Georgia Westbrook:  This is Georgia Westbrook and –

Alexandra Kiosse:  Alexandra Kiosse.

GW:  We’re here interviewing Bernice Kazis.  Today is July 5, 2016.  We are in Auburndale, Massachusetts.  So we’re just going to jump in.  Do you want to start? 

AK:  Yeah.  So, just the basics.  Does your family have stories about life in the former Soviet Union?  How and when did they arrive in the United States?  What do you know about the circumstances of their journey?

Bernice Kazis:  I have no family.  My father came in 1911.  He had no stories to tell.  He was glad to be out.  He came when he was seventeen years old.  He’s the only one that came from Russia.  My whole family was born here in the United States.  My mother, too.  So I have no contact with anyone that’s in my family that came directly from the Soviet Union.  I worked with them for seventeen years, but I had no one, particularly in my family.   So I can’t answer that question.

AK:  Did he have any stories about early life in the United States, about the first years of immigrating?

BK:  From my family, I have lots of stories.  I wrote a book about all the stories of all the people.  I remember one woman who came to my office crying.  She said she always thought people in the United States were very kind.  But she was standing on the corner of the street, and none of the cars would stop.  She couldn’t cross the street.  Well, she had no idea that she was supposed to press something, and the cars would stop.  Things like that were happening all the time.  But personal lives?  I became very close to a lot of them.  We resettled over two thousand people from the Soviet Union.  That was my only contact with people from the Soviet Union, but that was big contact; it was a great job.  I worked for Jewish Family and Child Service.  So you know all that.

AK:  Yes.  Do you want to talk about that now?  We have questions that –

BK:  I’ll wait until you have questions if you’d like.

AK:  Okay.  This is another background question.  How would you describe yourself in terms of your Jewish identity?  What are your feelings about your Jewish identity and how they changed over time?

BK:  My husband was a rabbi of a Conservative synagogue for thirty-five years.  So I think I’m kind of connected to Judaism.  I like it.  I had fun.  I learned a lot, helped a lot of people.  It was a wonderful place to be.

AK:  Did you always practice Conservative Judaism?

BK:  I was a member of Mishkan Tefila.  I went to Hebrew school at Mishkan Tefila when I was a kid.  My parents belonged to that congregation.  I married the rabbi of that congregation.  I was married before to my childhood sweetheart, who was a bombardier in the Second World War.  He was shot down over Ploiești oil fields in Romania.  He came home after two years in a prison camp.  He lived eight years.  I had three kids.  I was a member of Mishkan Tefila, and I married my rabbi.  That’s a story.  He was the rabbi of the congregation.  He was thirteen years older than I, not married, and so eventually, we married.  Up until then, I had close Jewish roots, was a member of a congregation, brought up my kids – they were very young when he died.  They were one, three, and five.  They went to nursery school in synagogue and that sort of thing.  I didn’t observe Shabbat or Kashrut, which I did after I was married.  It was good – lots of good moments.  I don’t know where that leads you with your other questions, but I thought I should tell you all that.

GW:  Well, I guess since we’re from the Jewish Women’s Archive, a follow-up question would be, being a woman and being so involved with Judaism, how does that affect your experience?

BK:  Being a woman was nothing.  My mother was a businesswoman all her life, traveling to New York, worked side by side with my father.  So being a woman – I never even thought about.  I just thought – actually, I just never thought.  I don’t think I ever gave my mother enough honor for being.  It just was part of life that my mother went to work.  I think I didn’t like it that she was always at work, and none of my friends had mothers who were working.  So I think in those days, I never really honored her as I did later on in life when I realized what she really had done.  Am I on target?  Is that okay?

GW:  Yes, that’s great. 

AK:  This is a segue.  It goes off of that.

BK:  Try it.  If we don’t want to do it, we won’t do it.

AK:  Did you celebrate?  It doesn’t seem like your childhood, really – we need this question.  Did you celebrate any secular or American holidays?  How did your experience –?

BK:  As a child? 

AK:  Yes.

BK:  You’re going to have a big problem.  I don’t really remember my childhood very much.  That’s not because I was unhappy.  I never was unhappy, but I just don’t [remember].  My brother remembered everything – names of teachers, where we went.  I never remembered those things.  But my mother and father were working parents.  Most of the time, we had someone in our house.  When we came back from school, there was always somebody there and that sort of thing.  Sure.  I mean, they didn’t go to work on the days of American holidays.  It was very equal.  It was very equal with us.  I don’t think I celebrated one more than the other.  I think I was an American Jew.  I celebrated both.  Even before I married the rabbi, I always observed all the Jewish holidays, as well as the American.  I like holidays.

GW:  Were you ever encouraged to make Aliyah or to spend time in Israel at all?  By whom?  Have you ever considered it? 

BK:  Yeah.  I have two stories.  First of all, you should know I have a daughter who’s been living in Israel for forty years.  So I have a foothold in Israel.  I have also two granddaughters there.  I have four great-grandkids there.  My granddaughter was expecting twins on the 14th of this month. 

AK:  That’s exciting.

BK:  So I had hoped they were boys.  I had hoped to get there for the bris, but it’s just not something I should do.  I would be more of a hindrance with them, I think.  So I’m not going.  But years ago, when my first husband came back from the war, and he felt great antisemitism here in this country, [he] decided that we should live in Israel.  So we got ready to go to live in Israel.  We went to the consulate to find out what was available.  At that point, I had one child, and she was just about a year old.  We went to tell the parents that that’s what we were planning to do.  They became hysterical and cried.  In those days, you didn’t make your parents unhappy.  I think if it happened today, we would just say, “Sorry, but we’re going.”  But that’s not the way we acted with our parents.  So we canceled the plan.  Interestingly enough, I married the rabbi, of course, who was a Zionist, and the house was a very Zionist household.  My daughter, who never knew that story – she was a kid of the ’60s – and decided she could do much more with her life if she went to Israel.  Of course, I was delighted.  So she went forty years ago.  She was getting her PhD in education at Harvard.  She came home one day, and she said, “You know, I don’t belong there.  I really belong in Israel.”   I said, “Yes.  Go.”  So she got her PhD at the Hebrew University.  So that’s my Israeli family.  I’ve got a lot of family there.  So, I went there twice a year, and I brought them all here over the years.  Forty years is a long time.  My Hebrew is horrible.  I can talk to my great-grandkids, but I never did learn.  We went on sabbatical.  I signed up for ulpan while I was there.  This was early, in maybe 1960.  It was a course that said you would pay for a certain amount, and then if you hadn’t learned, you could just keep learning until you learned, so I thought that was good for me.  My poor husband was very unhappy.  He had to sit on [inaudible] waiting for me.  So he said, “Don’t do that.  Don’t study.”  So I didn’t because I knew how to get around.  I knew how to Egged bus a lot more than he did.  He never knew those things.  So, does that answer your question? 

AK:  Yes. 

GW:  Yes.

BK:  I think you got more than you wanted.

AK:  No, it’s all good.

BK:  I was once interviewed, I believe, by someone from JWA [Jewish Women’s Archives] years and years ago.

AK:  Probably the early 2000s.

BK:  Really, when I had money and was able to give money and be active in the Jewish community and all of that.  I was very active.  But I think I remember it.  Anyhow, go ahead.

AK:  This is, for you, a two-time question.  I don’t know if that makes sense.  How did Jewish cultural and religious values impact your experience and attitudes towards marriage?  How is that relationship perceived by others?  Were there difficulties particular to your marriage or things that were easier?

BK:  Well, I could tell you a real long story – what my friends thought when I was marrying a rabbi.  Let’s see how I can answer all that.  Well, my first husband and I were always  – I would not have thought of marrying anyone but a Jew.  He was brought up in the same way I was.  He was a member of Kehillath Israel.  I was a member of Mishkan Tefila.  They were both Conservative synagogues.  So I can’t say that we went to Temple or anything.  We were like most young Jews; we celebrated all the holidays, we brought up our kids, sent them to preschool in the synagogues, that sort of thing.  It was just part of our life, my kids.  Of course, when I married rabbi, the kids were so young; they didn’t know that you didn’t have to observe Shabbat and that sort of thing.  So they just did.  We had a lot of clubs on Shabbat.  We had three kids, and we used to have – the oldest kid had his Shakespeare club, and the second one had a biblical club, and the third one had a baseball club because he was the boy.  So does that answer enough?

AK:  Yes.

GW:  Can you talk a little bit about –?  You said earlier that you helped resettle about two thousand people.  Can you talk about how you got involved with that originally and the process?

BK:  Yeah, I was a social worker with Jewish Family Service.  The boss made me the director of Russian resettlement.  So that’s how I became – I didn’t know any Russian.  I learned some words.  I think the boss was – (David Colton?) was the head of the Jewish Family Service of the North Shore.  It’s very different from the Boston one.  It’s a different Jewish Family Service.  He knew that we were on the North Shore, which was a pretty Yankee establishment for many years.  Jews were not welcome there for a long time.  So he asked HIAS [Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society] that he would take – how many they wanted as long as they were educated.  So we had really – I loved the Russians.  Not many people love the Russians, but I love the Russians.  I was involved in opening a school to teach them English, opening a job bank so that they could get people to help them write resumes and help them get jobs in engineering, and that sort of thing.  We had a lot of doctors, little women doctors.  So we opened up a school.  We opened up a job bank.  We used the Hebrew schools in the morning before the kids came to Hebrew school, so we could have classes.  We didn’t have to pay anybody for classes.  I had a hundred and twenty-five volunteers, and I used retired teachers to teach in the school.  I was lucky.  I got an anthropologist with a PhD to be the head of the school.  Because we didn’t take any federal funds for the school, every week we had a meeting, and I would have a rabbi speak.  Because when the Russians came, they felt Jewish, but they were afraid of the word “Jew.”  I mean, it was not a very good place for them to be.  They had to go to only one kind of school.  They were disciplined no matter what they were doing.  They could be killed if they were found studying Judaism.  So they were afraid to be Jewish, but they felt Jewish.  Yet, when they came here, they had never seen the kiddush cup unless they had an old grandfather or something.  They didn’t know anything about Judaism.  At that point, my husband was retired.  We had moved to the North Shore after he left the synagogue.  I just thought that it was better.  He wasn’t doing too well, physically.  I decided that people loved him.  He was a great rabbi.  He has a great reputation.  The synagogue just sold out to Boston College for twenty million dollars, and we moved to KI [Kehillat Israel] – not merging but independent.  So that’s a whole other story.  So, he would put them – those are on the door of every new Russian that came.  We would sit and talk to them about what it means to be able to say you’re Jewish in the United States.  That was very spiritual and very moving for me even now to take these people who were afraid to be Jews and say to them, “It’s okay.  We can put this on your door, and you don’t have to be afraid.”  But that was tremendous – tremendous for them and tremendous for us.  I used to get a couple of other people who were living in the building who were Jewish.  I would bring some wine.  After they had (inaudible), we would have a little party.  It was very meaningful to them.  Then, when they all made their – when they all got some money and moved away from Lynn, we had them in Lynn, where it was less expensive, public transportation easy, all that sort of thing – low-cost housing.  When they were able to buy a house or move to a better apartment, they took those with them.  We felt that was something.  They had a very strange attitude toward synagogue, of course, because they didn’t believe in God.  They didn’t believe in anything.  They weren’t allowed.  So, it took time and patience.  Sometimes, the volunteers were a little upset because they didn’t care about Judaism so much.  But I think we all worked it out.  I have many Russian friends.  I had a Russian couple help me with my husband when he wasn’t really well, just before his death.  The guy could sing any opera aria that you wanted.  So he would take my husband for a ride and sing, and they were very cultured.  They couldn’t imagine that you had to pay so much money to go to the opera or the symphony here.  It’s very expensive here.  Well, as I say, they were a special kind of Russian; they came from cities mostly – Moscow and St. Petersburg.  A couple from – where was the other one?  I think that’s enough.  What was the question?

AK:  How you were involved [inaudible]

BK:  So, that’s plenty. 

AK:  I know you said you didn’t really see women being different from men.  But was there a special role for women in the Soviet Jewry movement at all, or in your roles –?

BK:  Oh, I think there were many.  You’re asking about the Soviet Jewry, not me?  Yes, we had many activists.  There was one woman who was a really big activist, and they were thrown in jail, and they came out of jail.  I still get emails in Russian from the activists who want me to support somebody.  They all are Republicans.  They’re very conservative.  They still believe that the strong arm is the best kind of arm for leading a country.  They used to get very upset with me.  I’m really an old Democrat and used to have arguments about it.  Most of them are Republicans.  I don’t think they were that conservative when they came, but most of them believe in the – yeah, they’re mostly Republicans.  So, I don’t discuss – now that I’m not working there, I don’t discuss it with my friends.  What else?  So yes, I met a lot of women who had put themselves on the line and who had done amazing things.  I mean, things like – what did we do?  We went to Washington, and we marched.  I had all my grandkids come to Washington so they’d know what to do about being activists in their life and fighting for the rights of others.  That’s one [inaudible].  I’ll tell you a little story about my father.  I don’t know if it fits in here.  But anyhow, it popped into my head, so I’ll share with you.  He was wonderful.  They put him in the Navy as soon as he arrived from Russia.  When he came out, they gave him citizenship for having been in the Navy.  He married my mother, who was an American that didn’t want him to speak Russian.  She just wanted him to know English very well and learn English.  They had a women’s apparel shop.  In those days, it was assimilation of immigrants; you didn’t want your dear ones to get on the streetcar and talk another language.  Then that changed, and everybody is very diversified and holds on to their own.  But in those days, it was different.  So I was still a kid, and my father had brought with him – which I have, and I can show you – an old little purse about so big.  It had rubles in it that were his last money.  My mother sometimes would object because she had worked too hard, and she didn’t go to Florida like her friends and that sort of thing.  My father would call a family meeting, and he would take out this little purse, and he would throw the rubles on the bed.  He would say, “This is what I came with.  Now I have a house, and I have you kids, and you’re going to college.”  He would enumerate all the things that we had.  Then, he would say, “And your job in this world is to make sure that everybody who comes here has the right to live and do what we’ve done.”  So when I was offered this job to work with the Russians, it was like my father saying, “Okay, that’s what you need to do.”  He was great.  He was a great merchant.  As a matter of fact, when my first husband died, he was teaching me the business, and I was going to New York with him like my mother did.  But then Shabbat sort of interfered with that.  That’s a good story.  I haven’t thought about these stories for a while.  I wrote a book about the Russians; you know that.  It was good.  I’ll show it to you.  It’s all in pieces now.   They had a couple of them around here in the libraries.  But I went looking so that I’d have a decent one to show you, but it disappeared.  Let’s see if I can – that’s it. 

GW:  Can you talk a little bit about the book?

BK:  When you get finished, we’ll see if it comes up,

AK:  So I guess I’ll ask: do you notice any consequences?  Did you notice any consequences of the discrimination and the antisemitism in Eastern Europe, maybe in present-day or more modern times for people who came to America?  I know you talked a little bit about how they were afraid of Judaism, but maybe –

BK:  In Russia?  Yes.  Well, if they decided to leave Russia – nobody left Russia.  That meant that you were dissidents.  So if you [inaudible] Russia, then you lost your job, and you were treated as a ne’er do well.  Maybe you had to clean the streets or something like that.  You waited about ten years.  It was a political move that allowed the Russian Jews to come out.  They weren’t allowed to come out.  Things were pretty good before [Joseph] Stalin.  Then they got bad.  Stalin was really not very good to the Jews.  Then, they went this way and that, but it was really no good.  The Jews could not study, could not be Jewish, could not have anything that was Jewish.  Sure, they all suffered.  They suffered a lot.  Then, when they came here, they suffered because they were Jews.  They were told that Jews were no good, and then when they came here, some of the congregations asked them for money to be Jews.  That was very conflicting for them.  So, in the North Shore, I asked all the congregations to give them at least a year of free – they could come and go if they wanted and not have to pay.  Then, when it was over, it was hard because – and I didn’t blame them.  They lived that way all the time – hiding around, hiding that they were Jewish, not talking about it, celebrating holidays in the basement.  So, of course, it had a tremendous effect upon them.  Some of them clung to it here, but not very many.  But I would say that those in the North Shore were very Jewish because of the school we opened.  We could do anything we want.  We could talk about it.  So I had a different Rabbi come, and then we talked about being Jewish every week for a certain amount of time.  I think that was helpful to them.  Then, there was a very wonderful man in Swampscott.  He had the idea that he would give you, for instance – if you would invite, over the period of a year, four times – if you would invite one or two couples to your house, and you would have candlesticks and kippot and all of that to make it Friday Night Dinner, and you had invited people in certain weeks that he would say, you could go to the kosher butcher and get everything for dinner and bring it back and serve them, providing you lit the candles, you sang Zemirot, you did all of that.  That was terrific.  I know that many of us had Russians, and we could do that easily.  We went to the butchery.  We got the food.  We had them, and we taught them how to bless their kids and that sort of thing.  Some of them were non-Jewish.  I have one friend who’s non-Jewish, married to a Jew, and that’s how she came.  She made her husband bless her kid all the time.  He comes home from MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] on Fridays and all of that.  He has a girlfriend, and she told me how sad she was – it wasn’t Jewish.  I mean, this kid was – he had a bar mitzvah and all of that, but of course, he wasn’t Jewish.  But he lived – this little part of his life was very Jewish.  That’s the reality of today.  I can’t draw any conclusions, but that’s the way it was.  So that was very helpful, I think, for them to understand that Friday night, you could have a wonderful time and celebrate your being Jewish.  I think many of them still feel that.  I don’t know.  We had fun trying to help them become Jewish.  What else?  We already left the synagogue when I did that.  We went to Swampscott.  I asked my husband where he wanted to go.  He said near the ocean, and we went to Swampscott.  That’s when I took this job with the Jewish Family Service.  So, we had people at our house maybe twice a month on Friday night, and they were excited.  He would do the kiddush and all.  That’s all I can tell you about what we tried to do.

GW:  Is there anything that you wish people would understand about the Soviet Jewry movement that they wouldn’t be able to find in a textbook?

BK:  When I was a kid, we used to wear bracelets with the name of a Russian on it who was a refusenik.  Sometimes, synagogues used to keep a seat up in the bema for a Russian that they “adopted” sort of, who can’t come out.  It took years for people to come out – ten years, fifteen.  Then, they had to say they were going to Israel.  Did you know that?  In order for them to leave Russia, they had to say they were going to Israel.  They were afraid of Israel because Russia made Israel like the most horrible – it’s like when they came to America; they were so surprised that there were trees and grass.  They thought it was all concrete.  They had no concept – a lot of them.  I forgot what I was telling you.  At least, that’s pretty good – a half an hour, and I just forgot.  It’s hard when you get old.  You forget.  Let’s see.  What question was I answering?

GW:  You were talking about how you had adopted Russian Jews, refuseniks – the bracelets

BK:  Yes, with bracelets.  Yes, we used to wear bracelets, and there used to be a chair.  We used to talk about it a lot.  I remember after a few of the Russians had come, and we arranged to have a march from one part of Marblehead to another part of Marblehead.  The police were making sure that we were okay.  They were coming up on the side of where we were marching.  The Russians went into a terrible state.  They wanted to hide because they couldn’t imagine that the police were there to help them.  So, they all suddenly began to run away.  We had to tell them, “No, no.  It’s okay.  This is to protect you.”  Of course, it had a tremendous effect upon their lives.  But I think America helped them.  So when they got to Vienna, which is the first stop after they left, and it was terrible when they left.  The Russians smashed their records if they were taking records, kept their things if they didn’t think they should – it was really very hard for them to leave.  I had a friend who was a viola player, and he couldn’t take his viola with him.  So they had to use all kinds of ways and people in which they could maybe find someone who would go a different way.  It took a long time for his viola to come here, to come to the United States.  There’s a mouse.  Don’t get excited.  I have a mouse.  It just ran behind the couch.  I can’t do anything.  I call him all the time.  His name is Tim.  So, that’s good for that one, isn’t it?

AK:  Backtracking a little bit, could you talk about – was the march in Washington the rally to free Soviet Jewry? 

BK:  Was it what?

AK:  Was it the rally to free Soviet Jewry? 

BK:  Yes, it was. 

AK:  Could you talk about that?

BK:  It was the [’80s].  Yeah.  I flew into Washington.  It was in Washington on the mall.  I flew into Washington.  I asked my children to bring my grandchildren there.  I wanted them to march with me.  Let’s see where they were.  Some lived in Salem from lived in Salem.  They’re all over now.  I can’t remember where they all lived in the ’60s.  It was wonderful.  We had a whole group from the North Shore going on the plane to Washington.  We never stayed overnight.  We just marched all day and then took the plane home.  That’s what we did.  I have some pictures of it in one of my books when we were there.  I have not much to say except that I felt that this was something that we were doing that was very important and very worthwhile.  I think it did have an effect upon the powers that be.  There was the name of a treaty that the United States wrote with two of the senators [Jackson–Vanik amendment].  I know their names.  It’ll come back to me maybe before you leave.  They would let the Jews leave the Soviet Union in exchange for grain.  They needed grain, the Russians.  Two senators helped push forth through the Senate the fact that they could ask Russia to let the Jews go in exchange for grain that they needed.  That was how they really got to leave Russia.  So that was important.  It was important to march so that senators know they had to do something to help and that it wasn’t just a small little story; it was a lot of human beings not being treated as human beings.  Next?  I think that I answered that one.

GW:  So what do you think was the major impact of the establishment of Israel on the Soviet Jewry movement and how, I guess, Judaism was perceived and how –?

BK:  I think they thought it was great.  I think they felt very close.  I think Israel gave them a way to feel close about their Judaism because they didn’t know anything else to be close to.  I remember after they came here – I remember them taking a bus or walking because they didn’t have much money – walking from Lynn to where I was in Salem with the few dollars that they wanted me to send to Israel.  They all really cared about Israel.  Israel had a big impact upon them.  I think it was – and many of them went to Israel.  What came here was only half – not even half of what went to Israel.  In Israel, they are also Conservative.  (inaudible) they’re not liberal.  Got a lot of Netanyahu’s.  That’s who they are.  That’s how they believe.  Yeah, I think it was tremendous.  I think it had a tremendous impact on Jews, on anybody that really felt Jewish.  I mean, for me, certainly.  I have a lot of family there.  I was always there and always involved, raising money, joining organizations that supported Israel, that sort of thing – sat on a lot of boards.  I don’t do that now.  I do [it] here.  I have volunteer work here, but not the same.

AK:  What are you involved in?

BK:  I work with the people who aren’t doing well here.  I work in a nursing home.  I visit people.  Also, I play scrabble with the people who are in assisted living.  They can still do that.  They can still beat me.  So I do that because they’re there.  I gave up driving five months ago.  So that’s a whole different life.  There’s no spontaneity anymore.  So it’s very different.  It’s okay, though.  I gave it up.  I just decided that it was time.  Just became too complicated to drive.  So, that’s what I do here.  I greet people; I’m on the greeting committee, so I invite newcomers to go to dinner so I can tell them about wonders of where they’re going to live, that sort of thing.  So that’s good.  That’s the last question?  Looks like that.

AK:  Yes.  I think that’s good. 

GW:  Do you have anything else you wanted to tell us?

BK:  No.  I can tell you another funny little story about a woman.  My office was right across from Star Market.  I got a woman – she came into the office.  She said, “I only have a dollar and twenty cents, and I don’t know what bread to buy.”  So I thought, “My God.  Bread?”  So I went back with her.  I never knew that there was an entire row of bread.  I really never knew that.  I used to go in and buy what I wanted.  I knew where it was, and I would pick it out.  So she took me back.  I went with her through this whole row in the supermarket, explaining to her all these breads that I had never seen in my life.  It was very funny.  Don’t you think that’s funny?

AK:  Yes.

BK:  Yes, that was very funny. (laughter)

AK:  I don’t think they have many bread options in Russia.

BK:  No.  They would stand in line.  You always saw them; now, they are much more Americanized, but they always had a bag by them.  Every Russian had a bag to walk with.  In Russia, they would stand in line.  They didn’t know [what was at] the end of the line – lettuce, potatoes.  They never knew, but they would stand in line to get something.  I used to go into the school systems, particularly the one in Marblehead, and try and explain to the teachers.  I would always ask to meet with the teachers to tell them why the kids act differently.  I don’t know exactly now which ways they were.  But I think that if they wanted something, they used to have to do it skirting around to get something.  So when they get to the United States, they have habits that the Americans don’t particularly appreciate.  They dropped it.  When they first came to my office with kids, the kids used to whisper in their ears and be very quiet.  Six months later, the kids were just like America, just like my kids.  I could tell you a whole lot about this.  It was fun.  It was good.  This picture comes from Australia.  The fellow who was the anthropologist, who was the head of my school, was a professor in Australia.  This is a picture he had.  When we were doing the book, he said, “I got a great picture.”  Only one person noticed that this is not a tree that you would find – I don’t know.  They complained about the tree over there.  But he gave me this picture, and it was perfect.  So we put it on the book.  That was good.  When I came here, I had never written anything.  This was really an oral history of ninety-five people.  All three sections – the Russian, the volunteer, and the professional.  It was the three of them.  So it was really – I was reporting what people were saying.  So when I came here – and you have to study here; you have to do 450 hours a year.  So I take three courses every semester, and there are three semesters.  So one semester, I took writing.  I took writing for six semesters.   I learned how to write [inaudible].  That’s bad because we could have written another book, my friends and I, but I got old.  We could have written about the same people and shown how they were successful.  Most of them were.  Most of them were very successful.  Some are still working on the job they got when they first arrived.  They’re smart.  The group that was in the North Shore also taught me how to eat a grape before I buy it.  They do things like that.  But it’s great.  So how come this question was about Russians and Russian Jewry?

GW:  Well, I guess it’s a new exhibit that we’re working on. 

BK:  I didn’t know that. 

GW:  So we’re just collecting oral histories and seeing what we can do with it, I guess.

BK:  Are you interviewing any Russians themselves?

AK:  We’re working on [it].

GW:  We have a few contacts, but we have to get in touch with them and set something up. 

BK:  Do you want some names?

GW:  That’d be great.  Yeah. 

BK:  I’ve got the name of a person.  When she walked into my office – the first day, they all had to come to my office – not my office, the Jewish Family Service.  When she came, she knew English.  I knew that she was really smart.  She just was really bright.  So I made her my assistant because I didn’t know any Russian.  That was probably about two years into the job.  She’s a very good friend of mine.  She became an artist, and she works with pottery.  I mean, she became really – but she’s a social worker.  When I retired, she went to social work school.  She became a social worker.  She’s a social worker now, and she’s active still.  She and her husband make a big trip around someplace in the world – India or wherever.  I think she’d be delighted to talk with you. 

GW:  Yeah, that’d be great. 

BK:  She could take [inaudible] because she was really – she worked as my assistant.  She took them all in.  Let me get you the name. 

AK:  Thank you.

[Tape paused.]

BK:  I have a lot of names.  I don’t know what you’re looking for.  I have a name – someone who taught English, but that’s probably – you could talk to Bob.  Oh, my goodness.  Oh, you have to talk to Bob.  Bob is the guy who didn’t want to go into academia anymore when he came here.  Someone told him to come and see me, and I would give them a job.  But I had so little money.  The United States government gave Jewish Family Services X amount of money.  All in all, we were not having very much money for each family.  I could only pay him half, and he said he would take on the other half as a volunteer, and he would work there, and he would do it.  He had a great way of teaching English.  He would bring one of these big obituaries from the New York Times or something that told about the family and the kids and all.  He would help them with the culture while he was teaching English.  He’s a really brilliant guy.  He’s married to Sudha, who’s an Indian woman.  Here’s his number.  His name is Bob Newman, N-E-W-M-A-N.  I don’t know what kind of an exhibit you want. 

GW:  Anything would help at this point.  Then, we can talk to people and see.

[Tape paused.]

BK:  I've got so many names I could give you.  So how are you leaning, though? 

Do you have any way in which you’re leaning?

AK:  Well, we want to focus on the women’s experience. 

BK:  Okay, then you should talk to Galina Nizhnikov.  She was a real activist.  I don’t think I have her – she’s on my computer if I could find her. [Tape paused.]

AK:  Great.

BK:  They’re better than talking to me.  That’s first round.  I’m second round.  They’re first.

GW:  We need all sides.  It’s really helpful.

BK:  I think she definitely is the activist.  Who was the name of the woman that she was protecting all the time and sending everything to?  She’ll tell you.  She was really, I think, thrown in jail.  Not this one, but her friend.  Well, isn’t that nice that you came to make me remember all these things.

AK:  Yes, thank you for having us.

BK:  I actually got the book out.  I hadn’t seen the book for a while.  Just an aside – you can turn that off.  Is this the end?  You can make an ending.

AK:  I don’t know.

[END OF INTERVIEW]