think that was my first date, my first prom, of which I remember nothing, to be perfectly honest.  But I do remember that I was at school, at the Baltimore Hebrew College – remember that was a high school at that time – in December when we went to war.  Someone came into the classroom after noon that Sunday in December and said, “We’re at war, we’re at war.”  And although they didn’t dismiss the school, when we did get out at one o’clock, that’s all that anyone talked about.  In those days, we did not have radios that we could turn to immediately, so we all went home very concerned over, one, what going to war meant, and two, who would be going.  By that time, I was fifteen, and I was working with and meeting with people who were seventeen and eighteen.  And eighteen meant you’d be drafted.  So I wondered which of my friends and associates would go to war.  It was a very chilling experience.  I vividly remember standing on the corner of Eutaw and Dolphin on that Sunday morning and knowing that the world was going to change for a while.  I didn’t know how, but I knew it was going to change for a while.  

EE:  And do you remember anyone from your immediate community that left?

SC:  Immediately? No.  But little by little we heard about those who were leaving, the young men who were leaving – my mother’s friends’ sons by and large.  My brother was too young to go then.  He went during the Korean War.  And it wasn’t too long after that, I think, that my father was called into the National Guard.  That was an interesting experience for my father.  He described it when he came back.  It was interesting, one, because they were trained to protect themselves and others to a degree.  But, more than that, it put him in a society that was foreign to him – non-Jews, who on the weekend were beer drinkers, whose language was different from his, although it was English, and whose concern in the world was very different from his.  It was quite an eye-opener for him because he had never experienced that.  I asked him if he experienced antisemitism, and, to a minor degree, he did, but by and large, they were there for each other and to protect.  So it wasn’t heavy overt antisemitism, but there was some antisemitism.  It was a very interesting experience for him.  A very, what shall I call it, sobering experience, if you will.  It was clear to him that there was a really big difference culturally, and historically.  He could not fit into their world and they certainly could not fit into his.  So, as wonderful as this country was – the melting pot was then the concept, and the melting pot was not going to work.

EE:  Would you say that your father was also affected by his political views?  Was he fairly tenacious?  Were there difficulties there?

SC:  I don’t think so.  I think the men that he was with were probably Democratic.  They were probably, I’m guessing, blue-collar workers.  Who else went into the National Guard at that time?  So, I don’t think there was that difference.  My father obviously was Democratic; he had voted for Roosevelt.  He was the only president I had ever heard of because he was the only one we had at that time for all those years.  Most of the men that he was with also, if they voted, voted Democratic.  So, I don’t think it was the political views.  I have the feeling my father did not discuss issues of the Yishuv or Palestine at all with them if they even knew where it was, which most Americans did not know.

EE:  Now you said when you were fifteen, you were working?

SC:  When I was 15, I worked during the summer at Hutzler’s in the main cashier’s office, which was on the 7th floor.  I had worked as a cashier for my father on Saturdays and Sundays for some years because he only had one cashier, and she had to be relieved and he had to relieve the usher.  There was an usher on weekends only, Mamie, the cashier, and myself as relief cashier.  So, I, too, found myself in the society that I knew I was not part of and could not be part of.  I learned a great deal from them as well.  The movie theater, the Pic Theatre, was in southwest Baltimore.  Southwest Baltimore was near Pigtown, a totally Christian community with a different economic level, different educational level, and a level of life, which was led very openly and was very different from the life I knew.  

EE:  Now, I’ve missed this transition to the movie theater.

SC:  Well, the movie theater had been purchased, I think, after Norfolk Avenue, somewhere around the Fairview Avenue move.  My father had enough money to purchase a movie theater, and the movie theater was in Southwest Baltimore.  It was a small theater – seated about four hundred.  I used to go there.  It took three streetcars to get there – two transfers.  I think I was twelve – that means Fairview Avenue – when I began going down there to help him as relief cashier.  There were certain that we knew appealed – that my father knew appealed to the populace.  When he wanted to make certain that that week or that month, there would be reasonable income, he would play those movies, and people never failed to come.  Never failed to come.  There were movies where we had people waiting in lines around the block.  And there were movies where we didn’t have people waiting in line.  There was a large movie theater a block away, a very nice theater, far more decorative and expensive and much larger – probably twice as large.  I never went into it.  I have no idea who owned it, and it really didn’t make any difference to me because I was there helping my father.  I had no relationship with the neighborhood outside of the movie [theater.]  I don’t recall ever going into a store nearby or getting to know anyone who was not in the movie house itself.  I worked there, and because of the experience of being a cashier there, I was able to apply to Hutzler’s.  I don’t recall why I applied to Hutzler’s, but I do recall that it was the summer, and I wanted to earn some money, and that was the logical place to go because I knew how to be a cashier.

EE:  Why don’t you tell me about Hutzler’s and the whole downtown scene?

SC:  Hutzler’s was a fascinating place as a customer and as an employee.  It was where the elite would meet.  The Hutzler’s Tea Room was elegant.  Hats and gloves and very fine-looking ladies and genteel manners and food that was different from that which we prepared at home.  A very exciting place to be, and if and when I would make an appointment or go with my mother to Hutzler’s Tea Room, that was the epitome of a social afternoon.  Hutzler’s had a basement, which also had an eating area.  That eating area had a counter and small tables.  Very different atmosphere.  Food was fine.  Very different atmosphere.  One ate there when one was in a hurry, or shopping, or trying to get something done.  It wasn’t a social afternoon.  It was, “Let’s go buy whatever it is we need.”  And in between were all the departments.  I thought Hutzler’s was elegant, and I still believe Hutzler’s was elegant.  The staff were very, very well trained.  When I worked as cashier – because I was the youngest by decades on that staff, my responsibility was to go to each of the cash registers and collect the cash that had not been sent up through the vacuum tubes.  There were two stores at the time that I began working at there.  Hutzler’s had a store where the entrance on Saratoga Street as well as the entrance on Howard Street.  I had to do both buildings.  I determined for myself – because they didn’t tell me how to do it – except: “You never take an elevator when you have money.  You have to use the stairwells.”  I had very good exercise because the cashier’s office was on the seventh floor, and I had to go all the way down to the basement to collect from each of the cashier stations.  I recall that I decided I would do one building at a time.  I wouldn’t do both buildings at once.  So, I collected everything in what I called “the Howard Street building” and took it upstairs and then collected everything on the Saratoga Street side, which wasn’t much because it didn’t have as many registers.  The women who worked there were in their forties and fifties.  For the first time, I heard the word “menopause” and began to learn that there is a passage in life in which the body is “physically assaulted,” according to them.  It was a very interesting conversation in which I just listened.  They were very nice to me because they did teach me the difference between what I had been doing in the movie theater, which was handling eleven-cent and fifteen-cent admission fees, and here, where I opened up the drawer with thousands.  We counted the money that came from the bank every morning because we deposited it every night – also, thousands, but then it was tens of thousands.  I realized that money was a commodity.  I also realized that there are people who have no idea of hygiene and handling money.  Money came from the strangest sources on people’s bodies.  The seventh floor was the bill-paying area.  So, people who came to pay their bills – whether it was two dollars or twenty dollars or fifty dollars – pulled cash out of the weirdest locations in their body, and there was nothing we could do but accept it.  My hands and the other cashiers’ hands were so dirty and so black from handling the filthy money.

EE:  [Laughter] Where was the money coming from?

SC:  Bras.  Panties.  Shoes.  They were just hiding it and making certain they didn’t lose it.  When they got to the cashier’s booth, there was nothing we could do because the cashier’s booth was above waist height, but we could see obviously everything that was going on, and it was quite an interesting experience.  I worked there only for the summer because that fall, I enrolled in the McCoy College at Johns Hopkins University.

EE:  Well, we’re already getting to college, and we haven’t gotten you to high school yet, so why don’t we –?  You said you had gone to School 64.

SC:  Correct.

EE: Maybe you might want to tell me a little about that because that’s a famous school.  

SC:  I don’t know why it’s famous other than the fact that it was an upscale Jewish neighborhood on the other side of what I called – there were no tracks there, but there was a dividing line.  You couldn’t see it because there really was no boundary or border, but you could feel it.  What you could see is that the row houses ended, and single-family houses with land on all four sides began.  So, that was the dividing line.  But the school brought those two communities together because it was the only elementary school in that area.  So, you did have the “names” – the Hoffbergers, the Offits, the upper echelon of the Forest Park area – that was not in private school because a number of them were at Park School and private school.  Those who were not in private school were going to be at 64.  If I recall correctly, there were more boys than girls in the class, and it was an interesting time to come in because it was the beginning of adolescence for most.  Most were eleven and twelve, looking to junior high school.  I don’t recall any particular incident at the school except one, and maybe I just focus on those things.  There was a young boy in our class in the 5th grade who must have been 5’10” or 5’11” and looked like a budding football player, and I believe he was.  He went to City College, I think, and played football.  At any rate, there was a rumor around the school that he was visiting with the art teacher, who was a petite, attractive woman and a very good art teacher.  She taught us how to make marionettes, how to make puppets, and how to put on shows.  She was very talented.  I never knew whether the rumor was correct or not, but it lasted a year and a half.  Nothing was done; there was no action taken.  The boy wasn’t dismissed; the teacher wasn’t fired.  I have no idea what occurred.  But it lasted just long enough for me to believe that it was so.  Now, that was a shock to me because here it is in real life.  Never mind what you see in movies and you read in books, and I was an avid reader.  But to see two people and be able to put them together.  I do recall there was a different relationship in the classroom when the teacher addressed the young man who seemed never to respond, that is, verbally.  I came in at the 5th grade, which meant that I was an interloper or an outsider, and it took me time to break in to get into the group.  I wasn’t really accepted by the group in the 5th and 6th grades – it wasn’t until I went to junior high school with a number of those, again, who were going to public school as opposed to private school.  The 6th-grade teacher I remember very clearly because she was a remarkable woman, as well as a wonderful homeroom teacher.  She taught us English, as well as homeroom, so she had us more than anyone else during the week.  And as a graduation gift, she gave each of us, what shall we call it, not a prophecy but a prediction about what we would be doing.  We graduated.  I was ten and a half or eleven years old.  It would have been 1937.  She gave each one an individual assessment.  I remember one boy was going to be a movie star.  Another was going to be an author.  I remember mine, which is natural because she suggested that I would be in television.  Now, I did not know what television was.  I knew what it was meant to be because I could put “tele” and “vision” together, but I recall and recognized shortly thereafter that she was a brilliant woman.  One, she knew about it; two, she knew how it would operate; and three, she could project into the future.  She prepared all of this for us in couplets and in rhymes and in my case – and I never wrote this down, it just stayed with me – she said, “In 1960” – now this is 1938 at the latest – “1960, when television is here, we will watch you in old London while you broadcast from Algiers.”  Now, that was incredible.  Simply, that’s what she did for all of us, each one being different.  I’ve been fascinated by the fact that the woman was that talented and also able to look into the future and understand what technology was going to do for us, what the world was going to do for us.  I don’t know that she lived to see the technology do what it has done, and I’m not sure she’d appreciate the negative aspects that the technology has brought about.  At any rate, I graduated in ‘64 and went to Garrison Junior High School.  At Garrison Junior High School, I was able to form and bond with some of the young girls who had been with me in the 5th and 6th grades.  During the beginning of the 8th grade, I believe, some of us were offered an opportunity to go to Western High School in what was known as the “A-course.”  The A-course was academically advanced.  It meant that you were planning to go to college and that you would, number one, have more courses than your colleagues, but two, that you would focus on academic training.  I don’t recall the discussion at home.  I don’t recall any issue.  I know that I signed up for it, and that’s where I went.  There were twenty-six of us in the 9th grade when we started at Western High School, and there were sixteen of us in the 10th grade.  The others dropped out and went to the regular Western High curricular programs.  Western High, at that time, offered the advanced academic, the regular, and I believe it offered typing and stenography and so forth for those who were not academically inclined or didn’t think they could go to college.  It was a very intensive four-year program, and because of the war, those of us in the A-course were offered to become members of the first “Victory class, 1942.”  We were the class of ’43.  I’m not certain why this was done by the school board, but they offered those in the Victory class an opportunity to take the one course they hadn’t had in order to qualify for college entrance and leave at the end of the 11th grade and not go through a 12th grade – enter a freshman in college.  Again, I don’t remember any discussion at home whatsoever, and I elected to do that.  There was only one out of our group that did not elect to do it.  She and her father determined that she should stay another year.  At the end of the 11th grade, which was 1942, we then took six or eight weeks of chemistry in order to give us what we needed to graduate.  That probably was one of the least intelligent efforts at educating anyone because we were going with the summer school students.  Summer school students, by and large, were those who did not achieve and, therefore, they were repeating.  At 8:30 in the morning, we opened up the chemistry book to the middle and began in the middle of the chemistry book with terminology, etcetera, that none of us had seen.  And at 10:30, we started at the beginning of the book.  This continued all summer.  I do remember going up to the teacher – and I remember him clearly.  He was from City College, a very charming man by the name of Mr. Palmer.  I remember going up to him, having the courage to go up to him, and saying, “This doesn’t make sense.  I don’t understand how can we start in the middle and then go back to the beginning.  Why can’t we change classes or do something?”  He laughed and said, “No, it’s already set, and you can’t change classes.  Don’t worry, you’ll make it.”  And we did all make it, but it was not an intelligent approach.  It was at Western High School that I came across the first experience that I considered an overt, hostile, antisemitic act.  It was by a teacher.  There were only about three or four of us who were Jewish in this small, special class, and I was the only one who observed the second days [of our holidays].  I was not permitted to forget the fact that I was different.  Tests were given on the second day; assignments were given on the second day.  Whenever I came back, that teacher reminded me that “nobody else in this class missed it.”  I really detested her.  She taught Algebra.  That was Algebra in the 9th grade.  I tried to tell my mother that this was going on, and I really didn’t want to be with that teacher.  But, in those days, my parents felt that teachers were above reproach, and you respected them, etc., and that I would have to adjust.  When, in the 11th grade, I found out that she was to be my teacher again, I really was upset.  But there was nothing I could do.  So, I suffered another year with her.  But it was vicious.  That’s the only way I can describe it.  That’s when I knew that educated people could be antisemitic because my concept was that if you don’t know, and you haven’t learned history, and if you aren’t educated, I can understand antisemitism.  But if you’re educated, and you are a teacher in a high school, and you are antisemitic?  That meant that it could be anybody at any time.  That was a very important lesson – a painful lesson.  But an important lesson.

EE:  So, how was it that you were able to contain yourself?

SC:  I did very poorly in class.  I really did not pay attention.  I didn’t care what the grade was going to be.  I was not going to fail, obviously.  There was nothing that I could say to her.  I did have one argument with her, I do recall, in class, in front of the students, and I promised myself that I wouldn’t do that again.  It’s a no-win situation.  But I hope she didn’t do it to others.  It was terrible.  It was embarrassing.  It was uncomfortable.  It was unnecessary, obviously.  But she couldn’t help herself, I guess.

EE:  Did you have any positive role models in the school besides that one teacher that you talked about at 64?

SC:  Oh, yes.  There were many positive role models.  I don’t recall the other teachers because I only recall the highlights.  As I mentioned, the art teacher was an excellent teacher of art.  I had considered myself totally devoid of any artistic talent and found myself making things look the way that they were supposed to.  Miss Davies, who was the homeroom teacher in the 6th Grade.  I don’t remember, in particular, any teacher in the 7th Grade.  But I don’t remember any negative of 6th, or 7th, or 8th grade.  In the 9th grade, I can remember our English teacher.  Each teacher taught from a different perspective, she said to us.  We had a genius in our class.  We had a young woman who was a Mensa genius, daughter of two professors, and was accustomed to all “A’s.”  This English teacher said, “I don’t give A’s.  I want to tell you that at the beginning of the year because English is a language that you speak, and I’m certain you make mistakes when you are outside of class, etc.  So, the highest grade is 89.”  We all accepted that because that was the highest grade.  That was a very interesting lesson to learn that even if you achieved, you didn’t achieve in this particular case.  We had a History teacher, Miss (Gephardt?), whose knowledge of history was such that she brought it alive.  I could feel the history as we studied with her, and it was basically ancient and middle history, ancient – obviously, European History, Middle Ages history, and up to some American History, but not as intense.  I can remember we had in those days – young women had home economics.  I can remember a teacher who taught us cooking, one who taught us sewing, and one who taught us housekeeping.  There was a session on – I don’t know what they called it – body.  Whatever it was, they taught us about menstruation, what you look for, etc.  That was led by the nurse in school, and someone else came to teach.  We had athletics.  I remember playing softball [and] trying golf.  We had a softball team, and I played on the softball team.  I played basketball, short as I am.  I played on the basketball team and, occasionally, on the ping-pong team.  We had inter-mural sports with the other schools.  The only problem with that was that it was on a Saturday, but my parents let me go, and it was lots of fun.  I enjoyed my high school experience.  One of my closest friends during the three years – 9th, 10th, 11th – was a young Jewish woman.  We had a lot in common.  She was also the first young tragedy I knew of.  She married at nineteen, and she and her husband were sailing from Virginia Beach back to Cape May.  Their boat capsized, and she was never found.  That was also a lesson, understanding that the world is not always what we would like it to be.  I remember my Western years very, very fondly, but they comprised one part of my life because outside of Western, I had another life, and that was still with the Labor Zionist friends whom I had.  It included working because I worked elsewhere.  It included the relationship at home, obviously with my family, and still going to visit my cousin in New Jersey, where I learned a number of very interesting interpersonal relationships.  And they didn’t mix.  And then, there was a third, which was my neighborhood.  Again, I was integrated into the neighborhood.  I had some very, very close friends there.  I never tried to bring any of the groups together.  When I was with the school, I was with the school.  With the neighborhood, I was with the neighborhood.  And, with the Labor Zionists – which was, I found out afterward, an interesting way to live.  Most people don’t do that.  But I did.

EE:  Did you feel comfortable with that?

SC:  Oh, I was very comfortable.  I, basically, do that today.  I do that today.

EE:  What are the advantages to that, do you find?

SC:  I don’t know.  I’ve never tried any other way.  I like this.  It works fine for me.  I’m good.  As they say, “I’m good.”  No, seriously, I will tell you.  It enables me to remain private.  Nobody knows all of me.  I guess that’s what I wanted.  In the beginning, I know I wanted it because there were a lot of challenges, and I didn’t want to share those challenges with anyone.  And afterward, it became a way of life.  

EE:  Do you want to talk about the –?  We haven’t really talked about your social life –you mentioned your “interpersonal experiences” in New Jersey.  

SC:  My social life?  As I said, I think Manfred was the first date, and he took me to his Prom.  I think it was my mother who convinced me that I should go.  I don’t remember being thrilled at the idea.  For my Western High School Junior Prom, as it turned out to be – because we didn’t complete a senior year – four other girls and I dressed in our gowns and went to the Lady of our Lourdes Carnival.  None of us had a date; none of us were dating to any degree.  And we spent the night at the carnival on the Ferris wheel, on the rides, and eating cotton candy, and so forth.  It was the funniest thing in the world.  Now that I think about it, we must have looked like idiots.  But we had a wonderful time.  We had planned in advance to do just that because the carnival was on Liberty Heights Avenue – at the church.  I dated no one with any regularity until way later.  I do remember a few individual dates, and I was very uncomfortable.  I probably was aloof.  I was not the warm, friendly type.  I never approached anyone; I still don’t.  You have to break through that wall to get to me.  I don’t remember anyone, in particular, doing that.  One of my close girlfriends, however, dated quite frequently.  Every now and then, I would date one of her male friends.  She would say, “Why don’t you date so and so, and we will go out together,” which we did.  I’m trying to think.  There was no “going steady” dating or anything in high school.  I’d even have to really think about who I dated in high school, to be perfectly honest.  Social life was more Friday night at a friend’s house after we had supper because we could not go out on Friday night.  A number of us teenagers would congregate on her porch, and we would talk and sing.  A number were very Orthodox, so there was no other type of social engagement.  That was fulfilling.  I didn’t really belong to a sorority.  I didn’t belong to a special group where you automatically are put together.  It wasn’t until Johns Hopkins that I began “dating,” as you would call it, in a fashion.

EE:  Tell me about these sororities.  How do you remember them?

SC:  The only thing I remember about the sororities is that I didn’t want to be one of them, and they sure as heck did not want me.  I attended one sorority tea that I was invited to, and it became very clear to me that I didn’t belong; it became clear to them that they didn’t want me.  That was the end of sororities.  One effort and no more.

EE:  Now, what do you think of the whole notion of having sororities in high school or in junior high school?

SC:  I didn’t know the sororities in high school, to be honest – and, in junior high, this group that went from Garrison Junior High School to Western, in the “A Course” formed a club – not a sorority – called the “Happy-Go-Lucky Club,” which was exactly who we were.  We were a group of young women, young girls, who just wanted to enjoy life, in and out of school.  I think we may have even gone to the point of buying a ring, but I don’t remember.  We would plan activities – one a month or one every two months – which would include, usually, going downtown to the Hippodrome, seeing a show, going someplace to have something to eat.  Nothing at night.  I remember, nothing at night.  We had a wonderful time.  We had what we needed.  This is in retrospect.  We had the group that we belonged to so that we were not isolated because we could not belong to any of the other groups.  The classes were such that we couldn’t engage during the day.  It was only in the athletic activities afterward or in our own group, in our own neighborhood.  We all lived within, I’d say, ten or twelve blocks of each other.  Again, walking was no problem then.  It was a lot of fun.  And, I remember, we giggled, like girls giggled.  We did the things that girls did.  Went for ice cream and went to movies, or something like that.  None of us dated, as such.

EE:  Do you remember there being sort of an insider/outsider social system at school?

SC:  I’m certain there was.  But we were already segregated.  I mean, there were some people who said, “There they are.  They are the ‘A-Course’ girls,” in a tone that was derogatory.  So, we were already isolated because we were different.  People knew that we were different.  We were marked as college-bent.  And not all women went to college in those days.  And we had to – I think ¬– form this group outside of school so that we wouldn’t be only outsiders.  By forming this small group, we were insiders with this group.

EE:  Can you articulate what the “A-Course” meant?

SC:  Yes, the A-course meant that you took five majors, or six majors, instead of four majors and three study periods.  It was more academic work.  It was much more homework.  It was much more intensive because we completed four years of high school in three.  Those who finished the 12th grade under the A-course qualified for the sophomore year in college and based on their grade, did not have to take any exams.  Whereas in other schools, you had to take exams to qualify.  They didn’t even have to take exams.  That’s how strenuous this academic program was.

EE:  So, how did leaving after your junior year affect that ability to go into college?

SC:  I had no problem going into – at that time, Johns Hopkins did not accept women in the day school, in the full university.  It was in the McCoy College, which were afternoon classes, beginning at 4:00 o’clock.  My father did give me the choice of going to Goucher or Hopkins.  Goucher would have meant the same girls in the sorority who did not want me.  I had no intention of going to Goucher.  I was more comfortable in the company of men, anyway, in discussions, in academic circles.  So, I went to McCoy College.  But the fact is, that it was a war.  It was 1942, September 1942, and the number of men in college courses was diminishing every day based on the recruitment.  We were “permitted” – I use that word with quotes – if we wished to take day courses with the professors who taught at the University.  So, since I wasn’t working and I really wanted to have a substantial education, I opted to take day courses as well as evening courses.  That’s what I did until February ‘45.  And then we moved.

EE:  Where did you move?

SC:  We moved to California.

EE:  I don’t want to get to California yet because I have a few more questions back in Forest Park.  You talked about the classes and also the public versus private schools.  My guess is there is public school, private schools, and private parochial schools.  I wonder if you could talk a little about –

SC:  There was no private parochial school that I knew of other than the Yeshiva on Maine Avenue.  Occasionally, when I was at Hopkins, I dated some of those young men because they went to Loyola, and I went to Hopkins.  I don’t know if any of them took courses at Hopkins.  I don’t know exactly how we came to date.  When I say “date,” it was probably about five or six maximum.  My impression in high school, because I knew there was a Park School, was that by and large, the German-Russian split which existed in Baltimore manifested itself in Park School, where I knew there were German Jews being exclusive and not exclusively Jewish, and in Forest Park High School and City College – because City College was the equivalent of Western High School.  Academically, it was very, very successful.  It had also, I believe, a Victory Class.  I’m not certain, I don’t recall, but it must have offered the same option to graduate at the end of the third year, 11th grade, as opposed to going a full four years.  We didn’t mix.  In the neighborhood in which I was living, there were no people who were dating people who lived in the more affluent area of Forest Park or the people who went to Park School.  They were separate communities, and they stayed that way, and I imagine that’s quite normal.  They were with the people whom they knew the best.  Their socio-economic levels were parallel, comparable, and they were comfortable that way.  There was very little crossing the line.  Very little crossing the line.  We knew where we belonged.  That was another thing.  In those days, one understood the parameters, the barriers, and limitations.  If you were foolish enough or courageous enough to try to break through, you did.  Otherwise, you stayed with your own group.  

EE:  How would you contrast that would how things are today?

SC:  Oh, today, I think it’s very fluid.  Today, we have places where people of all backgrounds can meet.  A mall, for example, which did not exist then, affords the opportunity; a multiplex theater affords the opportunity.  Those opportunities didn’t exist then.  You couldn’t by accident fall into an area where these people were meeting – the people whom you may have wanted to meet [if ]you were not part of a group.  It was very difficult to accidentally get there.

EE:  Talk a little bit about the German-Russian schism here in Baltimore.

SC:  I knew about it – not because we’re Russian, but I knew about it because there were two country clubs that were Jewish: the Suburban Country Club, which was founded by the German Jews, and the Woodholme Country Club, founded basically by Russian Jews, who either could not get into Suburban, which, I understand, was the case, or decided that they wanted to be with their own landsman.  There was very little exchange between the two groups.  Very little.  Downtown, there were, I think, two what you would call “city clubs” – the Mercantile, which was a Russian Club, primarily, and, I believe, the Phoenix Club, which, I believe, was German, primarily.  Then, for young people, you had the YMHA [Young Men's Hebrew Association], which was on Monument Street – which definitely was not for either group that could belong to a country club.  It was for people who couldn’t belong, or didn’t want to belong – and the JEA, Jewish Educational Alliance, further down on Baltimore Street.  It was almost a ladder of progression, if you will.  You went from one to the second to the third, and in each step, you moved up in a socio-economic way.  It was very interesting, very stratified, very structured.  The people who belonged to the Reform Temples around the Eutaw Place area were one group of people, and the people who went to the synagogues in the Park Heights and Forest Park area were another group of people.  Again, there was that distinction.  It lasted a very long time.  A very long time.

EE:  Were you aware of any specific events or tensions that brought the two groups together or pitted them against each other?

SC:  Not until much later.  It really wasn’t two groups that were pitted against each other.  I knew that there were differences in philosophy with regard to a Jewish State because I knew that Jacob Blaustein did not want a separate Jewish State.  I don’t know what was said, but the rabbi of Baltimore Hebrew Congregation left, at the request of the congregation, because of something to do with the making of a Jewish State.  I knew that the – I think it was called – the American Council for Judaism, which was anti-Israel, was very strong in Baltimore.  That was the antithesis of what my parents, I, and our friends had been working for.  So, I knew that existed here, but I was never involved in any of that.

EE:  Do you remember specific incidents that brought the groups together?

SC:  The groups came together afterward with the wars in Israel.  I remember a mass meeting – a mass rally – at Baltimore Hebrew Congregation in 1967.  For me, that was a wonderful sign because everybody who was interested came.  Here, we met in a Reform Temple, which, for some, had been sort of off-limits.  We didn’t go to Reform Temples.  So, the community came together in ‘67.  I don’t recall as much in ’56, although there was a serious problem with the Sinai Campaign in ‘56.  The community began to work together somewhere around the ‘60s.  Probably ’67.  The community, as a community, recognized that differences of opinion existed but that it had to work together as a community.  Then, we were very fortunate because we had an executive at the Associated [Jewish Charities] who was a community builder.  He worked very hard during his administration here to bring the community together – to make it a cohesive, coordinated community.  Albeit the differences would remain and people would have their priorities and their interests, but as a community, we could address issues that should be addressed by a Jewish Community in a collaborative way.  He worked very hard to break down the barriers, and he was successful in breaking them down.  We’ve been successful that the two executives who have succeeded him have made that a critical part of their assignments here, and so we have a much more integrated community now.

EE:  Who is this you are talking about?

SC:  Robert Hiller.  Robert I.  Hiller was the executive.  I believe he came in in 1963.  

EE:  Okay.  I think that’s kind of another whole subject –

SC:  Yes, it’s a whole subject.  It’s another era.

EE:  Yes.  So, why don’t we get – we’ve got you –

SC:  You have me entering Johns Hopkins.  Some interesting things that I was doing at the same time that I was finishing high school.  In the Labor Zionist field, for example, it became clear to those of us who were ready to listen that the Holocaust was taking place, and it was very tragic that people were being identified.  They hadn’t yet begun the mass slaughter, but there was enough antisemitism in Europe to frighten everyone.  I remember that the Labor Zionist Movement sent us an emissary, a shlichah from the Yishuv.  For the first time – when I think about it, it is quite interesting – for the first time, we went on the air.  Now, they used to bring their materials, which some people call “propaganda,” which I called “literature to read so you understood what was going on.”  Scripts were developed for us, I believe.  I don’t believe we wrote our own scripts.  One of the young men, Marvin Braiterman, and I were chosen to do a series of Sunday morning radio broadcasts dealing with what was happening in Palestine and the history of how it became the important issue that it was for some of us.  Again, when I think about that, it identified the fact that my voice was a voice that others could listen to or would listen to and that I could articulate what needed to be articulated.  He, the same.

EE:  When was this?

SC:  It could not have been later than 1942.  It could not have been later, that I can recall.

EE:  So, how was it that you had already begun to distinguish yourself as a spokesperson?

SC:  I don’t know.  I do know that my mother, every now and then, was responsible for programs at the Pioneer Women, as they were called then.  They’re now Na’amat.  Evidently, a speaker did not show up at one of the occasions or was not going to show up, and my mother said, “You are going to go with me tonight, and you will recite Hebrew and Yiddish poetry.”  I thought, "This woman is really off.”  I said, “No, I’m not.”  She said, “Yes, you are because we don’t have a program, and you’re going to be there anyway.  So, you will recite.”  I don’t remember anything between the third-grade role as the King and that evening when I was about to recite, ever being public or visible that way.  I do remember being terrified.  I was so nervous it was unbelievable.  But I found out that my knees don’t shake or knock, and my voice doesn’t tremble.  Inside, I may be in turmoil, but it’s not visible from the outside.  I remember distinctly reciting whatever I recited in Hebrew because I did know Hebrew, I did read it, and I was very comfortable with it.  I’m not sure how many women understood it.  When I came to the Yiddish poem, I was in about the third stanza, and my mind went blank.  I wanted to absolutely disappear.  I recovered.  I don’t remember what I said, and I know it wasn’t part of the poem.  But whatever it was, it was successful, and the women were very, very happy.  They applauded, and that was that.  About two years later – because I wasn’t very political or paying attention, my mother said, “You should run for President of the youth group,” Habonim Youth Group.  I had been in the youth group for two or three years, so I knew everybody.  Running for President had not been on my agenda.  Number one, I was the youngest, by far, somewhere between one and a half and two years younger than the others.  It was because of the school process.  I had skipped the high first – you had a low and a high first when I went to school.  Then, I skipped the low second.  In other words, I went from entry – let’s say in September – and by the time we arrived at February, they recognized that I knew enough to move me to the next grade.  The following September, when I entered school, they moved me again to the next grade.  So, I was way ahead.  Then, finishing a year early from high school, I was in college.  So I went to college when I was fifteen and a half.  But my social life was with those with whom I felt that I could engage intelligently.  So, my social life would have been two years older – seventeen and so forth.  At any rate, it was the same thing in the Labor Zionist Group.  I said, “I don’t think that they’re going to have me, number one.  I don’t know whether I want it,” etc.  I don’t remember the details.  The next thing I knew was I was president.  That’s probably how I came to this role.  

EE:  Well, let’s talk about college, what you did at Hopkins or McCoy College, and what you thought you wanted to do.  Had you really thought about what you wanted to do when you grew up?

 SC:  I thought I wanted to be an attorney.  I didn’t want to be a writer, although, at that time, I wrote fairly well.  I didn’t want to be a public figure in the sense of actress, dramatist, radio, or anything – not until later, when I was interested in radio.  After this experience and my sense that I could do radio, I went and took whatever courses were required.  I remember in our English Program, Dr. N. Bryllion Fagin was the professor.  He ran an amateur theater group and taught us how to act in theater.  He also taught me probably the most important piece of information I’ve ever received, which is: “To be educated is not to know everything; it is to know how to find out the answer to everything.” That was very, very good.  I remember that.  I remember playing in Little Theater while I was at Hopkins, in various plays.  I remember not being one of the best.  But then, I don’t know that I tried the hardest, either, because that really wasn’t – my heart was not in that as a career.  I remember the history courses, the English courses.  I will close differently.  We moved from Fairview Avenue.  We were there for four years, and then we moved to a single-family house on Boarman Avenue.  I don’t recall much about that, except that it was socially isolated for me.  I had no friends on that block.  I had no friends around that block.  My friends were either back in –

[END OF CD 2] 

EE:  Today is September 7, 2001.  This is Elaine Eff with the Jewish Women’s Archive “Weaving Women’s Words.”  I am interviewing Shoshana Cardin.  This is the third tape of our interviews.  We are still in Baltimore.  We actually have been moving along, as your family moves along from neighborhood to neighborhood.  I think we have just made it to Boarman Avenue.

SC:  Correct.

EE:  So, why don’t we sort of pick up.  Why don’t you tell me about that move, and what that meant to your family and when it was in your life?

SC:  Well, Boarman Avenue occurred as I graduated Western.  So we were living at Boarman Avenue when I went to Johns Hopkins’ McCoy College.  At that point, I could not keep up with the activities, which were afternoon or evening activities, because McCoy College began at four o’clock in the afternoon, since it was intended, initially, for teachers to benefit from the curricular offerings.  So that meant that the social aspects of my life had to change.  Indeed, they did because my friends were primarily at that time, other than the ones I kept previously, my girlfriends were those whom I met at school.  The war was on, so those who were at school were limited in number as far as male students were concerned, and even female students, which meant that we had small classes and excellent professors.  It was a good time to learn.  I still helped my father out at the movie theater, although he was getting ready to sell it.  He had a sense of some other business that he wanted to get into.  I don’t remember that much about Boarman Avenue per se, except that it took, I think, two streetcars and a bus to get to Hopkins. [laughter] But that wasn’t unusual in those days.  My mother and father decided to take their honeymoon while we lived on Boarman Avenue.  I think it was the second year.  I must have been sixteen or seventeen at the time.  They went to California by train.  They were gone a few weeks.  When my mother came back, she said she felt very good in California.  They were in Southern California most of the time.  It was a possibility that that weather was better for her physical condition than the dampness in Baltimore because she was arthritic.  My father was anxious anyway to go to another climate more like Israel’s climate.  I did not hear more about that until the following year, 1944, where my father decided to sell property that he had bought.  He had bought an apartment building on Eutaw Place and decided to sell that property, which could give him enough resources to move west to LA in his own mind because it was better for my mother physically, and I think he was ready to leave Baltimore anyway.  He had done whatever it was he could do and wanted to get to the kind of climate that he was interested in – very different from ours.  We planned to move rather suddenly at the end of January ‘45.  The reason that we chose that date was that I was in school, and the semester ended [in] January, and if we drove cross-country, we could make it in time for the February semester.  I had already researched it, and I was going to go to UCLA.  We drove cross country in five and a half days.  We drove cross-country in the middle of a war when you needed ration stamps for everything, from gasoline to sugar to leather – everything that you wanted required some stamp.  My father had traded stamps for other things in order to get enough gasoline stamps to get across the country, which took a good bit of doing.  Obviously, he wanted to do that.  We had kept the stamps to trade that would give us sugar, the possibility of trading something for eggs, and for leather because we didn’t need shoes.  At any rate, it was a very interesting cross-country experience.  We took the Southern route because it was wintertime.  There were two cities where we stopped where there were no hotel rooms available.  In Birmingham, we slept in the ballroom.  The ballroom had been set up for multiple beds, if necessary.  Evidently, there were people traveling who were unexpected.  There were soldiers, sailors, and marines coming back who were traveling and could not have made – or did not make – reservations in advance.  So, this hotel was prepared to take large numbers.  The night we were there, there were no guests.  So the three of us were in this huge ballroom, which they let us rent at a reasonable rate.  The weather was very bad for several days.  We went through serious storms, and at one point, we were struck by lightning.  But a car is grounded.  You could smell the tires burning, literally.  You could smell the burn, and we felt the shock of the lightning bolt.  But, other than being terrified for a few moments, we were fine.  My father did not lose control of the car; he was a very good driver.  We kept driving west.  Even though I knew that there were Prisoner of War camps, I had never seen one in the East.  We were driving through Arizona, I believe, when we saw our first Prisoner of War camp.  Outside of that camp was a young soldier.  Obviously, he was looking for a ride because this camp was in the middle of nowhere.  My father said, “I think we should pick him up.”  My mother hesitated because this was a two-door car, and I was the passenger in the back, and that meant that the young man was going to sit next to me, and here she was, letting her daughter sit with a strange young man in the back of the car, and, if he were going to California, we were talking about hours and hours of driving.  At any rate, we did decide to pick him up.  I felt sorry for anybody who was stuck there, because, obviously, this was his leave.  It was fortuitous that we did.  We had a very interesting conversation.  He was not Jewish, of course – or, why, of course? – but, he was not Jewish, and he told us stories about the prisoners who came and were in the camps.  We began going up the mountains, and on the top of a very, very steep incline – and in those days, I don’t know if they’ve changed, there was nothing to stop you from going over the side of the road and falling one thousand or two thousand feet – we had a flat tire.  I thought to myself, “It was a mitzvah that we picked him up because he’s about to return the mitzvah.”  He and my dad changed the tire at a curve.  I’ll never forget this.  I just prayed no car would come – in either direction – so that nothing would happen.  It was impossible to see us if they were coming west – if they were coming east, it was impossible for us to see them coming from behind us because we had already made the turn.  At any rate, without incident, the tire was changed, and we drove another two or three hours, and then he got out to go wherever he was going.  He had told us where he was going.  I don’t recall.  But I know it wasn’t to LA.  We left him someplace before we reached LA.  Finally, we reached LA.  I had never been there, so I didn’t know what to expect.

EE:  Where was your brother Zvi?

SC:  Oh, my brother was in high school.  He was finishing the last semester of high school and was living with Gedaliah and Chana Cohen, my parent’s closest friends.  They had three sons, and it was natural for him to live there.  I believe their sons went to Forest Park High School, as well.  If I may digress, the son of one of our friends’ children – three children – just had a terrible tragedy.  Vadi Cohen was the name of the young man who was my brother’s age.  He had a son by the name of Amran, who lived in Israel and who was a very famous cardiac specialist for children.  He had done over seven hundred cardiac operations, saving children who came from Third World countries and children who could not be saved, according to their physicians, etcetera.  He went on a brief vacation with his daughter, who, I believe, is either sixteen or seventeen, and they were climbing Mt.  Kenya, and he died two weeks ago from – I guess it was the atmosphere was too thin for him.  Altitude sickness is what they called it, which is a terrible tragedy.  It’s a terrible loss not only to the family but also to the world because he was a young man, brilliant, doing wonderful work.  At any rate, my brother stayed with them until June of ‘45.  Then he took the bus to come out to California.  He also had a very interesting ride getting there.  We had no place to live that we knew of, so we went to the Jewish section, which was called Boyle Heights – B-O-Y-L-E Heights.  I recall very little of it, except that I didn’t like it.  Somehow, it reminded me of the negative parts of East Baltimore.  My mother liked it less.  So, we began looking for a place to live.  In about three- or four-weeks’ time, we bought a house on Olympia Avenue, which was near what was called “the Miracle Mile,” off of Wilshire Boulevard.  Wilshire Boulevard was the main street in those days.  It was not too far from Fairfax, which was the Jewish section, but far enough that you couldn’t walk it, and certainly not with groceries.  It had the May Company Department Store nearby, which is where we saw Hedy Lamarr and other actresses.  We were not terribly impressed, although she was gorgeous.  But, we had no phone, my mother had no car – she did not know how to drive, we had no friends, we had no family, and isolation became a very serious problem.  I was busy every day because I took the bus to go to UCLA.  I had taken the bus from Boyle Heights to go to UCLA because the semester started literally two days after we arrived.  I took a bus to get to what was the Bus Center.  It was the first time I saw it because the West is definitely more advanced or gets to it earlier than we do.  It was the first time I had seen dozens of people standing in line but going in a line which was moving because you picked up your orange juice at one counter, you walked around and picked up your coffee at another counter, walked around if you wanted a donut or something, because there were no bagels then, at the third.  But you kept walking in a line, and then, you paid as you went out.  If you wanted to eat, there were only stand-up stations; there was no possibility of sitting.  There were hundreds of people.  I was in just one of these many, many breakfast areas.  Hundreds of people were going by, standing in line, taking what they wanted, in a hurry – in and out in probably three minutes or four minutes.  I was fascinated.  I’d never seen anything like that.  I soon became adept at it because that’s the only way we could get there.  At any rate, when we moved to Olympia, it was much easier because then I could have breakfast, take the bus, and go to UCLA.  I signed up for my classes.  I made friends.  My classmates were interesting people, not everyone, obviously, but some of them were very interesting.  Went through that semester, and then, my brother came at the end of June.  I don’t think he was there two weeks – maybe three – when he decided that he didn’t like California.  My mother had already decided she didn’t like California, which was very difficult.  We had just left in January; this was June.  In August, the decision was made that my parents and my brother were going back.  I had to make a decision, and my decision was that I wasn’t going back.  I was not doing my senior year over because that’s what you had to do.  You had to spend at least two years before you’d get your degree – and I loved California.  It was a very laid-back, comfortable, interesting place to be, fascinating for a teenager such as myself.  I said, “No.  I’m not going back with you,” which was a blow to my mother because she had assumed that we would all go back.  After all, she had just been separated from her son for six months, and now she knew it would be a year for her daughter.  But I felt that that was not for me, and frankly, I did not think it was fair for me to be taken to California and then taken back home.  I also recognized that there would be a serious problem when they went back to Baltimore.  Chances were that they would not be able to get the type of house we lived in before.  Chances were that they would not be able to get back any of their belongings because they gave everything away.  They either gave it away, or they gave it to charity, or they gave it to their friends, and I just could not foresee that anyone would give anything back, which meant that my mother, particularly – because my father wasn’t too interested in material things – would have to start all over again and probably at a lesser level than she had left, which is what happened when they went back to Baltimore.  I don’t know where they stayed initially.  I’ve forgotten.  But they ended up buying a furnished row house.  I understood why – because they had nothing, no furniture or anything, because we left – whatever we had in LA was for LA, and that was sold, along with the house there.  I spent that year at UCLA.  It was a difficult year, again, because I had no support system there and very little money.

EE:  Tell me where you lived and what your social life was like there or how it differed from your social life in Baltimore.

SC:  It was very different from my social life in Baltimore.  I didn’t have any lifelong friends.  I did not find a Zionist youth group such as the one I knew, although through Dance Theater we did have a woman who came who was making a short film on ethnic dances.  She had posted on the bulletin board a call for volunteers to participate in Israeli – it wasn’t Israeli then – but Hebrew dances, Chalutz dances from the Yishuv.  I signed up and learned how to do some of the dances.  I knew some of them because I had learned them at Habonim, but others I learned.  It was a very interesting experience.  I did not have the type of friends because I did not have the time to develop them.  I had one very close friend, a young Jewish woman whose father owned the largest Jewish supermarket in Fairfax, who invited me to her home every week.  She obviously came to school by bus, as well.  There were no dorms at that time for women.  I would go to her house several weekends in a row.  It was her friends – male and female – with whom I became friendly.  But I recognized that the entree was through Shirley.  Shirley’s parents were wonderful to me.  They were very warm and caring people, very hard-working people, and just appreciated the fact that I was keeping Shirley company while Shirley was keeping me company.  I can recall there were several dates where I did not have the wardrobe that was appropriate – whatever the appropriate wardrobe was, in those days, I believe it was skirts and sweaters.  Shirley offered to lend me a cashmere sweater.  Well, you have to understand that I had heard the word “cashmere,” but I’d never seen it.  I had never felt it.  I knew that it was something rare and precious.  She had a drawer full of them, and she lent it to me, which I thought was very, very generous.  Living was difficult.  The Dean of Women would put a bulletin board sign up saying: “The following are licensed to accept female students – up to five students per house.  Apply.” There were phone numbers there.  It was a process for all of us who were from out of town to apply to various people to see if we would be accepted.  The antisemitism was very clear, even though it was late enough in the War to know what had happened and what was happening in the Holocaust.  It took me three efforts to get to a place where I was accepted for who I was, not what I was; where it was comfortable for me, where I was comfortable with the family, and the family was comfortable with me.  There were five of us there.   Eventually, there were five of us living there.  That’s how Mrs.  Nestor added to her income.  We paid for room and board – a very small sum of money, as I recall.  I think it was somewhere around twenty-five or thirty dollars a month.  Those of us who did have stamps would share the stamps with her so that she could do the cooking that was necessary.  It was just she, her husband, and a daughter, who was a young teenager.  I believe she was twelve at the time I moved in.  Getting to school was not easy because the buses didn’t run on the school schedule.  So, I hitchhiked to get to school.  I met some very interesting people hitchhiking as well.  It was a very free and open society.  The largest social framework in which I found myself was in Dance Theater.  I’m not certain what motivated me to go to Dance Theater, but I did.  We auditioned, and I was invited to join.  About two or three weeks after I joined, I was asked if I would be the Executive Director because the then-Executive Director wanted to relieve herself of those responsibilities.  She was a graduate student and had been Executive Director for about a year and a half.  I have no idea why they selected me, because there was a whole group of about thirty of us, or why they thought I could be the administrator for this process.  UCLA would put on a major show each year.  By major, I mean they would take either a Broadway Show or a movie that was very successful and put on a full production.  There was a Drama Department, a Dance Department, a Movie/Film Department, etcetera, because we were at UCLA, and the production studios frequently came there for background shots.  Students would serve as background individuals walking around, etcetera.  I found it a very interesting experience.  I had not administered anything that I was aware of, but I soon found out that I was a rather successful coordinator and administrator in that I could engage people in what it was they had to do, and I could have it on time, as it should be, etc.  So, I became the student-teacher/administrator of the Dance Theater.  That meant that I was working with the faculty all the time.  The play that was chosen that year was “Lady in the Dark,” which was a very, very successful but dramatic musical and not necessarily one that was happy.  We had to have male dancers because “Lady in the Dark” required, in the dream sequences, a number of male dancers.  Ginger Rogers played the role in the movies, and we had several women who tried out for that role and one, Barbara, who was outstanding in the role.  The other interesting thing was that several of us had a chance to try on her costume – Ginger Roger’s costume.  Ginger Rogers could not have been much more than 5’5” based on her costume because it fit me.  So, I felt very good about that.  We then had to audition male students for the dance sequences.  We didn’t want all-female dance sequences.  Now, this was ‘46.  A number of male students had returned from the War, but they were all much older than the college students at this time.  It was my responsibility to audition them and accept or reject them.  I was very uncomfortable because I had never done that before, and I didn’t quite understand.  But I found myself in that position, and I had to do it.  So, we put a call out for male students to dance; they would be dancing as couples, not as solo.  Surprisingly enough, we had about thirty who applied.  So, we held auditions on three different days, picked the cast for the dance sequences, and then picked the women for the dance sequences and had a remarkable play.  I mean, it was very well accepted, done very, very professionally.  We had all the raves and reviews.  In addition to that, for my own dance experience, I participated in what was called “Modern Dance” of a different fashion, doing dancing in sequence – a visit from a visitor.  I was a young woman visiting who had come from Arkansas, who had gone to New York City.  It was my responsibility to interpret what New York City meant to me through dance, which was fascinating.  I had a wonderful time with that.  At any rate, that’s what occupied most of my time.  So that my social life wasn’t the normal dating, and going out to dinner, etc.  I did date several individuals, one of whom wanted to marry me.  I knew I wasn’t ready, one, for marriage, and certainly not for him.  Lovely young man.  Came from an apartment larger than any house I’d ever seen, and I thought that that was fascinating and a learning experience.  At any rate, I graduated.  Our orchestra at the time of graduation was David Rose, which was quite an orchestra.  I did not have a date for graduation or for prom because there wasn’t anyone that I felt that I wanted to invite.  My mother’s birthday was celebrated on July 1st, and I realized that I should go home for her birthday because she had missed me all year, and it wasn’t fair for me not to go back for her birthday, fully intending to return to California in September of ‘46.  So, I came home.  It was the first time I flew.  It was interesting.  I wrote to my parents, asking them if it would make any difference to them whether I took the train or I flew, and my father wrote back that the price was not that dissimilar.  In-between that letter and my response to him was a major train wreck outside of Chicago on the Cross-Country Flyer.  So, Abba wrote and said, “Choose whatever you want because, obviously, one is as bad as the other if you’re in trouble.” I chose to fly.  What I didn’t realize – I had never been in a plane before – was we could not leave from the LA airport.  They had to transport us an hour and a half away – because LA.  was fogged in, which I recognized was the normal condition for LA.  It was foggy every morning that I went to school.  You couldn’t see the bridge that you were walking over until you were on the bridge.  But for some reason, I didn’t think it would be there at 2 a.m. – and they left at 2 a.m. to go east.  So they drove us an hour and a half by bus to – I think it was the Long Beach Airport.  It was a small plane.  I think it was a C-47, an Army plane.  I had a ticket to the next stop.  There were nine stops going cross-country, and I had a ticket to the next stop.  I had a validated ticket to go across country, but any serviceman who was returning home had the right to occupy any seat.  Therefore, you had to be prepared to be bumped.  I guess I was young-looking – the stewardess said to me, “If you don’t want to lose your seat, fall asleep ten minutes before every landing because I won’t wake you, and I don’t think that anyone else will,” which was very, very good advice so that I was never bumped.  I was supposed to fly into Washington, then I was going to take the train to Baltimore.  But we hit a terrible, terrible storm.  We stopped in Kansas.  We stopped in Chicago.  We stopped, as I said, nine stops.  We had to land in Pittsburgh because the weather was too bad to continue going on.  So, from Pittsburgh, I waited for a train.  When I got to Washington, I waited for another train.  It took me twenty-six hours to get home.  I arrived four o’clock in the morning at the train station, and, fortunately, there was a cab.  I took the cab to go home to a house I’d never seen before.  Of course, my mother and my father were delighted – although they’d been worried because I didn’t call at every stop to say, “I’m okay.”  It wasn’t necessary, I didn’t think.  At any rate, we celebrated Mother’s birthday, and I began to look for a summer job.  I wanted to earn some money because I wanted to go back to California and because I thought that that was the right thing to do.  I’d come home with a degree in English – a Bachelor’s in English, which really wasn’t anything to talk about – except that not everybody completed college.  I went to work – I went to apply.  I didn’t want to be a cashier anymore, so I applied for a job, because of the salary that was offered, to work as a jewelry repair helper at S & N Katz on Charles Street.  I knew nothing about jewelry repair, except that I liked jewelry, and I applied for the position.  I met the woman who was in charge of all the repairs, and she explained to me what my job would be.  I certainly wasn’t going to repair watches.  But I could repair wristbands, and I could repair bracelets, and I could repair other things.  I said, “Fine.  It sounds reasonable, and I can take that job.”  If I’m not mistaken, they offered me twenty-seven dollars a week, and I said, “I won’t work for twenty-seven dollars a week.  If I come here, it has to be thirty dollars,” which was a little courageous of me because I didn’t have any other job.  I went home because they didn’t offer me the thirty dollars.  I went home, and the next day, I received a phone call.  “Come into work.  We’ll give you thirty dollars a week.”  The reason for that was that the woman who was the jewelry repair person was planning to go on vacation, and they had no one to take her place.  She was leaving, I think, three weeks later, and so they hired me probably out of necessity.  At any rate, I worked there for two months, and then, I must have asked for a weekend off because I did work on Saturdays.  I asked for a weekend off and went to New York with my cousin toward the end of August.  In New York, I had what I thought was an appendicitis attack.  I had an extreme pain in my right side.  I couldn’t stand.  I couldn’t sit.  We were taking subways and trains, and I remember lying down on the subway with people angry because I was taking up four seats.  And then, lying down on the train, which was no better.  At any rate, came into Baltimore, went home, and explained what was happening.  I went to see the doctor the next day.  I was told that I was having an appendicitis attack and the appendix had to come out.  It was something that I just wasn’t prepared for.  But anyway, the doctor said that it had to come out, and I was in agony.  I was ready.  So, I went to Sinai Hospital and had my appendix taken out – only to find out from a resident there, by looking at the sample, that there was nothing wrong with the appendix.  It was probably the ovary, the right ovary.  But it was too late.  It had already been taken care of.  It didn’t heal as well as I wanted it to.  So, I had to go back to the doctor, and I spent more time recovering than I anticipated.  By that time, it was September.  September, once it begins, is not the time to go back to LA to try to get a job because most of the jobs would have been filled.  I was not qualified to teach in LA and wouldn’t even attempt to teach in LA.  A friend of mine suggested that if I were not leaving then, I should go and apply to the Board of Education to get a job teaching English because they were as desperate for teachers as they are today, if not more desperate.  Well, I didn’t have another job, and I decided that’s not bad to start.  I would teach for one year, and then I’d go back to LA.  So, I went and applied, and I was given the typical position that is given to the last person who comes into the system.  It was the lowest white, socio-economic school in the system.  It was a school that was a problem – the building, as well as the students.  I often felt that the teachers who were there either came in last or were being punished.  It was the sort of thing that a supervisor would say, “If you don’t behave yourself, I’m sending you to Southern Annex.” It was an annex to Southern Senior High School.  This was the junior high school.  But we were not next to each other.  The annex was about seven blocks or eight blocks away from the senior high school.  At any rate, my experience there was more of learning than teaching.  I came in on the seventeenth day of the school year, because I had the operation, and I was recovering, etcetera, and because of the holidays – the chagim.  I came in on the seventeenth day and was informed immediately to a class of thirty-two male truants waiting to turn sixteen, a class of twenty-eight female truants waiting to turn sixteen, and five other classes that were delightful and the right size and the right age for the seventh and eighth grades.  The leader of the students in the male group informed me immediately that they had sixteen previous substitutes, I was the seventeenth.  One day is all they had lasted, and they would be very happy to get rid of me, as well.  That was exactly what they had to say for me to determine that I was not going to leave.  I said, “I’m not leaving.  I am not a substitute.  I am here to be your teacher.” It was a very, very trying three weeks.  I think I cried every night out of frustration.  They were physically bigger than I.  They managed to bully their way through with all of the other subjects and all the other teachers.  I was determined to bring some order out of that chaotic classroom, and eventually, I did.  I don’t know that I taught them anything, but at least they sat still, and it ended the spitballs and the lunches flying across the room, etc., which they were apt to do.  In those days, the English teacher had the privilege of teaching each class seven periods a week, while every other teacher had only five periods a week.  So, it meant that I had more time either to agonize or to play with them.  I got along very well with the girls because I was teaching them what it was like to be ladylike.  We would talk about dress and clothes, and behavior, etcetera.  So they were much easier, and they were ready to read.  It didn’t bother them– even though some of them were already prostitutes and earning money for the family.  The boys, many of them, were delivering milk and papers, trying to earn money as well.  We’re talking about families that were – today, we would say “dysfunctional” – if they were families at all.  At any rate, what kept me rational and sane was that there was a seventh grade of very outstanding students with whom I could experiment, and they accepted experimental reading.  They accepted the idea of putting out a newspaper.  They had never put out a newspaper, and I suggested putting out a newspaper to give them something to do with their writing so that it had some meaning to them.  I also wanted them to read newspapers – as a course of life, not because someone handed them one.  At any rate, somewhere in the fifth or sixth week, I evidently had exerted enough leadership that the class was beginning to sound like a class.  The leader of the class was acting up, I said, “You’ll have to sit down and behave.”  He decided that was the time he would challenge me.  He said, “I don’t have to sit down because you tell me to.” I don’t remember what I said afterward, but whatever it was, it was a further challenge.  I recall that he said to me, “You know, for a nickel, I’d slap you in the face.”  I said, “Don’t go away.” In those days, we kept our purses in the desks.  Mine was the only one, by the way, that was never pilfered.  Everybody else had things disappearing.  I never had anything disappear.  At any rate, I went very deliberately to my desk.  I think there was more silence in that class than I had in the entire year in this class, and deeper.  I went to my desk.  I opened up the drawer where I kept my purse.  I took out my change purse.  I took out a nickel.  I walked down the aisle because he happened to be in the center aisle, alphabetically seated towards the back.  I instructed him to hold out his hand.  I said, “Hold out your right hand.” I guess he was so shocked, he did, and I dropped a nickel in his hand and stood there.  It really was a tense moment.  He didn’t know what to do, and I had no idea what he would do.  He looked at the nickel, and he looked at me, and he said something that I don’t recall, and he threw the nickel across the room.  That was the end.  I had “won” in that sense because I had to challenge him – or accept his challenge.  I had won, and the class was relieved.  The Vice Principal of the school happened to be standing in the corridor this entire time.  I knew he was there because I saw him when I went to get my purse.  He was about to come in the room, and I motioned to him not to come in the room.  The children didn’t know what I was doing.  So, when this was all over – and the bell rang shortly thereafter – he came in and said, “That was stupid.  You were risking something you never should have risked.  You should not have done that.  You should have sent him out of the room, down to the office for discipline,” and so forth.  I said, “No, I knew what I had to do.  I either accepted that challenge and controlled this classroom, or I could go home because it wouldn’t work if he were the leader of the group in the class.”  So, I was very glad that I did take that challenge.  It taught me a great deal.  Then the students – the male students – became my friends.  They began giving me advice – these fourteen, or fifteen-year-olds, most of them.  One of them said, “Don’t try to be our friend.”  That was the general tenor of education then, to become more friendly and less dictatorial, less authoritarian, etc.  “Don’t be our friend,” he said, “because number one, we don’t want you as a friend, and number two, you won’t be able to teach us if you’re our friend.”  Very wise.  Far wiser than the educators who were determining that the best thing to do was to be friends.  Another student who misbehaved – and I contacted his parents to tell them that he was misbehaving and upsetting the class – informed me that his father would come to see me.  Which his father did.  He said, “You can beat him any time you want because that’s what I do at home.”  Well, the students knew that a bill had been passed, or a resolution, whatever it was, that if you touched a student, you could be sued immediately.  They would taunt teachers, and in the beginning, before this incident with Nelson, I remember the boy saying, “I dare you to touch me.  I dare you to touch me.”  The reality was that the book Up the Down Staircase was very real.  I could have written the same book.  I recall that several teachers, particularly male teachers, took advantage of the “Don’t touch me” – and these students were very, very trying – by accidentally bumping them on a stairwell, which would cause the student to fall because the frustration became so great.  You couldn’t touch them.  You couldn’t punish them.  There was nothing you could do to work out whatever anger or tension built up.  I didn’t appreciate that, but I could understand why people felt that way.  The experiment lasted one year.  This was an experiment, I found out, to separate boys and girls – truants – and to separate them by age and by size.  The twelve-year-olds who were normal children coming into the seventh grade were small.  They were twelve-year-olds, hadn’t reached puberty most of them – were not growing.  This group was a group that could have been in high school.  It was a dismal failure.  It did not succeed in what they wanted it to do.  I think almost every boy failed, but we moved them up anyway, and half the girls.  Not because of my class.  Because I saw no point in trying to teach them over again, put them in the 8th grade and then see.  Let them reach age sixteen and let them go to work because they were working anyway.  But other teachers – there were two students who I felt should not fail.  One of them turned out to be Albert Kaline.  Kaline became a major baseball player, a Baltimorean.  I believe he is in the Hall of Fame now.  I had him for both the upper seventh and the lower eighth grade.  He was a very quiet student, taller than most of the students – never a troublemaker, but he also didn’t do his homework and was not a particularly bright child in school.  But I knew he played baseball, or softball, because he was very proud of that, and the other children told me as well that he was good enough to consider being professional.  I believe his father was semi-pro.  At any rate, we would, as teachers, sit down and go over students so we would know whether they were going to fail based on the teachers failing them or one teacher, which meant that they could move up, etc.  I remember saying, “Don’t fail him,” to the two teachers who were going to give him a ‘D.’  I said, “Because number one, he is not going to benefit from it.  Number two, if he can play ball, let him get to high school.  Then he’ll have an opportunity and then there should be the advantage of encouraging him to do well so that he can play ball, etc.” I finally persuaded one of the teachers.  One teacher gave him a ‘D’.  She wasn’t about to be dissuaded.  But the other one gave him a ‘P,’ which enabled him to move up to the next grade.  I think it was a service because I can’t imagine what would have happened to him.  He certainly wouldn’t have benefited from staying behind because of the atmosphere in the school.  This way, he was able to get on with his – it would be the appropriate chronological age for him to get out of high school and, particularly, play ball, which he did exceedingly well.  The other student was a problem because he was very bright and he was a nuisance in the classes.  Somehow, my class became the classroom where you sent the problem children.  You didn’t send them down for discipline because disciplinary measures weren’t working, so you sent them to me.  I had a library – a bookcase – in the back of my room.  English would call for books and libraries.  In the library, I had Classics comics, as well as regular books.  No other teacher had Classics comics.  First of all, I bought them myself, and secondly, they were frowned upon by the Supervisor of English.  But I really didn’t care because the Classics enabled me to teach children who weren’t going to learn this any other way.  When I would have a troublesome student sent by another teacher, I would ask the student to sit in the back of the room, where the books were, take a book, and read.  “Don’t bother me.  I won’t bother you.”  That was it.  We got along very well that way.  So, it was a very interesting experience.  I’d never had any education courses.  The time came for me to apply for tenure, and I had to take the exam, or several exams, which teachers still take to be tenured.  My principal told me that this is the year that he thinks I should apply for tenure, which meant that the supervisor would come several times to see me.  The supervisor came unannounced the first time and had a lot of problems with what I was doing.  One, I didn’t really insist on homework.  I knew that I was teaching students who didn’t have time to do homework.  They had to learn in school.  Two, Classics comics were definitely out of the question.  Comic books were not part of the curriculum.  Whatever else it was.  At any rate, she wrote an unsatisfactory report.  The principal called me in and he said, “She’s going to keep writing unsatisfactory reports.  So, we will work this out differently.  I will send a message when she comes to the building because the supervisor has to report to the principal of the high school first,” he said, “and that will give you enough time to put on a lesson plan that you should develop with your students that you can use for the semester so that whenever I call you, you can change your boards.  You can erase your boards.  You put the lesson plan up, and your students will know what’s happening.  Tell them.  And it’ll be fine.”  This is the way he operated.  That’s what happened.  The next time that the supervisor came, the principal of this annex – Junior High annex – came upstairs and handed me a note.  I put a lesson plan on the board and told the students who was coming because we got along very well.  The students liked me, and we had a wonderful lesson, and I got a very good evaluation.  I took the exam and passed.  So, I had tenure.  I taught for four years.  Two years later, one, I was pregnant – except that I couldn’t tell anyone because you’d be fired immediately.  You weren’t supposed to teach if you were pregnant.  Two, I realized that I would not be coming back to teach.  Chances were I wouldn’t once I had children.  What was interesting is that I was two or three months pregnant when the principal of the high school called me and said he wanted to meet with me.  The reason that he wanted to meet with me was that he wanted me to come into the high school division.  He felt that I could offer a great deal to the students there.  He appreciated the newspaper that I started, Baby Prattle, and the fact that I was able to work with various departments.  I had the Mechanical Drawing Department working on this.  I had the Commercial Department typing it up, and I was using – well, I called them, but actually, it was three or four faculty members who were not even in the building I was in – working together to put this out.  He liked that process, and he liked some of the ideas that I used in the classroom.  He thought that I was very innovative, and he asked me to come to the high school division.  Then, of course, I would have to take exams again to be tenured as a high school teacher.  I really felt badly, and I said, “I can’t do that.”  He asked me why, and I told him that I was pregnant and that my baby was due in November, so I wouldn’t be coming back in the fall.  I remember clearly he said, “I’ll tell you what you should do.  Have your two children.  Get it over with and come back to teach.”  At that time, you could take five years.  As a tenured teacher, you could leave a teaching position if you come back the fifth year, so they gave you two years per child.  After that, you were automatically retired.  I didn’t make any commitment.  I didn’t know how many children I would have or what would happen.  I made no commitment, but I appreciated the confidence that he had in me and the fact that I had been teaching four years – and that was the basis that he was using to bring me to the high school department.  That was it.  I finished teaching school in June of that year.  I was five months pregnant, and fortunately, it didn’t show, although I did tell the children the last week of school.  Then, I left and never went back because I had three children in thirty-nine months.  It made it a little difficult to go back to school.

EE:  Did you encounter any antisemitism in the school?

SC:  No.  I encountered ignorance of Judaism.  There was one other Jewish teacher.  Female.  Jackie Rosenblatt.  Rabbi Rosenblatt’s daughter-in-law.  I do recall when I began dating my husband-to-be, Jerry Cardin, one of the children, one of the girls – because he picked me up after school one day – said to me, “Do you know that that man looks Jewish?”  I said, “Yes, I do.”  She said, “Why would you date a Jew?”  I said, “Because I’m Jewish.”  She said, “No, you’re not.”  She could not accept the fact that whatever she had heard about Jews was not what fit me.  She was very distressed to find out that I was Jewish because that was not good.  But I never felt any antisemitism.  There was never any negative reaction.  I took off the holidays.  She had just come into the school; otherwise, she would have known.  There was no problem with the principal or the vice-principal, and the children were fine.  There was no antisemitism there that I could see.  There were very few Jews; I don’t think that there were more than two per class, and they left as soon as their parents could possibly move out.  I did not see any antisemitism, either in the teachers or the vice-principal, who was something else herself.  Nothing that I was aware of.  I had seen antisemitism elsewhere.  I went to apply for a position that summer, come to think of it before I took up jewelry repair at Arthur Murray Dance Studio.  As soon as they asked nationality, I knew I was in the wrong place because that was the same question that was asked while I was at UCLA, and they don’t mean nationality.  You don’t ask an American Caucasian what your nationality is.  What you are really asking is, “What is your Religion?”  But in school, no.  Never.  It was a mixed school in that there were children of judges and teachers, and I never understood why they lived there because the school was, as I said, the lowest socio-economically in the system.  There were children who came from dysfunctional, broken families, etc.  I did not see discrimination against the children either.  In other words, of one group against the other.  They had their own cliques, but I did not sense a ”We’ll take care of you” type of discrimination.

EE:  Where exactly was the school located?

SC:  Hanover and Lee Streets.  School #7 at Hanover and Lee Street, where Camden Yards is.  But Southern Senior High School is still Southern Senior High School.  We used to take the children over to Federal Hill.  I think I was the first teacher who took the children to the Walter’s Art Gallery.  In the seventh grade, we taught “Greek Gods and Goddesses,” and Walter’s Art Gallery had an excellent collection of statuary, artwork, urns, etc.  I asked permission to take the students.  Of course, they thought I was insane because here I am, taking a class full of students, and in those days, the classroom could have been thirty-six to forty-two pupils because we didn’t have enough teachers, and I would take them all.  We went to the art gallery, and I prepared them in advance for the statuary because seventh and eighth graders enjoy that.  We had a wonderful visit.  Never had any problem.  No discipline problem.  The children were all fine, and all came back the way they were supposed to and had a great time.  There was a respect for me and a relationship, which I enjoyed because the children trusted me.  I would say that was the most important thing – that they trusted me.  They could tell me things they would not tell their other teachers.  The only negative experience I had was with a child who, for some reason, wasn’t producing what I thought he could produce.  Exceptionally quiet, very seldom handed in papers.  I moved him from the rear of the room because, again, it was alphabetical seating, which I changed sometimes from A to Z and sometimes from Z to A.  I moved the child up to the first row.  I realized after I did that that he couldn’t see.  He couldn’t possibly have done the work because he couldn’t see the boards on the side or the front.  I became very friendly with the nurse, and I asked the nurse to please check his eyesight, which she did, and she told me he needed glasses.  He really could not see; he needed glasses.  So, in my innocence and ignorance, I sent a letter home to his father – or, to his mother, whomever – suggesting that the son needed glasses and the reason that he wasn’t doing well in school was that he couldn’t see the boards, and therefore, missed some of the schoolwork that was very, very important.  I received a hate letter in return that was unbelievable.  His child was not going to wear glasses, and his child was not going to be treated that way, and who am I?  I gave it to the principal and to the nurse.  I said, “He’s not going to make it in class if he can’t see.”  The father was adamant that no son of his would wear glasses.  But, the following year, he did get glasses.  So I don’t know what changed.  I was so shocked.  Parents then were either that protective, if it were a physical defect that someone suggested, or the other which was, quote, “You can beat the hell out of him if he doesn’t behave,” which, of course, is ludicrous, and was ludicrous then.  But it was a very interesting learning experience for me.  

EE:  Tell me what you looked like when you were a young girl, a young woman.

SC:  I wore high heels, short skirts, and blouses, or dresses, and when I say “short,” I mean to the knee.  My hair was either pulled back or in some sort of a French twist.  I didn’t look like a schoolteacher, and I must have looked young because in the third year that I was there – teachers would rotate the senior prom responsibility because who wants to be in charge of the Senior Prom as monitors?  I was assigned with a fellow teacher at that school.  He was about thirty, and his wife was either twenty-three or twenty-four, a young couple, but a nice couple, and I.  We went to the prom.  I don’t recall the hotel in which the Prom took place.  The waiter who came to serve us – now we’re in a room with seniors, that means they’re all underage.  We’re in a room full of seniors, and the waiter came over to our table, and we were all faculty at the table, and looks at this individual’s wife, asks her for identification, and looks at me and asks me for identification.  By that time, I was twenty-two or twenty-three.  I just looked at him, and I said, “See all of them?  They’re seniors.” I didn’t say, “They have drinks on the table,” but he looked at me and he said, “I’m sorry, I have to see your card because I don’t believe you.”  So, I evidently looked young.  Actually, when I began teaching, I was nineteen, and my first class – the two experimental classes of boys and girls – they were all waiting to be sixteen.  So, I was no more than three years older, and they were aware of it.  I did not change the way I dressed until the third year.  For some reason, my feet began bothering me, and I wore what I called “schoolteacher’s shoes.”  But I only wore them in the school, and I would change when I got ready to leave.

EE:  Describe to me your hair color, your eye color? 

SC:  The eye color is the same as it is now, blue-gray-green.  What do they call it?  There’s a name for it?  It changes color depending on what I wear.  My hair color was dark, dark blond.  I had long fingernails, always, and they were always polished.  I can’t remember if I wore hose or not because I hated stockings.  I may not have worn them, I just don’t remember.  I do know that the first couple days that I was in class with the almost sixteen-year-olds, there were whistles and cat-calls and everything else.  So, I made certain, after that, that I didn’t alter my wardrobe but that I wore the most benign, quiet, not provocative clothes.  There were enough young girls in that other group who were wearing the provocative clothes that I didn’t need to compete with them.  But I did not change my shoes or something like that.  I didn’t change my hairstyle or anything about myself.  

EE:  Let’s talk about your life as a working girl, and where you lived and, your social life.  I’d love to get us to.

SC:  My social life?  When I first began teaching school, I was very active.  I was dating three or four different people.  I like to dance; I like social dancing and, if I have to say so, I was a very good dancer.  And there was one young man who wanted to marry me – to whom I explained clearly I was not getting married, and certainly, not to him.  But at any rate, we still went dancing together every week – literally every week.  We went to the Club Charles, or Charles Club, whatever it was called because they had live music.  There was someone else who enjoyed opera and theater, which I enjoyed, and I dated him.  My husband-to-be was introduced to me as a blind date, and I went out with him.  It was a different kind of dancing, a nightclub routine.  I dated, I would say, a year or a year and a half before my husband proposed.  Then, that was my social life.  He was my fiancé; we were engaged for a year before I married, and then I was teaching school.  I don’t recall more than one girlfriend at that time.  Number one, I didn’t have time, and number two, I lived at home with my parents until I married, and then we moved to Auchentoroly Terrace, a three-story walk-up.  That means that there was a full flight to get to the foyer level, which was the first floor, and then three stories above that.  A very old building that my father-in-law owned, with high ceilings, huge rooms.  I learned to appreciate space in rooms and to appreciate high ceilings.  I loved it, with a fireplace in the bedroom and a fireplace in the living room.  It was a one-family house, obviously – about a century before.  It took two streetcars to get to school.  I didn’t drive, and I didn’t have a car.  My husband had a car, but I didn’t.  So I took, as I said, two streetcars to get to school in the morning on time and to come back in the afternoon.  But since I was not pregnant in the beginning, I would stop downtown.  Sometimes, I would go to his office if I thought he was there – or I called and found out he was there.  At other times, I would just stop downtown to do some shopping, walk around, or meet some friends.  That was the time that I could do that.  It was a very full life.  We ate dinner every Friday night at my parents’ house and Tuesday nights at my in-law’s house.  And then, the rest of the week, wherever.  I think that we ate home one night a week when we were first married, because my husband was involved with the Masonic Order and with the savings and loans companies, and that kept him occupied four nights a week.  I was involved because his family – females in his family – joined the Eastern Star, which I had never heard of.  I was informed that I was joining The Eastern Star; I sure didn’t volunteer.  That was every Tuesday night throughout the Fall, Winter, and Spring.  We were off, I think, July and August.  Being a female organization, it enabled me to meet a number of women who were about my age – some of whom are still very, very close friends.  That would be from 1948 on.  I married in 1948.  That was a strong social component to my life – these particular women, because the officers would meet once a month, or twice a month, during the day at lunchtime.  But the organization, as a whole, would meet on Tuesday evenings.  It meant picking up people and bringing in people.  There was a social event afterward, where we ate and had refreshments.  It was fairly typical of the women who were leading the organization to invite their husbands to serve at the same time as leaders.  The Eastern Star required a male, a Masonic member, be present when meetings were held.  As I said, in this particular group – Beacon Chapter No. 60 OES – the wives had asked their husbands to serve as the Masonic leader.  I had asked my husband to do so also, and he said he would when my turn came.  I became an officer, because my husband’s aunt was Worthy Matron – the name of the presiding female is “Worthy Matron” – I guess, in 1948 or ’49.  I think in ’48.  She appointed me at the lowest officer position so I could go through the chairs, and the chairs meant ten years, basically.  There were ten offices, and you simply rotated.  At any rate, it was a totally foreign way of life for me.  I had never heard of it; I didn’t understand it.  I didn’t appreciate it because even though it’s a secret organization, the vows taken include Christianity.  I could not understand and still don’t understand why Jewish women had to belong to a group where in taking the vow of membership, you kneel at an altar, and you recite parts of – it is our liturgy, but it also includes two stories from the New Testament.  But, at any rate, it didn’t seem to matter to the – I guess we had a thousand members when I joined.  And they were very happy.  It was obvious that the Eastern Star had not accepted them early on as Jewish women, so this was the defense.  This was an all-Jewish group.  That was one component.  The other component of my social life was my husband’s –

EE:  I’m not sure that I understand – the Jewish Masonic Orders?

SC:  The Masonic Order is not denominational.  Somewhere in the mid-1800s, a member of the Masonic Order determined that the women – wives, mothers, sisters, daughters of Masons – should have a social framework and should have the protection that Masonry would give to its members.  So, the Order of the Eastern Star was founded.  Now, the Eastern Star is the Star of Christ – the name itself.  “I’ve seen his star in the East,” if you know the New Testament.  So, it was a religious order for the women but not for the men.  Masonry does not include the Eastern Star or any of the stories of the New Testament, which is very interesting.  But the Eastern Star does.  These women who were related – and you had to be blood-related – were involved in social work for the community and in charitable work.  They formed a parallel organization.  There is a Grand Lodge of each State.  So, there’s a Grand Lodge of Maryland.  There became a Grand Lodge for Women of Maryland.  So there’s the Worthy Grand Matron, who is the leader of the Grand Lodge that’s state-wide.  And then, each sub-group has a Worthy Matron.  There were about a hundred fifty or a hundred sixty sub-groups when I joined the Eastern Star.  All of them performed charitable works.  Our Chapter took on its own charitable endeavors.  We had the freedom to do that.  The rules and regulations, and the secret signs, and the secret words, etcetera, etcetera, remain secret – and they were identical – we had to accept whatever the Eastern Star provided – but we could do the charitable work that we wanted to do.  Each matron could choose her own specific charity, along with carrying out that which her predecessors had either promised or obligated the group to.  But it was a very important social unit for the majority of women there, who really didn’t have a great social milieu outside.  I mean, they belonged to the Synagogue.  So they belonged to Sisterhoods, many of them.  But it was the most important.  Their husbands would come after the meeting to eat the desserts, the hot-dogs, the refreshments, and whatever it was we served every week.  For them, it was a support system, and it functioned as a support system – as did most of the secret societies.  It is unfortunate today – and I mean this sincerely – it’s unfortunate today that they have died, literally, because their members have, but also because society itself has suggested that this was the wrong way to go.  Many of these women found themselves loose when the organizations went out of business; they no longer had a support system, a social support system.  I can tell you that if anyone, particularly any one of the officers, who became very close groups, was in trouble, all of the others would come to that person’s assistance, without being asked, automatically.  The rules required it, and I’m sure we would have done it anyway.  The rules required that we go visit everyone who was in shiva, that we attend the funeral, particularly if we were Officers.  There were women whose families requested what was called an “Eastern Star Funeral.”  It’s a special service in which, in lieu of flowers, which the Christians bring to the casket, we brought the ribbons of the five stars – remember it’s an Eastern Star, so it is only a five-star unit – and expressed our prayers and condolences, and our appreciation to God for the time the person lived.  So, it played a very important role in the women’s lives, and it played a very important role in the men’s lives.  For men, it was an entree to business ventures, to understanding other people, and meeting other people engaged in things which they would not have been exposed to previously.  It also became a framework.  When a Mason died, it was customary for the man who had been the Worthy Patron to be buried with his apron.  The apron had significance; it was “to serve.” The individuals were meant to serve society.  So, the original intent was very worthy.  The fact that no African-American was included, no Catholic was included, and no Jews were included, except in their own setting, was unfortunate.  But that was the tenor of the times, and that’s the way it was done.  It served a very important social framework.  It does not exist.  I was one of those who helped put that chapter out of business because we did not have women who were willing to accept the responsibility.  It is a responsibility to meet every other week or even once a month.  You have to dress in white, a white long dress.  You are equivalent to the bride.  You had to memorize the ritual.  You could not read it; it had to be memorized.  You had other responsibilities to the Worthy Grand Chapter because they came to visit once a year, officially, and they had a representative who was at every one of your meetings to make sure that you did the right thing and who reported back if you didn’t do the right thing.  She was called “the Deputy,” and that was the right term for her.  Very structured.  Very structured.  Very rigid.  But aside from that rigidity, it was a very important social framework.  When we could not find anyone to assume the responsibility, because two people cannot assume the responsibility, it has to be a single person who does it, we just decided to close up shop, give the remaining money in our charitable coffers.  We did have money.  I think we had twenty-five thousand dollars.  We had a meeting to determine what to do with the twenty-five thousand dollars, and then the Chapter was finished.

EE:  When you say, “assume responsibility,” what do you mean by that?

SC:  Well, the responsibility, if you are the Worthy Matron of a chapter, your responsibility is to visit the sick, to visit the bereaved, and to make certain that the information is shared with the rest of the members.  You have a printed communication that must go out.  You have minutes that have to go to the Worthy Grand Matron.  You have books that you’re responsible for.  You have monies that you are responsible for.  It is a major undertaking of an organization, and the responsibility, in the long run, lands on the shoulders of this one person, even though others are doing it.  It’s that person’s responsibility.  It became too heavy.  There were no young people coming into this secret society, and the older women who had done it, if I recall correctly, two did it twice in order to save the organization – hoping that someone would stand up and say, “I am willing to be the Worthy Matron.”  But I think we had five years of searching.  Then, there was no one.  The women, frankly – the majority of them were too old to come out in the evening by themselves, and it was time to close up shop with dignity.

EE:  When was that?

SC:  I’d have to look it up.  It was twelve to fifteen years ago.  About fifteen years ago.

EE:  Were there other Jewish organizations?  Or other organizations that took away from people’s interest in this organization? 

SC:  No.  Many of these people belonged to multiple groups.  Many of them belonged to the Auxiliary of Yedz Grotto, which is an offshoot of the Masonic Order.  So they had affiliations in both, as their husbands did.  Others belonged to daytime social groups because this was a nighttime social group, met only at night.  Others were a part of daytime groups, such as a Covenant Guild or other guilds.  But they did not take the membership away.  The membership aged, and the purpose was no longer as valid.  There were other ways that one could do charitable work and other groups that one could give to without working.  I think in general, the sense was that being under the auspices of the Eastern Star wasn’t what it had been initially.  There was no reason to keep it alive.  We didn’t want to die out; we wanted to go out of business with dignity, which is what we did.  There were other groups that just disappeared.  Before we went out of business, five or six years before, another chapter, which was half-Jewish and half non-Jewish, had its members ask to come in [to our chapter].  You had to have permission to come into another group.  We voted that “Yes, they could come in.”  For a couple of years, their members were willing to assume responsibility.  After that, it was just all over.

    

EE:  You said that the other component of your social activities was something of your husband’s?

SC:  Yes.  My husband was active in politics and had a rather extensive – his whole family was active in politics.  So there were a series of events that we’d have to go to every year, which were command performances for me.  We became very friendly with most of the political leaders – state, county, and city.  That can take a lot of time and energy.  He was very active and invited me to go along.  So, I was very active with him in that respect also for a number of years.

EE:  Tell me about your husband and your husband’s family, the family that you married into.

SC:  My husband was one of two siblings.  His father was born in Russia and his mother was born here of Russian parents.  She was the youngest of four children, and my father-in-law was the oldest of five.  I believe there was another brother who died, an older brother.  They met in East Baltimore and married in 1924.  Then, they moved to Park Heights.  My husband’s older sister was born in 19 – no, wait a minute – [recording paused]

[END OF CD 3]

EE:  Let me just, let me just start up.  This is Elaine Eff with Shoshana Cardin.  This is the fourth mini-disk, and today is September 7th, 2001.  This is the second recording of today.  We are in her home in Baltimore.  We will continue where we just left off.

SC:  My in-laws must have married in 1922.  Sonja, the older child, was born in 1923.  My husband was born in 1925.  They lived in the Park Heights area until he was of Bar Mitzvah age.  Then they moved to Auchentoroly Terrace, where my father-in-law owned a building.  I met him in 1946, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.  I was still convalescing from my appendectomy.  It was a blind date, and we dated off and on, I’d say, until about March or April.  I had met his family; that is, he introduced me to his family.  I went to some of these political functions that you just asked me about, as well as organizational functions.  I think one of the first was a Masonic function, and I had to go home and find out what in the world Masonic was.  I realized that the whole family, all four of them, were social people who liked to go out in the evening and liked to meet with others, and they remained that way, very outgoing.  My father-in-law belonged to a different Masonic Order than my husband.  My mother-in-law belonged to both Eastern Star and the Yedz Grotto Auxiliary, which I mentioned before, plus another group.  My sister-in-law did not.  She was busy putting her husband through law school, so she was working.  She had one child who was born in 1946, I believe.  He was sick; he was an RH baby, so he was in the hospital a very long time and needed attention when he came home.  We lived in the same apartment building.  My sister-in-law lived on the first floor.  I lived on the third – they called it third – it was the fourth floor up, and my in-laws lived on the second floor.  But we were not the only tenants in the building.  The building had nine apartments, and we were just three.  We took up three of the nine apartments.  We had a pact of privacy.  No one walked in on anyone at any time.  You called ahead of time to ask if they were home to see if you could come down.  We went out to dinner frequently during the week, as I recall, because my in-laws enjoyed going out to dinner during the week.  When we married in 1948, we moved into the fourth floor – I call it – apartment.  My father-in-law had taken an apartment – this was a private house, initially – and divided into three on this upper floor.  So, there were three young couples – three young, childless couples living there.  We became friendly.  It was fun to see how each of us was faring because we all started from minus in economics and had a zeal and a desire to succeed.  We lived there until I was pregnant with our second child.  Steven was born there, but when I became pregnant with Ilene, this apartment could not handle another child.  So we had to move, and we found a house on Carlisle Avenue – 3313 Carlisle, which does not exist anymore because, after a while, the City condemned the entire block in order to build the first elementary school for the African-American community that had to come up to Hilton.  They had moved up to that area.  So, it wasn’t that we wanted to move, but we were told, “This house will be taken.  You have one year to get out.”  That’s when we found the lot that we built this house that we are living in, and we’ve been living here since then.  We moved in 1957, so I’ve been here a few years.

EE:  Tell me where we are.

SC:  We are at 3624 Anton Farms Road.  As I said, we moved here in 1957.  My husband was in real estate and building, we built the house ourselves.  We designed it.  My husband used to travel around to see what type of architecture and design was being used in tract housing because he was a tract housing builder along with Morton Macks.  I would go along to see what the houses looked like because I used to help design the kitchen.  I would look at the models of the kitchen and help in the design of the kitchen.  I would look at the models of the kitchen and help design the kitchen and learned to look at models for other things as well.  As a matter of fact, when we had openings and sold homes on major opening days, I would demonstrate the kitchens for the customers.  Several times, I was offered a position to do it professionally.  But, anyway, we looked at a number of houses, and when we bought this lot, we were informed that there were restrictions, one of which was that you could not build a two-story house.  By that time, we had four children, and it was not going to be easy to put four children and ourselves all on one level.  So we saw a design that was a front-to-back split; it was the first time that I had seen a front-to-back split out West, somewhere in California.  And decided that that was the design that would work for us, but we would re-create it to suit ourselves.  So, we had a year with which to design this house, and we took the year and had a lot of fun with it.  Then we invited an architect to make it buildable because we had designed what we wanted, but I didn’t know anything about structure, and Jerry had done the mechanical drawing but didn’t know too much about structure either.  He was not the engineer.  At any rate, we built the house and moved on August 1st, 1957.  That meant that we were in the county without public transportation.  Mail was not delivered to our homes then; it was a Post Office box.  We went down to the Stevenson Post Office to get our mail.  There was just a little grocery store down at the bottom of the hill.  It was wonderful.  It was rural living, which I enjoyed.  I think we were the fifth or the sixth house on this particular tract.  The children were pioneers in the schools they went to because there weren’t that many children around here.  As a matter of fact, one of our daughters went to Bare Hills because the elementary school wasn’t large enough to take the students that were trying to enroll in Wellwood.  Our sons went to McDonough.  Our older son started there when we were on Carlisle Avenue, and the younger son followed, and the two girls went to public school.  Our oldest son graduated from McDonough, and our other son left at the end of the eighth grade to go to prep school.  He went to Milton Academy.  Our two girls left the sixth grade and entered Park.  I was, by that time, fully engaged in volunteer activities.  I had been all along, but by that time, I was really immersed in volunteer activities, in addition to driving a carpool and the usual things that one does with four children.

EE:  Let’s talk a little about the kids coming into your family, becoming a mother, giving up your teaching job.

SC:  Well, I knew that I would give up the teaching job.  I was teaching because we needed the money, and my husband told me that as soon as he could afford for me not to teach, he would prefer I not teach.  Steven was born in 1950.  He was a sick child when he was born, so I had the doctors come frequently.  When he was six months old, I went to my physician – my obstetrician – and he said that if I wanted more children, I would have to become pregnant right away because my ovaries were really bad, which I knew from the appendectomy, which I didn’t need.  So I became pregnant right away – in six months – with our second, and frankly became pregnant again when the second was six months old, with the third.  I was the normal mother who was concerned – it’s the first child.  There are no courses for children and no courses for parenting.  I probably suffered through the same fears: “Is he awake?  Is he asleep?  If I can’t hear him breathing, is he fine?”  The usual.  Our bedroom was very close to the room that we turned into a nursery, so it was no problem.  Steven went through the normal night feedings, etc.  I would get up for all of them unless Jerry came home, and he always had late-night meetings.  On occasion, he would feed Steven at two in the morning, but that was very rare.  He did not feed the other children in the morning.

EE:  I assume that these are bottle-fed babies?

SC:  Bottle-fed because I tried to breastfeed, but Steven was a post-mature child with the symptoms of premature.  Actually, he is the subject of a chapter in Dr.  Schaffer’s book.  He needed nourishment that I could not give him.  When suggested that because my milk wasn’t rich enough and didn’t come fast enough, when they suggested I do both, I said, “No, there’s no point in doing both.  I’ll do one.”  He was a bottle baby, but he had to have boiled milk.  Ilene, I didn’t even try to nurse.  She had some digestion problems, and we had to switch her to mull soy.  She couldn’t take any milk; goat’s milk was the next step if this soy product didn’t work.  She was one of the early children who was raised on a soy product.  She was a very placid child.  Steven was a very active child.  Ilene was a very placid child – very happy, very comfortable, slept beautifully.  Steven did not sleep and didn’t eat well either.  Ilene ate well once we were able to overcome the problem that she had because she couldn’t hold food down until we got to mull soy.  When I was pregnant with my third, in the third month, I had to have an ovary removed because it really went bad.  I requested, as did Jerry, that I be told if this was a risk to me, as opposed to the fetus.  The doctor said, “Don’t worry.  Because, if there’s a problem, you will live.”  There was not a problem; the fetus was not disturbed at all by the operation, and Nina was born.  I then had three children.  Nina was born in April of ‘53.  Steven was born in November of ‘50.  So that’s doing things right.

EE:  What was that like for you?

SC:  I don’t remember any difficulties.  When Ilene was born, we were already in the house.  I remember painting the upstairs bedroom trim, all the woodwork, while my husband painted the walls.  I was at least six or seven months pregnant.  My mother was hysterical, but it didn’t bother me.  It had to be done.  I was going to be home twenty-four hours with one child.  So, I would be home twenty-four hours with three children.  We had wanted four children.  We had discussed this after we got married.  That four would be ideal if we could have two pairs, and that’s what we do have – two boys and two girls.  I didn’t feel constrained.  I didn’t feel confined.  My mind was still mine, and I could do what I wanted to do in the hours that the children were sleeping.  As I said, I remained involved in charitable endeavors.  I went to this Eastern Star thing every Tuesday night because I brought in a babysitter.  Then, as Nina was a little older when she was a year and a half or two years old, I was able to get a college student to come on weekends, which made things much easier for me and helped me in that respect.  I felt able to do things without the children – not having to run after three at one time.  They were fun to raise, other than their illnesses, and they were good children.  My parents came over; my in-laws came over.  The relatives would come over regularly.  We had parties at the house.  My husband’s lodge would have some of its events at our house because we had a two-story with an attic and a basement.  We finished the attic by painting it ourselves and then putting carpet down; that was the end of the attic.  Then we had some of the workmen come and finish the basement downstairs.  So it was a rec room.  We entertained, we enjoyed entertaining, and people came over frequently.  Then, when we found out we had to move – it was about the same time that Sonya, his sister, was very ill.  She had developed cancer, and she died two days before her thirty-third birthday.  Our youngest is named after Sonya.  It changed much of what I had known because I hadn’t known, other than the classmate of mine who drowned when she was nineteen – other than that, I had not known any young deaths.  Sonya was ill for, I think, close to three years before she died.  That was a very telling experience, a learning experience.  We recognized that it could come at any time to anyone without any warning.  She had one child, and just before she died, she asked me if I would look after him, even though her husband was alive.  Indeed, I did look after him.  That changed my in-laws.  My mother-in-law never got really over losing Sonya.  She also didn’t prepare herself for the loss, even though we knew it was inevitable.  Then, life resumed the way it was supposed to resume.  The big difference was that once we moved into this house, which was the year after Sonya died, all of the holidays were celebrated here, and every Shabbat dinner was here.  It was my parents, my in-laws, my brother, when he was in town, his wife and children, and whoever else was around, and the kids’ friends.  So, on Friday nights, it became a gathering place, and on holidays, a gathering place.  Then, because we built the house with the thought of inviting the community to benefit from it and to share in it, we found ourselves hosting every organization that called us, and there were many because the house lends itself to this.  The only rule we have is: “You don’t fundraise in the house.”  You prepare for the people and fundraise out of the house.  Otherwise, we were afraid that people would not come the second or third time there was an invitation.  Because of my husband’s involvement in politics, we had a number of political events here – with governors, mayors, senators, and vice presidents.  Which was very interesting.  I think it was also interesting for the children because, one, they learned that those people – and they were all men – are human beings and behave like human beings.  Even though they have these exalted positions, it doesn’t mean that they are that much different than we are.  The other was that there was a need to understand what made the country move, where the decisions were being made, and how the decisions were being made.  So we did that for many, many years.  Sometimes, the children were invited to sit at the dinner table, and sometimes they were not.  But they were always introduced to the individuals, and they became accustomed to it.  I don’t think that any one of them would have been surprised or thrown off balance by meeting a President, for example, because they had met everybody but the President in this house.

EE:  Now, when you say you built the house for the community, tell me, first, how you conceived the design of the house for that and which community you’re talking about.

SC:  The Jewish community.  We built the house, recognizing that we both enjoyed entertaining and that we had four children who would entertain.  So, we built the house in a way that the lower level is sound-proofed from the upper level.  We built the house recognizing that we would be entertaining two different generations and conceivably housing two sets of parents.  So, the house was built with such a design that we could use this room – the room that we’re in now – as an office.  It was a porch.  When we converted it into an office, it was converted with the assumption that if one of our parents wanted to live with us, they could live here and have a private entrance.  We would build a private bath.  They would have the den, and they would have this room as well, and they would be comfortable feeling that they were not in our way.  We built the garage with the same understanding that we could put heat in there and add another room to that, which is why the driveway is as wide as it is – if another family member wanted to live here.  We certainly weren’t going to put the two mothers-in-law and the two-fathers-in-law in one room.  We also built the house, recognizing that at the same we were entertaining, the children would want to entertain.  So the size of living room/dining room configuration and the size of the lower level were made large enough to accommodate, one, the generational differences, and two, the community, in the sense that we could have a community meeting, and indeed we did.  The foundation that was known as the RP Foundation – fighting blindness – frankly, met here for years.  The Board met here.  Its general meeting was here, because we wanted to help the community.  The person who really founded the organization was the person who arranged the blind date for my husband and myself, and my husband subsequently became Chairman of the RP Foundation and then International Chairman.  We had Israel bonds, which asked to use the house.  We had JNF [Jewish National Fund], which asked to use the house.  The synagogue asked to use the house for the seminary.  We had major events here.  I can recall that as a joke, Louis Bluefeld, who once had the largest kosher catering firm in Baltimore, asked me if he could rent the house for some of the events that some of his people wanted to cater.  Because outside where we have a formal garden.  We could put up a tent or extended it to the walk; you literally could put a hundred to a hundred fifty people in that area, and they would be very comfortable.  It was very easy to entertain that way.  We had two events for the Governor.  We had several dinners here for Senator Jackson when he was running for President and for Vice President Humphrey when he was the Vice President.  We had Senators Brewster, and I could go through them – the Senator from Connecticut, my brain is going – it begins with an “R” – Ribicoff, Senator Ribicoff, Senator Keating from New York.  We had a number who came here.  We had the Roosevelt brothers, when they were thinking of doing something.  Who came here? Sargent Shriver came here.  It was just a house where I was, as the wife, expected to have the house always ready for such company at any notice and where I thought that was great.  I enjoyed it.  So, when we built the house, we had that in mind.

EE:  Who was instigating these events?

SC:  Sometimes, it was the organizations.  The organizational leaders who knew us because we were visible in the community who said, “Will you lend us your house for–?”  Other times, it would be a political leader who said, “We need a place for–” and we would offer the place.  With the ones for the RP Foundation, he said, “I have to do something.  I have two daughters who may go blind”.  We said, “Tell us how we can help”.  He said, “Okay, let’s start to raise some money.”

EE:  Tell me who that was.

SC:  That was Ben Berman – Bernard Berman, who has since passed away.  He had three daughters, two of whom were diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa – when most people didn’t know how to spell it or knew what it meant.  He wanted to set up the first multi-disciplinary laboratory in the country to research the disease, and we succeeded in doing that.  It was known that you could call the Cardins, and if the house was available, you’d have it.  That was the way we were known.  We had entertained in our other house, which was a much smaller house, and had enjoyed it.  So this house, I must say, served all the purposes that we had in mind.

EE:  What were the family rituals like here?  I’d be curious to know how you integrated your parents, your husband’s parents, and your children, both in Carlisle in your traditional events and then when you moved here.

SC:  Friday nights, everybody was here and for every holiday, everybody was here.  My mother was getting older and was arthritic and did not have the room in her apartment to hold twenty people.  My mother-in-law did not either, so it was easier for everyone to come here.  It became ritual.  My nieces and nephew, when they were in town from college, would call and say, “Can I bring so and so?”  Friday nights became something very special for everyone who sat at the table, whether they sat there regularly or not.  We had a family ruling that our children could not go out on Friday nights because the family was having dinner, and it was wrong for them to go out.  Friday night was family night.  They may have chafed at that, but they abided by it.  But they could invite all their friends over, so it was easier for their friends to come here because they could not go out.  I think until they were seniors, we may then have relented and said, “After dinner,” except that we never knew when dinner would end.  They could go out, but otherwise, they could not.  It was just a gathering place.  I remember my older son’s friends calling up when they felt that they were in trouble, or they had done something that their parents would not appreciate, and coming over here to talk to my husband, or to talk to me and, occasionally sleeping over, because it was easier than going back home to talk to their parents.  It was just that kind of house.  People knew that and would call and say, “May I?” or “May we?” and I don’t recall turning anyone down, frankly.  It was a pleasure to do that.  We felt that we, in a sense, had a responsibility to share what we had been fortunate enough to build and to have the people who would benefit from whatever took place here to participate that way.

EE:  Were there any other particular traditions that were part of your Friday night dinner?  Food or blessing?

SC:  Oh, the food was usually meat, on Friday nights.  Obviously, we always lit the candles and did the kiddush.  Occasionally, we would sing when my father was here because my father had a lot of songs and Jewish melodies – Hebrew melodies – and he liked to sing.  We went to Chizuk Amuno, and my parents joined Chizuk Amuno – so they went with us.  My in-laws belonged to Oheb Shalom, which I tried for two years, and it simply didn’t take.  I had grown up in an Orthodox congregation, although we weren’t Orthodox.  It was just too uncomfortable for me, so we joined Chizuk Amuno.  What it meant – what came to be traditional – was because the hours were so different on the holidays, my in-laws would finish on Yom Kippur and be ready to eat when we were still in shul – because there was like an hour difference.  Or, on other holidays, their services were later because they went Friday nights, and we did not go Friday nights, and they came late for dinner, or they came early for dinner and then went to services.  So we had to juggle the schedules that way, but it was anticipated that whatever the schedule, it would take place here.  I remember that my in-laws came and broke fast easily an hour before we did, and I had help here to make sure that they would have food to eat and then waited for us to come.  Then, we broke fast as a full family.  Other than playing games and putting on plays – the children liked to put on productions because we have sliding doors downstairs that close off a section, so you could make it a theater, and they would like to perform.  On the holidays, they would create plays, and we would go down and watch the production of the plays they created.  Our youngest used the balcony leading to the bedrooms as his stage when he was three years old.  He used to play the banjo and sing.  He was a riot, absolute riot to see that happen, but he loved it.  He enjoyed doing it, and he was good at it.  He had the lead in several plays when he was at camp, so it was good practice for him here.  Other than that, simply being together, lighting the candles – my husband’s family learned to kiss on leaving and greeting, which they did not do until I entered the family, and my family did.  There was a very close sense of family because my brother and I have always been close.  We still are very, very close.  We are the only two left because his wife is deceased also.  It was just expected that you could call up and say, “I’m coming,” and there was never any question as to whether you could or couldn’t, and if it meant an extra table, it meant an extra table.  There were certain dishes that I prepared that the children liked, several that I took from my mother’s repertoire of dishes, and several that I created.  She made what she called chicken fricassee, and the children anticipated that they would get it.  It really was the gizzard and the feet and the neck – when you could get feet in those days.  The feet and the neck were sautéed, onions put in, and then ground beef, and tiny, tiny little meatballs with sweet and sour sauce.  Sweet and sour cauliflower, which I made.  Then, I created a dish of tongue.  I just didn’t tell people what they were eating – and they liked it very much, also, a form of sweet and sour.  Then, I roasted Cornish hens.  Of course, when the whole group was here, it would take a whole rib to feed that table.  I had someone look out for us.  We had bought a table that was extra wide and extra-long.  I have yet to see a table the width of our table because I wanted the food, once it was served, to be put on the table so people could help themselves, and that required an extra-wide table.  There were always four or five vegetables, salad always, soup, gefilte fish for those who wanted it – because not everybody wanted it – and the main course.  I did not serve two main courses.  I served a main course.  I had either this beef tongue dish or the fricassee, etcetera.  Sometimes the kids or my in-laws would say – between the soup, the salad, etcetera – we don’t need a main course.  But, by and large, everyone ate it, and then desserts, which we made here.  I didn’t have any bought desserts, desserts were all baked here, and some of my mother’s cookies.  Her recipe was a special recipe, which I still bake.  The children looked for traditional dishes that they were accustomed to.

EE:  Tell me what your mother’s cookie recipe is?  What kind of cookies?

SC:  We call them “Ema cookies.”  It’s a form of sugar cookie, but it has no sugar on top other than sugar and cinnamon mixed, which is only in the center, with a little dimple in the middle of the cookie.  It’s flour, eggs, sugar; it’s a simple recipe.  I would say it’s standard, except that the amount of oil that goes in it is less than most recipes, and it comes out crispier and flakier as a cookie.  My mother used to bake a batch that would produce somewhere between eighty and ninety cookies, and that’s what I learned to do.  They lasted for months in cans if you put them in the right can.  The children called them Ema, because we called her Ema, mother, “Ema cookies,” and that’s the recipe that I’ve handed to everyone in the family to bake.  She baked apple cake and peach cake.  She gave up yeast baking when her arthritis got bad and just baked something that did not require kneading.  For the holidays, I remember that we used to grind the liver.  I still have the grinder from World War I.  I kept it.  We don’t eat liver anymore because it’s not good for us, but we used to have chopped liver, and the chopped liver was always served in celery.  It wasn’t served as a dish by itself.  It was in celery, and there was enough for everybody – two plates, one at each end of the table.  My mother took great joy in preparing that.  When it came to holidays like Passover, our traditions were that the children could leave the table at the time that they were to look for the afikomen.  They did not leave the table before then.  My father, one of the grandchildren, and whoever would be around would make the charoset; it was my father’s responsibility, and my mother’s was to make the soup and the matzoh balls.  Everyone knew that this is who is going to do what, although everything was done here, in this house.  The children looked forward to it.  The gifts were shared, irrespective of who found the afikomen, and then the children could go down and play.  We called them up toward the end of the service so they could share in the singing, etc.  But in between, there was no point in having them restless, etcetera, so they were able to go down and play, and they looked forward to it.  The holidays were always a day of rest and relaxation.  I took them to shul – sometimes they walked with my mother, and sometimes they rode with me.  They knew that it was a different atmosphere and that there were certain responsibilities, and they would continue to go.  My daughters went to the high school, the Jewish High School because I insisted that they go.  I don’t think I ever asked them if they wanted to go.  My sons went to afternoon Hebrew School, even though they went to McDonough.  It took a special arrangement with McDonough to get them out of athletic activities, which took place every afternoon, so they could go.  That was very nice.  I told the headmaster that if I could not take them out for religious school, I could not let them go to that school.  They were both very good students, so he wanted them in the school.  Against their will – I’m sure – they went to afternoon Hebrew school all the way through.  One year, it affected the championship of Little League.  Sandy’s, the youngest’s, graduation night – because his team had won every one of their games had their League Championship Game the same night that he was to graduate.  That was a serious dilemma.  So, we had to come up with this Solomonic decision.  I explained to the principal that he would be late, so that he might not be able to sit on the stage when the graduation ceremony started, which I think was 7:00 or 7:30, but that I would bring him from the baseball game.  And that was the decision – that he would literally go from school, bring his change of clothes in the car, play baseball – and they won that year – and then the other change of clothes would be in the car, with some wet washcloths and something to eat, and then, go to the graduation.  He thought that that would work because he was concerned.  He was an important player, and they won the Championship.  So, I guess we did the right thing.  He appeared there before they called his name.  So, it worked out very well.  We just had a lot of fun.  We had a lot of interesting experiences.  The children loved this house, because the house enabled them to have a sense of freedom, as well as being their home.  My grandchildren don’t want me to sell the house because all of their memories that are tied into this house are positive memories, and they just want it to stay in the family.  My son was married here – outside.  One of my daughters took her wedding pictures outside and had the wedding itself – the ceremony – in the house, and then we went to a hall for the reception.  The beginning of the Sheva Brachot for my other daughter was here.  The house has numerous memories.  The baby namings of the girls all took place here, in this house, and my daughter Nina – the rabbi – wrote the ceremonies.  We planted trees – a tree for each daughter because it’s tradition; it’s certainly not law.  Tradition is that you plant a tree for the daughter, and by the time the daughter is old enough to marry, the trunk of the tree would be sufficient to create the poles for the canopy.  So, we have four trees outside for each of the four granddaughters.  The house itself – not just my husband and I, but the house itself, has meaning for the children.  Because it’s theirs.  Holidays, they would come here; they’d come to sleep here, or they’d play here.  When their parents were out of town, or in the hospital to give birth, or whatever, they would be here.  It became part of their lives as well, which is why I am still here.

EE:  Do you have any special Hanukkah rituals?

SC:  No.  Other than making latkes, no.  I don’t remember any special Hanukah rituals.  We played dreidel, but it was not a necessity.  It was just fun.  

EE:  We actually only got to the birth of three of your children.

SC:  The fourth – right.  I waited.  After Nina was born, the doctor said, “You’re fine.  You can now have all the children you want.”  I said, “Thank you very much.” I waited a few years because those were the three years that Sonya was ill, and then became pregnant with our fourth child, who was born in 1957.  So there are seven years between the oldest and the youngest.  We were already building this house and planning to move in this house.  He was born in May, and we moved August 1st of that year.  We had the bris at the old house and waited until this house was finished because, as I told you, we knew we had to leave because the houses were torn down to build a school.  About two or three years after we left, I went back to see what was left.  We had two blue cedars in front of our house, and the two blue cedars flanked the entrance to the school.  That was all I could show my children when they said, “Show me where I was born.” There was nothing for me to show except the two cedars – blue cedars, which were beautiful trees.  The wildlife, when we first moved here, with foxes and deer and loads of rabbits, etc., was very exciting for us because we had not had that – even though we had a little plot of land.  I guess we had a seventy-five-foot plot when we lived in the city.  This was very exciting.  The children would go to Fort Garrison – the actual fort itself – because when we moved here, one, there were very few houses, and two, across the street was an apple orchard, and the only dwelling or building there was the Fort.  So they used to go there and play around the Fort.  They enjoyed the – what I would say was the relaxed way of life in a very suburban area.  We were also fortunate that two of the neighbors who had been with us at the Carlisle Avenue area bought here.  We did not know.  I mean, it was not known to any one of the three that we were buying in this particular area.  They bought here, and their children were the same ages as our children.  So, when we came here, there was a ready-made camaraderie of a number of children, and there were others too – a number of children the ages of ours.  So, it quickly became a comfortable neighborhood for the children.  Sandy was the youngest, so he really didn’t have contemporaries on this street, but his contemporaries were a few blocks away.  When he was old enough, and I felt that it was time, they would go through people’s property to get to each other’s houses.  But the older children – all three of them – had contemporaries living here with whom they could bond and with whom they went to school and developed relationships and enjoyed the area, as I said because it was idyllic in the sense that it was sufficiently far away from other major tract houses to be isolated and yet, it was close enough to go wherever you wanted to go.  We didn’t have the beltway when we first moved here or the traffic that we have now.  It was great, and the children enjoyed it, and we stayed here.  The usual ritual of bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah took place in this house and at shul.  Our daughters, because they’re only fourteen months apart, shared the same night.  At that time, it had to be night.  But that’s [inaudible].  At that time, it was only a Friday night service was available.  The two of them shared the same service [and] the same ceremony, which led some people to believe that they were twins.  That’s fine, but they’re not.  And the boys’ bar mitzvahs were at Chizuk Amuno, as well.  We celebrated all of them there – daytime events with lunch there, not a party.  Then, they had a children’s party here.  At that time, by that time, the children began to understand that they could have parties here and bring their friends.  So Steven invited his class, prom night to come here, and they did.  Sandy had his classmates come here almost every spring or summer for a party.  Ilene had a party here.  I don’t remember Nina having one.  Nina spent a year in Israel – her junior year she spent in Israel, at Kfar Silver.  The grandchildren – when they were born – began enjoying having parties.  One granddaughter had her bat mitzvah party here, another granddaughter had her bat mitzvah party here.  My grandson had his wedding rehearsal here.  It’s just a place where they know they can come and enjoy themselves, and they do.  It’s wonderful for me.

EE:  Just tell me what this whole area was like in the ’50s.

SC:  Barren.  Barren.  You could count the houses easily on both hands because there weren’t that many – even to fill up both hands.  You had to do a lot of car-pooling because other than school buses when they ran, there was no way to get anywhere because there was no public transportation.  There was no postman, obviously, but there was a fruit man.  That was very good because he came on Thursdays.  He drove his truck into whatever driveway would permit him to come in and had produce and eggs, etc. because we didn’t have any food stores.  The stores that are now in Pikesville – the food store in Pikesville, the Giant, for example, did not exist at the time.  There were smaller stores.  There was a little store that I mentioned in Stevenson Village.  We had some severe snows the first few years we lived here, and one was extremely severe.  It literally snowed to the level of thirty-six inches.  It just so happened that my husband and I were away that week, and we got the phone call.  My parents were here, and we had a live-in couple at the time, and fortunately, the man was 6’6”.  We came back as quickly as we could, and we took the train because the plane wouldn’t get us in.  We took the train and then took a cab to come here and couldn’t get past Clarks Lane and Park Heights because they hadn’t plowed the street.  Now, Park Heights is a major six-lane thoroughfare.  You could imagine what the snow was like.  That was, I believe, ‘58 or ‘59.  But I believe it was ‘58.  1958 – February.  At any rate, there were no deliveries of milk or food.  Forget newspapers.  We had to get home, and our in-laws lived a block off of Park Heights Avenue at that time – on Labyrinth Road, I believe.  We slept the night there, on the floor, because we couldn’t get through.  I mean, we literally couldn’t walk the miles from there to here.  But the next morning, we managed.  During the night, they cleared a path – a single path – on Park Heights Avenue.  The next morning, my husband and brother-in-law managed to move my mother-in-law’s car out of its place in the street, and we made our way to Stevenson Road.  Except that Anton Farms had not been plowed and probably wasn’t going to be because it wasn’t a main thoroughfare.  The man who worked for us literally opened the path by walking from our house to the corner.  We left the car there because there was no place else to take it.  Because I always kept the house well-stocked, we were in good shape.  I received a phone call from a neighbor asking if we had bread and milk because they didn’t, and they lived around the bend.  That man was so traumatized by the isolation – nothing came in here for five days; we had no electricity.  The electricity went off.  All of us here are on well water.  We had no water.  So that meant that we had no heat.  We had nothing, literally.  Talk about primitive living.  The children had a ball because the fireplaces were all going, and we were cooking in the fireplace.  I used pots that I had – I didn’t care as long as they lasted the few days that we needed them.  We melted snow for water and boiled it when necessary.  We had the hand can openers, thank goodness, to give us some of that food.  We obviously emptied the freezer or refrigerator and put everything in the snow because the snow was deep enough to protect it for a long time.  Couldn’t get out the front door because, with the winds and the drifts, we had a five-foot wall at the front door, so we could only get out the side door.  For the children, it was wonderful.  One of our neighbors, who decided after three days that this was not wonderful, decided to walk – remember, you couldn’t get through by car – to walk to the corner and be picked up to go to stay in the Lord Baltimore Hotel.  But their son didn’t want to, so he came and stayed with us because we were having more fun than he was going to have.  That’s the way it ended up.  The children thought it was great, and some mothers who walked in the neighborhood came over to visit.  On the fifth day, we were able to get an electrician to come out and give us a generator to hook it up so that I could have enough electricity to cook.  That’s really what I was worried about was the cooking – to cook and give us a light in the kitchen.  The rest of the house was still dark.  That was quite an experience, which I shall not forget.  The children were huddled downstairs in front of a big fireplace that we have in this room where we have the fireplace, in the den.  You could just piled on the blankets and make them comfortable.  So, when you ask what it was like, that’s what it was like.  Nothing came in or out for five days.  We survived it, except for the couple that moved that fall [and] put their house on the market immediately.  He was terrified that he’d have a heart attack and that the ambulance wouldn’t get through to him, and he was right.  There was no ambulance that would get through to him; it would have had to have been a helicopter, and at that time, we didn’t have any helicopter pads.  A few others put in some changes in their homes so that they could go through this experience without too much difficulty.  The Gas and Electric Company did not correct the problem with electricity delivery here for at least fifteen years after that.  We had lights go out regularly – and not just for five minutes the way they do today.  It was for hours and hours, and there was nothing we could do because the current came from Park Heights Avenue, not from Stevenson Road.  Since Park Heights was built up and Stevenson Road was barren, there was nothing here.  There were no houses across the street; there were very few houses to our left going North, and there was no sense that it was a highly populated area because it wasn’t.  As I mentioned, Wellwood was new; Pikesville Senior High School was relatively new, and we were pioneering the area, basically.  Pioneering the area.

EE:  Have you ever thought about how the Jewish population was moving out to the Valley, which was a traditional non-Jewish stronghold?

SC:  Yes.  We moved here, there were people going out to Caves Road and going out to the Valley, that is, Valley Road, Stevenson, and Green Spring Valley.  There weren’t that many, though, not in 1957 or 1960.  Actually, it was later than that, that there was a major move because there was no place else to go.  Remember, we were constrained in where we lived in Baltimore by antisemitism and ethnic divisions, and Baltimore is still geographically ethnically divided.  So, Jews had to go northwest, there was no place else to go.  If we wanted any property around the house, it would have to be the Upper Park Heights Valley area.  That was the only place to go.  Couldn’t go east to Towson.  You couldn’t go to Catonsville.  One, we weren’t welcomed, and two, that was not where the facilities were.  So, if the synagogues were here, and the kosher butchers were here, and the grocery stores were here, it made sense to stay as close to here as possible and still move out and have space.  I think that’s what the constraints were.  Today, it is very, very different.  Today, you can buy kosher food in any store, irrespective of where it is located and it’s comfortable enough to move out to Carroll County, Harford County, or Howard County because we don’t have the limitations that existed then.  

EE:  Okay.

SC:  Carlisle Avenue was a very nice place to live.  They were detached houses with a little bit of land around them.  They were large enough to accommodate families with four children.  They had been built individually.  Our house had been built and lived in by the builder.  When we bought our house, it was either twenty-five or thirty years old, that’s all.  It was the kind of house that an older couple would build but was ideal for us.  The neighborhood had a number of young children of people our age who had moved there because that particular housing was less expensive than in a lot of other places, and yet it was a good neighborhood.  We were not too far from the commercial district.  We were only three or four blocks from transportation, and it was ideal for downtown.  If any of the men worked downtown, it was fifteen minutes, and you were there.  So, it was a desirable area.  It began to change, I guess, when we were there about three years.  African-Americans began buying and moving in for the same reasons.  It was an ideal location, the price was good, etc., and people began to move out.  Although, as I said, our particular street – the house next to us sold, and an African-American family came in.  Before we knew that the City was condemning or recommending that you sell your house, we understood that the house, if we were to sell it, would not be bought by any whites because of the “white flight” that was taking place at that time.  When we found out that the city was going to sell it, we had an inquiry from someone who knew the people who lived next door.  They came and were anxious to buy the house, fully furnished the way it was.  We told them that the city was going to take it, and they went ahead and bought it anyway, which I don’t understand – and bought the furniture.  Some of the furniture I’m sorry that we let go.  But that’s what made the house sell.  At any rate, the neighborhood had a number of children.  Some of us had front porches, and we had a very large front porch with a swing that could seat two or three children.  So, children came to our house very frequently to sit on the porch and to play.  Because we had three with whom they could play, as opposed to the one or two that they had at home, it was fun.  I can still see the children coming from both sides – from farther down on Carlisle Avenue and from farther up on Carlisle Avenue – to play on the porch.  Somewhere along the line, one of our dogs disappeared, and we went to get another dog.  We had two shepherds and a collie.  We went to get another dog, and my husband picked up a boxer, which was the biggest mistake ever in an animal.  Boxers are supposed to be friendly and loving animals – gentle.  This boxer was vicious and had evidently been mistreated.  I can’t imagine a dog being as vicious as that if he had not been mistreated.  He was a superb watchdog.  Jerry spent a lot of nights coming home late, and he preferred that I have the security of a watchdog.  Well, the shepherd we had had before that was a very good watchdog without being vicious.  But this dog decided when my husband brought him home that he would figure out who the family was and that everybody else was the enemy.  I don’t know how he figured out who the family was, but he did.  Look, there’s some deer right now, outside my window.  And they’ll go and eat my food – my garden.  See? They’re very tame and not frightened by automobiles, such as the one that just went by.  But we had loads of them when we first moved here.  As a matter of fact, we had hunters who asked permission to hunt them, and I gave them permission.  At any rate, this dog would not let anybody in the house and that included my mother and my mother-in-law.  I can tell you that they did not appreciate a dog that growled at them, and I had to hold their hand and take them into the living room; otherwise, Boxer would not let them in.  As vicious as he was with what he considered outsiders and adults, that’s how gentle he was with the children.  Steven, our oldest, would try to ride him like a horse.  He was a big dog.  When Boxer would lie down, Steven would go over and put his fingers in his mouth and pull his ears no matter how many times I said, “Don’t do that,” because I was afraid.  The dog was wonderful – never hurt him, never snarled at him, never did anything.  He just loved the children, but he disliked adults to the degree that I said, “We have to get rid of him.”  We did try.  We put an ad in the paper and said that he was a watchdog.  A woman came to buy him.  She lived in a basement apartment where she had a window with the grates across, etc., and she was afraid in the city – in the heart of the city – and she wanted a watchdog.  So, she bought the watchdog and took him home.  Two days later, I received a phone call.  One, her landlord didn’t appreciate the dog.  Two, he barked all night long at anybody who passed.  Three, he attempted to lunge at the landlord.  So, she can’t have the dog – could she please bring him back?  I knew the problem.  I said, “No problem.  Bring him back.”  She was afraid to bring him back.  She put him in a cab by himself and paid the cab driver to bring the dog back.  Why the cab driver wasn’t afraid, I’ll never know.  He honked the horn, and I went out, and there was Boxer in the cab, and I brought him in the house, and I said, “Okay.  We’re going to get rid of him some other way.”  We were doing some renovations downstairs, and we had a painter – downstairs and upstairs.  We had a painter in the house, and for some reason, the boxer did not like the painter, and he went after him, and the ladder and the paint – as you would see in cartoons – went everywhere.  And that’s when I said, “I’ve had it.  The dog’s got to go.”  So, interestingly enough, the painter said he lived on a farm about twenty miles outside of town, and he had a very large area, and he would like to have a watchdog.  So, I said, “Fine.  When you’re ready, he’s yours.”  I hadn’t mentioned that to my husband.  That evening, I don’t know what happened in the back.  I had the Boxer on a run, where I had put a wire up and a ring on the wire, so he could run the length of the back, but he couldn’t go to the width more than three or four feet – whatever his choke chain and choke collar permitted him to do.  Anyway, he was chasing something and going in circles, and he caught the chain around his neck.  He was choking, and I was afraid he would choke to death.  So I went out there to calm him and to enable him to let me get him out of this suffocating situation.  I was in the middle of doing that when my mother showed up, and that was not a very good scene.  She became hysterical, thinking that he was going to bite me or attack me.  I guess from her perspective, that made sense.  I knew that I had to save the dog because I was not going to be responsible for a dog dying that way, and he did let me.  He calmed down enough so that I could help move him around and get him untangled so that he wasn’t choking to death.  The next day, the man took him.  I had the man’s name and asked my husband to call.  I was just curious to know what happened with this dog.  We called him a month or two later, and he said that he still had the dog, but that the dog had gone through a plate glass window in this little community where he lived because there was somebody in there that he didn’t like.  I couldn’t understand why he still kept the dog.  I mean, that’s the kind of dog he was.  I had taken him to the vet because whenever we had a pet, I took him to the vet to be fully examined, to make sure he was well, and so forth.  The vet said, “Boxers are always, always gentle, and calm and loving.”  I took that boxer back to him and said, “This boxer will kill.  If you give him the chance, he will definitely kill you.” He said, “Impossible.”  I said, “Well, I’m sorry.  I can’t prove it to you, but if you ever – if anyone ever brings him to you, please understand he’s a dangerous dog.”  I can’t recall who it was exactly, but a neighbor came to visit us one time whose grandchild was on the porch.  We had a big gate, and the neighbor reached over the gate to pick up his grandchild.  If I hadn’t been there, he would have lost an arm.  I had no fear of Boxer for some reason – I grabbed him by that choke chain and pulled him back.  That neighbor didn’t come back again, and neither did the child because there was that much fear.  But he only lasted three months or four months, so when he left, it was fine.  We ended up getting a white shepherd, who wasn’t too bright.  Also went after police cars, policemen, and other dogs.  The neighbors complained.  We were getting ready to move here, so I kept him confined until we moved here.  He was much better here.  He still didn’t like police cars or policemen, and he would attack them if they came close enough, but we built a run so that he could be outside.  She was actually a female.  I thought a female would be less disruptive.  But friends used to call and say, “I’m coming over; get Lavon out of the way,” and we did.  She was with us eleven years when she died.  But Carlisle Avenue was a fun place because the children had companions and developed relationships that were good for them.

EE:  Can you describe, just a little, the relationship between that side – the Carlisle Avenue side of Liberty Heights, and the Ashburton side.

SC:  Actually, Carlisle was near Lake Ashburton.  We lived on the 3300 block of Carlisle, which is one block up from Hilton Avenue.  Or Hilton Street, I think it was.  So we had the lke and Ashburton south of us.  Across the street, the houses were somewhat smaller.  They didn’t have the amount of ground around them that we had.  Our houses were larger and older and a little farther from one other.  There was very little connection, or relationship, between those who lived on the other side of Liberty Heights and those of us who lived on the – what would it be?  It would have been the West Side of Liberty Heights.  I don’t recall any reason to go across the street, to be perfectly honest.  There was no commercial area there.  There was nothing that would draw you, or me, or the children there.  If anything, we went down to where the lake was because that was natural for us – that’s what the children would want to see and where they would play.  Although they had enough land around our house and enough children to play with that we didn’t have to go there too frequently.  But there was absolutely no relationship that I can recall.  Their houses were not taken over by the City, so none of them had to move.  I don’t recall any children or adults from across Liberty Heights Road – not at all.

EE:  Now, that side – there was a restrictive covenant?

SC:  Oh yes.  

EE:  In the Ashburton area?

SC:  Absolutely.  There was a restrictive covenant when we bought our house because the first realtor who took me around to look – because Jerry and I were looking independently, and we figured we would find out – because I could go during the day, and he couldn’t.  The first realtor said to me something that was very diplomatic, which was where he was going to take me.  I asked him why he was limiting himself to those areas.  He explained that we really wouldn’t be able to buy in the other areas.  There was no question about it.  It was very clear and made very clear if the realtor was honest.  That existed until we found this lot when we found out that the City wanted the area, I began looking with a different realtor because this was five years later.  That realtor said, “I think I know what type of place you’re looking for.”  I thought if we could buy instead of build, it would be easier, especially with three children and one on the way.  He said, “I don’t think you want to go into such and such neighborhood or such and such zip code because it wouldn’t be good.”  I thought to myself, “Here it is 1956.  We’ve been through the Second World War.  We’ve been through a lot of problems with the races, the ethnic fights.  It didn’t make any difference; the Covenants still held.”  It was very clear.  Anyone who wanted to ask knew immediately.  It was very clear.  You asked me about feeling antisemitism.  The first antisemitic act that my husband ever experienced was at the Green Spring Valley Restaurant, Night Club, whatever it was called.  We were there.  We had reservations.  I had never been there before, but they had dancing and he loved to dance, and I loved to dance, so we went there.  We were on the dance floor when some inebriated man who was also on the dance floor with his wife, and he just shoved his hand against Jerry’s shoulder and said, “There’s no room on this dance floor for you, Jew.”  At which point, of course, I said, “We’re leaving.”  Jerry looked at me.  I said, “I’m not staying.  I’m certainly not getting into a fight,” and explained to the maitre’d why we were leaving.  That’s the last time that I was ever there.  That was the first time that Jerry saw an overt act of antisemitism.  It was clear that we were not wanted in this part of town.

EE:  When was that?

SC:  That was before we moved here.  But this was not part of the Valley.  We are on the top of the hill – the Valley doesn’t actually begin until you go down the hill to Stevenson.  So when we inquired as to who was living here, they were all Jews.  We knew that Chizuk Amuno was going to be built, because I questioned what would be there for religious services and so forth.  We knew that religious services would be available nearby.  We also knew that in time that there would be a Beltway.  But basically, this was going to be an extension of the Jewish community that had started at Stevenson and Old Court Road, and that Gordon Sugar had built.  We had many friends who lived there, so we knew that this was going to be a Jewish area.  I did not want to live in an area where I or or the children might, experience antisemitism, although the boys did somewhat at McDonough.  But it wasn’t serious enough for them to be disturbed because when they invited their friends over, they invited all the boys over; they didn’t make any distinction.

EE:  I think it was interesting that you chose to send your boys to McDonough School.  Why don’t you talk a little bit about what kind of school that was?

SC:  McDonough was a para-military school.  Very rigid, tremendous discipline.  We didn’t really choose.  I am sharing this story with you, although I have done with very few others.  My nephew, whose mother died, was in the third grade. [Telephone rings.  Recording paused.] Jerry and I had had friends – and still have friends – who are non-Jewish, as well as Jewish.  When Harvey, my nephew, took the admissions test at McDonough, the result was a suggestion from the Admissions Officer that even though he had just finished the third grade, in order to make it at McDonough, he repeat the third grade and not go into the fourth grade.  My brother-in-law became very incensed and said, “This is antisemitic” – because his name is Goldstein.  My husband was very disturbed by that because we had friends who had children at McDonough, and he just didn’t think that that was the situation.  Jerry had gone to Loyola School, and he had a number of friends who were Catholic and had not experienced antisemitism – as I said, he really didn’t experience it until we were married and on that dance floor – and for some reason, he decided to prove that it was not antisemitism by having Steven take the admissions test.  Now, Steven would have been entering the first grade.  This was August, and by then, as a rule, private schools have concluded their recruitment.  I was not happy with the idea because the boys wore heavy woolen uniforms, they drilled with rifles, and as they were older, they were given real rifles.  It was a school that was academically challenging, but I didn’t appreciate the rigidity and the discipline that went along with the school.  At any rate, Steven, being five years old, didn’t know what he was doing.  So, that was fine.  We took him in for the questioning that dean, who was a woman, of the Lower School – Leah Watts Dawson – interview.  Then, for the written test.  It couldn’t have been a written test.  He was only five years old.  Whatever the exam was for admission.  At any rate, we were not in the room.  We were not permitted to be in the room.  When we first applied, or my husband first applied, we were told that there was no room on the bus.  That was a McDonough rule.  If there wasn’t a seat for you on the bus because McDonough picked up and delivered, you could not go, which made sense.  They didn’t want parents transporting children separately because you lose the cohesiveness of the group.  So, that made sense.  I was hoping that they wouldn’t find room on the bus, quite frankly, although I had not liked his experience in public school.  He had been in kindergarten for only three months when the teacher called me up to tell me what an impossible child he was because he knew all the stories she was telling and reading, and he could read them.  So, he went in the corner and played with the blocks while she was reading to the class.  I remember saying, “I was a teacher, and if he was in the corner playing with the blocks and not disturbing the other students, why bother with him, especially if he knew the story?”  So, at any rate, I knew that any school he went to would have to have some understanding.  Steven took the test, and we received a phone call the following week – this is already the second week of August – the phone call the following week that there is room on the bus.  “Hello there, we found a seat on the bus.”  He had done exceptionally well, and they really wanted him as a student.  That’s when Jerry told my brother-in-law, "We didn’t hide the fact that we were Jewish, and they didn’t deny Steven a space.”  I’m not sure that sat well with everybody, but that’s the fact.  That’s when Steven went to McDonough.  I wasn’t going to treat Sandy differently because Steven stayed at McDonough until he graduated, and there were some excellent teachers, and there was good academic learning.  As I said, we had other friends – Jewish friends as well as non-Jewish friends – who had sons at McDonough.

[END OF CD 4]

EE:  This is Elaine Eff and today is October 3rd, 2001.  I am with Shoshana Cardin, and this I our fifth mini-disk that we are recording of her – and our fifth visit.  Shoshana, we have made a lot of headway.  I think we should start with – we’ve talked about your family.  We actually haven’t talked about your family, I guess, growing into their own.

SC:  Right.

EE:  We’ve kind of left them as –

SC:  As children.

EE:  In school, right.  Maybe we should actually talk about your children and where they went, where they are.  Then I think we are going to talk about balancing your organization and family work.

SC:  Okay.  The boys went to McDonough.  Steven, the eldest, graduated from McDonough.  Sanford left McDonough at the end of the eighth grade and went to Milton Academy because he wanted to get into Harvard.  Steven did the research for his kid brother and said the best way to get into Harvard is to go to Milton because Milton is the feeder school for Harvard.  That’s what Sandy wanted, so he went there.  The girls went to public school through sixth grade, and then I was not terribly pleased with the public school, and they both went to Park.  Upon graduation, Steven went to Clark University and then to Columbia to get his Master’s.  Ilene went to Elmira just for one year, and then went to Notre Dame because she wanted to be in Baltimore; she was engaged and received her – Steven has a Master’s in Philosophy and a Master’s in Economics.  Ilene has a Masters in Speech Therapy and in Education.  Sandy went to Harvard and, after Harvard, to Law School, so he has his Juris Doctor degree.  Nina went to Connecticut College and then to the Jewish Theological Seminary – where she received a Master’s in Talmud and was later ordained as a Rabbi.  Ilene and Nina both live in Baltimore.  Sanford lives in Tulsa, and Steven lives in Denver.  They’re all married and have children.

EE:  Did any of your children’s career paths either –?  I mean, did you feel that you had any influence or direct influence?  Did any of them surprise you in their direction?

SC:  No, I don’t think I had direct – I didn’t want to have direct influence.  I specifically avoided that.  I wanted each child to do what he or she felt most comfortable doing and enjoyed doing.  So that when Nina, at the age of fourteen, said she wanted to be a Rabbi, I said, “Great, but you’ll have to wait until they let women become rabbis.”  She spent a year in Israel, for example, at school, the only one of the four who spent a year in Israel in high school.  She went ahead with her choices, and eventually, even though she was married and had three children, became ordained as a rabbi.  Ilene always loved to work with little children, and when she went to Notre Dame and also interned, she decided to become proficient in teaching the hearing impaired.  She speaks sign language.  Then she went to work at the Maryland School for the Deaf and then decided to go on to get her Master’s in that.  That was what she always wanted to do.  Sandy wanted to be an attorney for a while, and then decided he didn’t want it at all, left law, and went to work as the executive director of a foundation.  Many people were surprised that I said, “Go.  That’s what you want to do.  That’s what will make you happy.”  So, I encouraged each child to follow his or her own dream as opposed to telling them what’s best to do.  I’m very fortunate.  It worked out well.

EE:  Tell me what kind of parent you were.  What kind of parents you and your husband were?

SC:  I was strict.  I was the disciplinarian.  I believe in parameters.  I believe in expectations, probably more than most of my peers.  Some of my friends’ children called me “the warden” because I did not have any difficulty in saying to the girls, “You will be in at such and such a time, and that’s it.  I mean, there’s no negotiation.  That will be the time that you will come in.”  Even the boys.  “If it’s after midnight, you call me every hour until you’re home because I will be concerned.  I won’t destroy myself worrying, but I will be concerned.  I want to know where you are; that’s the only reason that I require that.” I  did not follow the fashions of the time, and I can remember some annoyances that my girls had, when I didn’t buy Pappagallo’s – or whatever the popular thing was and explained to them that that doesn’t make the individual.  The individual has to be comfortable in what he or she is doing as a human being.  I always encouraged them to do the best they could, but never competitively, because there’s a range of intellectual capabilities among the four children.  I didn’t want anyone to feel that he or she was not as good as the other one, and I worked very hard at that.  So, it was never competitive.  I did not show one report card to the next child.  “Do the best that you can, whatever that best happens to be.”  Even though I was specific in my expectations of behavior, free play was something that I believed in.  So, when the children would have parties here, and parents would come, expecting a structured party – whether it was a disk jockey, or an entertainer, or something like that – that isn’t what I had.  The parents were surprised that Sandy could bring home twenty-five schoolmates from McDonough, and they would just play.  They were playing outside; they were playing ball; they were playing inside.  I believed that play time is free time to play as they wished to play.  I did not structure their playtime.  We had a lot of fun.  Sunday evenings, we always went out – usually bowling – and bowled as a family.  We had a lot of fun doing that.  We also went to visit other families that had children because that was  – I wanted them to know that there were other children and other ways to develop relationships.  Just about every Christmas school break, we took the children away.  Frequently, we took them to Florida.  We drove down, which is interesting in itself – to drive with four children down to Florida.  Two of the years, I took my parents, so there were eight of us in a station wagon.  They didn’t have vans then.  Besides, I liked station wagons.  We went down to Florida and had a lot of fun.  We would take them to dinner and shows at the hotel so that they were able to see major entertainers.  I thought that, too, was a lesson for them.  When we traveled overseas, especially to Israel, we took the children as well.  We had a place in the Islands, in St.  Croix, and we took them there, so they had an opportunity to travel.  All of our children had passports, so we were able to travel.  Subsequently, I would say Steven traveled through Great Britain and to Israel on his own.  Sandy went around the world when he graduated law school.  I met him for part of that trip, but basically, only thirteen days.  He traveled for two months, and he was by himself.  Ilene and Bert travel.  I just wanted them to get a broad sense of society.  I did try to take them to the symphony; we bought season tickets for what I call the “Comfortable Classics.”  That didn’t work.  I did not succeed with either symphonies or museums, I don’t mind telling you.  But I did succeed with literature.  They all read.  It was a given that no matter what they had gotten during the year, when Book Month came, they could go in and buy up to three books – any three that they wanted and then they could use their own money to buy as many more as they wanted.  Book reading was very important to me.

EE:  What’s Book Month?

SC:  The synagogues and the Jewish community usually have a book month for Hanukah; it’s in November.  Now, it’s national.  National Jewish Book Month is in November.  They bring in many, many samples of books, and the children go through them, all ages, from pre-school on.  They go through the books to see what they like, and their parents then order the books for them.  To me, that was important.  I used to take them to the library when they were young to get books out because I wanted them to read and read not just what was assigned but read what they wanted to read as well because reading to me was, and is, very, very important.  That worked because they all are avid readers.  So we had a lot of fun.

EE:  How do you think it is that they all embraced Judaism?

SC:  Well, Judaism wasn’t a burden here.  Here, it was a joy.  Every Friday night, we had dinner – my parents, Jerry’s parents, our kids, and whomever they wanted to invite.  Friday night was open; you could invite anyone.  So, it could be anywhere from sixteen to twenty-six people for dinner on Friday night, and the table discussion was always lively.  The children were part of it.  It wasn’t a house where the children could not participate.  They would participate, and they would argue – what I would call normal family discussions at a table, except they rarely, if ever, dealt with the family.  They were discussions of world events, stories, or something that the children wanted to explain.  In with my disciplinary approach, there was only one reason that a child could be excused from the table, and that was to look up a word in a dictionary or an issue in the encyclopedia.  I had both the Encyclopedia Britannica and the dictionary in the part of the kitchen where I have shelves for books because I thought it was that important.  Frequently, the children would get up and go look up a word or look up a subject.  In that sense, it was fun; it wasn’t a chore.  The holidays, I did not drop them off and go about my business.  If it was a holiday, we went to shul together.  I was President of the PTA [Parent Teacher Association], and I worked on the High Holidays to make them enjoyable for children because I felt that if we didn’t put the joy in, it would only be a burden or a bore – since I insisted that they go to afternoon Hebrew School.  So it was pleasurable.  My father was not a traditionally religious man; he was a cultural Jew, and he knew many, many songs, many melodies, and many stories.  He could quote from any of the texts of our tradition, and he used to somehow make it part of every conversation.  I can’t recall a conversation where my father didn’t quote something, or someone, or some rabbi, or some teacher from our Jewish tradition.  So, it became very natural for them.  Jerry was very involved in the Jewish community, and they knew he was involved in the Jewish community.  We didn’t keep our activities secret from them, and again, it never appeared to be a burden.  It was always a joy and an access point.  We had Israeli generals here; we had Senators here; we had – talking about U.S.  Senators – we had a Vice President here.  We had a number of people who came, and the first thing that you would see when you walked into the house was this is a Jewish house.  It was Jewish art, and there was no shame or discomfort.  We were who we were and being Jewish was very much a part of our lives.  So, Jewish is a part of their lives.

EE:  Have you observed the continuity of any of these family traits in your children’s families?

SC:  I think so, to the degree that they can.  Yes.  I mean, all of the children observe Friday night kiddush and candle lighting.  Even though they may seem to be trivial, the fact is that every one of the four children does have candle lighting, does have kiddush, does do something different Friday night.  My two daughters are Shomrei Shabbat, so that means they observe the Sabbath strictly.  Sandy, who does not, still observes Friday night.  Shabbat is Shabbat.  The girls can have their friends over, but they don’t go out.  They don’t go on dates on Friday night, which was one of the rules that I had here.  You couldn’t go out on Friday night.  I explained that I don’t go out on Friday night.  The Museum has its Ball on Friday night; I don’t go.  I’d write a letter, and I would show them sometimes the notes I wrote.  “I’m sorry, I cannot attend because you are holding it on a Friday night, and this is my Sabbath.” I did the same with events that took place on Saturday morning.  So they recognized that the beauty of this country is the freedom to say, “I’m sorry, that’s not the day that I choose, or the day that my religion chooses for me to participate.”  So, yes, all of them belong to synagogue; all of them go to synagogue.  Not necessarily all of them regularly, but all of them go to synagogue.  All of them are Jewish to the core.  

EE:  You mentioned that you went bowling on Sundays.  Were there any other secular traditions that you maintained in the family that really became a part of life? 

SC:  Other than vacations and Sunday bowling, I don’t remember anything that we did consistently.  Because my husband worked just about every night.  Saturday night was our night to go out, as adults, as a couple.  We did have a boat at one time.  We took them out on the boat, but that wasn’t frequent.  Bowling was the only thing we did consistently, that I can recall.

EE:  I’m curious whether you adapted any – you said that your family was, were sort-of cultural Jews.  I’m curious if you picked up any traditions from your mother and father that you then integrated into your own families.

SC:  Well, the traditions were typical Jewish traditions: the Friday night tradition – the shul and Shabbat; being with the family on the holidays, that was very, very important.  I mean, my son still flies in.  As they got older, I said, “This is not a request.  This is a demand.  I want you to come in for the holidays.”  Whoever was living out of town – to the degree that you could.  “I want you to come in for the Holidays.”  Nina and Avram couldn’t because he was a Rabbi.  That made it difficult.  But times when he either had off or had vacation and he could come, they came.  So, getting together as a family at holiday time was very, very important.  Their observance of Shabbat evening – not daytime – was their business.  But Shabbat evening was very important.  Certain dishes that my mother prepared, which became known as Ema’s dishes, became traditional.  Cookies, what she called chicken fricassee, which was a sweet and sour dish, or sweet and sour cauliflower, which I just prepared for the holiday.  Certain cakes.

EE:  What is sweet and sour cauliflower?

SC:  You parboil the cauliflower – just to where it is beginning to get soft because I don’t like it soft.  I like it al dente.  Then, brown it in – it used to be oil.  Now, I use the spray.  You dip it in a batter, and then you brown it.  Most of my mother’s dishes took two to three pots.  Then, you brown it in a frying pan.  After it’s browned, you put it in a sauce – which is tomato sauce, some lemon juice, sugar, and I add mushrooms and seasoning, of course, and cook it.  It’s very thick because I don’t add much water.  It’s a thick sauce, and it’s the kind of sauce in which you can dip a piece of challah as well and enjoy.  It’s not made by many people, I don’t think that I’ve eaten it any place else.  That, and her special brand of cookies, which were special.  She prepared fricassee, which was almost the same sauce, but the base was – what’s difficult to get nowadays – chicken feet, the gizzard, and the neck, which formed the base so that you had the broth.  Then, it was ground beef with egg, matzoh meal, and I think it was cream of wheat.  You take a spoon of cream of wheat to make it even softer and fashioned it into balls, and put them, again, in the tomato sauce.  We added onions and mushrooms.  They’re traditional dishes.  And taiglach.  I’ve promised that I will teach my granddaughters to make taiglach, which also takes several dishes to prepare and time.  But that’s what my mother enjoyed doing.  She set a beautiful table – always.  When I went to one of my daughters today, I walked in and looked at the table and looked at how all the veggies were set up – the crudites and other things – and I said, “It’s a beautiful table.” Her response was, “Just like Ema used to set.”  So, those are the traditions that they remember, and it’s great.

EE:  Were your mother’s recipes Old World recipes?

SC:  Basically.  Old World and Israeli.  My mother was an excellent cook with eggplant.  Eggplant wasn’t so much Old World as it was Mediterranean.  So, it could be eggplant salad, fried eggplant, baked eggplant, or eggplant any way you want.  My brother and I were very accustomed to eating eggplant.  Her salads were Israeli salads.  Not the American-style salad but the way Israelis eat their salads.  I’m trying to think if there were any other specific Israeli dishes.  I don’t think so.  I think that the other dishes were the dishes that she learned from her mother, which were Eastern European.

EE:  Now, I would say that it sounds to me as if you had a fairly stable family life, both the family, your parents, your marriage of many years.

SC:  Very stable.

EE:  All your children are married once and for all.

SC:  No.

EE:  Oh.

SC:  No, the two boys have been divorced.  Steven has remarried.  Sandy has not, as of this point.  Although I imagine he will.

EE:  So the girls have stable [inaudible]?

SC:  Yes.  The girls – one will be married thirty years this December, and one will be married twenty-three years in July.  

EE:  Do you find that surprising?  I mean, given the climate that we live in today?

SC:  No.  No, that happens to be a bias of mine that the marriage is either made or broken by the woman, not the man.  I don’t believe in one love – for most people – because one can learn to live with someone else.  But I think that the cultural system that we have makes it almost imperative that the woman determine whether this marriage is going to last or not, as opposed to the man.  Men are fickle and much weaker than women emotionally.  I mean that.

EE:  Now, is this something that comes from your own internally?  Or is that family?

SC:  No, no.  It comes from me, internally.  Watching men and watching women, and as a youngster, learning about infidelity, learning about how different women coped, that it was not as unusual as our society would have us believe, back sixty years ago, seventy years ago.  I’m sure it was not that unusual prior to that.  It was just that society never discussed it, never shared it.  I just looked at various families and studied how the husbands and wives interacted, why they stayed together, and why when they didn’t, they didn’t stay together.

EE:  Are there any relationships that had a particular impact upon you, either positively or negatively?

SC:  No.  There wasn’t any one relationship.  I saw a number of women in what I would have called horrible relationships who stayed, and I began to understand why they stayed.  Then, I saw some women who wouldn’t put up with anything and decided to leave.  For some of them, it was not the wisest decision.  So, I learned that you can’t judge for others.  But, basically, it was not the man who, in most instances, made the decision to keep the marriage or break the marriage.

EE:  Well, it’s interesting because, in large part – I’d sort of love to segue into your leadership, your organizational affiliations, and perhaps it’s a good place to start.  How your organizational work – or where it met your family obligations?  How were you able to balance the two?

SC:  Well, first, I was raised in a family, and among my parents’ peers, where volunteerism wasn’t discussed; it was done.  There was an assumption that each of us had a responsibility to community however we define community.  So, it was not, I didn’t think, my choice whether I would be involved in a community; the choice was in what part of the community would I be involved.  It was not an “if,” it was a “when” and “what.”  The sense of social justice was very, very strong in our house.  I was interested in improving this world.  We now call it tikkun olam, and we didn’t call it that then, but we were working to improve the world, or at least, that was my impression, that all of us had that responsibility.  I guess I first began to work, or wanted to work, in the prison system.  That didn’t last too long because that wasn’t where a young woman should be.  Then, I worked in the mental health association, probably because of what I had seen as a youngster.  I realized people had problems and were not always stable.  Then, when I married, I was invited to join the Eastern Star, of which I had known nothing.  I didn’t even know it existed.  Because my husband’s family, all of the women in the family were in Eastern Star, and all the men were Masons.  That organization, in addition to being a social organization, was a charitable organization, and one of their projects was Rosewood State Training School.  Rosewood State Training School was not exactly a training school; it was a facility for mentally disabled and, later on, emotionally disturbed as well.  It was a huge facility at the time we volunteered.  We took responsibility for a cottage.  There were approximately thirty-five women, except that they were all ages and different levels of mental disability.  We went there once a week as volunteers to feed those who needed feeding to play with those who needed to be played with.  I don’t think anyone was over the age of six, mentally.  But physically, many of them were quite older.  I learned a number of things there.  One, I learned what it was to work when the doors are locked and you don’t have the key.  I also learned some women couldn’t handle it.  We had people who volunteered, and they came out there, and we literally had to send them back, or take them back that day, because the idea of being locked in a ward – because we met in the wardroom with a number of females rushing, yelling “Mother, Mother, Mother.”  Because that’s what we were, the mother image for them – and wanting to hug, and wanting to hold, and wanting to kiss.  The need to be physical that the patients had was sometimes a little too overwhelming for some people.  I also learned about gender differentiation.  There was a doctor in that facility – and this goes back to the ‘50s – who had been studying some of the patients who were there and came up with the theory that alcohol and tobacco were destructive during a woman’s years of reproduction, and she wrote a paper on it.  I don’t remember if I have the paper, but I had the paper at the time.  With our assurance that we would support her in her paper, she went and presented it to the head of the department, and it was rejected.  My sense was that it was rejected because a woman wrote it.  I had the feeling that if a man had written it, they would have paid closer attention.  I had not seen too much rejection because of gender, but I began to watch rejection of others.  This was the most striking example, especially since ten years later, there was no question that alcohol and tobacco were affecting the birth of the children.  So, I began to notice that and began to pay attention as to how professional women were being treated.  I knew how secretarial women were being treated, but I had not realized that professional women were also being treated in a fashion that was not the best for society or certainly for the individuals themselves.  This doctor subsequently left because she was just ignored.  I decided that when the time came, I would work for women’s recognition and rights, as well as whatever other work I was doing.  There was other charity work that we did there.  When the children were young, which meant that they were home during the day because they were too young to go to school, I worked with Beacon Chapter, which met at night.  I could get a babysitter to come in at, let’s say, 6:30.  I believe the meeting started at 7 o’clock, and I was home by 10.  As the children grew older, and I felt that they needed me when they came home from school, I took volunteer positions that enabled me to go during the day while they were in school and be home in the afternoons and evenings.  So, it was a matter of scheduling, and shifting the activities, and shifting the focus of activities, based on when the organization met.  As I said, I worked for the Mental Health Association –

EE:  What was Beacon Chapter?

SC:  Oh, Beacon Chapter #60, Order of the Eastern Star, was the women’s component, or auxiliary to Masonry, except that it was more Christian than the Masonic Order.  The Masonic Order is not Christian, but the Eastern Star is Christian.  I say that because I was shocked at my initiation at what I heard and what I saw.  Beacon Chapter was all Jewish and was formed open, as other Eastern Star chapters were, to the wives, mothers, daughters, sisters of Masons.  You had to be a blood relative.  Eastern Star was originally formed somewhere in the mid- to late 1800’s to take care of the wives of Masons.  Its basis was educational, social, and, at some point, maintaining support system for women who became either bereaved as widows or were left alone as daughters, etc.  So it was really a very positive, helpful entity.  There was no question that the Masons would take care of any woman who was in distress who belonged to an Eastern Star chapter.  That was a commitment.  For example, when Bonnie Blink was built, which was the retirement home for Masons, there was no question – although very few Jews ever applied to go – that women and men could go there to live out the rest of their lives if they didn’t have a place to live, or if someone needed to take care of them.  So, the purpose of it was fine, but it was founded by a Mason whose belief in Christianity was such that the Eastern Star, number one, is Christian from the beginning.  The Star in the East is the Star of Bethlehem, and it is the Star of Jesus.  Okay? That’s the first.  The second is that there are five star points.  And, of the five star points, one is Martha.  Martha is in the Christian religious liturgy and stories, not in anything Jewish.  So, I was surprised that these Jewish women, who were Jewish to the core – particularly the founders of this group – accepted this.  Then I realized it was their major vehicle for social life and for consistency.  Every other Tuesday, without question, the women met.  At one point, this Chapter had twelve hundred members.  Twelve hundred women.  It met as a group, and there was a ritual, and the ritual had to be followed in order to be a legitimate Eastern Star chapter.  There was refreshment afterward, and there was entertainment.  So, it served a social purpose because there was always charity.  We gave charity, and we performed volunteer work – both all the time.  Then, there was this social component to which husbands would come at the end of the meeting and socialize.  It was a very important social factor for these women.  But, as I said, I was shocked because I really didn’t ask, I was told, “Every Cardin woman is in there.” I was shocked, but it was ignored.  The one thing we did not do is that we did not show the cross.  In the non-Jewish chapters, which were the majority – not the majority, all – there is a visible cross in the room.  I was asked to serve at the level of the Grand Chapter.  There are individual chapters – usually geographically based or socially-based, and then there is the Grand Chapter.  Every State has a Grand Chapter, and all of those Grand Chapters make up the national.  Then there’s an international, so we are not talking about a small organization.  I was invited by someone who became the Worthy Grand Matron in Maryland to serve at the State level as a fraternal correspondent.  It was fascinating because that position required the matron to travel to every one of the chapters once a year.  There were 122 chapters here, and that woman traveled to every single one.  I mean, everyone who assumed that position had to – they had two years in which to do that.  I had a fascinating educational experience since I think I was the only Jew around.  I learned what their beliefs were and that they really were motivated to be charitable and to care for each other.  It was lovely to see, absolutely lovely to see.  Then, after two years, I said, “Thank you very much.  That’s enough.  That’s my contribution.”

EE:  You did that exclusively during that period of time?

SC:  No.  I have never belonged to one organization or been active in one organization exclusively.  It’s always been two or three, etcetera.  At the same, I was a volunteer solicitor for the Associated.  I also served on the Mental Health Association.  We helped – Beacon Chapter helped – establish the Alice Rockwell House, which is a halfway house for those who were released from Rosewood but couldn’t go into the general community.  Unfortunately, not a lot of lessons were learned by the City Government and State Government, which is why we had so many homeless people when it was decided that Rosewood was the wrong type of institution and you couldn’t institutionalize; you had to give them freedom.  Suddenly, the state released two thousand or twenty-five hundred people who simply couldn’t take care of themselves because they never had.  So we formed this halfway house, hoping that it would serve that purpose, which it did.  Except that, it probably couldn’t serve more than twenty-five or thirty people, and hundreds were being released.  That was one of society’s failures, but again, it was a lesson for us to learn.  We learned the government system.  We learned what you could do collaboratively because we had to deal with the Mental Health Association.  We had no counselors and no advisors.  We could only fund and go and meet with the patients who were willing to meet with outsiders – not all of them were – in order to help them adjust to society, whether it was counting money, playing games, or reading.  These were very elementary things but very, very important for people who were leaving an institution in which they had lived most of their lives and were now being asked to live on their own.  So, it was a very interesting learning experience.  But that exposed me to the Mental Health Association.  When I finished my term – I was Worthy Matron, that’s the name of the leader, in ’59.  We only served one year.  In 1960, I was asked to go on the Board of the Federation of the Jewish Women’s’ Organizations of Maryland, about which I knew nothing, but it sounded prestigious.  So I asked a few questions and I accepted.  In 1965, I became the President of the Federation of Jewish Women’s Organizations.  This was a group of women leaders who, basically, wanted to learn to lead.  It was a very important and significant entity for the development of women at a time when women were not regarded as that important in government or society.  Because this was a group of women leaders, basically, who wanted to learn how to lead.  We had skill sessions – public speaking, managing a meeting, writing the minutes, keeping books, budgeting, etcetera – at minimal cost.  I think it cost twenty-five dollars for an organization to join.  There were three or four learning sessions a year, plus Board meetings at the Annual Convention, which usually dealt with a significant social issue.  One Annual Convention dealt with opening up Route 40 – because we were a segregated state and Route 40 was closed to African Americans.  We brought in a speaker from the State Department to explain why we should support the opening of Route 40 and general opening of our society so that we wouldn’t be segregated.

EE:  How and where was Route 40 closed?

SC:  Route 40 would not permit – no restaurant or motel would accept an African-American guest or diner.  They literally said, “Sorry, we don’t serve your kind.”  There was nothing that was done, or could be done, by the individual.  It had to be a societal action.  So, at the same time that rabbis and others went to Gwynn Oak Park to fight for Civil Rights, the Federation of Jewish Women’s Organizations took on an educational role and gave the movement a lot of publicity and began to work to desegregate our society.  The Federation has monitored legislation at Annapolis dealing with women specifically, but not only so that human rights and social justice were always part of the agenda.  We still have legislative representatives who study the legislation, come back and suggest which legislation should be supported and which legislation is negative and should be defeated, and enable the women who are making decisions and who are leading organizations – some of them with thousands of members – to assist in healing this world.  So, it has played a very important role in our community for a number of years.

EE:  Now, how did you work your way up to the Federation?

SC:  I was invited.  Shortly after I became a member, I became Program Chairman for the Women’s Campaign.  That was my first responsibility.  The next thing that I knew was that I was First Vice President.  I’m not certain how.  One, I’ve always been outspoken; two, I’ve tried to be au courant with what’s happening in the world.  I understood the legislative process and was willing to go down to Annapolis to work on legislation.  I was just asked, frankly.

EE:  How is it that you were familiar with the legislative process?

SC:  I liked the legislative process.  I think that I probably wanted to be an attorney at some point or an office holder.  So I was interested in it.  My husband’s family had been in the State Legislature, so I knew something from them.  But, basically, I was interested in it for myself, and so I understood what one could accomplish in the legislature and found it very, very interesting.  I also found that advocacy was critical, and without advocacy, many things would have been left undone.  As I said, not being shy or retiring in the public.  It is interesting that there are two of me.  There’s the person who is shy and retiring, but the public individual is not.  I was willing to take on those responsibilities.  Now, at the same time that I was with the Federation of Jewish Women’s Organizations, I was moving up in the Associated Women’s Division.  It was called “Women’s Division” then.  In 1963, I co-chaired the last of G-Day.  “G” was for giving.  G-Day, again, mobilized about fifteen hundred women to go out and knock on doors to solicit for the Associated.  Men volunteered to drive three or four women per car to a specific area and drop us off.  Then we each went and did our solicitations and then gathered back, and the individual drove us back to the Armory.  For many years, we operated out of the Armory because that was the only place big enough to hold us.  At any rate, by 1963, the world had begun to change again.  It became clear to the woman who was the co-chairman – we were co-chairmen, but she was the senior co-chairman, and I was the junior co-chairman – Geetz Myerburg, Mrs. Sidney Myerburg – that this was not an effective and efficient way of raising money.  We were spending a lot of hours on the street, and not getting sufficient money to warrant it, or to warrant the men’s volunteering because this had meant leaving the Armory somewhere around 10 o’clock in the morning and not getting back until 1 o’clock.  So, if you multiplied three hours per person – and let’s say that we had fifteen hundred to two thousand people engaged – it really was not efficient.  We recommended that the following year, the same type of solicitation be done by phone.  So, we, in effect, finished, if you will – as someone said, “killed” – G-Day.  But it had run its course, and the fact was that the phoning did become more efficient and raised more money.  That continued for – well, it still continues in a clean-up process.  But that was 1963, the same time that I was, I guess, the first Vice-President of the Federation of Jewish Women’s Organizations.  I was involved with my children’s schools.  McDonough had a fair once a year, and people were asked to solicit parents to make things, bring things, or serve at the fair itself, either as a hawker for one of the children’s games with balls or as someone who would distribute food, or sell food etcetera.  So, I was active at McDonough.  I was active at Wellwood.  Then, when the children began going to afternoon Hebrew School, I became active in Chizuk Amuno’s PTA.  I can’t remember what year – I’d have to look it up – I became President of the PTA because I felt that there were some changes that I could help initiate.  If I were to characterize myself throughout my life, I would probably say that I have been a change agent wherever I have been.  Not for the sake of change, but because I saw some things that others did not see or were not willing to risk.  If I saw any place where I could make a difference, I didn’t hesitate to say that I’d be willing to assume the responsibility – and if it failed, it failed; if it succeeded, it succeeded.  So, I became President of the PTA.  I helped initiate a teen sisterhood; I helped develop the birthday cake once-a-month celebration of the children who went to the junior congregation.  I was the first to suggest that we hire professionals to enable parents to come to High Holy Days and leave their children in other rooms.  Otherwise, parents were staying home because they had no one to take care of their children and no place to take them.  So, I initiated that and was the Chairman of the High Holy Days services – whatever the title was – for several years.  All of these were concurrent.  So, you asked me before – exclusive – I’ve never done one thing exclusively.  When I concluded my responsibility with the Federation of Jewish Women’s Organizations, which was, I believe, ’67 – I’ve left out something.  I was also involved in Israel Bonds.  In 1959, I co-chaired the High Holy Day Appeal with the attorney Lou Sagner.  Co-chairing the High Holy Day Appeal meant that we went to various synagogues, spoke on behalf of the Israel Bonds, and raised money.  Somewhere in the mid-’60s, I became Chairman of the Women’s Division of Israel Bonds.  But I don’t know the year.  I was probably doing about four different organizations at the time.

EE:  What do you think of the fact that all these organizations have men’s and women’s divisions?

SC:  Until – I don’t even know when – I believe that the women’s divisions afford women an opportunity to express their leadership and to show their leadership, and to develop skills, which they probably would not be able to do in a co-ed group.  I went to an all-girls high school.  I saw the difference between the girls in an all-girls’ high school at age fifteen and the girls in a co-ed school at age fifteen.  We were not fashion-conscious.  We were not concerned about the next date.  It was just a different focus.  I would say that the majority of my classmates were going on to careers without any question, whereas – probably, although I don’t know – the majority of the women in co-ed high schools at that time were looking to get married.  It was just a difference.  I think that in the workforce and in professional careers, women can benefit from being with women, as opposed to just men.  I think the American Jewish Congress was the first national Jewish organization to disband its Women’s Division, but I don’t think that there’s been a woman president of that organization, and so I think that’s a loss.  I think women benefit from – if they wish to – a Women’s Division, Department, or Auxiliary.  I don’t have a problem with that, even today.  Just as I support single-sex education in colleges.  I think we should have women’s colleges.  I am not offended by the idea that there should be an all-male school.  There are different types of bonding that take place and different types of opportunities to exercise leadership, etc., that are not for everyone, but they are certainly there for some people, and I think the options should be there.

EE:  Do you think that we’ve in some way diminished our ability to build leaders?

SC:  No.  I don’t think that we’ve diminished our ability, but I don’t think that it’s been a society that has developed leaders.  I think it’s the individuals who have a support system behind them who have said, “I’m going ahead anyway,” so that we have more women in leadership positions, but nowhere near the number that we should have – if we look at the Fortune 500, or if we look at the universities.  There are more women now who are presidents of universities, but it has taken a long time to get there.  They certainly were professors, but it took them a long time to get to that as well.  So, I don’t think that we’ve diminished the opportunity, but I think that we have not provided all of the options that would enable some women to come to the fore and achieve their goals or recognize their abilities.  

EE:  Tell me about your support system, both in the early years and now.

SC:  My support system was confidence in myself, which my parents gave me, and support from my husband.  I could not have functioned in all of the organizations without his saying, “That’s fine.  You don’t have to be home with the children,” or without his financial assistance because I wasn’t working, and all of these organizations require some sort of financial commitment.  So, I had a support system for what I was doing.  I did not have support for a political life from my husband.  He did not want his wife to be a congresswoman or senator something of that nature.  But when it came to civic and social – social services – there was no objection; there was encouragement, and there was support.  The children supported it, too, because they understood what I was doing.  For the first, I guess, twelve to fifteen years, I was active in organizations that had no money and no staff, and frequently, I took the responsibility of collating whatever materials we had to collate – and certainly stuffing envelopes, etcetera – which we were all famous for.  I would use the dining room table, and get all four children together, and say, “Okay, we’re going to do an assembly line.  This is what we’re doing, and this is the organization, and this is why we’re doing it.  We’re going to do it.” Not, “Would you like to?”  So the children understood what I was doing and why I was doing it.  In 1967, when my husband asked me to run for the Constitutional Convention – which I did and came in third in our District, which meant that I was going to go there – I asked the children at dinner.  I said, “Let me explain what happens if I win.  That means I’m not here for dinner for three months during the week.  I’m only here on weekends for dinner and will be home every night so that I could be there every morning to send them off to school.  I said, “But I won’t be here to answer questions.  I won’t be here when you come home.  etc.” I said, “I want you to think about it.  If you think that’s all right, then I’ll do it.  If you will be uncomfortable, I won’t do it.”  At that time, the youngest was ten years old, and I felt that I had a responsibility to them.  They said, “We can manage it.”  I said, “Okay.”  I had help in the house who saw to it that they could eat, but I prepared the food before I left.  We used to assemble Monday evening, so I had Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday daytime with the children.  But I was gone Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday all day – until easily 10:30, 11 o’clock at night.  That was the support system.  I didn’t feel guilty, and I didn’t feel uncomfortable, because I knew they supported and they understood.  My parents supported and understood.  So, support systems are very important.  I don’t know what I would have done if I had thought my husband would not support me, or the children did not support it and understand it because it wasn’t worth it to me to disrupt the family for whatever it was I was going to do.  

EE:  Now, did you have political aspirations that you did have to put aside?

SC:  I didn’t have political aspirations.  I had political invitations, which is quite different.  No.  I had the feeling that my husband did not want to be “Mr.  Shoshana Cardin.” I was asked to run for Lieutenant Governor some time ago, and I explained that I could not.  I was asked to run for Senate – not State Senate, US Senate – and I explained that I could not.  I was not going to sacrifice my marriage and my family because that’s a price I wasn’t ready to pay.

EE:  Do you have any regrets?

SC:  No.  None at all.  I would probably have enjoyed it, but knowing me as I do, I would have invested a great deal of time and energy, and I would not have been the wife and mother that my family anticipated.  Maybe if I had started as a youngster, that might have been different.  But once I committed to marriage and had children, I did not see how that would work in my house, and it wouldn’t have.

EE:  Tell me, I know that there were obviously, in later years, you had to go through some real trials here at home.  I’m really curious to know what that taught you, what that experience was like for you, and how you came out of it on the other side.

SC:  What it taught me?  It taught me that “rats leave a sinking ship.”  It taught me that people who had been in this house dozens of times for assistance couldn’t remember our phone number when there was a problem.  So, I learned who our friends were, our real friends.  I also learned who some of my relatives were.  It taught me that if there is a political will, it will prevail.  It taught me that an innocent person could be convicted, irrespective of all of the protestations of innocence.  It taught me that one could get caught up in a situation where each person’s individual agenda was such that the total picture was ignored.  Nobody was looking at the picture.  It also taught me that the desire to destroy blinds people.  What happened to innocent investors who did not lose their investment?  They lost appreciation on their investment.  Innocent investors lost that appreciation not because that situation was not salvageable but because it served several people’s purpose to have this destroyed, and it served several people’s purpose to have my husband convicted.  I don’t believe in revenge because that takes too much energy; it’s not worth it.  I recognized that some people are willing to do anything to get to where they want to go.  The irony of it is that everyone who was involved, who could have assisted but refused, has not achieved anything since that day.  There were four critical players, and all four were forced off or fell off their horses.  Very interesting.  So in that sense, there is some justice.  But I learned that you have to rely on yourself, on your family, and you just have to pray for strength, and that was it.

EE:  Can you sort of characterize –?  I mean, I suspect looking at a graph of what that period was like it would be revealing.  How it is that you –?  I would say that anyone knowing you to say that you are absolutely at the top of your game.  My sense is that there probably was a point where you never imagined that could happen.  

SC:  No.  I was never depressed.  I was angry most of the time, which wasn’t very good, angry and disappointed, annoyed at what could have been done that was not done.  Also annoyed that an attorney, who was my husband’s defense attorney, proved to be stupid.  The man made a terrible mistake.  But that was beside the point.  I spent a good bit of time making certain that our children would not feel that they were threatened, although they were.  I would say that my sons, because they have the same surname, probably have not attempted to achieve anything beyond their own immediate circle because when you fill out applications, that’s the first thing that comes up.  So, in that sense, they have paid the price.  I have not paid the price.  I was involved and active while Jerry was in prison.  For some reason, which I don’t quite understand, society disconnected me from him.  I don’t understand why because if you go back and look at the articles in the papers, I’m with him all the time.  Yet, some decision was made by people, individuals, that what he did is what he did, and what I’m doing is what I’m doing.  Because when you think about it, I was President of the Council of Jewish Federations at that time, which meant that I was traveling the country; I was speaking – invited to speak; I was chairing a national convention which attracted twenty-eight hundred to three thousand people.  There was never any sense that I felt that “You don’t belong up there,” or “You shouldn’t be doing this,” or whatever negatives.  I never felt it.  Never.  It was very unusual if I think about it and sat down to compare other women in similar situations.  I can’t recall another woman in that situation.

EE:  Why do you think that was?

SC:  Well, first of all, back in the ‘60s – ‘67, when I did run for that convention, there were sixteen women out of 142 delegates, and there were a few of us who became spokesmen for certain issues.  The public person that I am speaks out.  I spoke out.  I was known in the community, the broader community, not just the Jewish Community.  Then, when it came time to try to sell that constitution, which was doomed the day it was signed, I agreed as one of the delegates to sell it.  I traveled around the state, so I was known around the state.  I was interviewed on television, etc.  From there, because of that public exposure, I was appointed to the Governor’s Commission on the Status of Women.  Again, I became a public figure.  I became a public figure for women’s rights, but not an extremist.  I became a public figure, one who wanted to teach women how to benefit from their rights once we get them, not in a destructive way or in a strident way, but in a sense of understanding that, actuarially, the average woman was going to outlive her mate.  At that time, she would have to function as an individual independently.  In order to do that, she needed credit in her own name; she needed to be identified as an individual, not as her husband’s wife.  That’s what happened.  I became identified as an individual.  Even though I was Jerry’s wife, I became identified as an individual.  So there was what?  Close to twenty years of my being a semi-public figure as an individual.  I remember when we changed the stationery from “Mrs. Jerome S. Cardin” to “Shoshana Cardin” at the Associated; it took a long time.  Or, when it was changed – because my husband never objected.  I had a checking account because I was working before I met him.  So, I had a checking account in my own name, and I realized how hard it was for women to identify themselves as individuals.  When we bought our first house on Carlisle Avenue, a neighbor next door to us had a sister – an older sister – living there.  I met the neighbors – they had children my age – and I met this older sister.  She introduced herself to me, using her husband’s name because that’s the social name.  For the next couple of months, I was under the impression that this man had died a year or two [before] because everything was “Mrs.” and his name.  It wasn’t until I became really friendly with her that I said, “By the way, when did your husband die?”  He had died twenty-five years before.  This woman did not have her own identity.  She was a bright, striking-looking woman, alert.  They’d never had children, but she had remained his widow all those years.  This was long before I knew I was going to be involved with Women's Rights and long before I knew what was going to happen in my life.  I said to myself, “That is a tragedy.  That’s a real tragedy.”  Fortunately, she had enough money to live the way she wanted.  But she never became the person she could have been, and that stayed with me.  When I realized that there were other people in that situation, I thought that I would do my best to see that that doesn’t happen unless people want it to happen, but not because they’re trapped.  I guess that’s probably why I did a number of things, and I didn’t hesitate to do them publicly.  So, I became a person in my own right.

EE:  So, would you have any specific advice for someone coming through this life-altering situation?

SC:  The sense of being able to take care of oneself is very important or knowing where to go to get assistance is very, very important.  I think that having created an identity for oneself is a support foundation which assists.  The other is knowing where you can go to get support when you want it, whether it is to your rabbi, or teacher, or friend, or whomever – that you have someone with whom you can speak when there are things that you cannot say to your children or to your parents at a time like that – although by that time, both of my parents had died, and I happen to think that they both died because of that situation.  A determination to get through it.  There was no question in my mind I was going to get through it, none whatsoever.  One, it was wrong; two, it was unjust; and three, there were four children involved, as well as grandchildren.  For their sake, I had to get through it.  I had to get through it.  I had to get through it to keep my husband alive, or he would have committed suicide, and I didn’t want that to happen.  So, there were many reasons why I had to be firm and strong and know what I was doing.  But I could not have done that had it occurred in 1962 or ‘63 because I had not yet developed that sense of inner security [and] self-assurance that I could handle whatever came my way.

EE:  Do you remember any sort of seminal event?

SC:  No.  There was no seminal event.  The process took two and a half years.  There was a sense of optimism, I must tell you, for two years, without any question.  I couldn’t believe what was going to happen, and Jerry couldn’t believe what was going to happen.  But there was no single event.  We had had financial difficulties, and I felt that I was up to it, whatever came along.  I have, as an adult, felt secure enough within myself that I could handle the challenges that life gave me.  I think that came from my parents.

EE:  You said that you probably could not have handled it in the early ’60s.  Was there anything in particular that happened in the mid-’60’s that sort of gave you that internal strength?  Or any event?

SC:  I think my ability to function at the Constitutional Convention probably was my first test, outside of the Jewish community.  It was my first test in a mixed group where we had professors, university presidents, attorneys – I remember two physicians, regional leaders, and political leaders.  It was a very diverse group, some of whom had been public figures for years.  I’m thinking of Senator Malkus, who was a major figure – representing his constituency for years, a conservative.  Through that experience, which lasted close to four months, I realized that I had been able to associate with every single faction there.  I was regarded as an ally, even when I disagreed with their opinions and their direction, and that was very important.  It became clear, I guess within a year after that, that I was able to work with people irrespective of their views and their backgrounds if we were working for a common cause.

EE:  Do you mind sort of briefly telling me what the Constitutional Convention was?

SC:  Maryland’s Constitutional Convention.  The last Constitutional Convention was redrawn, I think, in 1867.  We had many things on the books which we no longer observed, and we had many laws which had been written which were not reflected in the Constitution.  Maryland became a model state.  At that time, other States were looking to update their constitutions, and instead of amending every single section, piece by piece, Maryland decided to draft a new constitution.

[END OF CD 5]

EE:  This is Elaine Eff, with Shoshana Cardin for the Jewish Women’s Archive “Weaving Women’s Words”.  This is Disk #6 on October 3rd, 2001.  And we are going to continue talking about the Constitutional Convention.

SC:  Constitutional Convention.  So, we were going to create a document, a single document, which would eliminate all of those obsolete legislative pieces and create the new legislative pieces that would reflect the society in which we were living, and the time in which we were living.  It was passed by the General Assembly; they had to authorize it, and they had to authorize money for it, even though those of us who attended as delegates were not paid.  There were expenses because we operated the same way as a General Assembly would in the State of Maryland.  There was exactly the same number of delegates; we sat in the same seats; we had a Chairman who presided, who was an attorney – a brilliant man, H. Vernon Eney, since gone.  We had pages; we had secretaries; we divided into specific areas of concern so that each of us was assigned to a committee.  I was on the Suffrage and Elections Committee, and I remember that because the issues that we had – based on the Vietnam War – were issues that dealt with the age of voting, the ease with which one could register to vote, when the vote would be rejected, or not accepted, etc., and how often we should have elections for public office.  At any rate, the public discussions, of course, were on the total gamut of social rules in society, one of them being equality between the sexes, equality under the law – which pre-dated the ERA, the Equal Rights Amendment, which never passed at the national level, but did pass in Maryland.  At any rate, one of the particular issues was an issue dealing with education.  Should the tax dollars that are raised for education be distributed equitably among all the counties, or should it be treated or expended based on the need? I was invited by Vernon Eney to speak.  Again, I didn’t volunteer.  By the way, I’ve never volunteered for any of these positions – I’ve always been invited.  We had only been in the session, I think, five weeks – and I was surprised that he even knew my name.  I was invited by Vernon Eney to take part in a debate – to speak on behalf of tax dollars for education where needed, which would be unequal – and that was not a popular view.  I did some studying and found out what Montgomery County spent on its educational systems, what Baltimore County spent on its, and what Baltimore City spent.  I was asked to take the position – and I did – that to spend the same amount of money in Baltimore City as was spent in Montgomery County was a disservice to the City.  The City needed more; it had greater problems.  So, at any rate, we had that debate, and my side won the debate.  Even though I characterized myself as a homemaker from Pikesville, there was nobody who bought that.  Carlton Sickles, who then went on to become President of Catholic University, stood up on the floor and said, “I wish to take exception to what the Delegate has just said.  She is definitely not 'just a homemaker.’" That was a very important test for me and a good test.  I passed the test and was very pleased to find out that I could work out compromises; I could meet with anyone there.  They would feel comfortable.  I made them feel comfortable, and they accepted me.  So I guess that was another source of strength.  Then, in 1984 – you know, you sometimes say, “Is this what God prepared me for?" Or, "Have all of my life experiences been such to plan for this day?”  In 1984, when I was nominated to become President of the Council of Jewish Federations, which I had not anticipated – number one, there had never been a woman before; and number two, I know that they had asked three men because this should have been settled in the spring, and it still wasn’t settled in the summer.  At any rate, I was in the unusual position of being the Program Chairman of the Annual GA – which is the General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations, now the UJC; it still goes on each year, in November – as well as the incoming President.  Now, that had never occurred before because they’d never had this problem.  The night that I chaired, which was the opening night of the Assembly – the Assembly began on a Wednesday and went through until Sunday – I knew there was going to be a protest.  The President and I had met with a gentleman who purported to be a college student, but he was way beyond college age, who was complaining that North American Jewry was ignoring the plight of the Ethiopians and unless we permitted him to speak from the dais to the Plenary, opening night, he was going to stage a protest.  He promised a protest with infants, noise, and college students, etcetera.  We spoke with him and tried to explain that that’s not how we handle the first night.  The first night is a night for dignitaries.  The Consul of Israel was there or the Ambassador of Canada, because this happened to take place in Toronto.  The Governor of the Province would be there; the Mayor of the City would be there.  All the important people who should be there at the dais would get up and bring greetings and so forth and so on, and the only piece of business was the President’s Report on the State of the Union, as it were.  That was it; that was the evening.  We never discussed a business issue or a resolution.  Well, the young man was not pleased with our answer.  We thought we were prepared; we informed the police that there was going to be a protest, and to the degree they could stop it to help us out.  What we did not know – we had met Tuesday, and then we met at 1 a.m. Wednesday morning, to try to avoid this, when we realized that there was no reasoning with this individual.  In addition to which, we knew that negotiations were going on for the first big airlift, and we couldn’t say anything.  We did not know that in Canada, unlike the United States, if a policeman puts his hand on an individual, that person is automatically under arrest, and we certainly didn’t want to arrest anyone because that would have given us publicity that we did not need.  Well, we started the session, let’s say 7:30.  By 8 o’clock, he had arrived with his entourage, and I am the Program Chairman, which means that I am the Master of Ceremonies for the whole evening with his entourage – with infants and noise makers, and whatever else he could do to disrupt – and he had invited the media.  Well, we kept the media out – that was not difficult to do.  He literally walked around this huge auditorium, circled the auditorium, just shouting at the top of his lungs and having everyone else shout with him.  The audience became very angry because he was disrupting everything, including the Canadian representatives who should have had the opportunity to speak because this was not against them.  Finally, he said, “I’ll only stop if you give me the microphone.” My response was, “I’m not giving you the microphone.  It’s a bad precedent, and you really don’t deserve it.” After about – it seemed an eternity, but it was really just ten minutes, so it’s about ten after eight – I turned to the President, and I said, “I’m going to make him an offer.  I’m going to let anybody from his group speak to the issue, but he can’t speak to the issue.” He said, “Good idea.” So, I made the offer.  It fell on deaf ears.  I waited a few minutes; I made the offer again, this time, not to him, but directly to his followers.  I said, “Any of you qualified to speak on this subject is welcome to come up and speak on the subject of rescuing Ethiopian Jewry; the leader is not.” Nobody came up.  This continued for another ten minutes.  Then, the President said to me, “I’m going to gavel this meeting to a close,” which meant that he wasn’t going to give his State of the Union address.  We really didn’t have time for it any place else I was the Program Coordinator for the whole Assembly, and I felt very badly about that.  But he said, “I am not going to let him continue this because he is irrational,” which he was.  I announced that there would be a Session on this issue – specifically – at 10 o’clock that night.  We’d had scheduled that previously so that the people in the audience would know that we were not losing our minds or not being dissuaded and that the Conference would continue.  I had a feeling that he wouldn’t come back the next day if I could get to the TV set the way that he could.  The President stood up and gaveled the Session closed at 8:30.  At that time, my mentor – I had one in Baltimore, and his name was Robert I.  Hiller.  At that time, he was seated in the audience.  He had been the Executive in Baltimore and had gone to the Council, I think, in 1980, when they were shifting their priorities and re-organizing.  I saw him sitting in the audience, and he came up to me afterward and said, “People around me were saying, 'Why don’t you go up and rescue her?'”  He said, “She’s having a wonderful time, and she can handle this by herself.  Nobody needs to rescue her.” That was quite a compliment and gave me a sense of assurance that I could handle the situation.  I did not get hysterical; I did not get angry; I didn’t use any terms that I shouldn’t use.  I simply said, “I’m not moving, and I’m not giving you the microphone.” Afterward, at the 10 o’clock session, this same protester was absolutely silent.  We had an envoy from the Jewish Agency speak on what was taking place.  He didn’t tell everything because we couldn’t; it was still a covert operation.  We had representatives from Israel speak from the few Ethiopians that had already gone there.  He didn’t open his mouth; he didn’t ask a question; he didn’t make a statement.  But he did go to the media – to the TV cameras that were out in the corridor – and made whatever he thought his case was.  That’s when I was asked to go out and speak to the cameras and tell them what the facts were; that if it was the cause that he was interested in, he had the microphone for any one of his followers; if it was leadership that he was interested in, we wouldn’t give him the microphone.  The second compliment that I received – well, I won’t tell you from whom – it was the President of a major university who came up to me and said, “I’m sorry you were not President when the riots took place on the campus, because it would take that resolve to have prevented what took place.”  I thought that was very interesting because that did not even occur to me, frankly.  I hadn’t even thought about that at all.  Then, I realized that what he was saying was that Presidents gave in and gave in for the wrong reason – that if there had been enough resolve, we could have probably diminished the amount of difficulties we had with student protests.

EE:  I vaguely remember that you did have an important role with or knowledge of the Ethiopian airlift.  

SC:  Absolutely.

EE:  Do you want to speak about that?

SC:  Well, the Ethiopian airlift then was a very effective and clandestine effort.  Number One, the planes had to be repainted so that they would not show any Israeli markings.  And we had to have agreement of the countries for the space that they were going to fly over not to shoot them down or to challenge them.  President Bush, Sr.  – who was then Vice-President – played a critical role, because he served as an intermediary.  He was the one who contacted the countries’ leadership and suggested that they go along with this – that this was a very important humanitarian effort.  People were starving, and dying, and these people had been Jewish and had been forced to convert, etcetera, but were still carrying out Jewish practices which were identifiable, and Israel would accept them.  Coordination also took place at a time when the rest of the world really wasn’t watching.  We knew that Vice President Bush was engaged, and we knew the individual from Israel who was the lead in this.  It did cost.  We did pay.  We raised money to get the first group out, just as we did for the second group – because the first group was caught in the War between Sudan and Ethiopia, and Ethiopia didn’t want to lose the people.  Sudan wanted what you would call “ransom,” which we said we couldn’t pay.  But we had to get them to a place where they could board the planes, and these were people who had never been in a plane and obviously were coming into a new civilization and a different culture.  It was very exciting and thrilling, and one of the two times that we were able to keep absolutely quiet.

EE:  Now, what was your role, and how did you get involved?

SC:  As President of the Council of Jewish Federations, we were playing a role in that we were supporting the need for special money.  One, aside from all the other things that we were supporting, we would have to have money to cover this, and two, those political forces which had to be brought to bear would be brought to bear.  So, we needed to be certain that there were allies because this was the first time that it had been attempted.  A very difficult situation.  We were talking about a war between two countries in which killing was nothing.  We were talking about the terrible trek from Ethiopia to Sudan, to where they could board the plane, where people died on the way because they simply did not have the physical stamina to succeed.  We had to get food to them.  We had to bring supplies in so they would make it to the plane and actually go over there.  The leadership of UJA – United Jewish Appeal then – the Council of Jewish Federations, the Joint Distribution Committee, and – I’m trying to think who else? – the Jewish Agency for Israel, of course, and the Government of Israel were the key players in this.  We had to know what was happening.  We had to be certain that the political support was there.  We also had to be certain that no one spoke about it until it took place.  Now, with the second one – the second airlift – we were also successful.  But with the second airlift, there were a few more people involved, not too many, but a few more organizations involved.  There, we knew that we were talking about money.  I think the figure that was finally settled on was thirty-five million dollars.  I remember someone saying we were paying ransom, and I said, “What difference does it make?  We can get fifteen thousand people out.  What difference does it make?  That’s what it takes to produce it.”  We agreed.  All of us in that room with no notes and no minutes of the meeting, etc., agreed that we would help raise money to cover that because it was necessary.

EE:  How many people did you get out?

SC:  I think it was 14,300.  Again, with the cooperation of the US Government and Ethiopia.  Because this time, they came from Addis Ababa, so it was right in their home ground.  As a matter of fact, I had scheduled a trip to Ethiopia for the 26th of October – this year.  After the September 11th terrorist attacks, we decided to postpone the trip because we were not certain what the situation will be like, and I don’t want to put anybody in jeopardy.  But it was to be a fact-finding mission for those who were left in Addis Ababa – because there was a large encampment there – and for those in the Gondar, to see whether they are being treated appropriately, that is, whether they have the medicine, food, and other provisions and education that they require while they wait.  Because they are being processed at one to two hundred a week to Israel.  So that means that some of them are going to be there for a long time.

EE:  So was that to be a clandestine mission, or was it –?

SC:  No.  This was going to be an open, fact-finding mission so that we could report back to what is now the United Jewish Communities, which is the successor to the Council of Jewish Federations, and to UJA, and to Israelis, as to what we find to be the status of the refugees.  Because, in my opinion, they are refugees.  And their status, and what is needed to help them, those who are going to be there for the long haul.

EE:  And was this the same group that was involved?

SC:  There is an organization here, a North American organization specifically dedicated to the future of the Ethiopian Jewry.  They were not involved to any great degree initially.  They are involved now.  We’re working together.  So it includes that group, plus all those who were engaged previously.  But it is a small group – we had intended to take no more than ten people –because this isn’t a fun trip.  This is strictly fact-finding and will be difficult.  We had to allow for all of us to fit into one vehicle, go to the same places, see what we see, and then come back and compare and report.

EE:  What do you feel, Shoshana, has been your most worthy effort, personally, in terms of International Jewry?

SC:  I think every effort was worthy.  There are so many people who were willing to devote their time, energy, and resources, and they were all worthy.  The two that probably stand out the most in my mind – simply because I can’t think of a corollary or an equivalent – was getting President Gorbachev to denounce antisemitism because I was not the first try.  I was the first to succeed.  I’m not proud of it but getting an apology from President Bush.  I’m not proud that it reached that point, but I am proud of the fact that he knew that what he did was painful.  I think that other Presidents will remember that we are not to be treated differently.

EE:  know that you’ve recorded those stories in other places.

SC:  Right.

EE:  Do you want to do a little reprise of those?

SC:  No, I think you have them both in print and on tape.  The message was that American Jews should not be treated differently from any other Americans.  That was the purpose of it.  The fact that there was a President sensitive enough to say, “I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean to hurt anybody,” was also important.  It helped the Jewish community understand not to hide when there’s something to be said, even if it means getting the anger of the President directed towards you.

EE:  Alright, I know I promised that we wouldn’t take much longer.  So, I just have a couple of questions.  One is I’d like to know about your return to Israel, given that it was your birthplace.  I realize that there have been many trips.  But I’m just curious to know if you can really articulate what going back to Israel means to you, having been born there and having it been such an important part of your parents’ lives.

SC:  I was an Israeli who happened to come to the United States on what was supposed to have been a temporary visit.  So, Israel was always part of my life, even before it was called Israel.  My first trip back surprised me.  Number one, I was shocked by the fact that I remembered the Hebrew with the Hebrew accent.  I also shocked my relatives.  The second was when I went back that it was still a state that needed a lot of help, even though it had been a number of years – because I didn’t go back until 1960.  I thought, “How wonderful that people are willing to work here and pioneer,” because it was still pioneering, even if they weren’t on a kibbutz or a moshav, to create a free homeland for Jews.  It didn’t exist anywhere else in the world.  It doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world, and I don’t think that we all appreciated the sacrifices that these people made for a vision and then, hopefully, for their way of life.  I’m always astounded by that.  I don’t know too many people who would be willing to stay there and live the way that they’ve lived, particularly this past year, and not give up.  So, it is always encouraging to me, and I feel that I have to go back.  I have to.  I have to touch base, as it were, and offer whatever moral support I can offer and whatever help, if, in some way, I can help.  

EE:  When you’ve gone back with your whole family, was there a certain touchstone, a place that was most important?

SC:  Not really most important.  It was a place for laughter.  I was born at Hadassah Clinic.  But where we lived, initially, was an abandoned British Army barracks.  The first time I went back, the street in front of it hadn’t been paved.  I mean, it was really a garage, basically.  My cousin, native to Israel, said, “You want to see what your fame and fortune is?”  And took me there, and I looked at it, and I thought, “Talk about lowly beginnings.  No question about it.” [laugher] Well, now the garages are gone, and the street’s been paved, and you can’t see that anymore, but it reminded me that people do like to go home and look.  The home in which our four children were born does not exist because it was torn down to build a school.  When the children say, “I’d like to go and see where I lived and where I was born – I go, you can’t.  It’s not there.” So, I’m sorry that I can’t say that that is where I was born or that’s where I lived.  But for me, it was important to see it and the “lowly beginnings,” as my cousin reminds me, regularly.

EE:  I just have one question.  I wonder if you’ve thought about it.  But have you ever wondered what you would entitle your memoir?

SC:  I have no idea.  I have no idea.  I don’t even know where to begin.  I’ve been very blessed.  I’ve had a very full life, good and bad, and everybody had good and bad in life.  I’ve been very privileged to do the things I’ve done, to see the things I’ve seen, to meet the people I have met.  I just feel it was a remarkable opportunity for anyone.  For me, starting with the “lowly beginnings,” I guess you can only achieve it in America – to reach the pinnacle, as they call it, of American organized Jewish life.  I doubt that – well, I know that no one before me ever chaired five major national organizations, and I doubt that anyone in the future will be permitted to.  So, in that sense, I did make history.  But I have no idea what to call it; I’m not good on titles.  

EE:  Just for the record, tell me what the five organizations are.

SC:  Well, it was the Council of Jewish Federations, The National Conference on Soviet Jewry, The United Israel Appeal, CLAL, and JTA – Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

EE:  What’s CLAL?

SC:  CLAL is the National [Jewish] Center for Learning and Leadership – a very important training ground for rabbis and future leaders in pluralism and in interpreting our traditions and our teachings for the 21st century.  It was founded by Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, a brilliant, brilliant philosopher.  He is now the Chairman of the Holocaust Museum Board, a brilliant man, a superb writer, a visionary if you will.  I was inspired by him in the early ’70s, and I was surprised when I was asked to be the Chairman of the Board of his organization because it is not political at all, and the others I held were political.  It’s educational; it’s inspirational.  They work with Rabbis; they now have a major faculty.  I feel very good about that organization because when I came in, it was a ma and pa operation, and when I left, I had given them enough courage to become a major national institution, and they are.  They are.  That’s what I mean.  If I see that I can do something and move the organization forward because I have a vision of what it can be, I assume that responsibility because there are positions I turn down, a number of them.  I just couldn’t see myself in those positions.  I also didn’t know what I would do.  But, in CLAL, I did.  I knew where I was going and where I wanted to go.

EE:  That’s great.  Is there anything that I’ve forgotten to ask you?  I know there’s some major gaps.

SC:  Someone asked me if I were writing a book, and I said, “Yes, I am thinking about writing my memoirs.”  It would be impossible for me to put my life in a book.  It would probably take four books, five books.  Almost every decade could be a book because so much has happened, so much has transpired, and so much was happening concurrently in my life.  I’ve been blessed that I’ve been able to keep it separated so that I don’t confuse one organization with the other or one activity with the other.  It’s been very, very rich.  I don’t know how I can condense it.  

EE:  Well, I just want to thank you.  It has been a privilege for me, and I’m honored.  

SC:  It’s my pleasure.

EE:  I think we’ll close it here.  But if you think of any things that we need to talk about –

SC:  I’m available.

EE:  I’ll look forward to it.  Thank you so much.

SC:  My pleasure.  

[END OF INTERVIEW]