VICKI GABRINER:  This is Vicki Gabriner interviewing Ronya Schwaab.  Today is Saturday, January 18, 1997.  We’re in Ronya’s home.  And the interview is being held under the auspices of the Jewish Women’s Archive, Temple Israel Oral History Project in Boston, Massachusetts.  Good morning.

RONYA SCHWAAB:  Good morning.

VG:  Now we’re ready to start the interview.  I have read your reminiscences that are in the Temple Israel library, and they’re wonderful.

RS:  Thank you.

VG:  Absolutely wonderful.  And you know one of the--.  Actually, the first question I wanted to ask you was, how did it come to pass that you wrote your reminiscences, because that seems like a somewhat unusual thing.

RS:  It was unusual.  I have never intended to write anything.  I’m a verbal person.  I speak.  But about ten years ago, I developed a rather serious pain in my groin and couldn’t lie in bed, simply had to walk around.  And I decided, such an idle way to spend time!  Why don’t I begin to write some of the things that I remember about my childhood?  And for weeks, I stood and wrote.  And by the time I got through, I had a hundred and ninety-six pages hand-written.  A hundred! Then the thing abated, the pain abated.  And I was able to sleep again.  So the rest of it came a little slower.  Well, once having gotten the bug that I wanted to record it so that my children and grandchildren would know something of my background, I finished it, but didn’t have it published.  After that, I went into illness and depression.  And for a goodly number of years it just lay there, without doing anything about it.  And finally, when I moved to this place and I had recovered from the various illnesses, I decided it was time to do something about it.  I gave it to a niece.  She put it on her computer, helped me develop, kind of put it together.  And she took it and had it reproduced.  And that’s how it came into being.  So it wasn’t completed until about, when, 19—something, 1996, I believe, 1994.  Perhaps --.  I don’t even remember.

RUTHCHILD:  Nineteen ninety-four.

RS:  That’s right.

RR:  Okay.  I should note for the record that I’m also here, Rochelle Ruthchild, who was the other voice you just heard.  What you’ve written is a wonderful gift to not only your immediate family, but also to the rest of us who are interested in preserving the history—exactly the history that you’ve written about in there, which is really what these interviews are all about.  For the record, just state what you said early, which is you gave a copy of this to--.  There’s a copy of this in the Temple Israel library and you gave a copy to Rabbi Mehlman.

RS:  The rabbi.  And Rabbi asked for an extra copy so that he could send it to New York to the Jewish Historical Society, I guess, a branch that has to do with outstanding women in America.  And there is a copy, by the way, in the Newton Public Library.  And also, at the Jewish Historical Society at Brandeis.

VG:  Okay.  Let’s just state for the record that you live at the Golda Meir--.  What is it called, Golda Meir—?

RS:  This is called the Golda Meir House.  It’s one of the Jewish community housing for the elderly.  There are a goodly number of these buildings.  They’re built by HUD.  But they are co-maintained by the Jewish Community Housing.  In other words, there are certain programs and certain things that happen within the house here, which is provided for by the Jewish Community Housing.

VG:  And how long have you lived here, Ronya?

RS:  I’ve lived here for five and a half years.

VG:  Well, I’d like to come back to the Golda Meir housing project after we’ve first gone back to where you started.  I was terribly impressed in the book with the amount of, and clarity of, your memories of your childhood in Russia.  And so I’d like—

RS:  They were very vivid! [laughs]

VG:  I’d like to talk, you know, go back and talk a little bit about that with you for starters.  You were born in what year?

RS:  I was born in 1909, January.

VG:  Where?

RS:  In Belarus.

VG:  In what--?

RS:  The name of the city was Gomel.

VG:  Spell it.

RS:  G-O-M-E-L.  The L is pronounced soft, Gomel.

VG:  And the date of your birth is January—

RS:  Twenty-fourth, 1909.

VG:  Oh, so we’re coming up on a birthday.

RS:  In a few days I will be eighty-seven.

RR:  Eighty-seven, mazel tov, mazel tov. 

RS:  Thank you.

VG:  Tell me--.  We’re going to repeat some of the material that’s in your book.  I mean, we can’t help but do that.  Tell me what your strongest memories are of growing up in Russia.

RS:  Well, they’re very strong and they’re very painful.  They don’t hurt anymore, but they are sad because they were constantly connected with a sense of fear, a good part of hunger, a good part of pogroms. And the environment was one that was threatening, principally because we were Jews.  However, that is not to say that as a child I didn’t play with other children.  We improvised games.  We used a piece of shmata to make a doll.  We didn’t have Barbie dolls, you know, the way they have in America. [laughs]  But we used pots and pans and household amenities with which to improvise games.

VG:  Do you have specific memories of games that you played?

RS:  Yes.  One, for example, we would gather five little stones about the same size.  And played with them by throwing them up and catching them.  And I learned subsequently that in America it’s called Jacks.  But we were playing it.  We played doctor.  The doll was the patient and one of us was the nurse, and the other one was the mama.  And we played games like that, games that are common to children.

VG:  What were your dolls made of?  Were they handmade?

RS:  It’s a rag tied around a bunch of--.  The part was--.  The top was bunched and then it was tied around so it became a head.  The rest of it was a body.  And the sex didn’t matter.  [Laughs]  But the constant struggle for adequate food was something that was ever-present, particularly the War of 1914, as you know, the First War.  Produce became even more scarce.  And I had an experience that was absolutely appalling.  We had a cat whom I loved, and I not infrequently had her on my lap.  One day when the amount of food that Mama was giving me was much less than what I needed, and certainly less than what I would be willing to share, the cat jumped on my lap.  I pushed it off because I wasn’t by way of sharing that precious bit of food.  She jumped up again, and again I pushed her off.  And she did that a number of times.  And I was beginning to get annoyed with her, because I was consuming the food with a great deal of interest.  Finally she jumped up for the last time.  And this time, when I tried pushing her she stuck her claws into my thigh.  And pushing was no good because it was tearing away at the thigh.  Well, it took a considerable amount of time for Mama to finally gently lift her out.  And she left, oh, a considerable opening, which became infected because there was no medication and no sanitation to speak of.  And to this day, the sight of a cat in someone’s home -- no matter how loving she appears to be and how the hostess caresses her, but she jumps up on people.  And the idea that she’ll jump up on my lap is absolutely terrifying.  And I mean those are the things that you retain.  So that it’s forever.  I’m an old woman now and I’m still afraid of having a cat jump on me.  Yet I know that people who live alone are encouraged to have a pet, somebody to love, somebody to receive love from.  Well, I simply am not availing myself of that area of receiving love or giving love.

VG:  Was it usual to have pets?

RS:  I really don’t know.  I assume that it was because many people had cats, partially because there were an awful lot of mice.  So cats were an indispensable part of your equipment.  Non-Jewish people had dogs.  Those were a menace, because the same little girl that I’m talking about – me -- went walking on the street, thinking rather happy thoughts, having no concern, meets a non-Jew with a dog.  And the first thing he yells at you is, “You’re a Christ killer.”  And that of course terrifies you immediately.  Then he says, “I’m going to stick the dog on you.  And he’ll do to you what you did to Jesus Christ.”  And a five, six, seven year old girl is terribly frightened.  It’s on a    main street and a lot of people are likely to see it happening, which means I will probably be saved.  But too many instances, they used it precisely as he indicated to me.  And the idea that a dog can do something to you which will tear you apart is so terrifying that I remain victimized by it.  And I’m afraid of cats, that they’ll jump on me and dogs that they’ll tear me apart.  So I defy modern concepts that having pets is a highly desirable thing for people who live alone and in isolation.  I don’t have it and I don’t want it. 

VG:  You’re doing it your way.

RS:  Huh?

VG:  You’re doing it your way.

RS:  I’m doing it my own way.  I’m doing it by sharing my life with other people, helping other people.  Something I’ve done virtually all my life since the time I came to America and learned enough of the English language to be accepted, however poorly I still spoke.  Nevertheless, I began doing things for other people.

RR:  Could you just say who were the non-Jews in your shtetl, in your town?  Were they Poles, Ukrainians, Russians—

RS:  Russians.

VS:  Okay.

RS:  At that time it was called Belorussia.  And I have since then learned that it’s called Belarus.  But I’ve also lived not far from Kiev for a period.  That’s a later part of the story. 

VG:  And can you say where your town was?  Where is it located in Belarus?

RS:  Okay.  It’s roughly, approximately--.  If you know where Minsk is, Gomel is one of the principal cities in Belarus.  Minsk is our capital.  We were about two hundred miles south, I guess, north—I don’t know—of Minsk. [Gomel is about 250 miles southeast of Minsk and about 80 miles northeast of Chernobyl.  –ed.] At the other end, certainly south, the Dnieper River flowed to Kiev, which is the capitol of the Ukraine.  And we were not too far—about two hundred and fifty miles—from Kiev.  And the reason I mention it is because this Kiev is a very important city in my scheme of things.

VG:  Before--.  I want to come back to Kiev.  And I remember you talking about that in your reminiscences.  What language did you speak in your home?

RS:  I spoke Russian fluently.

VG:  Is that what your parents spoke?

RS:  No.  To begin with, I had only one parent.  My father had gone away to America in 1913, and I was a very little girl at the time.  But my mother, my uncles, my aunts, my grandparents, spoke Yiddish.  They’re called Litvaks [?].  They spoke Russian Yiddish, not Polish.  But I learned Russian and spoke it very comfortably.  Indeed, when I was accosted by someone, and charged for being a Christ-killer I would use my knowledge of the Russian language to defend myself by saying, “I am not a Jew.  And if you do harm to me you’re killing a Christian child.” This at the ridiculous age of five or six or seven.  And they’d say, “Well, if you were a boy we could prove it, because if we put your pants down and if you’re circumcised.  But you’re a girl.”  So I would baffle them.  They would not be absolutely certain.  I’d say, “You know what?  I’ll prove it to you.”  And I would then go about reciting a series of words, all of which had an R in it.  The Russian R is sharp.  The Jews pronounce it gutturally.  And I’d say, “[A long string of Russian words with plentifully rolled R’s – ed.].”  You get it? 

RR:   Mm-hmm.

VG:  Okay.  Well, then he was certain that he didn’t know whether I was or wasn’t Jewish.  And there was no point in tangling with me anymore.

VG:  Now, why did he think initially that you were Jewish?

RS:  Well, maybe because I looked Jewish.

VG:  I’m asking what does that mean?  How would you—in the streets how would you identify each other as being either Jewish or non-Jewish, if you didn’t know the person?

RS:  You develop a sense.  For example, I knew intuitively that the person who was coming towards me was a Jew or not.  And it became almost a saving device for avoiding contact with a non-Jew.  Indeed, when I came to America I tried using the same methodology.  And after a while it faded away.  But in Russia, there was an acute wealth, a man could be recognized because he wore a beard.  A boy could be recognized—

VG:  Meaning a Russian man would have a beard, or a Jewish man had a beard?

RS:  There were many, there were many goyim, many peasants who wore beards.  But Jewish men had a very special way of their beards—

VG:  What was it?

RS:  Well, it was--.  It also has to do, I think, with the face, with the carriage, with the humbleness that a Jew showed, because he was always doing this.

VG:  Okay.  What you’re doing--.  I’m going to say what you’re doing, because we can’t see you on the tape.  You’re kind of raising your shoulders, your face—

RS:  He was doing that because he was afraid he’d get knocked on the head, you know.  And—

VG:  Would he hunch over a little bit?

RS:  That’s right.

VG:  So he was kind of protecting his—

RS:  A goy didn’t have to do that, so he could walk straight.  The way—another way you could tell is by the kind of boots he was wearing.

VG:  What was the difference?

RS:  Well the difference was that in many instances they were called valenki.

VG:  Spell it.

RS:  V-A-L-E-N-K-I, valenki.  And they were made of a soft material like a felt.  And they had soles to protect them against the snow or the wet.  But the rest of them wore valenki.  But he also, when he wore boots, they were usually rough boots up to here.  Jews did not wear boots.  They wore shoes most of the time.  And when they were very, very poor, they simply had rags wrapped around their feet with something to hold them together.  That was during the intense period of poverty.  But when you ask me specifically, How did I know?, the answer is intuitively.

VG:  Right.  What I’m trying to get from you are the specific, concrete things that you actually picked up that formed that intuition.  Part of it is dress.

RS:  Part of it--.  Another thing--.  Yes, dress.  Jews, for example wore traditional—not real kapotes, but they wore certain jackets that were tied with a belt.  Not a belt made of leather, but a belt made of fabric.  Goyim were dressed with trousers and heavy sheep-lined jackets, and hats that were—that had earmuffs to them but they frequently were tied on top, so that they didn’t--.  When it was very cold, they were put down.  The outfit that a Jew wore—a Jewish woman had to have something on her head, because she had to have her hair shaved off when she was getting married.  So she wore a ‘titel,’ whatever you call it.

VG:  A shaytl.

RS:  A shaytl.  And then she had a kerchief.  But there was a vast difference in her appearance when she put the babushka on, from the way Christian ladies looked.

VG:  Tell me what the difference is.

RS:  The appearance of the face, the color of the face, the expression of the face, the eyes—

VG:  Okay.  The expression on a Jewish woman was what, and on a goyish was what?

RS:  The expression on a Jewish woman was one of suffering, almost always one of suffering.  The expression on the goyish face was one of vitality and imperviousness to anything that might happen to her.  It didn’t mean that she didn’t get beaten up occasionally by her husband, because that was part of the tradition.  It was part of the culture.  But she was full cheeks usually, usually blue eyes or light color eyes, usually light color hair.  And there was a feeling of strength and immobility—immovability about her, you know.  I don’t know whether you in the course of your travels you’ve observed how Russian ladies look.  Whether they—

VG:  You mean non-Jewish Russian ladies.

RS:  Non-Jewish, mm-hmm.  Whether they don’t somewhat resemble what I’m trying to describe to you.  Of course, I remember—don’t remember, I’m talking about 1909, 1910, ’11, ’12, ’13, whereas, you are seeing them in 1996.  They have been through a revolution and a certain kind of refinement period and modernity.  And perhaps they’re not as visibly different from others.  But in my days the difference was marked.

VG:  And you were able to tell someone who was wearing a shaytl, versus someone who had her regular hair?

RS:  I think so, yes!

VG:  And were the babushkas the same, that the goyim and the Jewish women were wearing?

RS:  Nearly the same.  Sometimes the ones that the Jewish ladies wore were either white or black, or solid colored.  They were not colorful.  Whereas the babushkas that most of the non-Jewish ladies wore were full of flowers and very colorful.  They were red.  They were white or white ground with a lot of red flowers on them.  I wish I had pictures to show you but I don’t, because…

VG:  You have the pictures in your mind.

RS:  I certainly do, yes.

VG:  Now in your home when you would--.  When you would have an encounter on the street with a non-Jewish woman or man that was negative, would you go home and talk to your parents about it?  And what kind of information did you get from your parents about how to deal with the non-Jews?

RS:  I would go home and tell my mama about it.  And she’d say, “Ikh hob dir gezukt tsu nisht gayn gas aleyn!”  But I--.

VG:  Translation?

RS:  That you shouldn’t go on the street by yourself.  See?  “Az du hersht nisht!”

VG:  You don’t listen to me.

RS:  “…Hershn nisht.  Iz nisht gut...”  [Unclear] frightened to--.  I don’t remember the word ‘frightened’ [i.e., in Yiddish – ed.].  But more importantly Mama, superstitious as most Jewish ladies of those days, also had her own set of prejudices.  And we children were told especially don’t go near a church because the church was really the source of the greatest antisemitism.  And she’d say, “But if you must go by, make a fig”— you know, a fig is a sign of disrespect or—

VG:  A fig is where you’re putting your what?

[Unclear]

RS:  What is that?

RR:  Kookish.

VG:  Is that Russian?

RR:  Yeah.

RS:  What is that?

RR:  Kookish.  You’ve never heard that?

RS:  Kookish.  Make a fig—

VG:  Well, let’s see.  What you’re doing is you’re making a fist, but you’re putting your thumb in between your second and the third finger.

RS:  That’s a fig.

VG:  Sticking up.

RS:  And hide it in your pocket so nobody will see.  And go, poo, poo, poo, three times and pass by as quickly as you possibly can.  And the result is--.  I mean, little children don’t question why Mama would say go poo, poo, poo, and make a fig.  You do it, because it’s the only way Mama says we can survive, you know.  So that’s—

VG:  A fig is a Yiddish or a Russian word?  The word itself, ‘fig.’

RS:  Figguh.  I don’t remember what it is.  I can look it up.

VG:  Okay.  So did you do that then?  Did you make a fig?

RS:  Sure.  Every time I had occasion to walk anywhere where I was near a church, the first thing I did was put this, put it in my hand, my pocket so nobody would see it and poo, poo, poo, spit three times.

VG:  Is your earliest specifically Jewish memory one of a positive memory or a memory about how to be careful out on the street because you were Jewish?

RS:  It’s a negative memory, because I was always aware that I and my people were in some danger.  And when it became—shortly after the war broke up, because there was unrest in the Russian army and the Russians were defeated and finally came back.  The shortage of food and the pogroms that resulted--.  There were people, for example, in different cities who suffered terribly, because when people are hungry they look for a scapegoat who they can abuse and from whom they can rob whatever there is.  We were living in Gomel and we didn’t have a pogrom.  But a man and his wife came to us at night from a city called Bialystok. And they said there was a terrible, terrible pogrom and they ran away.  And so they came to our house.  And Mama wouldn’t think of not letting them in.  So they stayed with us for a good long while. From then I learned the nature of a pogrom.  And it was terrifying.  So when you ask for the general feeling that you carry away when you go away from Russia--.  Besides there were other things that I have to endure subsequently that reconfirmed my childhood impression, that it was no place for us.  But we were kind of stuck.  There was no place.  Papa was in America.  And we were stuck in Russia.

VG:  I want to go off in two different directions from what you just said.  I’ll say them both and then we’ll--.  Obviously you can’t do them at the same time.  One: I’m curious what you remember, and what you feel okay about saying, about what these people told you about the pogrom and Bialystok – which is one question.  And the other question I wanted to ask you is, I want you to talk a little bit about how your family expressed their Jewishness in the home, in terms of rituals and in terms of synagogue attendance, you know. 

RS:  Okay.

VG:  So I wanted to hit a little bit of the negative and then do the positive.

RS:  Well, in the home the rituals were observed very, very closely.  We had only kosher food.  Mama observed kashrut.  We had two sets of dishes.  They were broken and they were not particularly appealing.  But they were different.  We observed Shabbos.

VG:  What did you do for Shabbos?

RS:  Well, my zeyde would go to shul.  The rest of us would remain at home, but the cleaning and the preparation for Shabbos were intense.  We would white wash, and we would clean, and we would polish, so that everything shone.  And the only decent meal was that of Shabbos, where  Mama cooked gefilte fish, and sometimes we had chicken when she was able to obtain it for us.  And nobody lit anything.  Nobody did anything.  And zeyde would come home from shul and we would have cholent. That’s something that cooked over twenty-four hours in the oven.  And again, he would go for his nap.  And we, the kids, were told to be very quiet. And of course, we were not about to comply.  And frequently Mama would scold us and say, “Go out of the house because you’re disturbing zeyde’s nap.”  And then in the evenings zeyde would have the ceremony of havdole.   And frequently when it was the new moon, he would go out with a group of men and they would say a prayer outside for the new moon.  And we observed holidays very, very, very rigidly.

VG:  Did the women celebrate the new moon at all, or always the men?

RS:  Men.

VG:  The men did it.

RS:  Women were not included in anything except cleaning and preparing.  Mama didn’t go to shul but she prayed.  She had a prayer, a sidur, in Yiddish.  And she knew it by heart, and she prayed.  The only time she went to shul was on holidays: Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.  But she—they sat up in the balcony, whereas the little ones were allowed to be downstairs with zeyde.

VG:  So were you--? 

RS:  I would frequently –

VG:  Little ones up to what age?

RS:  Well, as long as you were five, six, seven, it was all right.  By eight or nine I had moved away.

VG:  Do you remember whether there was someone within the women’s community in the temple who was what they called a zogern, someone who would say the prayers, sort of lead the prayers for the women.

RS:  Well, the women said them in Yiddish.

VG:  Right.  I’ve just been reading that there’s a—there was often a woman called the zogern who was of--.  I just wondered if you knew of it in this community.

RS:  I don’t remember, because Mama used to mumble her prayer all the time.

VG:  And did she light the Shabbos candles?

RS:  Absolutely, absolutely.  That’s where I learned to do it like that.

VG:  And how did you do it?

RS:  Well Mama would go like this—

VG:  Okay.  She would put her arms out wide and circle around the candles.

RS:  Circle around as though she was including the world.  And then she would go like that.

VG:  Okay.  What you’re doing now is you’re turning your hands with your palms outward.

RS:  Yeah, well, she put it like that.

VG:  She [covered her eyes].  That’s how she did it

RS:  That’s right.  So to prevent her from seeing the brilliance of the light.

VG:  But she didn’t turn it with her hands, her palms in.  It’s interesting.

RS:  I don’t know.  It’s possible that she--.  I remember my recollection is this.

VG:  That’s interesting.  And then you learned how to do that, too?

RS:  Well, I never practiced it until I was asked to participate in Temple Israel with the Russians.  Then I learned how to say the prayer in Hebrew and what to do.

VG:  Did your mother teach you the prayers in Yiddish?

RS:  My mother didn’t teach me anything.  I just watched her.  And I knew that she was saying the prayers in Yiddish, because she didn’t know any Hebrew.

VG:  She didn’t--.  Did she talk to you about that at all, that she was—what she was doing, explaining it to you and try to draw you into that.

RS:  No.  There was no instruction.  If there had been--.  We were three sisters, you see, three little girls.  If there had been a boy he would have been sent to cheder, and he would have studied and he would have known—he would have learned Hebrew.  But girls were actually forbidden to study.  That’s one of the big beefs that the new women are complaining about.  And that is through not even to--.  Not only were we not encouraged, we were not allowed.  Girls were only allowed to be at home, to learn how to be balebostes, to know how to run a home, a kosher home, to bear children, and to do whatever their husbands told them to do.

RR:  Submit.

VG:  Everything you say leads me off—makes me want to go off to twenty different directions.

RS:  That’s your problem!  [Laughter]

VG:  I want to go--.  I want to go back again to the question of rituals in the home. OK?  I’m making notes, so hopefully I’ll come back to everything I wanted to ask you.  The holidays, okay, so let’s take each holiday and tell me how you—how you celebrated.  And whether or not you did it with extended family, or just your immediate family.

RS:  Okay.  The holiday that I remember best is Pesach, because that was a real celebration.  For one thing, the snow was beginning to melt because it’s usually in April.  And you were beginning to see the recovery of life: yellowish grass would appear in the rivulets that the sun would form. 

More importantly, we were taken to the public baths and actually given a real, honest-to-goodness bath!  And, not infrequently, something new was given to each child: a pair of shoes or an apron or a dress, or something.  You waited all year to get something that would warm the cockles of your heart.  And that happened on Pesach.

VG:  The public baths were for Jews?

RS:  Huh?

VG:  Or mixed?

RS:  Public baths were for Jews, because Mama went to--.  I guess--.  I don’t know.  Mama probably didn’t have to go to mikvah, because she wasn’t sleeping with a man.  My father was in America. 

VG:  Right.

RS:  So I don’t remember my Mama going to a mikvah. But the public baths that she took us to were for Jewish people.  And the preparations for Pesach were the most joyous event in my young life.  We baked our own matzos in conjunction with several of the neighbors.  And one day Mama said, “Tomorrow when we bake matzos, you will be allowed to do the perforating.”  You know, that little thing like a little wheel.  I couldn’t sleep all night at the excitement that I will be perforating the matzos!

VG:  How old were you?

RS:  I guess six or seven.  And so if you ask me--.  And, of course, the preparations, the elaborate preparations.  A white tablecloth on the table and the matzo.  And then Mama would do the chrain [grated horseradish – ed.] and her eyes would tear.  And prepare the thing that is mixed with apple and honey.

VG:  Charoses.

RS:  The charoses.  And everything was so--.  And we had peysakhdike dishes that Mama would bring down from God knows where she had them hidden.  And everybody was dressed up in their best.  And zeyde would be stretched out on two chairs and some pillows.

VG:  For the Seder.  He’d be reclining.

RS:  Yeah.

VG:  Did you go around the house and make sure that everything was absolutely clean?

RS:  Oh my God, we went around for chometz, and then you went someplace to discard the chometz.  You sold it or you gave it away or something.  I don’t remember, but I know there was a whole production having to do with chometz.  And it was a celebration symbolically, because we were celebrating our freedom from Egypt.  The idea that we would be subjected to other enslavements was somewhat dissipated in the big celebration of Pesach.  But [laughs], as you probably know, there was another exodus shortly after Moses brought the people out of Egypt when Joshua was sent to conquer—what’d you call it--.  In any event—

VG:  Okay.  Now you’re in an area that I don’t know the answers.

RS:  Hebrew --

VG:  I don’t know the answers.

RS:  In any event, there have been others.  And of course in the course of reading history, Jewish history, which I have been absolutely enchanted with and immersed in, I have truly learned how many other enslavements we have endured and survived.

VG:  Who did you have Passover Seder with?

RS:  Well, there was my mother and her one brother, and zeyde and bubbe.  And she had a sister, Elena [pronounced Ye’le’na – ed.], who was—

VG:  Spell her name.

RS:  E-L-E-N-A.  And so she was part of it.  And that’s it.  We couldn’t afford to have a very large group, because everybody had very limited means with which to buy the necessary food.  But that was our family.

VG:  Did you do one --?  How many Seders did you do?

RS:  We did two Seders.  But we observed, from a point of view of not working, we observed the first day of Seder and the last days of Seder, the last two days of Seder.

VG:  And tell me how you made the matzo?  Do you remember?

RS:  Well, all I know is that there was one person was mixing the flour and the water, and another person who was supervising the oven.  By the way, the oven was a brick oven, and it was -- and wooden panels were used to put the matzos in and then pull them out.

VG:  Is this a community oven or in someone’s house?

RS:  This was done by a community of several people, each having his own task, because speed was supposed to be important.  If I remember – this dates back to…

VG:  I think you have to--.  The matzo has to be done in a certain amount of time for it to be—

RS:  That’s it.

VG:  Pesakhdik.

RS:  All I know is that one person was responsible for mixing the dough, another person was responsible for putting it on the wooden thing to put into the oven.  Then a certain amount of time later, this was put out and the new one was put in. And I was responsible for perforating.

RR:  And what did you use to make the perforation?

RS:  There was something that looked like a little wheel, and it had a handle to it.  And the wheel had teeth.  And as I went like that, it perforated.  In fact, you’re making me remember things that are very difficult to re—

VG:  But you’re doing a great job.  I am, I’m looking for--.  I’m trying to be very specific.  I’m actually trying to ask you to recreate in as much detail as possible what your life was like there.

RS:  But I must tell you that, while these are very vivid in my mind because they represented highlights, there will be chunks of my life that are totally and completely blocked out.  Then comes another period of vivid recollection.

VG:  Would you like to move to another period of your life where—or stay?  I mean I could stay at this period, but we can—

RS:  You’re doing the interviewing.  And I will leave you to determine what it is that you want next.

VG:  Okay.  Let me ask you one more question.  Actually I want to ask you to go back even further.  I want to ask you if you recall any stories that were told to you by your bubbe or zeyde or by your parents about your grandparents’ lives and where they had come from?

RS:  No.  I have no such recollection.

VG:  Did you have a--.  What kind of relationship did you have with your grandparents?

RS:  I loved my zeyde.  He was a very gentle, beautiful man with a big white beard.  And he was very kind.  And I liked my uncle.  My grandmother was always sick.  And she was in bed most of the time.  And Mama was the one who carried on most of the household.  So I have rather unpleasant feelings toward my grandmother because Mama was compelled by her to marry my father.  She made the shidduch. She was the one who was the dominant factor in that household.  And although she was bedridden, she wore the pants, so to say.  Zeyde was very good natured and very kindly disposed to her because she had suffered grievously when she was attacked by a bull and the horns caused her to lose her baby.  And she lost the first several children that she conceived.  My mama was the first one born.  The other children were her sister, Elena, a brother, Alter, and another brother, Yaakov.  Yaakov disappeared in the First World War.  He was a--.  Both of them were soldiers.  But he disappeared and was never heard from.  And my poor grandmother never knew whether he actually was--.  Because there were no witnesses that he was dead. But he never appeared.  And she grieved.  And she said, “At least if I knew that my Yaakov is toyt [dead] I would mourn him and then forget.”  But this way, it was a perpetual raw wound in her heart, because she never knew what happened to Yaakov.  So the family remained.  She died of cancer.

VG:  Your grandmother.

RS:  My bubbe died of cancer.  But before she died, she was still a dominant lady.  Mama was eighteen, for example, and living with us at the time was a young medical student who was one of the rare specimens allowed to go to medical school.  And he was our boarder.  He liked my mother.  And he was teaching her Russian.  And she loved him.  And there was quite a love affair between them.  Then one day--.  But it was very innocent, because people didn’t go into bed the way they do nowadays.  Mama loved him and hoped that eventually he would become a doctor, and she would be his wife.  Whereupon, bubbe announced that a man is coming to see her who is the father of her future husband.  And Mama said, “Nothing doing.”  And she said, “Oh no, you don’t know anything about it.”  So the man came—he was my other zeyde—and brought a bundle of silver toys or something, and said his oldest son wants to marry my mother.  And bubbe agreed.  And announced to my mother—

[End of Tape 1, Side A]

VG:  This is side two of the first tape, interview with Ronya Schwaab.  Go ahead.  You were talking about your mother and—

RS:  Yeah.  Mama began to cry and said, “I will not marry him.  I’ve never seen him.  I don’t love him.”  And her mother said to her, “You cannot break an engagement according to Jewish law.  Once a pledge was made, it has to be kept.  Marry him, and if you’re unhappy, then you can divorce him.  But you cannot break this promise.”  So reluctantly Mama married this man who was my papa, and was obliged to move to Loev, L-O-E-V, which is not far from Kiev, because that’s where he lived.  All three little girls were born in Loev.  Although at the beginning I said I was born in Gomel, that was a mistake. However, as very young children we went back to Gomel.  My father was very much under the influence of his father.  His father was a smith, a smithy.

VG:  A blacksmith?

RS:  A blacksmith.  And Mama, who came from a large city, felt much superior to these people, and especially, she was very averse to the idea of her living in this small shtetl.  And so she began.  And there was no great love.  Although, traditionally Mama birthed three little girls.  But Mama began urging my papa to go to America in order to accomplish two things.  One, get rid of his father’s influence; and two, establish a life for himself.  Earn a livelihood and bring us over subsequently.  That was about 1913.  And as soon as he went to America, Mama returned with all of us to Gomel where we lived for the rest of the days that we were in Russia, at least as a family.  Now we are still talking about pre-revolutionary time.  And the question of education came up.  My older sister, by virtue of being the oldest one, was the only one who was being sent to school.  You know, first born, privileged.   She was pretty.  She was accomplished.  And she was right for going to school, which meant paying in those days; which meant if you go to school you have to be dressed decently, so Mama would sew dresses for her.  If you were going to school you had to have a pair of shoes because you can’t go barefoot.  So Chaya would have a pair of shoes.  If you were going to school, you had to bring a lunch which would not shame you.  So Mama would see to it that the best things we had were put aside for the lunch for Chaya to take to school.  My younger sister was Sema.  She was two and a half years younger than I, a fragile child who required a great deal of attention. Very gentle little girl, beautiful.  And she needed to be given cod liver oil, the doctor said.  To induce her to take cod liver oil Mama had to find bon bons and chocolates and things that were a rarity.  But that was the only way to get Sema to drink that horrible stuff.  So here was Chaya getting all of the things she needed and Semichka getting all the necessary things to induce her to survive, so to say.  And here was I, in between, strong, healthy, good natured, fat, resentful.  Everybody’s getting what’s coming to them.  But what’s coming to me?  Moreover, Chaya knew that she was the cock of the walk.  And she governed over me because Mama would go out and try to earn a living for us on the black market, you know, to get us food.  And Chaya would come from school and she would lord it over me.  The result is that I felt a great deal of resentment and a great desire to study.  The war ended, the revolution came; with the revolution came freedom to go to school without having to pay.  That was a big thing.  And everybody was allowed to go to school.  But I wasn’t ready for anything.  So my zeyde, Eloev, said, “Why don’t you send Ronya to me?  I’ll engage a tutor, prepare her for entering whatever class she’s chronologically entitled to.  And she will study with me.”  So the two girls remained with Mama, and I lived in Loev during the early days of the revolution.

VG:  Your mother went with you to your—

RS:  Huh?

VG:  Your mother went with you—this was to her father?  You went to study with your grandfather?

RS:  Yeah.

VG:  And your mother went with you?

RS:  No, my mother remained in Gomel with the two girls.

VG:  Oh, okay.

RS:  But then zeyde died, grandmother died.  Alter was the only one—Yaakov was the only one who remained alive of their family.  So there was Yaakov and Mama.  Elena married a widower with several children, a very comfortable widower.  So Mama and Yaakov Alter were the people who were supporting us, don’t you see?  The two girls were here.  I was with my grandparents in Loev.  As you probably know, the revolution was not approved by the rest of the world.  And armies of intervention entered Russia to fight the Red Army.  In a way, I’m telling you what’s in that book.

VG:  Yeah, some of it’s in there.

RS:   So we were very unfortunate.  The Polish army was our savior.  It came to Loev and it expelled the Red Army that went across the Dnieper to the other side.  And we were under the government of the Poles.  So Mama is a lawyer in Gomel under the Communists.  I’m in Loev under the Poles.  And I’m known as my grandfather’s—apple of his eye, because he wants me to go to America to join my father.

VG:  His son.

RS:  His son.  The Poles are traditionally antisemitic.  And when you’re in a small town, everybody knows who’s a Jew.  And the first thing the Poles do is find out, Who are the Jews?  They get the names from the non-Jews.  Then they find out who are members of the Communist party.  Well, my grandfather had a son who was a member of the Community party.  Indeed, he was one of the Red Army men that went across the river. And he had a young daughter who was a member of the Communists.  And he has a grandchild that he’s very anxious to see in order to send her to America.  Well, the Poles couldn’t find a richer resource for their devastation.  They couldn’t get at the son.  He’s across the way shooting at us.  They got at the daughter.  And all Jewish women, young women, were taken to the marketplace and raped publicly.  But how can he get to me?  And that became a struggle between my grandmother and the Poles.  The Poles wanting to get to do away with me.  And my grandmother wanted to save me.  And it was during that period that I endured probably the greatest trauma and the greatest suffering of my life.  It lasted about six weeks to two months.  I had no way of being in touch with my Mama, because communications were very primitive.  At any rate, we were occupied by a foreign country. 

VG:  Well, now, what year is this?

RS:  Huh?

VG:  What year is this?

RS:  This is around 1919 or 1920.

VG:  So you’re about twelve or thirteen.

RS:  I’m less than that. I’m about ten or eleven.

VG:  Okay.

RS:  I was born in ’09, and maybe I’m older.  Maybe I’m older.

VG:  Okay.  No, I think you’re closer to right.  Ten or eleven.

RS:  I think I’m about eleven or something.  And so I craved my mother.  And we are like sitting ducks, you know, because the Red Army’s firing across the river.  When they see cows come home they think it’s—the dust is raised, they think it’s soldiers, so they shoot.  And the Poles are shooting back at them.  And where we’re sitting -- there are no shelters.  There are no ways of protecting yourself.  We’re just sitting like sitting ducks, plus the fact that the search for me goes on.  And my grandmother, otherwise not particularly articulate, not particularly educated, but resourceful, trying to hide me to protect me from their laying their hands on me.  So there are stories that I can tell that would curl your hair.  I mean, at one point my grandmother said, “I’m going to put you face down in the barn underneath the cow.”  You know, where the cow’s belly is, so it won’t step on me. “I’ll cover you with straw, with hay.”  The reason you have to be down is because if you stay up, you’ll breathe, and the hay will move.  So you can perhaps do a little bit of turning of your head so that you can breathe because if it’s caught in the muck of the barn you won’t be able to breathe.  And there I used to remain for long periods while the search for me went on.  Another time she was unaware that they were again looking for me—

VG:  Unaware?

RS:  Unaware.  And I was out in the backyard.  And at that time we used to get our water from a well where we used to pull it up by a rope. A pail was suspended all the way down and then you’d pull it up by a rope.  And I was in the process of pulling up a pail of water when one of the Poles jumped the rope.  And I went headfirst.  And the neighbor standing nearby caught me by the feet and held me.  And I was saved, you know.  Even I don’t believe it.  Yet it happened.  Well, those were the kind of incidents where it was specifically against me.  But the rest of the time we were full of lice.  We never changed our clothes.  We never bathed.  Nights were nightmares.  And there was no way that we could communicate.  The river was frozen.  And the reason they wanted to be in Loev was that when the river would finally flow again their object was to get to Kiev, which is the capitol of the Ukraine and the breadbasket of that part of the world.  One morning the sun was shining and—you know, I’m a child.  You don’t stay in the house, you go out and you meet another child with whom you stand and were very friendly.  And suddenly, something big lights up and blinds you.  And you’re for a moment completely out of it.  And then when you open your eyes, you see there’s a big hole near you.  And in it are pieces of your friend’s body.  A bomb was thrown right at my—right near my feet, so to say.  I survived.  But my friend was dismembered.  Now these are not the kind of experiences--.  I mean, you’re so happy that you survived.  You don’t mourn your friend the way you normally would, because you don’t have normal reactions.  And this went on for nearly eight months—eight weeks.  And it was spring, and the river began to flow.  But the Red Army wasn’t just sitting around. They were anxious to evict them from Loev.  We don’t know what happened that night.  But we do know that members of the Red Army -- either from across the way, the river, or from another part -- came into Loev with plenty of liquor, surrounded those who were managing the situation, got them good and drunk.  And in the morning when we got up, we were told that they had been expelled from Loev.  Well, that was close to the eight weeks ago.  Mama didn’t know what happened to me.  I didn’t know what happened to Mama.  But all I can tell you is that the reunion--.  Mama came to Loev to visit me.  And if ever I felt a profound, unbounded love, it was for my mother.  I walked with her on the street and I held her hand.  And she looked so elegant.  She was so big city.  And she was my Mama.  I don’t think I ever loved my mother ever, ever, ever again that way.  And eventually Mama promised that she would take me back to Gomel so that I could join my sisters.  And even Chaya, for whom I had not had very much feeling of affection -- just the knowledge that I’ll be back with my sisters and with my mother was a very enticing prospect.  So that was another vivid recollection of something that one simply never forgets. 

VG:  When your mother came to visit you--.  I remember the story in the book.  Was that the time when she was supposed to come and didn’t come until two or three days after she was going to come?

RS:  No.  That time she simply came much later.  The incident that you are referring to occurred while I was still in Loev.  She wanted to go to Kiev.  By then the boats were going.  And Mama was going to go to Kiev in order to do her black marketing.  What she was dealing with was saccharine.  There was no sugar, no sugar and no salt.  And saccharine was available, but it was on the black market.  So Mama used to go either to Kiev to buy black sugar—saccharine, or to Minsk.  In any event, this time she went to Kiev.  And with the understanding that when she returned and established things at home, she would come for me.  By then I was already relieved at the knowledge that she will come for me.   But I was still living in Loev with my family.  One day I received word through somebody that she’s taking the boat and she’s going to Kiev.  And she will be back.  And the boat used to stop at Loev.  That was one of its official stops.  And—but she would go on to Gomel and then she would come for me.  The boat that was due to come on a particular day—I don’t remember now when—didn’t come.  We all went to the waterfront to receive the boat.  And it just didn’t come.  And we waited, and waited and waited.  And finally a public address system, which the Communists installed, said the boat was delayed.  “Go home. Disburse.  When we hear—when the boat arrives we will again announce it on the public address system, and then you can come to meet your relatives.”  So we went home thinking that the boat is simply delayed.  But it turned out that when the boat was partially out of Kiev, it was passing a small village where it normally does not stop.  Well, there were about twelve Red Army men dressed in Red Army uniforms waving to them to stop.  Well, the Red Army then was then regarded as saviors.  So the captain pulled up in order to let them come in.  And when they finally got on the boat, it turned out that they were not Red Army men.  They discarded the uniforms.  They were what was called the Chyornaya sotnya.  Chornaya is black, sotnaya is a hundred.  They were called the Gang of the Black Hundred [an anti-revolutionary, tsarist group – ed.].  They were famous for their murder and for their antisemitism.  And when they got on the boat they said to the captain, “Keep going.”  One held a gun to his head.  And he said to the passengers, “The Jews go to that side, the non-Jews to this.”  And, of course, many tried to pass.  “I’m not Jewish,” they would say.  And they’d go there.  And then there were mothers with children in their arms, with babies in their arms.  Among the people on the boat was my uncle, one of my favorite uncles, who was a commissar. He had gone to Kiev with his portfolio and his black leather jacket, you know, and the boots in order to get instructions because it’s our capital.  He was among the people who were being whipped at that side where the Jews were. And as he stood there witnessing the carnage he said, “Why am I standing here waiting to be killed?  Why don’t I throw myself overboard?  I can swim.”  And so he did, by an effort, a gross effort.  He threw himself in and he swam under the water.  The waters around the ship, the boat, were filled with blood.  People who had been killed were being thrown overboard and they were bleeding. And there were others that were trying to swim. But he was a good swimmer.  And while they were firing bullets at the people in the water, especially those who were moving, he managed to escape.  And he came to a--.  He was a good swimmer.  He swam for a good long time.  And he finally came to a shore.  And made contact with a peasant who was living there and said, “I don’t think I can do much more swimming.”  Besides, he had to remove his black jacket and his boots because they were weighing him down.  And the peasant was able to get him to Loev.    We were asleep, still waiting for the boat.  And suddenly there’s a knock on the kitchen door.  And we’re scared out of our wits because a knock on the kitchen door--.  People who lived under Germany know what a knock on the door at night meant.  And we say, “Who’s there?”  And some hoarse voice, unrecognizable, says, “Lova.”  And everybody knows everybody’s name.  And it could be an imposter.  And you simply don’t open the door.  You communicate with each other with our eyes.  And we say, “No.  Don’t open the door.”  Well, there’s no further sleep for us.  And it gets quiet on the other end.  At the crack of dawn we look out of the kitchen window, and there is a figure sprawled by the door, obviously completely out.  So we open the door and we drag him into the kitchen to see who it is.  And it’s Lova.  He realized that we were afraid to let him in.  And he was unrecognizable.  His face what like beaten to a pulp.  His body, his clothes were torn.  And he was completely out.  And we ministered, and we tried to revive him.  And when he finally opened the eyes, he told us the story of what happened.  And the following day, an announcement was made that the boat was coming in.  So those of us who could still walk went to--.  I kept asking him, Where’s my Mama?  And he said she wasn’t on the boat.  But I didn’t trust him.  I didn’t trust anybody anymore.  She said she was going to be on that boat!  So we went to the waterfront to meet the boat.  And we watched relatives taking off pieces of their bodies—of their relatives’ bodies.  And I was viciously sick.  I was nauseous and I was vomiting.  And I was waiting each time a new passenger was brought up.  I, on the one hand, hoped it was my mother.  And on the other hand hoped that it wouldn’t be her.  And she was not there.  I became so sick that I ran a hundred and four temperature.  And I was absolutely devastated by the fact that my Mama wasn’t there.  On the one hand, there was a sense of relief.  She was not there, that means she was not there. 

VG:     Right.

RS:  But she might have been one of the people who perished in the waters.  They tried to pick those up.  That’s why they were so delayed.  And I began pleading, make contact with Gomel to find out whether my mother is at home, whether she’s alive.  Well, since I had two members of the Communist party in my family they were able to reach Gomel through government, because people didn’t have private telephone or anything like that.  And they—a messenger was sent and Mama said she had been sick and didn’t take the boat [unclear].  But she promised she would come for me.  And that’s when she came.  And that’s why at that--.  It stands out in my mind as the probably high watermark of my life, was to be with Mama and hold her hand and walk with her proudly through Gomel.  And—

VG:  So the story that you just told, with the boat and the Black Hundred, occurred before your mother.  And then she came to see you.  Okay.  And then your mother came to see you, and that’s when you were describing walking down the street and—

RS:  That’s right.

VG:  Feeling this great love.  Okay.

RS:  And then I came to Gomel and by 1919, 1920--.  We began receiving packages from my father.  And then he sent us ship’s carton.  Ship’s carton are tickets for a boat.  And we had to make special—we had to receive special dispensation, because Russia wasn’t letting out anybody.  But we were being reunited with my father.  And so special arrangements were made.  And complications were always there.  My sister developed scarlet fever.  Scarlet fever. There was a danger that our trip may be delayed. But…

VG:  That you write about in your--.  That’s in your autobiography or your reminiscences.

RS:  Yeah.  And then it was the problem, my personal problem, of how will I relate to this newfound father.

VG:  You were concerned about this before you came to the States.  Were you able to talk to your mother about that at all?

RS:  Oh no.  Nobody talked to Mama about it.  Those were not the things you talked about.  No.  You silently observed how everybody was praising Chaya and Sema.  And everybody was leaving me out of the picture.  And I thought, “So why would papa have only two laps for the two favorite daughters.  What does he need with an ugly duckling?” You know.  Those are all--. I built it up in my own mind, because that’s what I had been fed.  But it’s interesting that I was obviously strong.  And every one of these things became a challenge to me.  If my sister said that I was big bellied, frog-eyed, ugly--.  My cousin, who fell in love with me, looked at me one day and said, “Your eyes are so beautiful.”  Well, that helped!  Then I was posing for Eugene Spyker, a famous portrait painter. 

VG:  Here in the States?

RS:  Sure.  Many years after I came here.  And Eugene Spyker said, “You have a lovely body.  But you’re suntanned, so there are too many colors.  I’d rather do your face.  It’s more interesting.”  And he had me pose in some kind of peculiar position where my eyes were very important.  And he said, “You have a very interesting face.  And your eyes are very expressive.”  And I thought to myself, “My God, and I’ve been tormented all my life by my sister telling me how ugly I am and how horrible my eyes are, my frog eyes.”  They were bulgy, you know.  The fact that she said I spoke like a peasant and that I was grob, you know, uncouth, was a challenge to me, and I became interested in speech.  And I outshined her by a long distance with an articulation that she never developed.  And even lost most of my accent, which she never did.  And became a public speaker as a result of that, I’m sure, because that was a motivating force that brought me into it. 

VG:  Let’s pause just for a minute.

RS:  Yeah.

[Recording paused.]

VG:  Okay.  Let me just explain now that we have--.  We took a break and we’re deciding to--.  We’re deciding actually to have a second session to do the rest of our talking.  But I’m going to tape the end of our discussion now.  You were talking about the fact that you had divested yourself of a lot of your photographs.

RS:  A lot of objects and photographs that I had with me, but which in a way showed steps in my life.  But which I felt my children and my grandchildren would be more interested in retaining them.  Whereas if I died, there’s nobody here who would be particularly interested, so that I don’t have pictures of me.  However, I have pictures of my children and my grandchildren.  And that…also the fact that more recently I was asked to conduct a Seder--.  I hope we’re not being recorded.

VG:  Yeah this is recording.  Do you want me to turn it off?

RS:  No, I don’t know.  Whatever applies.  This is a home that’s, as I told you, part of Jewish Community Housing for the Elderly.  Two years ago, Iya, the woman who was the manager here said to me, “Ronya, I cannot find someone to conduct the Seder.  Would you do it?”  I said, “I’m an ignoramus.  I don’t know any Hebrew.  How can I?”  She said, “Don’t worry.  You don’t have to know Hebrew.  Everything is translated.  Please do it.”  So I prepared myself and I did a--.  I conducted the Seder two years ago and again last year.  There were pictures of me and my grandchildren and my son taken at that Seder that I’ll be glad--.  That I still have, because it’s very recent.  And there’s quite a history connected with that as well.  I tell you, everything that happens is so intertwined with everything else that precedes it that it’s very difficult to discuss an eighty-seven year old life in two or three or even five sessions.

VG:  Well, especially when someone has the kind of very detailed and clear memory that you have, also.

RS:  Well, I didn’t think I could remember all of that.  But you’re probing me so I—

VG:  Down to the matzo perforations.

RS:  Oh, the matzo.

VG:  This is wonderful.  Okay.  I’m going to turn the tape off again now.

[End of Tape 1, Side B]

VG:  This is tape number two, an interview with Ronya Schwaab.  This is Vicki Gabriner.  It’s Saturday morning, January 18^th—well, actually it’s Saturday afternoon, January 18^th 1997.  So we were--.  Continue with the story. [Microphone adjusted, static.]  I’m not used to working with these microphones.

RS:  At what point did we leave off?

VG:  We--.  Oh, you were talking about your home and saying that one of the reasons you—

RS:  Yeah, he wanted to marry her, but she refused.  Nevertheless, he went to visit her when she was in the hospital and while she was at the home.  And he actually went to see her after she gave birth to the little girl.  And he held the child and said, “Let my brother adopt her, because he’s married and I’m not.”  But she refused.  And that was the last they saw of each other.  She gave the child out. And a few years ago the girl who’d grown into a mature twenty-nine year old woman began to search for her real parents.  And she found Runy.  When Runy wrote me that letter that she has now found the little child that she had given out, I was altogether bewildered.  I didn’t know what to say.  Moreover, Runy’s name is now Runy Levine.  And I thought to myself, “Where did Runy get Levine?”  So I wrote her and said, “You probably assume that I know all about this.  While the news is very exciting, please fill me in on the details.”  So the next letter that came gave me this entire story and she said, “I have in the interim married a man who is Jewish.  And he demanded that I convert.  So I converted to Judaism.”  She rejected…

VG:  It was clearly in store for her anyway.

RS:  Yeah.  And she said, “I was ecstatic when I found—when Allison looked me up.”  But she said, “We didn’t know where to find you, because she was looking for Dean Schwaab.”  And Dean had changed his name after he went into the—for his master’s degree.  He changed his name to Dana from Schwaab.  And his first name was not Dean anymore, but Joel.  So she could not find a Dean Schwaab anywhere.  She located the Schwaab in New York.  That was my middle -- my youngest son.  But he had just died.  And a woman who answered the phone who was closing up the apartment said, “I’m sorry to have to tell you that Dean is dead.  And the man you are calling Dean Schwaab is dead too, just a few weeks ago.  But their mother lives in Newton and this is her address.”  So Runy wrote me a letter saying that she finally was able, through Allison’s effort, to find where I am and won’t I please meet with her and with Allison.  Allison is dying to meet me particularly, because she wants to know a great deal about her father.  She doesn’t know anything about him.  And I only know of him from the first year at college.  So I wrote an enthusiastic letter saying, By all means, I would be delighted to meet you.  And so Allison and Runy came to see me here one Saturday morning.  Runy is in medical school in Washington—I mean Allison.  She resembles Dean amazingly well.  And she is starved for information about her father because she’s already met her mother.  But it’s her father.  And I said, “Well, this house is a repository of what your father was all about.  If you come here, I’ll fill you in on every particular you want.”  So she came here several times, met Eugene.  And it turns out that Eugene knew about the fact that Runy was pregnant because he volunteered to adopt the baby.  And then I thought to myself, “How will I announce to my two granddaughters that there is another granddaughter in the picture?”  So when Daniela came to visit me I said to her, “Darling, you’d better sit down.  I have some rather important news to impart to you.”  And I began talking about Runy and Allison.  “Oh,” she says, “I knew about it.”  I said, “How did you know?”  She said, “My mother got cross with my father one day and she reproached him for having had an illegitimate child.”  And the two little girls were listening so they knew that somewhere in the world there is another little sister, half a sister.  But they didn’t know where she was.  I said, “Well, I have just seen her.  I have touched her.  She’s alive.  She’s vibrant.  She’s wonderful.”  And from then on, I made arrangements for her to come again and meet Daniela.  And then she and Daniela went to a—at that time to Seattle out where Jocelyn lived.  And they visited with Jocelyn.  And they’re—

VG:  Jocelyn is your granddaughter?

RS:  Is the second granddaughter.  And of course, Allison is now the third. And Allison kept saying, “I don’t want to inherit anything.  I was brought up in a very comfortable home.  All I want is to establish contact with you, because you are my father’s mother.”  And the two of us have become very dear friends.

VG:  That’s an incredible story.

RS:  I just received a letter from her yesterday.

VG:  Where does she live?

RS:  She lives in Washington where she’s studying—

VG:  D. C.?

RS:  She’s—

VG:  State of Washington or Washington—

RS:  No, no, in Washington, D. C.  But her mother lives in South Carolina.  Her mother and father are divorced.  And at the beginning, when she made the effort to find out who her birth mother was, and eventually did find—and find out how to reach me, her mother was very resentful.  She said, “I’ve given you everything that a mother could give to a child.  Why do you have to go dig up past?”  And she was very unpleasantly disposed toward the idea that Allison would at age twenty-nine begin seeking out relatives from the past, so to say.

VG:  This is the adopted mother.

RS:  This is the adopted mother who she loves very dearly.  But Allison kept saying to her mother, “It no way takes away from the love I have for you or for the devotion or for the gratitude of all the things you’ve done for me.  But I want to know who my roots are.  I want to know where I came from.  I didn’t come from you.”  And so, interestingly enough, she find out that Dean, her father, was brought up in a Jewish home but we didn’t observe any Yiddishkeyt of any kind.  But she’s interested in that part so—

VG:  Is she--?  Was she brought up in a Jewish home?

RS:  No, she was brought up in a non-Jewish, not particularly religious.  But church was the place where they went.  So, came Pesach, and I invited my granddaughter, Daniela, because she was local.  And I said to Allison, “If you’re interested, you can come and observe a Seder celebration.”  And Allison was here.  And I have pictures of both of them.

VG:  Are your other granddaughters Jewishly identified?

RS:  No.  Only Daniela is interested.  Jocelyn’s completely disinterested.  They’re not interested in the religion per se.  But Daniela was studying comparative religions.  And she had me as a grandmother, and I’m steeped in Yiddishkeit. I’m steeped in Jewish and Judaica.  And every time Daniela comes she says, “You’re an endless resource of information for me.”  And that sends her to further search. 

She once said to me, “If I ever have children can they be Jewish?”  I said, “Well, if you convert, they can be Jewish.”  But—

VG:  Oh, you mean, Daniela’s mother was not Jewish.

RS:  In fact, they have never known that there was such thing as Jewish because Dean was a professor at Presqu’ile. There were very few Jews there.  None of them particularly articulate about who they were.  And Dean, so he certainly wasn’t interested in any religion whatever.  He was married in the Badenta Society to avoid any implications that they were religious.  But his wife came from Polish stock.  She had her touch of antisemitism, whether she knew it or not.  It’s the sort of thing that you absorb of your mother’s blood.  And she had a grandfather who objected to the fact that she married a Jew.  So there was—on the surface there was already--.  Dean said, “I don’t care.  I’m not a Jew.”  “Yes, but you were born of a Jewish mother, and you are a Jew.”  You see, people who deny their Jewishness don’t get away much with it.  He wasn’t trying to get away with anything.  He was just trying to convince them that his Jewishness had nothing to do with whatever the prejudices are that feed that kind of hostility.  But it was to no avail.  But the grandfather died, and now Dean is dead.  And Anna is beginning to appreciate what I’m doing for Daniela.  And Runy’s grateful for the fact that I’m doing so well with Allison.  And Allison is devoted, and loving and kind.  And in return, is inherited the family.  She’s got a grandmother now, which she didn’t have before, a very devoted grandmother.  She has two sisters who love her and whom she adores.  She has my son, Eugene, with whom she’s very friendly.  She’s met my niece, Lisa.  She’s developed a whole family, you know, a circle of people all interesting, all professionals, all intelligent at least, and none fundamentalists, none zealots.  I’m Jewish, very Jewish, but I don’t flaunt it.  And I don’t impose it on anybody.  If they choose to ask me questions and get me to define certain reasons why I’m not an admirer of the Catholic Church, I have more than enough information to let them know.  When we go to a museum in New York and Daniela is with me, I say to her, “Darling, here’s money.  You go to the Museum of Fine Arts, and my sister and I are going to the Jewish Museum.”  “Can’t I go with you to the Jewish Museum?”  “Why, of course, sweetie, you can if you want to.  But I didn’t want to impose upon you.”  So that I’m not proselytizing. I’m not urging her.  I did suggest to her when she asked me the question if I ever have children can they be Jewish, she was the one who was asking.  And I took her to Israel.  And that sealed the thing.  So—

VG:  You said you also had other grandchildren, is that--?

RS:  Well, I have my two grandchildren from Dean, and Allison.

VG:  But you don’t have any other grandchildren.  And how did Allison’s adopted mother--?  Did she come to terms with Allison finding—

RS:  She’s come to terms with it, because next year Allison is going to be graduating from medical school.  And I said to Allison, “One of the great joys, if I’m still alive, is for me to be able to come to your graduation.”  And she said, “I’ll see to it that you do.”  And she spoke to her mother.  And she said, “Look mother, this in no way excludes you.  But I want my grandmother, Ronya, to be there, too.  What objection do you have?  Dean is dead.  I don’t love anybody as much as I love you.  But I would like my grandmother to be there.”  And her mother said okay.  But in recent months, her mother developed a new boyfriend.  And the whole picture has changed, because she’s very busy with her new beau.  She’s an artist.  She does portraits.  And she says, “My mother’s whole life has undergone a change, including her attitude toward me and my newly found family.”

VG:  She’s happier, so she’s more receptive.

RS:  Yeah.

VG:  Yeah.

RS:  So that’s the story.

VG:  Good, good for you.

RS:  I told Rabbi Mehlman about it, because I felt that some of these things that are happening are so uniquely not my doing, not your doing.  That there are some other elements, that’s what’s bringing me to the realization of some measure of spirituality.  That there is some kind of an entity that is governing my life, has governed it almost from its very inception, from saving me from utter and complete destruction to overcoming my shortcomings, my difficulties, my physical ugliness or whatever you can call it, my speech.  I’ve become a very successful public speaker.  And so that then the advent of Allison, the warmth and the attention that children have developed toward me…grandchildren…despite the fact that their mother has tended to try not to be so friendly. And there are still a number of other things that occur in one’s life which are unpredictable, unexpected, and which enrich the totality of one’s life without necessarily doing something about it.  So that’s the story of Allison.

VG:  I think that’s a wonderful story.  And I’m glad that you shared it today.  And I think it’s a--.  I was going to say I think it’s a great note to end today’s interview on.

RS:  Good.  Fine.

VG:  Well I can see you were going to say something else, so shall I catch that?  You were about to say something else. Were you?

RS:  When you come the next time I’ll try to have pictures of Allison and the two girls, of Jocelyn and Daniela, and maybe be photographed, if you think that’s a good time to do it.

VG:  No, we’ll do it today.  But that’s okay.  So this is the end of today’s interview, January 18^th 1997.

[End of Tape 2,Sside A]

[Tape 2, Side B is blank.]

VG:  Today is Sunday, January 26^th 1997.

RS:  Twenty-seventh, I thought.

VG:  No, it’s the 26^th.

RS:  Twenty-sixth, you’re right.

VG:  This is part two of the interview with Ronya Schwaab.  I’m Vicki Gabriner.  Rochelle Ruthchild is also here.  And it’s Sunday afternoon.  And we’re going to pick up more or less where we left off.  But before, I want you to repeat what you were just saying about the television show you watch in memory and how--.

RS:  At one point in our interview the last time you commented rather with some degree of amazement that I remember so vividly things that happened to me when I was quite young.  Recently I watched a program where the brain was being studied interiorly.  And it was established that memory, very frequently, is related to profound experiences, either of terror or of joy, or whatever the emotional impact of that particular experience might have been.  And it in turn develops that part of the brain, which retains it for a very long period of time.  So if I remember the things that happened to me at age eight or nine or ten, it’s because they were emotionally very, very profound in their influence upon me.

VG:  Thank you.

RS:  You’re welcome.  [Laughs]

VG:  So, you know, I think that in the last interview we did, we pretty much stayed in Russia the whole time, and we didn’t really get to the States.

RS:  Right.

VG:  So I thought that today we would—we could pick up and--.  You did talk about your parents—your father sending your mother the ticket and some of the problems when you attempted to leave.

RS:  Right.

VG:  So why don’t we pick up from there and talk about your—

RS:  Well how detailed do you want it?  [Laughs]

VG:  Well, I’ll tell you what.  I think that today it might be--.  As you can tell I’m a person that likes details.  And I also felt like when you were talking about the shtetl that you are such an incredible resource on a society that no longer exists.

RS:  That’s true.

VG:  So I was asking for a lot of detail.  I think today, I’ll let you frame it as more as you feel comfortable.  And maybe in the period of time we have together—

RS:  So we might fill in certain minor details.

VG:  Right, right.  So let’s try to maybe go through the rest of your life. (Laughs.)

RS:  I believe we began receiving packages, food packages from my father around 1921.  That I’m not certain about.  But they consisted of the kinds of things that could be sent through the mails from America to Russia.  And that sustained us in a large measure.  And finally in 1922 or thereabouts, Papa sent us what is called shifscartn, which is tickets for a boat to get to America.  Well, wouldn’t you know things didn’t go very smoothly for us.  My older sister developed a very serious, contagious sickness.  For the moment it eludes me.  And Mama became petrified at the thought that that may prevent our taking the boat, because it was extremely contagious.  Indeed, she kept it a secret.  Otherwise the medical profession would have isolated the girl.  This way Mama stayed with my older sister, and we were sent to an aunt.  And when she finally recovered sufficiently to be able to travel, she was still contagious because at that time the skin was peeling.  It was--.  It’s funny.  For the moment--.  The name of the disease is a very common one.

VG:  Chicken pox?

RS:  No, no.  It wasn’t chicken pox, it was something else.  I’ll remember it in the course of time.

VG:  It’s in your reminiscences, too.

RS:  My older sister, Chaya, Anna, Ann.  In any event, that represented serious problems.  Nevertheless, we began our trip.  And, of course, everything had to be done, if not surreptitiously, there were always bureaucracies to cope with.  And Mama would leave us at some point and she would go off and work the various organizations that were responsible for our eventually getting here.  And when we got to the last stop, which was probably Latvia or Lithuania. At the moment I don’t remember.  All I know is that we were put into a place like barracks.  And there they went through the process of delousing us.  And cleansing us of whatever it is we carried with us.  And it was quite a job, because we were covered with lice.  And much of my memory centers on that, because among other things we were very young, so we didn’t have any hair on our bodies.  But Mama was a mature woman, and she had pubic hair.  And Mama who was a very religious woman, and very observant of the proprieties of Jewish tradition, was subjected to having her pubic hairs shaved.  It was the only time during that entire painful travail that we went through that Mama cried because she felt that she was willing to violate a law, which she regarded as sacred law.  Most ignorant people don’t know what is in the Torah as explicitly forbidden and what there is not.  There is, however, that we must not shave, you see.  We must not shave our faces.  We must not use anything which represents metal or something sharp, because these are instruments of violence.  And that explains why Jews wear beards.  But women were never asked, never told why pubic hair is part of the ritual of non-shaving.  And so Mama was very distressed.  Well, however, distressed or no, she survived.  And we finally got to the boat.  Papa sent us tickets for second-class rather than third-class, which is where most people traveled.  And we were very exclusive, because we were allowed to eat in the dining room.  And we had a cabin for Mama and the three girls.  The first night after the tugboats had finally taken us into the ocean itself, we went down to dinner.  And I—my eyes were popping at the splendor of that dining room and the magnificence of the foods that were being served.  Among other things was an epicene [?], which is an—

VG:  An orange.

RS:  An orange.  To this day the recollection of the nectar and the taste of an orange can be something that I associate exclusively with the trip on the boat.  And it was the one and only time that I genuinely enjoyed the food.  After that things got rocky and I became seasick and so did my older sister.  Sema, the little one, the one who was considered the most vulnerable because she was an ailing child, came through it with flying colors.  She was the darling of everybody in the dining room.  And she ate every meal while we were there.  I couldn’t ever go into that dining room again.  Just the smell of the food was enough to send me vomiting.  And I was nauseous.  Mama was very sick.  And when people tell me that people are seasick because of a mental state, I can only say to them, “Bull.”  You can supply the rest.  Because I didn’t have the slightest idea that there was such a thing as a psychological reason for being seasick.  Neither did my mother, nor did Sema, know that she can be perfectly all right even though the doctors warned us she was the most vulnerable and may not survive the passage.  It was wintertime and the rocking was severe.  The storms were terrible.  And you had to hold on all the time.  And, more importantly, every now and then the ship would touch an iceberg and it would actually shake.  Never, apparently, so dangerously as to endanger our lives.  But to ones who didn’t know what was going, on this shake up was a pretty shocking thing.  And they insisted—the authorities insisted that we go out on deck because being sick at home, in the cabin meant that people had to keep coming to you to offer you services, whereas, presumably in the fresh air you might feel better.  So they would drag me out on deck.  And as the ship pitched, I was kind of rolling from one side to the other.  And then they would take me down into the infirmary.  And in the infirmary they’d scare the life out of me.  [Russian]  “They will send you back!”

VG:  They spoke to you in Russian?

RS:  Huh?

VG:  They spoke to you in Russian?

RS:  Well, otherwise I wouldn’t have understood them, because the medical profession certainly knew the language because so many of us were Russians or Jewish.  And they had one of the two other languages to speak.  And I spoke Russian exceedingly well.  Don’t judge it by the way I speak now.

VG:  No, it’s fine.

RS:  So the threat that they would not allow me to remain while the rest of the family goes was terrifying.  Plus the terrible discomfort, the actual physical terrible feeling of being nauseous and sick.  In fact, Mama says that everybody used to report her that my body would go into all sorts of contortions, and that I was virtually immobilized and twisted in some form.  It was such a terrifying thing.  Well, then two or three weeks later, I don’t remember now—February 2^nd 1924, we arrived to these wonderful shores of America.  And suddenly the shipped stopped rocking and I stopped feeling sick.  And we saw the Statue of Liberty.  And it didn’t mean the same thing to me as it has come to mean, because all I know is that we needed to get to America and America was the goldene medine. That’s all I knew.  And that the Statue of Liberty represented something very important to the refugees who were coming out of Russia.  By 1922 American laws admitting refugees from Russia was very restrictive.  But we were--.  Both the Russians let us out and America let us in because we were being reunited with my father.  I didn’t have the remotest idea what my father would look like.  But unlike those who traveled in the third-class down below, we didn’t have to go to Ellis Island.  A small boat came, picked up the choice passengers first or second-class and took us aboard and brought us to the waterfront where papa and a cousin or his, or a brother, somebody who had been in America a long time, came to meet us.

RR:  Ronya, do you remember how you got from the boat to the tugboat?

RS:  They transferred us onto a tugboat, I remember.

RR:  Isn’t the boat really high up?

RS:  Well, it was.  But they put down a plank that connected the big boat to the little boat.  And we—no great, nothing was expected of us.  All I know is that the sight of my father was as shocking as anything I have ever experienced, because I saw a picture of him.  He was a very handsome, very strong looking young man.  Ten years later he looked like an old man, very hunched and very sad looking, and rather disfigured.  His face was somewhat disfigured, and very withdrawn.  We learned subsequent--.  Mama knew about it but I didn’t understand all of that.  That about a year or two after my father came to America he was working in a factory where they were making soap.  And a hot spark of soap hit one of his eyes.  He was at the furnace, whatever that thing is being stirred into solid form.  And it burnt out the entire area of the eye.  In those days there was no workman’s compensation; there were no unions, there was nothing.  My father had to undergo, I don’t know, countless surgeries where skin was grafted from his thighs and from his arms in order to somehow patch up the face.  And when I saw my father, he had this hideous looking glass eye staring at us.  And the rest of him was very, very sad.  And what we didn’t know is that he had pneumonia when he came to—with a high fever, he could barely budge.  But the idea of not meeting us would have been impossible for him to endure.  So that was how we were received.  But we were all put into a car and this man who was with my father, presumably my uncle, was driving.  And it was the first time I was riding in an automobile.  And the street was very wide.  And it was February, and there wasn’t a speck of snow anywhere to be seen.  And me, stupid and naïve, thought to myself, “My God, that’s the way they receive people.  They clean up every bit of snow.”  In Russia, snow stayed on from October until Pesach.  And here it’s February, the coldest month of the year, and there isn’t a speck of snow anywhere.  And I thought, “My God, what a magnificent reception this is!”  No snow and wide streets and cars going this way and that way! And then, suddenly the car stopped.  And not only did my car stop where I was riding, but all the cars alongside us and the ones facing us.  And then the cars were going this way and we were standing still.  And I was ashamed to ask anybody, papa wasn’t talking to us.  He could barely talk, because was very sick.  Mama and the other girls were also observing--.  I don’t know what went on in their thoughts.  But I was ashamed to ask questions.  Why did all the cars stop?  Who gave the order?  What unseen hand?  And, you know, in my imagination there was an entity somewhere in the sky that ordered cars to stop.  And it was a long time before I realized that there were lights.  I had never seen lights before.  I had never seen lights.  I’d never seen a bell that could be rung and a door can be opened, you know.  Well, finally we came to the Bronx where Papa had purchased a house for us.  And the specific address is 231 East 174^th Street.  This is seventy-odd years ago.  I’ll never forget the address!  And Papa took us upstairs to the first floor.  On the ground floor there were shops and a drugstore.  And then there was an apartment above us, second floor, which was occupied by tenants.  And we were brought into this house.  And I thought, “My God, this is a palace compared to where I’ve lived in the past.”  And for a long time people kept coming in.  And suddenly a bell would ring.  And all Papa did was go to the hallway and there was a little black thing and he pressed it and then the people were upstairs.  And I thought to myself, “How did they manage to get in?”  You know, nobody’s gone downstairs to open the door for them.  All of these things were displays of the most miraculous kind to a stupid little girl, very naïve.  But several hours later I needed to go to the bathroom.  Nature was demanding its toll!  And I was--.  How does a greenhorn like me dare to ask, “Where do I go to pish?” You know, that sort of thing.  And I thought, “Is it possible that the people never go any place?”  We always had an outhouse.  And there was no question.  If you needed to go, you went to the outhouse.  Well, finally, I said to my aunt who was occupying half of the house—that became a source of great contention.  And I secretly, quietly whispered to her.  “Oh,” she said, “that’s simple.”  She took me by my hand and she took me to the bathroom.  And she said, “All you have to do when you have finished is pull that chain.”  Picture what a miracle it is to see a toilet, you know!  And then she showed me that there’s hot water and cold water.  And from then on I luxuriated in taking showers every day of the year, because that was something I used to write home about, back to Russia about, for a long time.  But Papa was still a source of great disappointment to me.  Well, for one thing, I felt very inferior to my other two sisters.  They were always praised for their beauty.  Nobody ever talked about my beauty.  Nobody ever talked about me as somebody special.  And I always thought, well, the whole world can’t be crazy.  If nobody finds it particularly attractive--.  If nobody finds me attractive and my sister keeps telling me how ugly I am, what will Papa do when he finally remains with us?  He’s got only two laps and three daughters.  And I was sure that I was not going to be one of the daughters occupying one of the laps. So that I immediately began to develop a sense that I had to withdraw in some way in order to protect my father from the embarrassment of having an ugly duckling.  You know, stupid things that perhaps don’t occur to grownups, but to me it became a very important issue.  And for a long time I would claim a headache or such—a reason for retiring to a bedroom so I would not be there when people come and Papa would be subjected to the humiliation of having to introduce me.  Because, you know, when somebody tells you something long enough, you begin to believe it.

VG:  Right.

RS:  And you act in those terms.  That’s true in politics.  A lie can be told time and time again until you begin to act in those terms.  I have always been defined—until I decided not to—by other people.  And it defined me. Then the presence of a father who was very strange.  Then as I grew, older people who came to the house all probably sensed my sensitivity, but for some reason when I got married, somebody else defined me.  And it wasn’t until I was divorced and on my own that I decided that nobody was going to define me but me.  But that took many years.  Until then I was pretty much subjected to this and acted in terms of their definition of me.  And I do, however, think that having overcome their definitions of me was one of the impelling, compelling, motivations in my attempt to overcome whatever it is that might have been a shortcoming.  I decided if I was a big-bellied frog, and I loved the idea of being a dancer.  So I went to study the dance.  If my eyes were so ugly, then how come that Irving, a cousin of ours—older than me, going to Columbia University at the time—said to me one day, “Your eyes are very lovely”?  And just to hear him say it was enough for me to fall all over him.  He was in love with me, and I kind of ate it up.  But these are all the minutiae of growing up.  The teachers were encouraging.  They said, “Tell her to get off your back!”  I’d never heard the expression before.  But they said, “You’re better than she is,” meaning my sister Ann, because we were in the same class, you know, teachers encouraged me.  And all I needed was for someone to kind of show me kindness.  And I responded very quickly, because I’d had so little of it in terms of my relationship with my family.  And when I was living with my grandfather, my uncle used to beat the daylights out of me.  Then the Poles came along and they were out to kill me.  So that the whole conglomerate of seeming criticism out there and hostility toward me had its effect.  And so anybody who showed any kind of interest in me or any kind of affection for me, immediately became somebody who was for whom I was willing to try to overcome whatever is wrong with me.  And I submit that my—whatever I have achieved in life—and I think it’s not inconsiderable, even though I’m not boasting or anything of the sort.  It hasn’t made me arrogant.  But I feel that it was the negatives in my life that compelled me to try awfully hard to overcome the things about which people were negative.  If a big belly is—a big-bellied frog is the wrong way to look, you had to be slender, then dancing was the answer.  If my speech was--.  My sister said, “You speak like a goy,” you know, “like an ignoramus,” so to say.  Then the idea of speaking well became an obsession with me.  And teachers were aware of the fact that here’s a little girl struggling to master the English language.  In addition to that, there was a tremendous amount of hostility toward foreigners in the twenties, in the early twenties.  And when you are a foreigner and a Russian foreigner—which meant you came from a Communist country—and a Jew, you had a triple burden to bear.  And there was a tremendous amount of hostility.  And it became imperative for me that I learn to speak the language so that nobody, nobody would ever be able to say to me, “You’re a greenhorn,” or laugh at the way I spoke.  And so I joined all kinds of debating societies, learned how to think on my feet, learned how to speak to an audience.  And eventually I became a public speaker.  This is how these things occur when you find a compelling reason for wanting to master something.  And this went on--.  The very first time I ever made a public speech—was when President Roosevelt was running against Dewey, I believe it was--.  I don’t remember who it was.  But--.  And at that time Sidney, Sidney somebody was the head of the workers’ union of the New York, of the trades—the—

RUTHCHILD:  Garment workers.[1]

VG:  The garment workers?

RS:  And I saw a cartoon in the New York Times in which Uncle Sam was lying on a table and Sidney, with a knife in back of him, is standing over him.  And the cartoon said, “Clear it with Sidney,” because the antisemites felt that Sidney—I’m trying to remember his second name, but Sidney I remember—I used to know his name—was apparently advising President—the forthcoming president on matters relating to labor relations with the rest of the country.  And when he was asked something about it, he said, “Clear it with Sidney.”[2]  And that became a slogan suggesting that he was being influenced by the Jews.  And of course Sidney was portrayed with a long nose, the typical picture of a Jew.  At that time I still spoke with a considerable accent.

VG:  What year was—

RS:  I--.  Huh?

VG:  What year was this?

RS:  When was this?  I was already in high school.  I, that means that… I had been here at least four or five years.

VG:  Oh, still in the twenties?

RS:  Huh?  I think I was—

VG:  No, no.  I mean it’s the 1920s.

RS:  The very first time that the president ran—

VG:  That Roosevelt ran?

RR:  That’s 1932.

RS:  Possibly 1932.  So I called up the Democratic Party headquarters and I said, “I would like to speak.  And I want to speak for Roosevelt.”  And they heard this young woman with an accent and they said, “What do you want to say?”  I said, “I’m outraged.  I came from Russia and there was antisemitism there.  And here I’ve discovered that there is antisemitism, because Roosevelt has some relationship with Sidney.  And I feel very badly about it.”  So they said, “Okay.”  And they invited me to come to a meeting, which was taking place somewhere on the street.  And they had a little platform, a little stepladder with a little platform that was mobile that they carried with them.  And they put me up there and they said, “Try to gather a crowd.”  And here was this peanut of a lady with an accent raging about the fact that in this glorious land of opportunity and freedom, that there was antisemitism in a political campaign.  And people stopped and they listened.  And when there was a big crowd they began tugging at me.  “Come on.  Get off.  The important people have to get up to speak.”  In other words, I was being used as a come on, so to say, because most of the people who spoke were men.  And they were members of the Democratic Party.  Well, that was my initiation.  But I still didn’t speak English the way I wanted.

VG:  Where was this?  Where in New York?

RS:  No, it was not in Union Square, but it was somewhere outside of the Bronx.  That I know.  But I do remember that the crowd became interested because of my emotional input.  I was so troubled that in this glorious America there could be antisemitism. That to me was something that I rejected as being impossible and that I was going to fight against it.  What—

RR:  Sidney Hillman, is that is?

RS:  Huh?

VG:  Sidney Hillman?

RR:  Yeah, Sidney Hillman, of course.  You’re smart.  Look, if you know American history you know that it was—he was a very important person in the organization of unions in New York, and of course--.  But I never continued with political activity.  Instead, I continued pursuing two things.  I had to work and I had to continue to study how to speak correctly.

VG:  Where are we now?  Are you in high school you’re talking about?

RS:  I had already graduated from high school.

VG:  Which high school did you go to?

RS:  I went to the Theodore Roosevelt High School.  It was a commercial high school where I studied typing and stenography, and of course, the usual academic subjects.  But during the time that I was there, the need for earning additional funds was so intense that another foreign girl, her name was Frances, and we were the only two out of thousands that went to Theodore Roosevelt High School in the Bronx who were allowed to take a week every other week to work.  And I worked at Macy’s department store on the seventh floor where we worked at the shoe department where we were putting labels, price tags.  And they were gummed and the place smelled, because you were constantly using these gum price tags.  And to this day the smell of anything that has a—permeates my nose.  In any event, I worked there and came back to high school the following week.  Having done the same work, we had to take the same Regents.  We had to take the same exams as everybody else, which meant that I worked very hard.  Five days a week I worked, and over the weekend I had to submit—prepare and submit homework.  And it was a rough thing.  Then something happened.  I read an announcement that the department stores are running a competition.  And the subject, if you will, was called “Labor Turnover in Department Stores.”  What I knew about labor turnover in department stores wasn’t worth even the paper to write the title on.  So I remembered that when I was just here a few months I had spoken to my principal because we were put, all of us, into a foreign class.  And there we chatted in our own languages.  And the poor teacher was tearing her hair.  She was not--.  She kept saying, “These are shoes.  This is a blouse.  This is my hair.  This is my nose.”  And we kept saying, “So she knows where her nose is!”  But we were talking among ourselves, and I wasn’t learning anything.  I wasn’t learning the language, because we were talking in Russian.

VG:  Were the students in Theodore Roosevelt High School, were they mostly Jewish?

RS:  Yes.  No, they were not mostly Jewish.  I’m talking about--.  I’m going back now to the history of what I’m going to connect with the announcement of the contest.  I had spoken to the principal in Russian.  And I kept saying to him in Russian that I want to be put into an American class.  And he doesn’t understand me.  And he says to me in English, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”  Well, finally the two of us kept using gestures, but we didn’t understand each other. Finally, he said to me, “Du farshteyst Yiddish?”  He was one of the few Jewish principals at that time in the entire public school system in the Bronx.

RR:  Vos is geven zeyn nomen? [What was his name?]

RS:  Huh?

RR:  Vos is geven zeyn nomen? [What was his name?]

RS:  I don’t know his name.  But I’ll tell you it was PS 4.  And I don’t remember his name, but I’ll never forget what he said to me.  At one point he said, [in Yiddish], “You will be ashamed.  I’m going to have to put you into a class with little ones.”  And I said, “Well, I’m ashamed anyway.  Everybody laughs at me.”  He said, “All right.  I’ll do what you want.”  He put me in 1A and gradually advanced me.  But then he was interested in me.  And one day we were talking and he said, “I’m going to teach you a few facts about living in this country.  One of them is, always go to the top person, no matter who it is.”  Remember, the top person was always a man, of course.  He said, “Because if you go to the smaller people, they are not prone to give you the answer.  The top person will know.”  I didn’t know how to relate it at the time he told it to me.  He said, “Just to make it clear in your mind, even the President of the United States, when he goes to the bathroom, he does exactly what your father does.”  And he says, “That is true to every person that is high up.  He is fundamentally a human being with functions very much like your father.”  So when I heard this announcement, I went to the office on my lunch hour.  And I said, “I want to talk to the president of Macy’s.”  And the lady looked at me as though I was crazy, which I was.  She said, “The president of Macy’s?”  You know, this stinking young girl.  She said, “What do you want with the president?”  I said, “That’s none of your business.  I want to talk to him.”  And she said, “Yeah, but you can’t talk to him.  First you must tell me what it is before I can even consider making up an appointment.”  So I said, “Well, I’m interested in the contest, but I don’t know anything about labor turnover.”  “Oh,” she said, “then you don’t want to see the president.  You want to see the head of the personnel department.  He’s the man who can tell you what labor turnover in a department store means.”  I said, “Fine.  Then let’s make an appointment with the head of personnel.” 

VG:  And you were speaking English.

RS:  Oh, again, I was speaking English -- not as well as I speak it now.  But after all, I was already in high school and I had been here for four or five years.  I was still speaking with an accent.  But I was speaking.  I had gotten enough of the flavor of the language.  So I met with the personnel department head and he gave me information.  And I began reading it and it was too much for me to absorb.  Nevertheless, there was a prize being offered, some money.  The first prize was $100, the next one was seventy-five, the third one was fifty, and the fourth one was twenty-five and a medal.  Working with me on the seventh floor in that department was a gentleman from India who spoke the most magnificent English with a beautiful voice.  And I took a shine to him.  And he kind of liked me, too.  So I told him I’m planning to do that, would he help me?  He said, sure, he would be delighted. So the two of us would go on the subway.  He would take me home to the Bronx from Macy’s.  And we would read the material and he would make suggestions and he would help me rewrite certain things that I wrote.  And I finally submitted whatever it is that he helped me with and then I wrote.  And lo and behold, I was awarded the fourth prize and I got twenty-five bucks and a medal.  And by the way, I still have the medal.

VG:  Do you?

RS:  Yes, I do.  I found it just about a month ago, by accident, because I thought I’d misplaced it when I moved here.

VG:  Maybe we can take a look at it later.

RS:  Oh, sure.  You want me to go get it?

VG:  Sure.

RS:  Shut off.

[Recording paused.]

RS:  Can you read what’s on it?

RR:  “Kern Prize Essay on Retailing.”  Yep.  You want to read the back?

RS:  No, you read it, because I can’t.

VG:  Okay, let’s see.  Oh, fourth prize, Rose Chernin, Theo. Roosevelt High School.

RS:  Yeah, Theodore Roosevelt High School.

VG:  Okay.  We’ll take a picture of it later.

RS:  Okay.  In fact, I had a graduation.  I was wearing a white graduation skirt and blouse.  And it had--.  In the late twenties, early thirties people wore very long blouses.  And I had this medal and I had myself photographed with the medal when I was being graduated from high school.  Well—

VG:  Is that with the--?  Do you still have that photograph?

RS:  Huh?

VG:  Is that a photograph that you still have?

RS:  I gave it to one of my—

VG:  So that’s one of the ones that you divested yourself of?

RS:  Yeah.  I’ve divested myself of almost all of them.

VG:  But your—one of your children might have that photograph?

RS:  It’s highly possible that either Sema or Daniela or possibly Dean to whom I have given it.  But then Dean died, and I don’t know what happened to much of what--.  It’s a shame, but I’m confused.  Because different people ask for different things when they came, and I showed them the pictures.  And they took whatever they felt was particularly meaningful to them.  So I don’t have it.  I do, however, have a picture of my father that I retained because it was photographed before he went to America.  And I think I can locate that.

VG:  Okay.  I’ll make a note of that and we’ll look for it later.

RS:  I’ll have to look for it another time.  I’ll look for it during the week when you’re not here.

VG:  Okay.

RS:  Well, then when I graduated, I no longer worked part-time at Macy’s; but I began looking for a job, because now I was a typist and some sort of a stenographer.  I was never good at any of the technical things.  But I graduated with honors.  Even though I was threatened that they would not allow me to graduate, because I wasn’t doing well in Spanish.  I had to learn another language other than English.

VG:  Three weren’t enough! 

RS:  Three were not enough.  And they would not accept Yiddish or Russian as one of the languages.  But I had to learn some.  Well, French was too difficult for me, so I decided to take Spanish.  And I just couldn’t seem to be able to absorb two sets of vocabulary, two sets of rules, two sets of grammar, two sets of pronunciation.  And I was doing very poorly.  And although I was receiving excellent grades in the rest of my subjects, I wasn’t doing so well at Spanish.  Nevertheless, the principal or the authorities felt that to keep me from graduation because of that would have been quite cruel.  And so I graduated.  And at that time, late in the twenties or early in the thirties, antisemitism became quite, quite rampant, because Theodore Roosevelt High School had a service for its graduates to obtain jobs.  And the Jewish girls and boys had the hardest time to find a job.  And finally I found one on my own, because the ads in the newspapers were very explicit.  They wouldn’t say, No Jews need apply.  But what they said is, The church of your denomination is in the immediate neighborhood where we are located.  And it was never a synagogue.  It was always a church.  So finally I found a job and I got in and worked there for about a week.  It was a big firm of some sort.

VG:  Doing secretarial work.

RS:  Secretarial work.  And one day I witnessed an extraordinary abuse of another worker.  And I spoke to my manager or whoever was in charge of the department and I said, “This is outrageous.  Why was this person so severely rebuked in such a crude manner?”  And she said, “It’s none of your business.  Keep your mouth shut.”  But she reported it to my boss.  And he called me in and he said, “Sister, you’ve talked yourself into this job and now you’ve talked yourself out of it.”  And they fired me at the end of a week.  Well, that was my experience until I got into a law firm at which Benjamin W. Berger was the boss.  And he was connected.  He was doing all kinds of city claims called ‘garnisheer’ or ‘darnisheer’ or something.[3]  And it had to do with workers demanding certain things.  I don’t remember the particulars. But he occupied an office.  And there were three additional desks occupied by three other attorneys.  And I had to service them all, which I was doing at the time and I was doing it pretty well.  Moreover, I was answering the telephone.  And then one week he said, “I’m sorry, Rose.”  By the way, my name was Rose Chernin.  Now, the reason it was Rose was because when we arrived in America, Papa was asked for the names of the children.  And he said, “My oldest daughter--.”  When he arrived here and he was being processed at—

VG:  Ellis Island.

RS:  Ellis Island.  They asked for the names of the children.  He said, “Chaya Sorde is the oldest one.”  And they said, “Let’s call her Ann.”  Then he said, “Ronya is the second one.”  And they said, “What?  How do you spell it?”  And he said, “I don’t know how you spell it.  Her name is Ronya.”  They said, “Let’s make it simple.  Let’s call her Rose.”  Sema is the only one who retained her name as Sema, because that was simple to spell.  So I became Rose and my maiden name was Chernin.  And—

VG:  So Chernin was your father’s—

RS:  My father’s name.

VG:  And it was Chernin in Russia.  That’s not short for something else.

RS:  Well, Chernin in Russian means black.  Cherney is black.  Chernina was the feminine form of my name, Rose Chernina.  But for American purposes it was Chernin.  And that’s how I worked.  And the reason I mention it is because one day—

[End of Tape 3, Side A]

RS:  [Unclear]

VG:  That was Ronya and Rochelle talking in Russian, while I was turning the tape over.  Go ahead.

RS:  Okay.  One week he says he hasn’t got the money to pay me.  “But I’ll pay you next week,” he said.  And the good-natured person that I was said, “All right.”  Mama gave me money for carfare and I kept coming in.  And the next month—and the next week and the third week and the fourth week.  And he said, “Until one of my cases breaks and I get some money, I don’t have money to pay you.”  And I said, “Well, I can’t afford to continue working for you.”  He said, “Please, if you leave, this office will be closed and three other attorneys and myself will be out on the street.  Please don’t do that.”  And he pleaded with me.  And I have always been kindly disposed toward people.  And I thought, “Surely a man like that doesn’t just not give it to me because he doesn’t want to.  He hasn’t got it.  I’ll wait.”  I worked for him for nearly a year, never got paid.  And finally I said, “Well, there is a limit.”  By the way, he belonged to the Ethical Culture Society.  And you know, the irony of it, this guy belonged to the Ethical Culture Society and he doesn’t--!  And I’m the one person who sustains this office and he says, “The day you leave, the door will be shut and I will be out of business.”  Well, close to the end of a year I found that that was very unprofitable.  I couldn’t continue and he would no longer say next week.  He simply stopped.  And he remained owing me a whole year’s salary.  And finally I left.  And I don’t know happened to him.  After that I began to dance.  And I worked as a model and earned a living at the Art Students’ League and various other places, in order to earn enough money so I can pay for classes and for rent.  I moved away, because during the time that I was working for Mr. Berger I went to City College at nights.  And that meant I would leave the office at five o’clock and have a brown bag with some food in it.  And go all the way uptown to City College of New York and run to make my classes.  And very frequently I was stopped by the Dean of Women who said, “It isn’t dignified for a young woman to run.”  And I’d say to her, “I’m sorry.  I won’t do it again.”  But inwardly I was saying to myself, “Oh, you sourpuss.  If you knew what I’m doing in order to get to class, you wouldn’t reproach me that way.”  But, of course, you’re timid.  You don’t talk back.  You apologize.  You promise never to do it again.  And then they catch you again.  In any event--.  So this went on.  And in order for me to begin to dance I needed money with which to sustain myself. And anyway, Mama was a religious lady and she didn’t like the idea of her daughter being on the stage eventually.  It took a long time before I got to doing things on the stage.  But the fact that I was studying dance and going to City College at night, and going out with my professors late at night, and coming home and then having to get up the next morning.  And Mama couldn’t wake me.  She said, “What kind of a dissolute life is that?  It cannot continue.”  So I said, “Well, I’d better move away,” because as long as Mama was there to interfere with what I wanted to do, that wasn’t the way to do it.  So I engaged a room—

VG:  Where did you move?  What part of the city?

RS:  I moved on West 23^rd Street in Manhattan with a couple who had no children, but they had an extra room.

VG:  On the West Side?

RS:  On the West Side.

VG:  Chelsea, yeah. It’s called Chelsea now.  I don’t know what it was called then.

RS:  And then I studied with Anna Sokolow and I studied Martha Graham’s technique.  Then I went to see Martha Graham herself.  And I was so overwhelmed by her that I asked her whether I could study with her.  And she said, “Honey, you’re too old,” because by then I was twenty-three or twenty-two, twenty-three.  I don’t remember the dates now.  But she said, “You’re body’s fully formed.  You’ve never had a dance class in your life.  You cannot study Martha Graham’s technique now.”  And I pleaded with her to give me a chance.  And she said, “All right.  I’ll give you a scholarship for one semester, and then you’re on your own.” So I studied with Anna and I studied with Martha Graham for free, and absorbed what I believed to be the greatest woman in the dance field, the priestess of modern dance.  And in order to earn a living, I was working at the Art Students’ League and posing.  And then, in addition to that, many of the teachers, the art teachers, would ask me to pose for them privately, so that I was getting supplementary payment.  Otherwise, I was earning $15 dollars a week again.  That was it.  But I loved it, because I lived downtown.  Mama wasn’t there to nag me.  I was studying what I wanted to study.  And I was a model, a really good model, because dancers are the best models.  They know what to do with their bodies, you know.  And this went on for a goodly number of years.  And then Anna Sokolow finally included me in her dance group, her professional dance group.  Anna herself was a member of Martha Graham’s professional group.  But she formed a group of her own, and she did the choreography for us.  And her husband, Alex North, used to write the music, original music, for her dances.  And Anna became famous.  She’s a very well known choreographer.

VG:  Is she still alive?

RS:  She’s still alive.

VG:  I think I read something about her just recently.

RS:  That’s right.  She was honored on her, I don’t know, fiftieth or seventy-fifth or eightieth, ninetieth birthday.  She’s an old lady.

VG:  Well, if you’re eighty-seven, she must be--.  Were you about the same age?

RS:  She was older than I.

VG:  So she must be in her nineties, yeah.

RS:  She was in her nineties.  My sister said that it was amazing.  She and Florence, who used to dance with us--.  My sister, Sema, and Florence, a woman who danced with me in Anna’s group, went to the observance of that celebration.  And Anna didn’t recognize Florence.  That she didn’t recognize my sister is understandable.  But she didn’t recognize Florence.  Florence was with her for fifteen or seventeen years.  And believe me, we knew each person so intimately.  We had so much occasion to change clothes and see each other’s behinds and see each other’s fronts [chuckles] that you can tell who the person is just looking by how she walked, or taking a look at her behind or something because it’s a very intimate kind of thing.  You have to change costumes.  So Anna became apparently--.  But she became disoriented.  But until then she choreographed some splendid dancers.  And I was the least accomplished of the dancers in her group.  She would frequently tear into me and do horrible things to me.  But I wanted this and I was willing to cope with it.  But there was one other thing, when she would create a dance and I was in it—however minor a part I had—two things.  First of all, John Martin, the critic, the dance critic of the New York Times gave the most glowing reviews of our concerts.  He never singled me out as being what takes the group down.  In other words, I wasn’t so bad as to attract special attention for detracting from the success of the group.  But another reason why Anna wanted me there is that by then my speech was considerably more polished, and we couldn’t afford to make up programs.  They cost money.  And so I was assigned the job—when the lights went down in the theatre, I would stand up in front of the curtain in costume and tell the audience the name of the dance, who wrote the music for it, and a summary of what the dance is about, because modern dance was very abstract, avant-garde, very abstract, and you had to give the audience some sort of an idea what this is all about.  And then I would step back behind the curtain and the curtains would part and we would begin to dance.  Anna knew that she needed me because no one else in the group would stand up and address an audience in a big theatre with hundreds, probably thousands of people.  I was the only one who was bold enough to do it.  And she couldn’t afford to dispense with me.  At least that’s one of the reasons why I think she kept me.  But she gave me a hard time.  Then in the mid-fifties, I believe it was, there was a revolution in Mexico or something.  The Mexican government invited Anna and the group to come to Mexico as a resident company for six months.  By then I had met my—the man who was to be my husband.

VG:  In mid-1950s?

RS:  Late, late fifties because I know I was married in sixty something.  Somewhere I have—

VG:  And how old--?  Could you--?  I mean you came here in 1924.  You were at that time--.  At that time you were what?

RS:  Thirteen or fourteen, thirteen and a half.

VG:  Okay.  So by the sixties you were--.  By the fifties you were--.I have to do my math quickly now. 

RS:  It’s hard to figure.  But I can tell you I didn’t get married until I was about twenty-eight or twenty-nine.

VG:  Okay.  So that--.  But that would have brought you up to the late thirties.  When did you get married?

RS:  I got married in the late thirties.

VG:  The late thirties.  Okay.  So this--.  Now so this thing in Mexico must have been in the thirties sometime, not the fifties.

RS:  Must have been.  I don’t remember now the details because I had very divided feelings.  But my future husband said, “Look, you either go to Mexico or you marry me.  You can’t have it both ways.”  And he was very perceptive.  He was a very smart guy.  He had other flaws but smartness wasn’t one of the things he lacked.  The group went off to Mexico and I got married to Gene.

VG:  Before you go on to that, Anna Sokolow is Jewish?

RS:  Yes, very Jewish!

VG:  Okay, and also a Russian.

RS:  She’s Russian.  She’s Jewish.  She went to Israel.  She taught an Israeli company.  And she created—choreographed dances for the Israeli company.  But she also was particularly good in the jazz idiom of America.  And she created dances with a jazz theme.  And she had a specific, very strong feeling against war.  And one of the famous dances that we did was an anti-war dance, very abstract, but something that I could identify with very closely.  And there were a number of other subjects at which Anna excelled.  And while she was not a very nice person, she was an excellent choreographer and a good dancer.

VG:  Did she go to Mexico?  Was there any connection with Trotsky?

RS:  She went to Mexico with the entire group.  That was late in the thirties.

RR:  I want to ask you, were there other women in the group who were Jewish, or was that unusual for you to be?

RS:  No.  As a matter of fact, there was a mixed group.  Florence was Jewish.  Ruthie was Jewish.  But there were others.  For example, we had a little girl—I just had her name and now it escaped me—who came from Spain.  She was the youngest of the group.  And she escaped Franco’s war, and she came to America.  And she became one of the prize dancers.  And she did the solo parts in Anna’s group, and she became a member of Martha Graham’s group.  And eventually she left and she did musicals on Broadway.  And her name was--.  Gee, I just had it a few minutes ago.

VG:  It’ll come back later.

RS:  But she was amazing. And as a matter of fact, I would allow myself a quarter for lunch.  We would go to the automat.  I’d give--.  Anita was her name.  Anita Alvarez.  I would give her fifteen cents because she needed milk.  And all I needed was a muffin and coffee.  That was my lunch.  And one day I said to somebody, “Some day when they bury me they’ll find a muffin growing in my belly.  And whenever I get married and have more money, I will never look a muffin in the eye again.”  Because that was my lunch, and Anita got the bigger share of what I had.  At that time, when you have a quarter, you’re perfectly willing to give somebody else fifteen cents and keep it for yourself.  But when you get married and you have children and your husband is a pretty good provider, you don’t give away three-quarters of what you got.  You become much more conservative in your attitude.  In any event, that was the end of my dancing career was marrying Gene.  And then began the turbulence of marriage and children.  And that was, by the way, something I completely eliminated.  And would much rather eliminate from this interview because I just touched on it very cursorily, because I felt that to expose my husband’s flaws and the problems I had would, at that time when I was writing this, he, I believe, was still alive.  But anyway, for the children’s sake, I didn’t want to particularly besmirch him, because there was plenty of dirt.  And I didn’t want to do that.

VG:  That’s fine.  That’s fine.  I’m just wondering if there are some--.  If you can talk—without talking about your husband in that way, whether there are—you can talk some about those years of being married and just describe the kind of—

RS:  Oh, indeed I can.

VG:  --House you kept and when the children were born, et cetera.

RS:  Well, we bought a house in Brooklyn.

VG:  Brooklyn, New York.

RS:  Brooklyn, New York -- because he had lived in Manhattan, not far from where I lived.  And he had the beginnings of a business, a book business.  And I used to go to his house and work with him.

VG:  Where did he live?

RS:  He lived just a few blocks away.  I lived on 23^rd Street.  I don’t know where--.  He and his mother lived within an easy walking distance of my house.  And what was interesting is that until I married I was on WPA project.  I was a dancer.  I danced with Temeris on WPA.  That was the Works Project that—

VG:  [Unclear]                                                     

RS:  And I continued posing.  But when I married, Gene said, “You are either going to be my wife and work with me or not.  But you cannot be on a project and you can no longer pose.”  Because in essence what he was saying was, I now belong to him.  And I wasn’t, by way of exposing my body to anybody else.  But I liked him, or at least he challenged me.  He was the only one who didn’t indulge my weaknesses, so to say.  He took me up on them.  And when I remembered the first night he took me out.  That I can tell you.  I—we were dancing.  I was in a nightclub.  I’d never been in a nightclub in my life before.  He was drinking very heavily.  I never touched liquor because I just wasn’t--.  Dancers don’t drink, you know.  Besides I never was interested enough.  And then we left the dance floor and he said, “Let’s go for a walk.”  And we went somewhere to a waterfront and we watched ships.  And in the course of conversation I said something, “You know, I’m pretty ignorant.  I haven’t had much of an education.”  And he said, “I wouldn’t boast about it.  Suppose you told me that you stank.  I’d say to you, ‘Go and take a bath.’  If you tell me you’re ignorant, all I can say to you is go and get educated.”  Nobody had every taken that line and used it against me.  It was really a line on my part.  It’s true that I wasn’t particularly well educated.  But that never came as an issue.  And here, education became an issue, because he had a master’s degree from Columbia.  Well, when he talked to me like that I began to cry.  No boyfriend had ever talked to me that way.  But the next day he called again.  And gradually I reconciled myself to the fact that with him I’m going to have to be much more careful about what line I use!  And most particularly go about the business of informing myself more than I did until then.  And then followed a rather turbulent wedding of sorts, and the birth of my first child.

VG:  Do you have dates?

RS:  Huh?

VG:  Do you remember the date you were married?  You don’t—

RS:  I believe it was ’39, because I believe that Eugene is forty-six, forty-seven.  He was born a year after I was married.  In other words, I was by then either twenty-nine or thirty years old when I gave birth to Eugene.

VG:  And he--.  Eugene is how old?

RS:  Fifty-seven.

VG:  Oh, fifty-seven.  Okay. 

RS:  I think we can deduct, because you see, none of these were important enough for me to make special note of.  They were not--.  In any event, he was what he referred to himself as a ‘militant atheist.’

VG:  He, meaning, Eugene.

RS:  My husband.

VG:  Oh your husband.                                                                                                     

RS:  And so the children were being brought up in a household where there was absolutely no religion.  And my own lack of commitment to Judaism became evident because I was willing to submit to that.  Besides, I did [unclear] and while I was in the hospital with the boys when I gave birth to him, they were each circumcised.  But that’s the extent of religious commitment that I had. 

VG:  They didn’t have a bris.  They just had a circumcision.

RS:  Just the--.  The physicians did the circumcising.  There was no bris.  There was no ceremony.  There was simply satisfying my need to perpetuate Judaism by the Covenant, so to say.

VG:  In other words, your husband was willing to have them not even be circumcised.

RS:  He didn’t even know about it.  He was not circumcised.  He was a child of a Jewish mother and a Catholic father.  And his mother didn’t believe--.  His mother was the daughter of a rabbi.  And yet she abandoned Judaism.  And Gene didn’t think of himself as a Jew for a long time.  He wasn’t an antisemite but he was not a Jew unless he heard people say nasty things about Jews.  Then he defended them.  It was a particular dichotomy that exists in people who don’t really know who they are.

VG:  And he was born in this country?

RS:  Huh?

VG:  He was born in the United States?

RS:  He was born in the United States of a rebellious mother and a Communist father who believed in Eugene Debs.  And, as a matter of fact, his name was Eugene Lincoln Schwaab.  And my oldest son was called Eugene—is called Eugene Lincoln Schwaab.

VG:  And your oldest son was born when your husband was alive?

RS:  Oh sure.

VG:  And he was still named--.  He had the same name as your husband.

RS:  Junior.  Because he was not religious so to him the idea of not allowing to have his son--.  So we used to call them Big Gene and Little Gene.  And for a long time I was interested in humanity.  I wasn’t particularly interested in Judaism per se, although when I heard a cantor sing on radio or television, my heart would melt because it was something that I associated with the love that I had for it when I lived as a little girl and went to shul with my grandfather.  But for a moment this was obliterated.  And for a long time I was interested in helping build unions because my sister was working at Orbach’s and life was almost impossible there.  Then I was interested in the black problem.  Negroes were being abused and charged with all kinds of crimes.  And I became interested in the black problem.  And a member of our dance group many years earlier had been a black and we became very good friends, not lovers, but good friends.  And I traveled with him to Washington for a sit-down strike for some reason or another.  All I know is I spent my life concerning myself with problems of people who are not being well represented in this country.  Still a great believer in this goldene medine, which would be fair to everybody.

VG:  And this you--.  This was--.  You say you got married in 1939.  So in fact while this was going on was the Nazi, was World War II.

RS:  Yeah.  That’s what I’m coming to.  But throughout the time of what was happening in Europe, most of us didn’t really know.  We knew how antisemitic Father Coughlin was on television.  There were Nazis here in parts of Manhattan.  But we lived in Brooklyn.  I was very much involved in helping my husband in his business.  I was working for him.  And I was bringing up first one and then two children.  And the result was--.  And he himself, both of us believed very strongly in socialism.  We believed that capitalism was not a fair system of distribution of wealth.  We were not active Communists.  But for all practical purposes we were inclined in that direction. Well, my name, Rose Chernin, later on became a source of great, great pain to me and my family.  I’ll get to that in a little while.  But I stress it because when I worked for Mr. Berger my name was Rose Chernin.  When I met Gene his mother, who came of German descent, and who looked down at Eastern European Jews as inferior.  This is characteristic of the German arrogance.  And she said to me, “Your name is Ronya?  Ronya?  What kind of a name is that?”  I said, “It’s my Jewish/Russian name.”  She didn’t approve of that.  She didn’t approve of the fact that I listened only to long hair music.  “You mean you don’t know who Bing Crosby is?” You know, I wasn’t familiar with American culture, per se.  I was indoctrinated by grown-ups into the love of Beethoven and Brahms and music and the symphony.  I was interested in the dance.  I was interested in society.  I was interested in what was happening to other people.  And here she was very critical of me.  So to please her they called me Ronnie.  Ronnie was acceptable, Ronya was not.  Some of the literature that I have publicizing my lectures talks of me as Ronnie Schwaab.  It’s the same one.  It wasn’t until I divorced Gene that I finally said, “By jiggidy, I’m not going to please a mother-in-law, and I’m not going to please the immigration people, and I’m not going to please anybody else.  My name is Ronya.  I want it back, and nobody will ever change it again no matter what else happens to me.” Well, Israel was created in ’47.  The war was over, the Second World War was over in ’45.  By then it became very clear what the Nazis had done to the Jews.  I was no longer able to contact my relatives in Loev where I had lived.  I was no longer able to contact my people in Minsk.  And the entire awe and terror of what happened in Germany was more than I can easily cope with.  That was about the time when I was fed up with the way my husband carried on.  He was a philanderer and an alcoholic.  And if those two things don’t tell you the story, then I don’t have to fill in the details.  And I decided to divorce him.  And I did eventually divorce him.  When I did, I wasn’t just freeing myself from him and from his abuses.  But I was freeing myself to become me again.  I became profoundly, profoundly interested in the Jewish problem.  And I remember that at one time I had read that one of our sages, Hillel, had said, “If I’m not for me, who will be?  If I’m for me alone, what am I?  And if not now, when?”  And that’s when I decided to start going to a temple.  And shortly thereafter, I became interested in Soviet Jewry.

VG:  Okay.  Let me stop you for just a second.  I just want to clear it.  Do you remember the year, which you were divorced?

RS:  [long pause] No.  But I should be able to—

VG:  Was after World War II?

RS:  Oh yes.

VG:  Okay.  After the State of Israel was created?

RS:  Right.

VG:  It was before the Rosenbergs’ execution?

RS:  Before what?

VG:  The Rosenbergs were executed in 1950?

RS:  They were already executed.

VG:  When you divorced?  Okay.  So we’re in the fifties.

RR:  Yeah.  Your youngest son was born in the fifties, right?

RS:  That’s right.  So I divorced Gene sometime in the late forties—

VG:  No, late fifties.

RS:  I mean, in the late fifties.

VG:  Right.

RS:  Or very early ’60.

VG:  Your--.  You had--.  While you were married, you had three sons.

RS:  I had three sons.

VG:  Your oldest is?

RS:  Eugene, and he’s fifty-seven.  And each child was five years younger, because they were all five years apart.

VG:  Okay.  And your second son is?

RS:  Dean.  And the third one was Dean.  And they each were born five years apart.  That’s all that--.  In fact, I can be constructed if I took the trouble.  But I’ll tell you it’s--.  The two sons are dead.  And it’s almost too painful to try to identify because the love I had for them, the affection I had for them never actually disappeared.  The wound healed somewhat.  But I was building a new life.  And at that time, the three boys were still alive.  As a matter of fact, I had taken Dean on the advice of the attorney before divorcing.  And we went to Israel for a three-month period in order--.  He said you had to be separated for a period of time to see what will happen.  And Dean was the only one at home.  Dean was already in graduate school and Eugene was already married.  And so Dean was the only one that was left at home.  He was about thirteen or fourteen when the two of us went off to Israel, and to Greece and to France.  And we came back three months later.  And the attorney said to me, “Last night Gene spent the whole night with me talking: should he try to convince you to stay with him, or should he go to his most recent mistress?”  And I said, “Well, if at this stage of the game he still hasn’t decided, I’m going to go through with it.”  And so I divorced.  And I became interested--.  Once I joined the temple it wasn’t that I suddenly got religion.  But I entered a journey in search of spirituality.  And the first manifestation of it was by profound interest in the plight of the Soviet Jews.

VG:  Why did you join Temple Israel? 

RR:  That wasn’t the temple you joined.

RS:   No.  I became interested in Soviet Jewry before I joined the temple.  Indeed, I didn’t join the temple, I just went to services on Friday nights.

VG:  Oh, okay.

RS:  And at that time—

VG:  Was that here or in Brooklyn?

RS:  I lived in Watertown and Temple Israel is in Boston.

VG:  Oh so you--.  In other words, after you got divorced you moved up to Boston.

RS:  When I--.  We lived in Newton all our lives.

VG:  Oh, okay.  When did you move?

RS:  I moved away from the house and moved to Brookline in order to enable Dean to complete the one year that he needed to complete high school.  And he said, “Mother, I’m ashamed to have to go back to class where everybody knows me.  And they know that my mother and father are divorced.”  So I said, “We’re not going to live here.”  I virtually gave the house away on Dudley Road.  And we moved to Sewall Avenue in Brookline.  And he went to the Brookline High School and completed his studies there, and then went off to New York University of New York.

VG:  When did you move to Boston, though?  When you initially married you were in Brooklyn, New York.

RS:  That’s right.

VG:  Okay.             

RS:  We moved to Boston when Eugene was six, and Dean was about a year or a year and a half.

VG:  And you moved to Newton.

RS:  No.  We moved to Brookline and we lived in a rented house on Naples Road.  And then when I was pregnant with Dean, which was roughly four or five years later, we built a house on Dudley Road in Newton Center.  And that’s where we lived until we divorced.  And for at least a year after that, I remained in the house until Dean needed to go back to school.  And then I moved to Brookline so that he could go to the Brookline High School to finish.  In order to spare him the embarrassment, the pain--.  You know, nowadays a divorce is a matter of routine.  For me with my Jewish background, it represented a failure on my part, because when you marry, it’s forever, you know.  That was--.  However, the loneliness, the terrible ordeal of adjusting to being all alone—not because I missed Gene, but because I missed friends, because during the time that we were together our friends would disappear one at a time, because his conduct was unacceptable to them.  And so we were discarding friends at the rate that people discard old shoes. And when we got on the verge of divorcing there was only one couple left that continued to be friendly with us because he played cards with the husband of this woman.  And he said to me, “You know, you made good friends and you keep them.  Leave Dubie and Ann to me, and you go and get yourself new friends.”  Well, I wasn’t in a profound depression when I moved into Sewall Avenue, but I was certainly in something resembling a depression.  And I thought I would always be alone except for Dean, who kept feeling the sting of our life together.  One day somebody said to me, “How would you like to come and help stuff envelopes for an organization?”  And I said, “Oh, I’d love to,” just to be out of the isolation.  And I--.  She took me up to an organization called American Technion Society, and we stuff envelopes.  And the next time she said, “Why don’t you come to a meeting of the women’s division?”  And I said, “Sure.”  And after a year or two I became its president, because I was a very profoundly interesting person.  But my principal interest beginning with 1964 to 1984 or ’83 was Soviet Jewry.

VG:  And when you were living in Newton and you were--.  Until the point where you divorced, did you belong to a temple?

RS:  No.

VG:  Okay.

RS:  We not only did not belong to a temple, we never spoke of God.  When the children used to ask their father, “Is there a God?”  He’d said, “No, there is no God.  And it’s a figment of people’s imagination.”  And he accepted the Communist line that it’s the opiate of the people.  So came Christmas time for example, and you know, the world, the American world is agog with Christmas.  He ordered a Christmas tree for the children.  Fortunately, living next to us in a very identical house built by the same man, was Dr. Eli Friedman, who had been a Hebraic scholar before he became a doctor.  And he came to the house because he was a pediatrician.  He was taking care of my young, newly born child, Dean.  And he saw a Christmas tree in our house and he said, “What the hell is that doing in your house?”  And I said, “Well, the children insist on it, and their father approves it.”  He said, “Tell the father that I don’t approve of it.”  And he gave big Gene a big scolding.  Gene admired him very much.  And said, “This time you bought it, you had it, you trained your children but don’t you ever, ever, ever again have a Christmas tree in your house.  Chanukah time I’ll see to it that the children are rewarded.”  And he used to come in every night of Chanukah and give my children a silver dollar.  Throughout three times, seven times in the course of a given week and with each of the children.  And that stopped having a Christmas tree, but not because big Gene believed in anything. He kept saying he is a militant atheist.  So when I joined Temple Israel, I didn’t really join.  I was wetting my feet, so to say.  But by then, I was already very active in Soviet Jewry.  I went to the Soviet Union a year or two in 1964.  That’ll tell you when I was divorced, because shortly before I was divorced they found a shadow on my lung and I had to have it removed.  They didn’t know whether it was cancer or not.  And when I recovered—

VG:  You had your lung removed?

RS:  They removed one of the lobes in my right lung.  And they said it was benign, that I had evidently been born with it.  But it grew with me, so it was quite large.  I was told never to smoke again.  I had been smoking for many years. And I was told the next year I must take it very easy.  Well, life wasn’t so good.  I was in the process of a divorce and the pain was intense.  Lung surgery’s worse than heart surgery because it’s--.  It breaks, you know, they have to enter the lungs by pulling the ribs apart.  Recovery’s very slow.  Nevertheless, late—much before the year was out of my so called recovery, a group of Hadassah ladies in 1964 were planning to go—1965—were planning to go to Russia on a research project.  And they invited me to come along because I spoke Russian and because I had gone to Russia the year before to visit my family, and came back imbued with the knowledge that the Jews are not being treated well.  So I grabbed--.  Despite the fact that the year had not yet elapsed, I decided to go with the Hadassah group.

VG:  Just--.  I’m sorry--.  But you said you visited your family, so part of your family survived in—

RS:  Yeah.  The family on my mother’s side survived.  The family on my father’s side did not.  They were condemned to death at Babi Yar, because they were right near Kiev.  They were—they perished there.  But on my mother’s side, the family remained alive.  And they were moved to the Ural Mountains.  When Hitler approached Minsk, they had already been moved away.  And while it was very tough for them, nevertheless they came back after the war, and I visited them, because I had been sending them packages for many years.  Are we through?

VG:  No, no.  The tape’s still going.  And the Ural Mountains are east?

RR:  Yeah, east and they divide Russia and Siberia, basically.

RS:  Yeah.  So I went with Hadassah to--.  And this time an incident occurred which shook me, several incidents, first of all, the leader of the group--.  See, every time her name comes to me and then momentarily it leaves me.  She’s become a very important person in the upper echelons of Jewish society.  Charlotte Jacobson.  Charlotte Jacobson was then the president of Hadassah.  And they were invited as people with expertise in certain areas.  And so the member of the group that went were all people who were dealing with Hadassah Hospital in Israel--.  One of them had to do with the nursing staff and knew all about nursing.  Another one had to do with the opthamalogy and knew all about opthamalogy.  Each member of the group had some specialized knowledge of the various component parts of a medical institution such as Hadassah.  I, of course, was a life member of Hadassah.  I lectured for them.  But I wasn’t--.  Hadassah is a very class conscious organization.  So I was an ordinary soldier and they were all generals, if you know what I mean.  Among the people who were in that group was Mamie Gameron.  She was my machatenesta. Her daughter married my brother.  So she knew me.

VG:  Married your brother or your son?

RS:  My brother, my brother, Eli.  When you came to America, my mother had a son.

VG:  We didn’t do that.

RS:  Well, that’s a very important part of our lives.  There’s so much to talk about.  In any event, so Mamie was—knew me.  She used to come to visit Eli, and Judy and their children and I was always there. So Mamie said to Charlotte, “We ought to ask Ronya to come with us.  She’s been there once before.  She knows the language, and she will be useful to us as a translator,” to which Charlotte agreed.  Of course, we each paid our own way.  But late in January, I was operated on very early in the year.  And I had not fully yet recovered.  It was late in January of 1965 that we undertook the trip to Russia.  And it was with them that I witnessed some of the most extraordinary events.  One of them was that we wanted to go to Babi Yar, which is in Kiev.  And we asked Intourist to allow us to go.  We had a bus that was given us.  There were twenty-four of us.  So that we had our own bus otherwise transportation would have been extremely difficult.

VG:  And you were in Kiev?

RS:  We were.  At first we were in Moscow, then we were in Kiev.  And we traveled because we went to the principle centers.  So Kiev became an important part for us because of Babi Yar.  When we were in Kiev, we asked Intourist to please give us the bus for the afternoon.  In the morning we were invited to visit some of their model schools.  And some of us were authorities on education in the group.  So we were--.  They said, “[Unclear].”  Impossible.  And we said, “Why?”  And they said, “What is with you Jews that you’re always interested in something—of people who are dead?  Why don’t you go and see the things that are alive and vibrant and represent the glories of our society?”  And Charlotte couldn’t converse with him fully.  And finally I said in Charlotte’s name, I said, “No. We’re only there to acknowledge the fact that these people died innocent victims of prejudice, which you claim you do not have.  We are not interested in death.  We’re interested in the living.  And the problem is, however, that the people who perished are the very people who would like to live, but they’re not being allowed to live.”  And I invoked the philosophy of the Nazis.  I didn’t dare say anything about what they’re doing.  He said, “Well, there’s no time for that kind of nonsense.  We will not give you the bus.”  So Charlotte said, “Tell him that we don’t need his bus.  There are taxis.  We’ll take as many taxis as is necessary to accommodate twenty-four people and we’ll go there on our own without the guide.  We have enough of our own people.”  So that’s what I told him.  And we went off to our appointment to visit this model school.  And when we came in the students all sat like this with their hands like this on the desk.  When the teacher came in they all stood up, you know, like soldiers—

[End of Tape 3, Side B]

VG:  Okay.  This is tape number two from the interview with Ronya Schwaab on January 26^th 1997.  And so this is the second tape from the second interview.

RS:  The book of Jewish wisdom, and it’s based on the Talmud.

VG:  Oh, this is the book you got for your birthday.

RS:  Yeah, I got it yesterday.

VG:  Who sent it to you?       

RS:  A Jewish lady with a Russian husband whom I had helped out.  And they were so impressed with my interest and what I’m doing for the Jewish people.  They had only met me once, and they sent me this book.

VG:  How nice.

RS:  [Unclear] and full of interesting things having to do with Jewish history.  By the way that’s my principal [unclear].

VG:  That’s good.  And I think we’re going to do a—

RS:  Huh?

VG:  We’re going to have to come back again.

RS:  Oh yes, this is really--.  Everything you see here, no matter what it is, whether it’s this, something that is absolutely unique came to me from Greece.

VG:  This is a book which is Images of the Jewish Community: Salonica 1987 to 1917.  And it’s—

RS:  That’s right.  Based entirely on—

VG:  Postcards.

RS:  Postcards.

VG:  Right.  And who gave this to you?

RS:  Huh?  A young woman who is married and has children and with whom I have become very, very friendly.  And she and her husband and children are living in Greece now and teaching in the--.  They teach in English.  And this is what they sent me for Chanukah. 

VG:  Beautiful.  It’s a beautiful book.

RS:  It’s an extraordinary book.  And you see, I’m reading three different books that I intend to review as a unit.

VG:  Oh, where are you going to review them?

RS:  Right here.  There’s a good audience here.

VG:  Review them orally.  You’re going to talk about them at a book club.  Let’s see--.  So one of them is the Mezuzah in the Madonna’s Foot. 

RS:  That’s one of them—

VG:  By Trudi Alexy.

RS:  And the other two, one is called The Shadow Man by Mary Gordon.

VG:  Oh yeah, that’s about her father.

RS:  And the other one--.  Yes, about her father.  And the other one is In This Dark House—

VG:  In This Dirt House?

RS:  In This Dark House.

VG:  Dark house.  Oh, Louise Kehoe. 

RS:  Those three books I’m reviewing at the same time, because there is a theme that runs through them that I want to bring out. 

VG:  And what is that theme?  Because I know those two books have to do with fathers and finding their Jewish histories.  Is the book The Mezuzah in the Madonna’s Foot similar?

RS:  Well, it’s the reverse, but it still deals with the fact that Jews are hounded through the ages in such a way that the revival--.  And the recovery is almost unbelievable, because this has to do with what Spain, Spain, a Fascist country under Franco, allowed thousands of Jews to come to Spain to be saved from the Nazis.  And during that time they were amazed at the kind of friendly attitude that the Spanish were showing them.  And it turned out that many of the people who were so friendly were Marranos.  They had been Jews who converted to Catholicism under the pressure of the 13^th and 14^th centuries.  And the theme of how Jews survived, and how constantly telling them about how bad they are is causing a certain degree of self-hatred, is characteristic in The Shadow Man.  And in the other one, In This Dark House, in both instances they deny their Jewishness.  Indeed, one of them converts to Catholicism and becomes an ardent supporter of antisemitism.  And the other one simply never acknowledges that he was ever a Jew.  He doesn’t convert.  He’s just a non-religious Communist whose background is as shadowy as anything could be.  And both these daughters trace their histories, their backgrounds of the truth about their fathers.  And here too, the person who writes The Mezuzah says to her father, when she’s ten years old and they’re in France, having run away from Rumania and from Czechoslovakia, because the Nazis are following.  They finally got to France.  They were living in Paris.  And it was during the Vichy regime in Paris, which worked with the Nazis.  They had to run away.  The father announces to the family, including this young lady, Trudi, whatever her name is.

VG:  Trudi Alexy.

RS:  Alexy.  “We’re going to convert to Catholicism, and then we will go to Spain, because Spain is a Catholic country.”  And so they convert to Catholicism. And this little girl says, “But we aren’t Catholics.”  He says, “Please don’t argue.  We’re going to become Catholics.”  And she says, “But Mama always taught me never to tell a lie, and this is going to be a lie.”  And she lives with that problem.  Nevertheless, they feel very secure when they are in Spain.  Thousands of others come to Spain and are saved.  But when she finally arrives at this country she begins—by then she’s a grown woman.  And many years later she suffers a terrible depression because the conflict within her of being Catholic and wanting to become a nun and writing poetry to Jesus are all in contradiction to what she knows is not Jewish.  And she knows that they are Jews.  And she decides that the only way to construct her life after therapy, after psychiatrists, after hospitalization is to go back to Spain.  And what she does then is retrace the nature of Marano.  Marano, by the way, means a swine.  Crypto-Jews and Maranos continue to practice Judaism even though they converted to Catholicism.  And so she relates the present Maranos, the people who run away from France, and from Czechoslovakia and from all other countries.  And she says what was amazing is that Spain under Franco, a Fascist country, admitted them and allowed them to stay until the war was over.  And then they each went to their own—whatever countries they wanted.  She said, Yet the democracies of the world wouldn’t acknowledge anything, wouldn’t allow a single Jew to enter through all this period.  And when she gets through, you have a feeling that there is a healing that’s taking place, because she locates Maranos who live in our own country--not just in Spain, but in our own country--who are still afraid to declare themselves non-Catholics, but practice Judaism.  And the reason the title--.  The title is a fascinating title, The Mezuzah in the Madonna’s Foot.  One of the explanations that was given her by a Marano whom she interviews is that in front of every Marano’s home, they had to have a statue of the Madonna.  That was the Catholic church’s demand.  And when they came home in the evening from whatever it is, they had to kiss the Madonna’s foot.  Well, he was telling them that they inserted a mezuzah into the foot of the Madonna.  And so when they’d kiss the Madonna’s foot, they were kissing the mezuzah, which is what we do when we come into the house.  We touch the mezuzah or we kiss it.  And that’s why it’s called The Mezuzah in the Madonna’s Foot. 

VG:  Fascinating.

RS:  But it wasn’t until the end of the book that I found out the significance of the title.

VG:  Yeah, the subtitle is “Oral Histories Exploring 500 Years in the Paradoxical Relationship--

RS:  That’s right.

VG:  Of Spain and the Jews.”

RS:  That’s right.

VG:  Looks like a wonderful book.

RS:  And it ends up with a statement by Carlo, the King of Spain now.

VG:  Yeah, I saw that on the leaf, that she interviewed him, yeah.

RS:  It’s a wonderful statement by him.  Anyway—

VG:  Back to Soviet Jews.

RS:  Yeah.  So they refused to give us the bus.  And we’re in the school interviewing the teachers and finding out what the situation there is.  They have a very rigid academic program and they have a very rigid after-school program.  So children are not just idle but it’s compulsory.  Everything is compulsory. 

VG:  Are these—these are Jewish kids, or these are just Soviet kids?

RS:  No, Soviet kids. We’re not visiting a Jewish school.  There is no Jewish school in 1965.  And while I--.  Charlotte said to me, “Ronya, you take one classroom and I’ll take the other, because there isn’t time enough for us to go simultaneously,” you know, to go first into one class—we had had two classrooms to visit.  So I was translating in the second of the two classrooms when suddenly a messenger comes in.  “Madame Schwaab, Madame Schwaab --.”  See, they speak to me rather than to Charlotte, because I’m the one who speaks Russian there.  “We’ve decided that the bus will be available for you at twelve o’clock to take you to Babi Yar.”  They’ve changed their minds.  I said, “Well, that’s very good.”  I went into Charlotte’s room and said to her, “Charlotte, the bus will be waiting for us at the particular time.”  And we went to Babi Yar.  And it’s a wild ravine.  It’s difficult to picture that close to ninety thousand Jews were killed and buried there.[4]  It’s just an indescribable thing.  And one of the people who came with us was a Russian, a Russian Jew.  And he—we--.  My machatenesta Mamie, wrote a service for us which we recited, a memorial service.  And he sang “El Maley Rachamin.”  I had never heard it sung like that before.  And I cried for the first time as though someone very dear to me was buried and I was listening to “El Maley Rachamim.”  And it left a permanent impression on me.  It was the most moving thing that I had ever been to.  And I made up my mind when I came back to America that that would become my life’s work.  And one other thing happened while we were there.  We were invited to Friendship House.  They have fancy names for everything.  And at this Friendship House the group was talked to, talked at by a group of Jews who kept defending what was happening in the Soviet Union.  They never had it so good.  Among them was a young woman, a professor at the University of Moscow, who was not only a teacher there, but she wrote children’s stories.  And she was telling us the glories of life for Jews there.  Before I went I bought myself a mezuzah, you know, one of those little things.

VG:  A necklace.

RS:  Huh?

VG:  A necklace, you mean.

RS:  A necklace, and I was wearing it on my neck.  Usually I don’t wear religious symbols of any kind.  But for Russia, it was necessary that I do that.  At least it was necessary for me.  Well, she told us the story of how wonderful things are for her and we listened to it.  And I practically was… trusting her, because she was so convincing.  As we were leaving the premises she came over to me and she said, “[Unclear]…an andern?”  I said, “Far vos…?”  “Mayn man is zeyer krank.  Efsher dos vell helfn.”  And I tore it off, because I didn’t have time to fuss around to-- I tore it off and I handed it to her.  And I felt, Here is a woman who is obliged to stand up and talk about what is happening, how glorious things are.  And here she tells me surreptitiously to give her a symbol of Judaism because she thinks it will help her husband.  Now how would you react to that sort of thing?

VG:  Let’s translate though from Yiddish.  She came up to you and she said, “Do you have another one?” and she pointed to your Mezuzah.

RS:  I said, “No.  I don’t have another one, but here’s this one.”

VG:  And you said, Why is she asking?

RS:  I said, “Why do you want that?  You don’t want anything Jewish.”  And she said, “My husband is very, very sick and I think that this might help him.”  There was no time for our discussion.  I couldn’t say to her, “Why did you tell us all those lies?” because that’s not the way to do it.  You tear it off and you give it to her and give her whatever comfort she can get from it. So these were two incidents.  Many incidents occurred the preceding year when I was there visiting my family in Minsk, those who survived.  I was only allowed two days.  I hadn’t seen them in more than forty years.  I left as a young girl.  I came back as a middle-aged woman.  And I was sitting with my uncle and my aunt and his son and the son’s wife and some neighbors and my aunt.  And they had prepared all kinds of goodies for me.  And I kept asking questions and they didn’t answer a single one.  They were just telling me the glories of being Jewish in the Soviet Union.  But they were probing me for questions.  And I had to talk incessantly until I lost my voice.  At one point I said to my uncle, “Dada, if I gave you the money, would you be interested in going to Israel for two or three weeks, just to see for yourself the Jewish state?”  And my uncle turned red.  I was sure he was having a heart attack or something.  And he began yelling at me.  “That Fascistic state,” he said, “I don’t want to hear anything about it.  They kill Arabs on the street and they have sex and perversion.”  And he delivered a lecture that nearly terrorized me.  In the afternoon when he lay down for a rest, his wife, my aunt, whom I had never met before, took me for a walk.  And she said--.  I said, “Why was he so angry with me?  I didn’t ask him whether he wanted to live there.  I didn’t ask him except I asked him whether he wanted to visit there.”  She said, “You don’t ask questions like that because there is the son and his wife, a non-Jew, a member of the Communist party.  There are neighbors. We don’t know which one of them will report this today to the KGB.  And if he had done anything but answer the way he did, that would be not so good for his health.  So that’s the way he had to talk.”  Well, after that experience and many others that I had--.  But these stand out because they were so unusual—I decided that from now on--.  I had told you that Hillel had said, “If I’m not for me, who will be?  And if I’m for me alone, what am I?  And if not now, when?”  Well, I had already been for others.  So I knew that I didn’t owe anybody anything and it was time for me to be for me alone, meaning my people, not me personally.  And it was then that I decided to dedicate my life, actually my life, for working for Soviet Jews.  I went back four more times to meet with Jews.  Each time I wore something, a Star of David or a Yiddish paper in my pocket, which I can’t read.  But walking on the street they would recognize me and wave to me.  I’d simply say, “Keep going.”  And we would keep going until we’d get to a cemetery.  There it was safe, because we could sit and talk. Nobody can bug us.  And that’s where I heard things that I needed to know for me to become the Electra par excellence on the subject of the Jews of the Soviet Union.  When I was there with the Hadassah group, Charlotte Jacobson in ’65,[5] it was around Simchas Torah time.  And we were invited to the big synagogue.  And for the first time after the services we came out--.  To begin with, we were allowed to sit downstairs on the bimah, something that traditional Jews don’t allow women to do.  But it was Charlotte Jacobson and her group, a delegation of friendly people from America.  And when we went outside we found that there were thousands of young Jews dancing.  And I joined them and I danced with them.  And I said, “What are you dancing?”  And they said, “This is Simchas Torah.”  And I said, “Do you know what it means?  Do you dance at Rosh Hashanah, too?”  They don’t dance at Rosh Hashanah, but they dance at Simchas Torah.  Did they know the meaning of the word simchah, Torah?  Yes, they knew that it was a celebration of the finishing of the reading of the Torah.  And until we were banded, it was a night of intense pleasure.  And I learned that that same time Elie Wiesel was there for the first time.  And then he wrote the book called The Jews of Silence.

VG:  So where were you—what city were you in?

RS:  At the time when this was happening I was in Moscow, because that’s where they had the main synagogue.  So these were some of the incidents that occurred which propelled me into the absolute need to--because I had the equipment to be helpful.  And while there were organizations, the National Conference of Soviet Jewry, of which I was a member, the Action Committee for Soviet Jewry, which was local, of which I was a member, Student’s Struggle for Soviet Jewry, of which I was a member.  But principally I was doing things on my own because unlike them I was not bound by any of the restrictions that Jewish organizations put upon you.  Besides, nobody was paying my rent.  So I had the right to go where I wanted, when I wanted, and meet with whomever I wanted, and that’s what I did.  And then when I joined Temple Israel, I had already been involved with Soviet Jewry for a number of years.  And as long as Rabbi Gittelsohn was there, he was not particularly interested in the work I was doing.  He had invited me to lecture one day.  But he himself was so involved with the problem of the blacks that he did not throw his heart and soul and effort into supporting me. But shortly thereafter, he retired and the new rabbi came in.  And that was Rabbi Bernard Mehlman.  He became profoundly, profoundly interested in the work I was doing and was most supportive.  And, indeed, the two of us devised all kinds of methodologies.  We created special services for the Russians. The national group in New York had some people translate the erev Shabbos services into Russian.  And we had two or three hundred copies of it.  And we would plan a service that would be held once a month in Hebrew, in English and in Russian.  And the Russians participated.  But that meant I went from house to house asking people to participate and getting them onto the bimah and getting a female to benschlicht [light Shabbat candles] with me.  You know, to--.  And it was a period of extraordinary activity, which eventually resulted in the rabbi’s going there.  And when he came back he was a changed man.  He said now he understood what this firing and what was compelling me to the kind of work I was doing.  From then on he went back several times, first with Rabbi Friedman, his assistant, then with the cantor who sang for the Russians cantorial music that they hadn’t heard in close to seventy years.  And his relationship to the Russian community was nothing short of amazing.  Indeed there were members of our temple from dating back to the Germans who felt he was becoming too Jewish, you know.  Too Jewish.

VG:  Did people say things to you?

RS:  Huh?

VG:  Did people say things to that affect to you?

RS:  They would say it to me.

VG:  What did they say?

RS:  He’s becoming too Jewish.

VG:  Oh, literally.

RS:  One day I said, “You know, rabbi, I hear rumors around that you’re becoming too Jewish.”  He made a rather obscene remark and he said for them it could be tantamount to this--.  He said--.  Tantamount to that.  He didn’t say it.  But he said, “Ronya, I’m the rabbi of all the Jews.  And only of Jews, not of non-Jews, but of Jews.  And I don’t have to apologize for being too Jewish.  There’s no such thing as too Jewish.”  And the two of us worked until I became very sick.  And that’s when I quit working there.  But I did continue working for [Unclear].

VG:  When did you get really sick?  Was that in 1984?

RS:  Around ’84 I became quite sick.  I had double pneumonia and I had a very complicated situation.  And I had trouble breathing.  And I had to constantly go to Beth Israel Hospital and, you know, get all kinds of treatments and training on how to breathe and how to walk.  And by then it was so close to the Gorbachev period that the intensity of work was no longer needed, because even in 1979, fifty-nine thousand Jews left Russia.  So that the need for me to do the kind of work I was doing--.  He continued, by the way.  He did some wonderful things after I stopped working, because I frequently went up to his study to plan something.  And I would gasp.  I couldn’t breathe.  And he knew that I was declining in health.  Of course, I recovered subsequently.  The thing stabilized and it became just part of my life, the fact that my breathing was severely impaired.  But at that time it was acute and I had to quit.  But to this day when something having to do with Russians, a newcomer or someone whom he had successfully brought out, the first thing he says when he wants me to meet them is, “This is the lady that started it all.  This is the little lady that started everything having to do with Soviet Jewry.”  He regards me as the pioneer in the field.  The first time that he was going to the Soviet Union I was already lecturing all over the place.  I really was very much in demand.  And I was lecturing at Lexington Temple there and told the story of—told the story of the dramatic situation for the Jews.  And at the end a man came over to me and said, “How can I help?”  And I said, “Well, you can help by writing a check.”  He said, “What’s the check for?”  I said, “Well, my rabbi is going to the Soviet Union and he had invested $10,000 in bringing things to the Russian Jews.  So anything I can do to help him to defray that cost would be helpful.”  So he wrote out a check Friday night for a hundred and fifty bucks and I gave it to the rabbi.  And then I asked another man who felt very much indebted to me for what I did, and he gave me $1,000 to give to the rabbi.  So I really truly--.  After all, for one person to assume fifteen hundred, one thousand one hundred fifty bucks out of the $10,000 was doing pretty well.  And with that money he had bought everything that he was advised the Russians needed.  And also he and Rabbi Friedman had taken along two specially designed heart valves, because there were people in Russia who needed heart valves.  I don’t know how it works but somewhere on the side--.  I don’t know the medical explanation for it.  But they needed heart valves.  He and Rabbi Friedman went not under the name of rabbi, but mister.  And Rabbi Friedman looked particularly Jewish, but Rabbi Mehlman, tall, lanky, he doesn’t necessarily look.  And so they divided up whatever they were carrying.  They were carrying a lot of Judaica and jeans for the--.  You know, in Russia it became a fad to have jeans and to have sweatshirts.  And so they bought up all of that and carried those two heart valves.  And they divided it up so Friedman had it in his suitcase and Mehlman had it in his.  When they arrived in Russia, Mehlman went by the—

VG:  Customs?

RS:  —where they examine your luggage without as much as by your leave.  And Friedman in another line was held up and taken to a private room with his luggage.  And they went over everything in his suitcase and found not only the Judaica, which they promptly removed and said, “When you’re ready to go home we’ll give it back to you.”  But the heart valve--.  They were embarrassed.  They were humiliated that somebody from America had to bring a medical life saving device to Russia, after all.  They kept him there for a long time. And poor Bernard was outside waiting for Friedman to join him.  Friedman felt he was going to have a heart attack and he doesn’t, finally, be allowed out because he didn’t know what they would do you next.  And Rabbi Mehlman was outside waiting for Friedman to join him because, you know, they were separated.  They were traveling together.  By the time Friedman finally came out, Rabbi Mehlman said to him, “What is it that delayed you?”  And he told him the story.  The two of them were properly frightened.  Nevertheless, they had the names of the refuseniks they were supposed to visit.  And the person for whom the heart valve that was in Mehlman’s suitcase came to claim it.  Her husband came to claim it.  And he fell on his knees and he began kissing Mehlman’s hands for bringing it to him.  Actually, there was a group of physicians who had been there, who were established, because you have to have a specific size and weight and what have you.  And he began kissing Mehlman’s hands for bringing him the life saving device for his wife.  And there were many dramatic incidents that Mehlman was telling me about.  Then a year or two or three, I lost track of time, I was attending Rabbi Mehlmans’ Bible class because I’d been studying with him from the day he arrived.  That’s part of my spiritual journey that is continuing to the present time, my Jewish spiritual journey.  And a lady’s standing and we’re waiting for Rabbi Mehlman to come in and begin the Bible class, which I was taking with him. And this poor lady is looking around and looking around.  And I said to her, “Is there anybody you’re looking for?”  And she said, “[In Russian.]”  I said, “Oh.”  She said, “I don’t understand.”  I said, “Well, I understand.  Sit down with me and we’ll talk Russian.”  A few minutes later, Rabbi Mehlman arrives.  And he takes a look and he says, “Oh, you know Ronya already.”  You know, he was so delighted to see that the two of us made friends.  This is the lady who received the heart valve.  And when they came to America, they became very close friends with Rabbi Mehlman.  And as long as they lived in Boston, we saw each other very often because she—they used to come to temple.  But then they moved to Revere and I visited with them there once.  And since then it’s very hard for me to go to Revere.  And they simply got--.  I’ll tell you.  Most of the Russians for whom I did an awful lot of things gradually became independent of me, so to say, went about their own lives.  They had a very accomplished son who was a physicist or some important scientist in California.  And while it was a wonderful visit with them in their own home in Revere, since then she has called me a number of times because they attended the community college.  And she learned how to speak English very well.  And her husband had an important job at Cambridge, also in the scientific field.  But we’ve lost track of each other. Hundreds of them have gone through my hands in some form or another.  But this was a very significant thing because she was the lady for whom Rabbi Mehlman brought the heart valve.  From time to time she still suffers severe heart troubles and she ends up in the hospital.  But she’s all right.  And since then the rabbi has done some marvelous things.  But we no longer have Russian Services, because most of the Russians are already settled here.  And many of them know enough English.  And they have become members of the temple.  And the temple now has established a school where they teach the Russians English as a second language.  And if they can’t afford, they are members without paying any dues.  And this is how I came to meet my Russian relatives.  I don’t know whether I told you about it.  But I had put my reminiscences in the library and one I gave to Rabbi Mehlman.  And one of the ladies who was attending the Russian/English class saw the reminiscences--.  No, no.  She didn’t see the reminiscences.  The bulletin, which commemorated the seventieth or eightieth or ninetieth anniversary of the Sisters of the temple had a glowing review of my reminiscences.  And since she’s a member of the temple, she receives a copy of the bulletin.  So she read this Ronya Schwaab reminiscences.  And she says, “My God, my friends in New York have been looking for somebody by that name.”  So she called me up and she said, “Who do you know in Russia?”  And I said, “Well, my uncle.”  “What was his name?”  I gave her.  “Where did he live?”  “In Minsk.”  “Oh,” she says, “it sounds like you are the person that your cousins are looking for.” It turns out that my uncle’s daughter, who was a little girl when I was there, is now a grandmother.  She’s in New York with her daughter, her daughter--.  Her daughter is married and has two children.  And they have been looking for me all over New York, because every letter and every package that they got from me had a Brookline address.  And they mixed up Brooklyn with Brookline.  And they were looking all over Brooklyn!And then this woman who worked with Vonya--.  She’s a doctor, and Vonya was someone in her office called Vonya on the telephone in New York and said, “I’ve found your cousin!”  And so since then Vonya and her family came here to visit.  And I have new cousins.  So my family is enlarged now. 

VG:  What happened to the uncle who--?

RS:  My uncle has been dead for a long time.  He died of old age.  So is his wife.  The only one who remained behind is the son who was very severely injured in the Second World War.  And he wasn’t going to leave.  Besides, his wife was non-Jewish.  And so they’re in touch with each other but he has no--.  He did not have the desire to leave Russia.  But they are very happy.  They’re living in Brooklyn.  And they just visited my sister two weeks ago Saturday.  And I was supposed to go there to meet with them because they have wonderful pictures of Vonya as a little girl, of my uncle Yaakov and his wife.  Wonderful pictures that the children were not interested in.

VG:  You have them here in the house?

RS:  Yeah.

VG:  We’ll have to look at them at some point, too.

RS:  Yeah.  And I prepared it all in one envelope so I can bring it to them and give it to them, because when I died whoever cleans up after me isn’t going to know who they are.  And they will cherish those pictures.  Well, then my sister became sick and I became sicker.  And she did—they did visit there, but I wasn’t there.  I was too sick to go.  But I’m hoping to make it up--.  This coming Pesach my sister is coming here.  And I have again been asked to do the Seder.  I conduct the Seder here.  And that’s for the moment all I can say.

VG:  Today.  Genug.

RS:  Genug.

VG:  Genug.

RS:  I should say so!

VG:  We’re finished.

[Recording paused.]

RS:  Having been to Russia and having learned Russian identifies with certain things that I’m saying, perhaps even more closely than perhaps someone who had never been to Russia or doesn’t know the language.  So in a way I’m talking to both of you.  Besides, it’s a project--.  Incidentally—

VG:  I put the tape back on.

RS:  Huh?      

VG:  I put the tape in.

RS:  No.  Don’t put the tape in.  Don’t.  Please shut it off.

[Recording paused.]

RS:  Wait for dinner that long.

VG:  Do you mind if I put the tape back on?

RS:  Huh?

VG:  Do you mind if I put the tape back on?

RS:  Well, you’re putting it on at the very--.   Go ahead and put it on.

VG:  Well, this is a continuation.  You’re talking about doing the Seder here.

RS:  Well, at first I resisted and then I said, “All right.  I’ll see what needs to be done.”  So since I read very widely I came upon most interesting material relating to the Seder that doesn’t appear in the Haggadah, but which is currently just as relevant as the exodus from Egypt.  And I decided I’ll do it my way.  I’ll talk about the relationship between what happened three thousand years ago and the exodus from the Soviet Union, which with I’m very well familiar, the survival of the refugees from Hitler’s camp.  And I found that George Washington attended a Seder once, because there was a great deal of depth, of interest and depth of—

[Recording paused.]

RS:  It was late in January or early in February.  And I began doing research and accumulating all in one envelope.  April 6th my son Eugene was stricken with a very, very severe heart attack.  And that was just one week, because April 14th was the first Seder.  And for the next week his life hung in the balance, because he also developed pneumonia.  And the doctors were very pessimistic about the prospects for his survival.  And it was one of the terrifying periods in my life.  Indeed, it, I think, has shattered my life so whatever illnesses I know have or whatever depressions or whatever difficulties I have both emotionally and physically are a direct outgrowth of what happened during that whole year of Gene’s illness, year and a half.  But I am aware of the fact that she had asked me to do the Seder was rather apprehensive that I would not be able to conduct it.  And she said to me, “Ronya, if you pull out, I’ll understand.”  But I sat down and wrote her a note and said, “I’m in the hospital every day from morning to as long as they let me stay there.  But in the evening I’m quite—I’m at home and I’m alone.  And while Gene’s illness is my personal tragedy, the observance of Pesach and the Seder is a national celebration of freedom.  And I don’t think that I can impose my personal tragedy on the lives of the people who live in Golda Meir House and who look forward to a Seder.  I will conduct the Seder.”  And I did.  And since then I conducted the following year.  And Gene was one of the people present at the Seder.  And she asked me again to do it this year.  Of course in the intervening time, Gene was recovering and then he had very serious setbacks a number of times.  And the most recent thing was this past August where he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and nearly died.  Again he has survived.  And I feel the fact that he has survived gives me reason for celebrating everything that can be celebrated.  But, of course, I’ve never retained the joy of life that I have enjoyed until the time when Gene became so sick.  It’s been a shattering experience because it’s just--.  The thought of losing him after having lost the other two is just too much.  And unlike death, which is final--there’s nothing more you can do about it.  You recover after a period of grieving, but when the person who’s hanging onto life--and you worry about everything connected with him.  Is he eating properly?  Of course for periods he stayed at my home and I took care of him.  But I just couldn’t carry very much longer than three weeks.

VG:  He stayed here? 

RS:  I gave him my bedroom and I slept here.  It was tough on me.  But he needed the love and the care that a mother could give.  But he also developed in me a tendency to be over-solicitous and over-caring and calling every day.  And “How are you?” and “Did you get dressed warmly?” and “Please don’t go out, it’s going to be very cold today.”  And it became--.  The truth is, it became too much for him because he’s got an awful burden to carry, trying to restore his business and attending to his spiritual needs and to his friends and everything.  So that, in a way, I’m teaching myself to withdraw and to keep my hands off.  And—

VG:  Was he married or--?

RS:  He was married when he was a very young man.  But when he developed cancer and had the second surgery and the doctors were not so optimistic about it, she decided there was no future in it for her and she picked up and left.  So Gene suffered a lot of rejections in his life.  And this was one of the shattering experiences.  And there’s plenty more about Gene’s life that’s very painful.  Among other things he had already gotten--.  He graduated from BU from a cum laude.  And he got his master’s degree and got very excellent--.  He was on dean’s list.  But when he was recovering from his cancer and he went back to try to get his doctoral degree in the field of psychology, he wasn’t doing so well.  They dropped him because he was getting B’s instead of A’s.  [Unclear] doctoral degree you don’t get Bs.  And so that was another rejection.  And then his wife and other difficulties.  And so I’ve lived with that burden of knowing that I know that it’s bitter cold out today.  I wouldn’t go out today.  I did my walking, which I do every day either outside or in the building.  I simply go down the stairs, four flights of stairs. Then I begin my ascent and I go up either all four or five flights at one time, or go one at a time.  And traverse this building and the adjoining building. And I do that up and down and I manage to do thirty-five, forty minutes of walking, which is good for me.  Gene is now so preoccupied with trying to rebuild his business that he is--.  He just doesn’t have time for his exercises and for his walking.  And he was not particularly good at taking care of himself.  So there are times when I’m very troubled.  And unlike what happens to a woman after her children have grown—a woman who’s willing to take her hands off her children—is that she--.  I don’t know what my Daniela is doing, whether it’s cold or hot or whatever.  She’s a big woman now and she can take care of—

[End of Tape 4, Side A]

RS:  [Unclear-not English.]

[Recording paused.]

RS:  As far back as--.  The story only goes from 1807 to 1917.  Everything was demolished by a fire, and every artifact was destroyed except postcards.  And there are pictures of what the Jews wore, what kind of business, how successful they were.  And those were Sephardim.  Now, when I read this book, The Mezuzah, I discovered that some of the Maranos that left Spain went to Greece.  And so it’s almost—it’s a chain.  It’s an endless chain that has never really been broken.  No matter how many deviants there are, no matter how many self-hating Jews there are, no matter what terrors have been inflicted upon us, I remain so imbued with the concept of survival of the Jews that, as I said before, I’m just swimming in books and in material and in studies, studying the Bible. And then someone gave me this book based upon the Talmud.  And for the first time I’m being introduced to the Talmud.  There are many things there that don’t sit well with me.  But I have to remember when it was written.  And then before then, I read a book called The Jew in the Lotus.

VG:  Yeah.  I read that.  Did you like that?

RS:  And again--.  And, of course, there’s no end to the amount--.  And, of course, read every Jewish magazine to which I--.  Because I’m a life member of these Jewish organizations.  And this is it.  Next Sunday, February 2nd at ten o’clock in the morning we will have the beginning of a series of people come to talk with us at Temple Israel.

VG:  Oh, right, Barney Frank, next Sunday.

RS:  Barney Frank is going to be the speaker there.  And I have already--.  Are you recording?

VG:  Yes, I’ve been recording.  Was that okay?

RS:  That’s all right.  I didn’t know.  But anyway, there was a young man whose father lives in this building.  The father came here from Russia five years ago, a very fine looking gentleman.  He’s been here about five years.  About three or four months ago his son came from Kiev and showed us his dancing.  He’s a dancer who bases his folk dances on Jewish themes.  And I was so impressed that the first thing I did was call up Rabbi Mehlman or go to see him and say, “Is there anything we can do for this young man?  Because we’re studying Eastern European Jews this entire year.”  And I said, “Here’s a guy who comes from the very heart of Eastern Europe Jewry, Kiev.  And he does dances.  We have songs.  We have music.  We have klezmer.  We have literature.  We have all kinds of stories.  We have the language.  And here is a man who comes from Russia.  Is there anything we can do?”He said, “For the moment, every day has been planned for the whole year.  You know, Ronya, we do that in advance.” “Well,” I said, “if you can’t find a Sunday afternoon or a Sunday evening in which he can give a concert, then I’m really a little bit distressed.”  But a little while later I get a call from Rabbi Mehlman.  “I’m interviewing Vova on channel 7 on Jewish perspective. Can you be there and interpret for him?”  I said, “Sure.”  So in December before Chanukah, we went to Channel 7 and Vova danced two of his dances and the rabbi gave a very interesting introduction.  And then he interviewed him, and I translated for him.  And then he interviewed two other people, because the half-hour segment is devoted to more than just one interview most of the time.  In any event, so, a few weeks ago Vova’s father, Rigordi, called me and said, “You know, Vodimer—.”  His name is, full name’s Vodimer.  Vova is a—

VG:  It’s a nickname.

RS:  A nickname.  He’s terribly anxious about his wife and two and a half year old child, because the Chernobyl power plant has again begun emitting poisonous gases.  And for a two and a half-year old, it’s a dangerous place to be.  And he would like to expedite their departure from there just as quickly as possible.  What can you do?”  I said, “Well, I can do only one thing.  I can call Senator Kennedy.  I can call Senator Kerry, because they both know me.  We’ve been photographed together.  We’ve worked together.  And tell them the story and see whether they can do anything with the Department of Immigration.”  He said, “Fine.”  And when I called they said, “Look, nothing that you say to us on the telephone is of any consequence.  You have to write us a letter detailing all the particulars, and we’ll see what we can do.”  So he came to me and I helped tell him what should go into the letters.  And someone, an American, translated his Russian letter and we sent it out.  And a day or two later I said to myself, “My God, I left Barney Frank out.  Here’s our congressman.  And he’s an awfully good man.”  So I said to Gordy, “Let’s write to Barney Frank.”  Well, when I learned that Barney Frank is going to be at temple, what do you suppose I did?  I went to see the rabbi.  And I said, “Rabbi, will you permit me to bring Vova with me on Sunday so he can meet Barney Frank and have the physical human face behind that letter?”  He said, “Will I permit you?  Of course I’ll permit you.  I’ll welcome it!”  So I’m taking Vova with me on next Sunday morning to temple to be--.

VG:  And how do you get to temple?

RS:  Well, the temple gives me a cab ride twice a week for free.  All I do is pay the tip.  But when I told Vova that I will again order the cab the way I did the night we went to the temple to meet Rabbi Mehlman, he said, “[unclear-Russian].” 

VG:  He has a car.

RS:  It’s not necessary.  I now own a machine, an automobile.  I’m a little uneasy about him driving me.  But look, he’s a young man and his life is very precious to him.  I’m sure he’s capable of driving me, otherwise he wouldn’t get a license.  So how am I getting there?  Instead of calling the cab, I’ll go with Vova.  And he’ll drive me there and I’ll show him that he can park in the garage and have his ticket validated and introduce him to Barney Frank.  I think that might be a--.  At any rate, the father is ecstatic about it.  He’s willing to do anything for me that I would ask.  But what I need is housecleaning. And I don’t want to demean him, and he won’t charge me.  So I have to ask somebody who is willing to charge.  So there’s a Russian lady here who charges ten dollars an hour.  And when I’m not well enough to do my own house, thorough cleaning she does. 

VG:  So she’s someone who lives--.  She lives here.

RS:  Yeah.  Okay.  I’m going to prepare some tea and we’ll have a little bit of something, nothing significant.  I hate to—

[Recording Paused.]

RS:  --anxious to give me some measure of comfort.  He had given me some lovely, lovely gifts.  And a Russian friend who was very connected with me, very devoted to me came to the house and photographed me wearing every one of the things that Dean had given me, from a small piece of jade—

VG:  Oh, that’s beautiful.

RS:  -- To a big piece of jade to a magnificent black cashmere throw to a Chinese jacket.  All manner of things.  And the other day--.  And I mailed them.  And his nurse, his male nurse, was saying that, “Who is this beautiful woman?”  By then Dean didn’t think of me as a beautiful woman, because he was angry.  He was angry and bitter.  He said, “That’s my mom.”  And the nurse said, “But she’s beautiful.”  “Well, if you think so.”  You know, he was very reluctant to say very good things.  But when he got those pictures, the nurse said to me when I subsequently saw them, “You know, Dean felt absolutely ecstatic over the fact that you took the trouble to have yourself photographed in things that he gave you, because you value them so much.”  And I have the pictures, and I’ll show them to you.

VG:  Oh, great.  Great.

RS:  Well, that’s the story.  I don’t know.  Have some toast with some cheese and some fruit.

VG:  So you know what—you know what we do before we eat?  We hold hands.

RS:  We do, too.  [Unclear] and I hold hands.

VG:  So let’s just hold hands then and we’ll just—

RS:  He says a prayer.

VG:  Would you like to say a—

RS:  I don’t know any prayers.  But I know how to feel grateful for whatever is happening to me.  Come on ladies, because there ain’t going to be another invitation. 

VG:  This is it, huh?

RS:  No.  It’s almost dinnertime, you know.

[Recording paused.]

RS:  I didn’t know I was recording.

VG:  I wasn’t.  I just put you on now, if that’s okay.

RS:  And I go to the theatre.  The rest of the time I stay here and I take Chinese exercises for the elderly.

VG:  Tai chi, right?

RS:  No, not Tai Chi.  She teaches regular exercises.  And I—there’s a discussion group on Saturday afternoons that I’m very active in.  You see the--.  Are you ready for tea?

VG:  Yes, ma’am.

RS:  I think I’ll just take this, my dear.

[Recording paused.]

RS:  He said, “I brought a photographer with me, and we would like to see you in action.”  So they photographed me going into the temple and photographed me benschlichting, I think with a Russian lady.

VG:  That I haven’t seen yet.

RS:  Well I—

VG:  I mean, I haven’t seen the whole tape.

RS:  And they did a considerable amount.  They followed me with a camera.

VG:  Right.

RS:  And went into Rabbi Mehlman’s class.  In any event, I’d completely forgotten about that.  I didn’t know it was on the same tape.  But they had it because they edited the tape.  And when finally they invited me to come to New York to be interviewed, when he was already an accomplished psychologist and was active, then they apparently used their tape of photographs of me to include in that particular thing.  And I didn’t remember that.

VG:  Is he still at Columbia, the man who interviewed you?

RS:  Huh?

VG:  Is he still at Columbia?

RS:  No.  He’s working with Jewish Children and Family Services.

VG:  And where is he, do you know?

RS:  In New York.  He doesn’t go to school anymore.  He got his master’s degree.  And he’s now pursuing a doctoral program. 

VG:  Did he interview you on tape, videotape or on oral tape?

RS:  He taped me orally.

VG:  And do you have a copy of that tape?

RS:  Huh?

VG:  Do you have a copy of his interview with you?

RS:  No, but they do.

VG:  Jewish and Family Services.

RS:  In New York has it.  I’ve never even asked for it.  I don’t know, you know, I’ve been interviewed so many times that it’s really quite silly.  Hebrew—not Hebrew—Jewish Historical Society sent someone down here to interview me. And they sent me a copy of it somewhere.  I don’t bother keeping those things because, look, when you get interviewed so many times, where you going to keep them?  And they sent me a reprint.  They sent me a typed form of what I spoke about.  I don’t know whether it was ever put into a videotape or anything like that.  Hebrew—the Jewish National Historical Society--.   But then—

VG:  Here? Here at Brandeis, yeah? 

RS:  Then I was interviewed by people from the Combined Jewish Philanthropies.  I don’t even know what ever happened to that because I wasn’t particularly interested in getting copies of anything.  I’d never have occasion to use them. 

VG:  Well, it’d be interesting to try to—

RS:  I --

VG:  Not for you, no.  I might try to track these things down and we could have a Ronya Schwaab collection.

RS:  I [unclear] the pictures.

VG:  Your family pictures.

RS:  The new cousins, the Russian pictures and the pictures of me in costumes [unclear].

[End of Tape 4, Side B]

VG:  Today is February 3^rd, 1997.  This is Vicki Gabriner interviewing Ronya Schwaab.  This is the third interview.  This is side one. [Recording paused.] Okay.  Let’s start with the photograph that you gave to Temple Israel for the archives that you wanted to correctly identify on this tape.

RS:  That’s correct.  Appearing in the photograph are a number of persons: Marshall Schneider, who worked with me in Soviet Jewry, Rabbi Gittelsohn, from my temple, myself, the governor and the wife of Buckmann and their little daughter, Lilly.  Now the story goes like this.  Originally a group of people, seven or eight, decided that they would lift a plane.  Among them were two non-Jews, the rest were Jews.  And Hillel Buckmann was one of them.  They would lift a plane and they would take it to a neutral country.  Then leave it there so that it could be returned.  And then they themselves would be on the way to Israel.

VG:  In other words, they would take a plane from Russia.

RS:  That’s right, because they had a flier among them.  Hillel disapproved.  He thought it was a very bad idea.  But they, for the moment, abandoned the idea.

VG:  And who was Hillel?

RS:  Hillel Buckmann.  He went away.  It so happens that at the time when this occurred that I’m coming to he was away on vacation with his little girl, with Lilly. The group re-met in his absence and said, “Well, if Hillel doesn’t want it, he can be left out.  But we will do it anyway.”  What they didn’t know was that among them was a spy.  And he reported their plans to the government. So when they were about—when they entered the field toward the plane, they were all arrested.  Hillel was not among them.  Yet when the trial was held, Hillel was found guilty along with the rest of them.  And he was put away in prison for ten years. Well, bad enough, they at least were caught red-handed.  But Hillel Buckmann was not among them.  His wife continued to plead that he was innocent because he actually objected to the project.  And in her efforts to set him free, she came to America to plead his cause.  He remained in prison for many years.

VG:  What year was it that they attempted to leave?

RS:  I don’t remember, because all of the material that I had on the subject I discarded when Hillel was finally brought to Israel and came to America.  All I can tell you is that before his wife—I’m trying to remember her name.  For the moment, her name eludes me.  She stayed with me during the time when she was in America.  Anyway, we wrote petitions.  We wrote letters.  We wrote all manner of things.  And nothing was happening.  I involved Kennedy.  I involved everybody that was involvable.  But most important of all, she came to this country with Lilly.  Before she left Russia she was allowed a visit with her husband.  And she conceived a child, which was born in Israel.  When she came here she said, “Ronya, what can you do to bring Hillel—the attention to the American public of the unfairness toward Hillel Buckmann?”  I said, “Well, I’ve done everything I could by writing.  Now I’m going to call the governor and ask him whether he will call a news conference.” The governor called a news conference.  And we were there.  And she pleaded.  But of course, she spoke in Russian and I translated for her.  The governor was very kind.  And then Lilly got on.  She pleaded with the governor.  “Can I say a few words?”  I translated and he said, “By all means.”  Well, Lilly--by then eight years or nine years--said to the newspaper, “Every little girl has a daddy; only I don’t have one.  Please help me bring my daddy.  Bring my daddy to me so I, too, can have a daddy.”  And it was so touching that even the people, the newspaper people were crying. Anyway, that’s the picture.  And the mistake that she made is that she forgot to mention the fact--because she heard me verbally--that Hillel was not in the group that was arrested, because he rejected the plan the first time around.  Eventually, by the way, Hillel was set free before the termination of his term.  I don’t remember.  I believe it was a ten-year term.  The temple next to us here, Temple Rayim, where Marshall Schneider was a very active person in Soviet Jewry. They had set aside a chair with a talis on it.  And when Hillel Buckmann was freed, he came here to claim his chair and talis.  And that’s the story of that picture.

VG:  Okay.  And this is a picture that you have to Betsy Abrams at Temple Israel to be included in the Temple Israel archives, she said.

RS:  That’s right.

VG:  Okay.  And you’re correcting—

RS:  I’m correcting the essay that she wrote about it.

VG:  Okay.  And you got a copy of this essay.

RS:  No.

VG:  She told you what she had written in it.

RS:  She sent me a copy of it.  And I immediately realized that there were errors in the factual information.  And I called her immediately but she had already gone away on three weeks some place or other.  So I’m hereby correcting it.

VG:  It is hereby corrected.

RS:  Huh?

VG:  It is hereby corrected.

RS:  Okay.

VG:  So let’s—

RS:  [Unclear]

VG:  Yeah.  Let’s pick up with your life again.  Well, I mean, that was your life.  But let’s pick up again where you were at in the last interview.  I wanted to go back in time again to when you came over to the States.  When, obviously, after you had been here for some period of time you became a very avant-garde person, dancing, modeling, not exactly what you would have expected to be doing growing up in a Russian shtetl.  So I’m interested to know how that transition happened for you.  And what happened with your mother during that same period of time, and your sisters, and the birth of your brother.

RS:  Okay.  Well, the chronology must be slighted altered because my brother was born one year after we came here.  So that his existence and his dominance, so to say, of the family, a boy. My mother had had only three girls.  And this was born, this little boy was born belatedly after she came to America and she slept with my father again.  And the fact that it was a boy was a source of great joy to my mother and my father. Father said he now had somebody to say kaddish for him.  And Mama felt that this was, from her point of view, the messiah.  But the child had a difficulty because he was being brought up--not just by a very dominating and kind of restrictive mother, but by three sisters who were fairly old.

VG:  How old were you when he was born?  You were like fifteen or--?

RS:  I was fifteen.  Sema was thirteen. Anne was sixteen and a half or seventeen.  And we were all mamas to the boy. And, of course, we loved him insanely.  But we also demanded or imposed our will upon him, because none of us had had courses in psychology on how to bring up a child.  And one time--.  He was a beautiful boy.  He was so beautiful that we, without my mother’s knowing it, entered him in a beauty contest.  You know, he was almost like an angel.

VG:  Okay.  Ronya’s now showing me a picture of her brother as a child.

RS:  He—

VG:  Yeah.  Beautiful.

RS:  You get a pretty good idea of what he looks like.

VG:  Yeah, beautiful child.

RS:  In any event, my mother knew that he needed a pair of summer shoes.  And my mother used to go to Bathgate Avenue in the Bronx, which is the bargain place for food, for clothing, for shoes, for--.  You bought it off—

VG:  In the street?

RS:  Huh?

VG:  In the street.

RS:  In the street.

VG:  From carts, yeah.

RS:  Yeah.  She brought that—

VG:  Say the name of the street again.

RS:  Bathgate, B-A-T-H-G-A-T-E, Bathgate Avenue.  Mama brought back a pair of sandals and said to Eli, “Sit down.  I want you to try these.”  He took one look at it and he said, “[Unclear].”

VG:  This is for a girl.

RS:  For a girl.  And Mama said, “Boys can also wear them.”  In America sandals were--.  In Russia--

VG:  Only girls wore sandals.

RS:  It’s almost exclusively--.  Rarely did boys wear--.  I don’t know.  He must have been four or five at the time.  And Mama said that he is to sit down and get it on, put the shoes on.  He was crying and she said he [unclear].  And Mama said, “I will break you, your spirit, until you do what I tell you.”  I was--.  Even though I’d never had any kind of training, I knew that there was a very severe blow to Eli.  Eli never forgot it.  He wore those sandals because Mama wouldn’t have him have it any other way. But it was not cruelty on my mother’s part.  My mother was so conditioned to our physical survival because of our circumstances in Russia that no one can interfere with her objective of supplying with us with whatever it is we needed for physical survival.  Our emotional needs she didn’t know, and probably didn’t even care, because that was a secondary consideration if she ever considered it.  In any event, so Eli wore the sandals, grew up with a—and developed asthma.  He was a very sickly child for a long time.  We didn’t realize that my father brought in a cat, because we were so ignorant of what can cause that sort of a thing.  My father brought a cat with the intention of delighting us, well particularly--.  Everything was done for Eli.  And Eli, unbeknownst to us, was allergic to cats and he became deathly ill.  My mother spent nights at Eli’s bedside. And he recovered from that, recovered from other cases of pneumonia.  And it was one of the most poignant things in my mother’s and father’s lives that Eli was sickly and frequently threatened with death.  But he grew up.  He went to City College as a very bright young man, graduated.  Applied to medical school because that’s what he wanted to do.  And was rejected because he was a Jew. This is during the beginning of the Second World War.  And since he wasn’t going to medical school he had to go into the Army.  The Army found that this constant predisposition for asthmatic attacks disqualified him for active duty abroad.  But he became a member of some kind of a military thing that operated within the country.  And when he came back the Veterans’ Bill of Rights, he was able, on scholarships, to get to the University of Michigan and get his master’s degree.  By then he was no longer particularly interested in medicine, per se, as in research.  And he was admitted again on scholarship to Johns Hopkins where he graduated with a Ph.D. and subsequently was engaged by Harvard.  And had a very, very interesting and rather remarkable career.  But he died four years ago as a very young man, at age sixty-five.  And unless you want greater detail about Eli, that’s the story of my brother.  Since he lived in Boston, well, because he was at Harvard, I was in closer touch with him than perhaps any other member of the family except his own.  He had a wife and three children.  One of them, he had a very tragic life, because his youngest son committed suicide at the age of twenty-one or twenty-two.  His wife died of cancer at a very early age.  And so the two children that remain were stricken with a great deal of grief because they saw tremendous tragedies in their lives.  And at age sixty-fifty, on the brink of perhaps the most glorious period in his career--.  He was being given a sabbatical.  He had tickets to go to Italy and to England and to Israel to do research, because he was doing history, history of medicine.  People who were outstanding in the field of tropical public health.  That was his field.  He was a parasitologist.  And he died quite suddenly.  And that was the end of Eli.  So his two children were asked whether they could establish a scholarship for him.  But Harvard demanded that the minimum it could be $10,000, which is a lot of money for two children to shell out.  They did and then the rest of us put a lot of money into it, the family.  And so the scholarship rewards a worthy student in the field of tropical public health in the field of parasitology. 

VG:  And your brother’s last name was Chernin.

RS:  Chernin, C-H-E-R-N-I-N. 

VG:  What school?  What medical school did he apply to that he was rejected from—

RS:  I don’t remember, dear.  I do know that he was rejected and it was because he was a Jew.

VG:  So what’s his wife’s name?

RS:  His wife’s name was Judy.

VG:  Judy.  And his three children are?

RS:  The three children were Josh, who is alive and married and has a child.  And Lisa, with whom I’m very close, and Michael.  And Michael was a very troubled boy.  Of course there was a great deal of conflict in the family.  And when he went off to college he went on drugs.  And Eli saw him through rehabilitation centers.  And he went back to school.  But even though he was perhaps off drugs, he had severe back pains.  And he kept saying if within the year my back pain doesn’t abate I will kill myself, and he did.  He committed suicide in a very methodical sort of way.  And Lisa had to go there to straighten out everything.  So if you want to add it to the number of tragedies in my personal life, that’s where Eli’s suffering and rising to, so to say, to glory.  Because one year after he came to Harvard, he was sent to India to do research.  And when he came back—he was just an instructor.  When he came back, the product of his research there was invaluable. His—the head of the department was a Dr. Tom Weller, who was a recipient of the Nobel Prize.  And he submitted Eli’s name as the outstanding scientist of the year and Eli won.  And picture what it was like for my mother, for me to go to Washington to see our wonderful—her son and my brother getting a $1,000 and a medal.

VG:  What year was this?

RS:  Huh?

VG:  Do you remember what year this was?

RS:  No, dear.  But Lisa would know because I’ve given her all the information including pictures of us taken in Washington with Eli with a medal and all the details.   But he died at age sixty-five and it was tragically.

VG:  Yeah.  Let me pause just for a minute.  I want to change the battery here.  It’s making me nervous.

RS:  Sure.

[Recorder is turned off and then back on.]

VG:  Okay.  Let’s see if this tape--.  Let’s see if this battery--.  I don’t see anything going on.  I want to make sure that this is getting picked up but there’s nothing, no red on this.  Now there’s a little bit of red on it.  Say something.  I want to see if the tape is picking up.

RS:  Huh?

VG:  Say—

RS:  Try it again.

VG:  Okay.  I think this is good.  You had a lot of loss in your life.

RS:  Yes.

VG:  I’m wondering how you—how you—how you absorbed it all and—

RS:  Coped with it.

VG:  Coped with it.

RS:  Well, at the beginning when I lost my first son, it was very difficult.  But my son anticipated his death and kept saying that he would rather die than become a deficient person.  He was a very fine artist, a wonderful human being.  And he saw what happens to people who survive who’ve had aneurysms in their brain, and who become incapable of functioning fully.  So when he finally died, which was forty-three days later, in a way I was relieved that he was not subjected to the humiliation and the chagrin and the fruitlessness that his life would have been had he survived.  Because when they operated he died of a--.  The brain just burst out of the cranium.  He was a very humane person, loved doing things for people.  He was a wonderful teacher and he was the father of two very cute little girls.  He admired me.  There was a great deal of affection between us partially—not just mother/son affection—but because we were each doing things for other people.  And to that extent we were on the same—on the same wavelength, so to say.  I was scheduled—had been scheduled—you know these things occur months in advance—to give a book review at Temple Ahobei Shalom two weeks after he died.  Now I could have said to the chairperson there, “My son died two weeks ago.  Don’t expect me to come in and give you a lecture on a book.”  But that’s not what I did because I felt that Dean would be honored if he knew that his mother had the guts to stand up and do something for other people.  Because that’s why programs are arranged so other people could in some way benefit from the wisdom, or the knowledge, or whatever it is that the lecturer presents. And so I spoke to the chairperson and I said, “I don’t want to have to go through the audience.  Most of them know me.  They would all start comforting me.  And I’ll begin to cry and it’s no good.  I need not to be pitied.  I need to be left alone.  Can I come in through a back door around to the [unclear]?”  She said, “Sure.”  And that’s what I did.  That was the beginning of my feeling I have to go back into the public, because I was a professional book reviewer.  Then a book came out called When Bad Things Happen to Good People written by what’s his name, Kushner, and I read that.  And for the first time I realized that my spiritual growth underwent a leap because what Kushner said was very important in my recovery.  He suggested that if as a result of great tragedy, like the loss of a son, which he had suffered, you can--.  In his judgment, it wasn’t God that was punishing him for some unknown sin.  But that the genetic element that caused his death was in his brain and it was ticking away like a bomb.  And when it finally ticked, it terminated his life so to say.  But that I, the mother who suffered that loss, can compensate for it by becoming more compassionate, by listening to other people when they talk about their tragedies, by doing the kind of work I have done, only more so, to help humanity.  And that even if you don’t believe that God caused this ting, God’s work is manifested through what you do for humanity because you’re doing it in the image of God.  And also, that the people who feel other people, their hands, the surgeons, the people who are trying to save human lives, have God given gifts.   At that time I was willing to accept that concept of God, rather than the God who was angry and punishing and unknown.  And that he was somewhere inside of me.  And all of that helped me overcome that tragedy.  And once you develop the ability to reason and to take on greater responsibilities, vis a vis, the rest of humanity, you heal.  There is a healing process.  You never forget.  I’m surrounded with Dean’s work.  I love it.  I look at it practically every day, all the time.  Moreover, there were two little girls that were left.  They’re now two grown women.  And my influence and my help and my love for them is incalculable.  And to me they’re a piece of Dean.  So that’s how I suffered Dean’s death.  Dean came fifteen years later.  By then I had virtually recovered except for an incident where I had a very, very severe depression.  And it took a long time for me to get over the depression in which I felt that my whole enthusiasm for life, for the beauty of life, for everything that had to do, simply disappeared.  I saw nothing but darkness.  And all I wanted--.  I didn’t want to commit suicide.  But I was envying of people who died quite naturally.  Those were the only news that was of interest to me.  And the doctor kept saying, “You’ll recover.  And you’ll get a love life and you’ll do this that or the other thing.”  Well, eventually I did recover.  And that, in a way, was perhaps -- while the most painful of all the things I’ve ever had to endure, was nevertheless a very significant healing thing.  Because when I came out of the depression fully, I suddenly opened my eyes, and as it says in the Bible, “They have eyes but they see not.  They have ears but they hear not.”  For the first time I had eyes and I saw.  And I had ears and I heard.  And it compelled me into a feeling of rejoicing that I was given another chance with the gift of life, because during the depression I was really dead, for all purposes.  And that was, again, a reinforcing strength, you know, in how to approach life and its vicissitudes.  Life is something that is beautiful, that we take pretty much for granted.  But when we are suddenly cognizant of its pricelessness, of its value and what we can do with it—what we can do with our own lives in order to influence other people—then it becomes meaningful and very healing.  And so ever since that time, my attitude, despite many physical setbacks—because I’ve had very serious pneumonias and what have you—which weakened me physically, but did not weaken me emotionally.  So those—these are the elements that have made it possible for me to endure the losses I sustained: Eli’s, Dean’s and, finally, Dean’s.  The thing that brought me to my knees really, and has almost made it impossible for me to fully recover, is Eugene’s illness.  And that happened April 6, 1995.  And because it was so dangerous and so threatening, and the doctors were so ruthless in stating just how imminent death was, that for a period I kept going to the hospital and making like nothing was bothering me, and being very, you know, strong.  But after a year of that kind of make believe, my health, both physical and emotional, has broken down.  And I’m still enduring the consequences of Gene’s illness.  Because unlike death, Gene is alive but he’s suffering.  And I’m aware of it.  And he had become more precious to me than life itself.  But there isn’t much that I can do.  And while I’ve taken courses and have learned to take my hands off him, and not to intrude, and not to call him every day, sometimes we don’t talk to each other for two weeks on end.  Nevertheless, when we get together and I look at his tortured face, I cannot make peace with the fact that Gene is always being threatened.  Yet, even so, I immerse myself in reading, in studying and going to classes and giving lectures, and even trying to do line dancing.  [Laughs]  Because only if I’m strong can I help Gene.  I’m the only one he’s got left.  Gene had a very sad life. 

VG:  Tell me throughout these losses that you’ve sustained--.  You mentioned reading Kushner’s book.  I’m wondering how either your relationship to the rabbi at Temple Israel or in general your Yiddish or your Judaism moved you through these also.  Was that important?

RS:  Well, at the time when Dean died it was still during the time of Gittelsohn’s presence there.  I went to shul on Friday nights and I couldn’t make myself—certainly not in the beginning—read responsively.  And I said to Gittelsohn one say, “I can’t mouth those words, ‘God is just.  God is glorious.  God is compassionate.  God is all knowing.  God is this, God is that.”  I said, “To me, I’m telling a lie.  I don’t feel that way about it.”  So Rabbi Gittelsohn said, “Ronya, don’t worry.  Don’t read responsively.  Simply come.  Is there anything in the service that gives you comfort?”  And I said, “Yes, your sermons frequently do.  The music always does.  The [unclear] singing is something I love.”  He said, “Well, keep coming and we’ll see whether as time goes on you will reconcile with the understanding that a service is designed to constantly remind us of the human system.  There is no such thing, but there is some kind of an entity which governs our lives in some measure or another in a big measure.  Just try.”  And so I continued going.  And I continued not reading responsively.  Then one year—and I was very active in Soviet Jewry during this time--.  One year I attended an international conference in—it’s in my reminiscences.  So you can find out where it was.  And I was representing no one, because I belonged to every organization but no organization was going to pay for my going there.  But in those days, money was not the most important thing.  I was there and Father Drynan was there, and a number of other people from Boston.   It was a very emotionally packed conference with some Russians who had just come out speaking to us.  Particularly there was a historian from England who moved me immensely.  Somewhere I have his name.  I even have his book.  But suddenly a black man—and I have his name somewhere—stood up and he just spoke a few words.  And then he said, “Will you brothers and sisters join me in singing ‘Let My People Go’?”  He was a black man and it was one of their favorite spirituals.  But after all they talk about Moses and letting people out of--.  I sang it and tears were rolling down my face.  And some home I felt as though I had a spiritual experience that was different from anything I’d ever known.  When I came back I told it to Rabbi Gittelsohn.  And he said, “That’s all right dear, you’re coming along, you’re coming along.”  And he said, “With time, you will become so immersed in the magnificence of having this spiritual feeling, too.  You don’t get it very often.  But if you get it once, you’re a very lucky lady.”  Then came Rabbi Mehlman.  And that began a spiritual journey of my life.  He’s been here, I guess, seventeen or eighteen years.  From the very first day that he came I took to him because Rabbi Gittelsohn admired me for doing what I was doing.  Indeed he had me lecture from the [unclear].  But he himself was not heart and soul involved in that kind of thing.  He was more interested in the freedom of the blacks, which I shared.  But as a rabbi his principal interests--.  Proof of it is, one day I was coming home from the doctor’s carrying a plastic bag in which I had a pair of orthopedic shoes for which I’d paid $110, and my wallet and my book.  I’m always with a book.  It was about five thirty, six o’clock, summertime.  It was very light yet.  And three young men came toward me, gave a good pull on that and tore the thing off.  And I stood there and said, “What are you doing?”  And one of the young men said, “Yes, what are you doing to her?  Go in and call the police and tell them that he just took your--.”  I left them and went to call the police.  Well I came back and they were gone.  I guess that was their team. That’s how they worked.  They got rid of you by sending you to the police.  When I came to shul, Shabbos, the next Saturday morning, I was in the elevator with Rabbi Gittelsohn, and I said, “Oh I had a horrible experience.  I was mugged yesterday.”  And Rabbi Gittelsohn said, “Oh, were they black?”  I said, “No.”  He looked up to the ceiling and said, “Thank God they were not black.”  Now to me that was the measure of a man.  He didn’t say, “Were you hurt?  What happened to you?”  He said, “Were they black?”  Once I assured him they were not black, he was thanking God.  Now what the hell difference does it make?  His parishioner was defiled, so to say.  My whole life was being torn asunder and he’s concerned whether they were black or not.  That’s the difference between Rabbi Gittelsohn and then Rabbi Mehlman.  I’m sure if this incident had occurred and I had come to Rabbi Mehlman and told him, he would be more solicitous of me.  That doesn’t mean that Rabbi Mehlman is not interested in the plight of the blacks.  He is.  But it’s not his paramount interest.  His paramount interests are his people, all his people.  Then another thing, he began teaching.  Every Thursday and for as long as I was well I attended every one of his classes until I became sick.  But more importantly, he became an active participant with me in my work for Soviet Jewry.  That was the most spiritually supportive thing.  People don’t have to teach you how to worship God or how to be spiritually enlightened.  They can do things.  And when they do things without having to preach to you they are, in a way, supporting your spiritual aspiration to redeem your brothers and sisters from slavery.  That’s what Rabbi Mehlman did for me.  He supported me--.  I mean, I was supposed to be the chairperson of a committee of Soviet Jewry.  There was no committee.  There was no organization.  I was a one-woman organization.  Rabbi Mehlman arranged to have two hundred and fifty copies of a translation of the [unclear] Shabbos service sent to us from New York.  And we arranged to have services once a month specially for the Russians.  And I would run around from one to another, gather them up, pull them [unclear], tell them what they had to do and find another woman with whom I would bench-licht [light Sabbath candles] Friday nights with the two of us doing it.  And at the end, the rabbi would feel--.  They were so grateful that they were being honored.  I mean here are people who were despised, who couldn’t announce to anybody that they were Jewish, who couldn’t speak Yiddish, who couldn’t go to shul, couldn’t observe a holiday.  And here in the most prestigious temple they were sitting on the bimahand they were being honored as very special people.  To them, it meant a tremendous amount in building their self-respect and their spiritual development.  For me, it meant that I had the support of the strongest person in that special community, my temple.  And to that extent, Rabbi Mehlman is my unqualified guide to spiritual growth to this day.  And when someone comes that he knows I may have had something to do with in previous years, the first thing he says to everybody, “This is the little lady that started it all in Temple Israel.”  And he went--.  He once said to me, “Ronya, where do you get your enthusiasm and your heart?  Your whole heart is poured out on that.”  And I said, “Rabbi Mehlman, if you ever went to Russia and looked into the eyes of refuseniks as I have done now four or five times, you’ll understand what it is I’m about.”  And about—later.  I don’t remember what period of time but later, he and Rabbi Friedman—at that time Rabbi Friedman was his assistant—went to Russia for the first time to the Soviet Union.  They had $10,000 worth of material that they purchased to bring to the Russians.  A great deal of it was Judaica but the rest were dungarees and, you know, all the things that Russians needed and wanted.  In addition to that, they worked together.  Rabbi Mehlman worked with another committee with whom I was also associated called the Action Committee for Soviet Jewry.  On the committee, the action committee, there were physicians who had been to Russia previously and who knew of two cases where it was necessary for them to have heart valve replacements.

VG:  I think you actually told this--.  I can’t remember if it was tape one or tape two.  But I think this story is on tape.

RS:  Okay.  So their experience there and the follow-up to it of the people who came to America and then became members of the temple--.  One of the women who got the heart valve became a member of the--.  So that it’s a circular thing, you know, it never ends.  To this day, I know of one case where the rabbi, on subsequent trips, was responsible for getting somebody out on his own by first getting him into Poland.  And the rabbi told me the story.  But he said, “Nobody will ever know the details,” because he was doing something that was quite extraordinary.  Now for him to be so committed in some way, it wasn’t only what he was doing by way of giving me support, but it was also the fact that in a way I was slightly, perhaps more than slightly, influencing him in his pursuit of the same project.  It’s possible.  In any event, he was so generous in his praise and in his gratitude to people who did good things that my files were replete with letters of praise from Rabbi Mehlman.  And that’s--. So my story is with Temple Israel that while at the beginning I was very—tried to be active on social action committees.  But then I kind of laid out for myself the perimeters in which I could possibly act, you know, you can’t do everything.  And Soviet Jewry was my beat.  To this day is. 

VG:  Did you attend services regularly at Temple Israel?

RS:  Yeah.  I, well, I was able to drive.  I lived--.  Shortly after I joined the temple, I had lived on Seul [sp?] Avenue, which was virtually within walking distance of the temple.  But to reduce costs, I moved to Watertown.  But I was able to drive, and that was not a problem to me.  And I attended services Friday nights.  And I used to go religiously Saturday morning to the rabbi’s study group where they studied the [unclear] of the week.  And it’s only recently that I stopped going to that only because of age and health.

VG:  Let’s--.  As always, whenever you answer a question of mine I find that I can—I want to go off in five different directions at the same time.  I’m going to again go back in time to your coming over to the States and the changes that you went through in your life.  And also the religious changes that you went through, how you practiced your Judaism—

[End of Tape 5, Side A]

VG:  Okay.  Go ahead.

RS:  Little girls in Russia didn’t have to practice anything.  They were not going to cheder.  They were not being taught anything.  I went to shul with my grandparents, either or the two, depending on where I lived.  Mama was very religious.  She was very observant.  And when we came to America—after all I was fourteen by then—Mama continued to observe kashrut.  She continued to observe Shabbos.  And she kept telling us, all of us, “You must be--.  God will punish you if you don’t do what the religion declares.”  You’re not supposed to carry anything on Shabbos.  You’re not supposed to do any work on Shabbos.  You’re not supposed to ride a train or a car on Shabbos.  And here I was beginning to feel resentful because if those laws had any legitimacy at all, God never meant them for the 1900s.  They might have been applicable when people lived in small communities in what was then Palestine they could walk to shul.  In fact, there was a law that they couldn’t go beyond a certain point, because that represented work already.  But you had to walk to shul.  But when you live in the Bronx and it’s almost impossible to get to a shul on foot, how are you going to get there if you’re not going to go by car or by subway or by trolley or something else, which means you don’t go to shul.  Well, Mama didn’t go to shul for that reason, but she prayed at home.  And she kept saying, “God will punish you if you don’t do the things that God wants you to do.”  And I became rather disenchanted with God and Mama’s conception of him.  And I decided I would challenge it. So one day I took a big handkerchief in one hand and a book in another, and walked out of the house and walked around and walked around until I was tired.

VG:  On Shabbos, you mean?

RS:  Yeah, on Shabbos.  Came back and said to my Mama, “God didn’t do anything because he doesn’t really care what I’m carrying.”  And Mama said, “[Unclear]”, you know, the punishment will come at some point.

VG:  Don’t be so smart.  The punishment will come. 

RS:  And I kept saying, “My God, I’m not doing any harm to anybody.”  And of course, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, you become more American.  After all I didn’t stay fourteen.  I came in 1924.  But now I’m talking about much later.  And I decided that I would be defiant, not because I wanted to hurt my mother but because I simply found it onerous to comply with her attitude.  I had always dreamed of dancing.  I was chunky.  I was clumsy.  Yet in my mind I was picturing myself as a ballerina.  But there was no--.  It was out of the question.  We couldn’t afford it.  And when I came to America, I had more compelling things to do.  Then, as I grew up, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, I had boyfriends.  And one of their buddies invited me to go to see Martha Graham dance “Rites of Spring.”  And I heard music for the first time that was so strange to my ears that it disturbed me.  And I watched Martha and her group do this primitive dance.  You know, the sacrifice of this young--.  And I thought to myself, “My God, there are times when it is divinely beautiful and other times when it was hideous and unbelievable.” And I said, “But there’s something about it that’s quite unique.”  And I said to buddies, “What is this?  What do you call this?”  He said, “Well, you remember there was such a woman as Isadora Duncan who began the modern dance.  But she never left a real technique.  Martha has a technique and a highly trained company.”  Well, this was worth pursuing.  So I said, “To whom shall I go to find out more about it, possibly take a class?”  And he said, “Well, that’s easy.  Most of the girls who belong to Martha’s professional group in order to earn a living teach.  And Anna Sokolow is the person you should go to.  She’s Jewish.  She will be--.  She’s perhaps--.  She’s as well qualified as anybody in Martha’s group.  Although she herself is not a magnificent dancer, but she’s very knowledgeable of the dance.”  So one Saturday—after all, I was working by then.  During the week I was working.  So Saturday was the only one that I was free.  I went—I made arrangements with Anna Sokolow to take a class with her.  And she spent the whole hour working me.  Whatever she did, she asked me to do, too. Well, I didn’t realize that I had never done anything like this in my life.  And when she got finished with me I began going downstairs and I collapsed.  Because the muscles were so sore that I couldn’t walk down the stairs.  And Anna saw me and she said, “Don’t worry.  Next Saturday when you come, we’ll work the same muscles and you’ll feel better.”  So I went home that evening, that afternoon in the subway.  But I didn’t sit down.  There was no seat. And I couldn’t sit down if I wanted to.  Thank God I didn’t sit down, because if I had sat down, I wouldn’t have been able to get up.  I got home and immediately went to bed for a rest.  And when I woke up I didn’t realize how stiff I was. And as I was trying to get out of bed, I fell on my face.  The muscles in my thighs and my knees and my calves were simply, simply hurting to a point where it was maddening.  But I had an appointment with Bernice to go to the theatre someplace.  So how do you resist?  Besides going up the stairs of the subway was possible, going down was very painful.  We went to the theatre.  We were sitting in the balcony.  We went upstairs, watched the play, enjoyed it. But when it was time two and a half hours later to get up and go down the stairs, I couldn’t.  Bernice had to carry me.  And I kept calling Anna and saying, “How can I go to work?  What shall I do?”  She said, “Keep pressing those very muscles.  Do as many things as you remember we have done.  And come without fail on Saturday.  We’ll work it out.”  And that was the beginning of my dancing career.  I studied with Anna.  And since I--.  Oh, I never finished telling you the story that I was working for a Mr. Berger and I wasn’t getting paid.

VG:  No.  You told—you did tell that story.

RS:  Well I didn’t tell you the rest of the story about his reporting me to the FBI.  But, oh, let me finish the story with Anna.  Well, since I no longer had a job with Mr. Berger, I was idle.  So I decided that the only thing I can do still enabling me to dance and study because I was gung ho, set on that.  I decided to go to the Art Students’ League and get paid as a professional model.  That’s how the dancing and the posing came together.  The posings financed my ability to dance.

VG:  Anna, I can’t remember, again, I think it was tape one, you—we did talk about your dance career.  And I remember that it ended when the troupe was going to Mexico and the man you married said you either go there or you marry me.

RS:  Right.

VG:  I’m curious to tie this up with the—your change in terms of being Jewish and how you moved away from your mother.  For example, you went to class on Shabbos.  Did you tell your mother that’s what you did?

RS:  I didn’t tell her, but my mother knew that I was doing something.  Besides, my mother disapproved of the idea when I once told her that I’m learning how to dance and that we will probably give a concert, Mama said, “[unclear].” You know, a Jewish girl on the stage. It was a disgrace to my mother.  There was not a smidgen of religiosity or spirituality left in me.  All I wanted to do was to pursue what was of great interest to me and that was the dance.  And to support it I had to--.  Mama never knew that I posed, because I was posing in the nude.  In Art Student’s League, you don’t keep your clothes on.  No.  You know, you do what the monitor tells you to do.  And nobody bothers you.  There is no sexuality connected with it.  They’re there to study the body and it’s a very--  It’s pretty much like when a doctor, a healthy, normal doctor, when he examines you he doesn’t exactly get a sexual kick out of it.  And the artists, the people who taught, are very devoted to the idea of teaching their art class, the elements of anatomy.  So that nobody ever--.  You continue to feel self-conscious because you came from a tradition where exposing your body was not considered kosher, you know.  But I was quickly drifting away into a philosophy of life and an attitude, which simply pushed away anything that had to do with my shtetl life or my religious affiliation.  That doesn’t mean that I denied I was Jewish.  But I did nothing that Jewish people do.  I didn’t observe kashrut.  I ate ham and cheese sandwiches, if I could afford to buy them.  I traveled on Shabbos.  I taught or took a class on Shabbos.  I posed in the nude.  I mean, these were all—

VG:  A shonde.

RS:  It’s a shonde.  But I was among people who thought and acted that way.  I was not the only one.  Everybody in the group, everybody who danced, nobody ever talked about going to synagogue or going to shul or anything like that. Rehearsals were called and we had to be there no matter what the day.  And you simply did what you needed to do.  So when I say I joined the group of avant-garde people, that’s precisely what happened.  And we simply disqualified the idea of God.  Now the element of spirituality was never truly absent, however, because when we did an anti-war dance, which Anna choreographed, I identified with it very, very strongly.  And what could be more spiritual than the desire to stop the killing of other people?  You know, to me, that is what spirituality is all about.  At any rate, at that time that was all over so that I had no guilty conscience or scruples about doing what I was doing.  The one thing that I did not join in was the freedom of sexual contact.  When Mama impressed upon us, “[Unclear].”  You’re not allowed.  And I was so ignorant and so unsophisticated about these things that the idea of having sexual intercourse with young men who pursued me was alien to me.  And never, ever [unclear] until I was married.  I mean that--.  I was the only one probably in the group that observed it, because I found Anna in bathrooms and places, where I saw her in action.  But it was not something of which I became a part.  But what I did become a part of is a movement that supported the Soviet Union, that felt that capitalism was not good for the majority of the people.  And, in other words, I became interested in the problems of the blacks, the problems of the poor, the problems of the people who try to form unions.  In all respects, I drifted away from my mother’s idea of just clinging to survival and pleading to her God for blessings.  I moved away into an activist philosophy of life.

VG:  Now I assume that by now we’re in the thirties.  Is that right, the 1930s?

RS:  Oh yeah.

VG:  And once again, I want to go off in two directions.  Let me come back and let me ask you a question about what was going on with your sisters during this time.  Did they take the same route as you did or follow your mother more closely or their own—something else?

RS:  They pursued their own.  My oldest sister was working at Ohrbach’s.  And she became very active in helping to organize a union there.  Because Ohrbach’s is a place where people go for clothes that are replicas of good clothes, but these are cheap ones.  And salespeople were not allowed to sit down even when there was no customer around.  They had to be clocked when they went to the ladies' room.  They were not allowed to meet together in any group.  And life was pretty wicked.  And so my sister was interested in that.  And she became very much interested in the Soviet Union.  Indeed, I don’t believe she joined the Communist party.  But for all purposes she worked with them.  Sema, the little one, was the only one that was going to college of the three of us.  During the daytime she went to Hunter College.  And she met, at age eighteen, I think, or nineteen—she met a wonderful young man at the camp.  And they fell in love and they married.  So Sema was the youngest of the lot to get married and move away from Mama.

VG:  Was she the first one to do that?

RS:  Huh?

VG:  Was she the first one of the three to get married?

RS:  Of the three, she was the first one to get married.  And for a period she moved away, because she still hadn’t finished college.  And she moved away to an apartment.  Her husband was a very fine artist.  And he was working for the New York Times at the time, doing commercial art.  That picture of Martin is Sema’s husband.  It’s a self-portrait.  You’re not getting a good enough light.

VG:  Okay.  You’re pointing at the picture that’s over the—

RS:  That’s hanging.

VG:  The chair.  Yeah, that’s hanging on the wall.

RS:  That’s Martin.  And it’s a self-portrait, and it’s Sema’s husband.  When she conceived a child after she graduated, she needed to live in much larger quarters than the little apartment.  And so she moved upstairs.  In my mother’s house there was a second floor.  And she and Martin and Bobby lived upstairs.  And then she gave birth to another child.  In all of this time, Ann was not married.  But I was already on the verge of getting married.  But that fell through.  However, I wasn’t in such a great hurry.  It didn’t matter to me.  Besides, my mother was dead set on Ann’s getting married first.  She said, “It’s tradition.  The oldest daughter had to get married first.”  And she used to say to me—that’s before I began my dancing career—“[unclear].”  Why do you have that Chaya doesn’t have?  “[Unclear].”  Pretty you’re not.  “[Unclear].”  Smart, you’re also not.  So what have you got that the fellows are all following you and not Chaya?  I’d say, “I don’t know.”  And she’d say, “[Unclear].”  I know.  “[Unclear.]”  You’ve got a big tongue.  Now, I suppose that kind of speech from a mother is kind of tearing you down.  She tells you quite out.  You’re not pretty and you’re not smart.  And that you just have a big tongue and theoretically induce people to pursue you because of your tongue.

VG:  Meaning that you speak?

RS:  Yeah.  So—

VG:  Did your mother speak that way to her other daughters?

RS:  No, she didn’t, for two reasons.  Ann was her first born in whose behalf she was fighting.  Semichka was frail.  But more importantly, Semichka got herself a wonderful husband.  And that’s an accomplished fact.  There was nothing she could do about that.  But I was still around going to college at nights, City College at night, coming home very late because I dated my professors.  And wherever I had beau.

VG:  B-E-A-U.

RS:  Yeah.  I had them.  The best.  And Ann was arrogant.   And she still felt the sting of not being the cock of the walk the way she was when we were in Russia.  And so her coldness and her manner of that kind isn’t the kind that attracts young men to you.  So she never attracted anybody that way.

VG:  And I want to see if I can describe the motion you just made because we can’t see that on the tape.  You turned your head very much to the side kind of pointing your nose up a bit.  And you with the back of your hand you were just kind of motioning some unseen person away from you.

RS:  The idea is, “Look.  I’m superior to you.  And unless you do my bidding, so to say, you’re not particularly worthy of my friendship or my attention.”  That’s what in essence her attitude was.

VG:  Did your sisters--?  For example, when Sema got married, did she keep a kosher home or had she observed?

RS:  None of us, none of us kept a kosher home, none of us.

VG:  Was she observant in any other way?

RS:  No.  As a matter of fact—and this is interesting—she was not observant.  Her children went to the Workman’s Circle Shuls.  They learned how to read.  They learned how to speak Yiddish.  But religion was out, neither Martin, her husband, nor she believed in anything that related to religion.  And while she did not defy openly the way I did it manifestly, you know, challenging God, she--.  To this day I have gone a long way in the direction in becoming, not observant, which I’m not, but very cognizant of a spiritual entity.  I refuse to call it God, simply because God in the Bible is always doing something that’s very treacherous from my point of view.  But the compassionate part, the part of loving other people, the part of not hurting other people is something that is so strongly imbedded in me that I choose to interpret it as not merely my personal preference, but the inspiration of a spiritual entity.  I feel that everything in my life, including my new granddaughter which I discovered at age twenty-nine, are not accidents.  That something governs my life besides my own propelling it into whatever areas I want it.

VG:  And your mother—your sister Sema is still alive?

RS:  Yes.  She’s the only one left.

VG:  Okay.  Your mother died when?

RS:  I have—I have the dates for my mother’s death, for Dean’s death, for Eli’s death.  I have it all written down some place.

VG:  Okay.  And your—did your mother remain observant?

RS:  Until the last day.  And I respected my mother.  Let me explain.  Mama, after a while, moved to a hotel on Long Island, a Jewish hotel for the elderly.  That’s where my mother lived with her social security.  There they had a chapel downstairs.  And Mama used to pray.  She could barely see, but she knew how to pray because she knew it by heart.  And they had observed kashrut there.  And in all respects it was very acceptable to my mother. Then something happened in our society in which they decided that the people that are being kept in institutions should be let out.  They’re not dangerous.  They may be emotionally slightly off.  But the streets and the hotels were filled with people like that. Financially, from a hotel point of view, it was a highly desirable thing because suddenly they were filled with people, non-Jews, who came from these institutions and whose social security the hotel was collecting.  A change took place and Mama discovered that in order for her to go downstairs on Shabbos, the elevator which had been so arranged so Mama wouldn’t have to press the button to go down to the chapel downstairs, the mishagoyim, as Mama referred to them—

VG:  The mishagoyim?

RS:  Uh-huh.  Determined that they don’t want an automatic button because they want to be able to go where they want to go.  This was set for Saturday for the Jewish people.

VG:  Oh so she didn’t have to work.  Okay.

RS:  So Mama suddenly found herself after they arrived with the need to press a button in order to go to wherever she wanted to go.  To my Mama it was an outrageous violation of her rights.  So when I visited her she said, “Ronya, [unclear].  Talk to an important rabbi and see what he has to say about this business of my having to push a button.”  And I went to see the [unclear].  And I laid down twenty-five bucks because that was--.  He didn’t ask for it, but this was a contribution for his time.  And I sat before him and I told him the story.  And he said, “Your mother is right.  She cannot press the button.”  I said, “Well, what should she do?  She wants to go down to pray.”  “Engage somebody in advance who will come down with her, press the button for me and engage somebody to bring her up.”  And that’s what my mother had to do.  So she stuck to her religious beliefs without deviating.  But insofar as the three girls and Eli were concerned—and Eli was bar mitzvahed, I presume.  I don’t remember.  But he was clearly brought up like a young boy was.  None of us, none of us was religious. 

VG:  Did your--?  Go ahead.

RS:  As I told you, I began going to Temple Israel shortly after—no, before Dean’s death actually, sure, before Dean. Because I remember that I used to think that it would be comforting to go to Temple Israel Saturday morning before going to the hospital when Dean was sick.  And I discovered that it wasn’t.  And I spoke to the rabbi.  By then Rabbi Mehlman came in.  I said, “I don’t find it comfortable to come here.”  And he said, “Then don’t.  Do whatever gives you the greatest comfort.”  He said, “If you don’t want to come when other people can talk—if that was the thing.  Come later, come when the services have begun.  Leave before I say my last blessing, so that you will not have to mingle with people.”  That comforted me, that I was able to hear the service and not participate with the people.  Because whenever there’s a great tragedy, one of the things I find is almost a sense of shame.  You don’t want other people to talk to you about the situation.  And I never quite understood what it is, whether it is a feeling of guilt that in some way you’re responsible for it, or whether it is a feeling of shame that you have not been able to bring up your family so that they will survive you.  I don’t know what it is.  All I know is that it’s very painful for people to comfort you.  I couldn’t accept comforting from people for a long, long time.  It changed after Dean died.  By then I had so matured and so--.   Rabbi Mehlman came to my apartment to say Kaddish.  He brought Cantor Simon—Cantor Roy with him.  And I gathered people here and in my home we had a Kaddish.  And I sat shiva -- not in the strict sense of the word.  I didn’t take my shoes off and sit on a box or anything like that, because I don’t consider that that’s the important thing.  The important thing was that I was remembering my son and that people came into the apartment to visit with me and comfort me.  And that was my idea of sitting shivah.  It wasn’t the business of, you’re not supposed to shake hands or you’re not supposed to do this.  To me these are peripheral [unclear].  My Dean is very spiritual.  And he’s a great believer that it doesn’t matter what religion you belong to, that there is a spiritual entity.  And I want to tell you, that’s keeping him alive.  And it’s such a strong influence that I find that on the one hand, my Judaism is a great source of comfort to me; not because I adhere to the religion, but because I adhere to its precepts, which are the most important.  What does God want from you?  He wants justice, justice, justice.  He wants fairness.  He wants love.  He wants kindness to other people.  He wants you to take care of the orphan and the widow.  These are the concepts.  And those I fully support. And the wisdom behind them, the literature behind them is so magnificent that I revel in it and study it all the time.  Because I feel that we have contributed to the world a base, first of all for monotheism because Christianity became a monotheistic religion.  Islam became a monotheistic religion.  We started it.  There’s only one God and they call him Allah and they call him Jesus Christ but it’s the one God.  And our God doesn’t have any sons or mothers.  So in that sense, my pride in my Jewishness is certainly greater than anything my mother would expect from me or anybody else for that matter.  But it is the dominant element in my life.  I must tell you, Daniela, the older of the two grandchildren--.  Both girls are attached to me.  But Jocelyn is interested in nature and in snow and in sleeping in forests and studying art.  She is out in Jackson Hole reveling in the glories of nature.  Daniela began interested in Judaism through me.  Not because I wanted to proselytize; after all, they had a non-Jewish mother.  They had Dean as a father who never knew anything about Judaism.  Daniela is so immersed in what I tell her about Judaism that there is no question that she asks that I fail to answer.  She was studying comparative religion while she was at college.  And one day she called me up and she said, “Ronya, what’s the difference between antisemitism and a Semitic country, Semitic peoples?”  “Oh,” I said, “that’s [unclear].”  She goes back and she says to the students, “I don’t have to go to the library to do research.  My grandmother is an endless source of information.”  And to this day, Daniela now--.  I’ve taken her to Israel, and she means to pursue her studies there at some point.  She was so--.  She’s interested in anthropology.  Now, what can be more suitable?  And to this day, when there is information that she needs, she comes to me.  Then there’s Allison. 

VG:  Before you go on to Allison--.  So you’re—your--.  Gene.  These are Gene’s kids, right?

RS:  Huh?

VG:  The—your two granddaughters are Gene’s?

RS:  Daniela—they are Dean’s—

VG:  Dean’s children.

RS:  [Unclear]

VG:  And all your sons were bar mitzvahed?

RS:  Huh?

VG:  Were all your sons bar mitzvahed?

RS:  No.  They were all circumcised, but not bar mitzvahed.

VG:  Not bar mitzvahed.  Oh, okay.

RS:  Circumcised because I insisted on doing it in the hospital, because my husband was partially Jewish.  He came of a Jewish mother but a Catholic father.  And didn’t believe in God.  And therefore, there was no practice of any kind of religion.

VG:  And then your sons--?  So let’s see, Dean married a non-Jewish woman.  And in their home there was no observance of any—

RS:  None whatever, none whatever.  And yet, as a matter of fact, they didn’t go to church.  They didn’t go to synagogue.  Nobody knew they were Jewish.  And Daniela didn’t know anything about it.  She says on Sundays, when her dad and mother would go out some place, they had a baby sitter.  The baby sitter would take them to church, because that was the only place where they were absolutely quiet.  So she knew what it was like to go to church occasionally.  But she didn’t know what this was all about.  She was not interested in anything that had to do with what went on in church.  The first time that she knew anything about Jewish per se, is when she was already seventeen or eighteen in New York.  She wanted to go with me to the Jewish Museum.  And there was a display of the trial of—that famous trial of—

VG:  Eichmann.

RS:  Huh?

VG:  Eichmann?

RS:  No.  That’s much before this.  He was a captain of the France army.

VG:  Dreyfus?

RS:  Dreyfus, Dreyfus.  And she became interested in that.  And she asked me for more information.  And from then on, it’s flowed.  And she tells me that she now fasts at Yom Kippur.  And she comes to somebody’s Seder.  Mine, if I conduct one here.  But she’s now in Maine.  So--. But she says she’ll find a place where she can go to seder.  And she says on Yom Kippur she was fasting.  Now, I never fasted on Yom Kippur, because I didn’t see what was I observing by fasting except denying myself food because of the tragedy of the destruction of the temple.  And I didn’t think that was a good enough reason for me two thousand years later to fast.  But something happened, the Entebbe incident after Israel was created.  And you remember, a French plane was intercepted with many Jews on it.  And a glorious young man by the name of [Yonatan] Netanyahu, the brother of this new minister [Benjamin Netanyahu], was in charge of a group that surreptitiously got into Entebbe and disarmed the terrorists who had the plane and saved every Jew except one woman who died of a heart attack.  Because they were doing something that the Nazis had done, separate the Jews from the others with the intention of killing the Jews so they can take the rest of the French people back to France where they were going.  To me, the ability to have done that --.  It not only made military history, but to me it was a miracle the likes of which I had ever witnessed.  It was even greater than the creation of the state of Israel.  And so I said, “How will I ever commemorate this extraordinary event?”  It took place some time in the fifties.  “I will fast at Yom Kippur in honor of the Entebbe incident.”  And to this day, despite the fact that I’m not so strong anymore, I fast.  But I don’t fast as a punishment.  I fast lovingly.  The result is, it’s not hard, you know.  I fast.  I don’t even take my medication, because that would require drinking water.  I’ll survive one day without it.  But I have to have a reason for doing a religious observance.  But not for some vague idea that some day the temple should be rebuilt.  I don’t want the temple rebuilt.  I don’t want us to go back to making sacrifices.  I think the new religion that developed as a result of the destruction of the temple was the creation of synagogues, and rabbis instead of priests.  I think that was probably the most, the greatest, development in Jewish history and to me, the most significant. So for me to continue fasting because they destroyed the temple twice already was nothing.  But the Entebbe incident was something.  It was man made, a miracle, man made.  Now if God had anything to do with it, bless Him for it. 

VG:  Before I interrupted you before, you were also going to go on and say something about your newfound granddaughter.

RS:  My who?

VG:  Your newfound granddaughter.  Do you remember what you were going to –?  You were talking about Daniela and Jocelyn.

RS:  Yeah.

VG:  Okay. And where they are, in terms of their religious practice. 

RR:  Right.  And then you were about to go on and say something about your new granddaughter, Allison.

RS:  Well, I had told you earlier how Allison came in—

VG:  Right.  Except I actually lost part of that on the tape.  I don’t know whether you want to repeat that or not or just move.

RS:  I’ll just move on.  Allison two years ago was twenty-nine years old when I first met her.  And she was very anxious to know--.  She was adopted by--.  Her mother was non-Jewish.  She was a—

VG:  [Unclear] Go ahead.

RS:  She was brought up in a non-Jewish home, but not particularly religious.  When she met me, she wanted to know all about my son, naturally her father, Dean, and about me.  And I began telling her about my background, my Jewish background, and my studies of Jewish history, this, that and the other thing.   And she said, “I sorely miss having all these years not known anything about my father and his background.  But also the background from which he came, which derives from you.”  And I began telling her more about my past.  I gave her my reminiscences to read.  She was studying medicine in Washington.  And when it was time to have a seder and I was asked to conduct the seder here, she and Daniela came to the seder.  And I said, “But what possible interest can the seder have for you?”   “Well,” she said, “on the basis of your story, it’s a celebration of freedom -- whether it’s freedom from Egypt or, as I put it, freedom from [unclear] for which I was working,” or freedom from Hitler or freedom from Spanish Inquisitions.  She said, “And I think that’s a worthwhile thing to commemorate.”  And she came and she heard stories that she had never known existed, because I didn’t just read the Haggadah.  I brought in a lot of extraneous matters.  But they were not extraneous.  They were relevant.  But they were not in the Haggadah because the world has moved on since the Haggadah was written.  And to this day, she’s very much interested in Jewish matters.  I didn’t try to proselytize with Daniela or--.  I don’t expect them to convert to Judaism.  But Daniela asked me about a year ago, “Ronya, if I ever had a child, can I bring him up as a Jew?”  I said, “Well, that’ll depend upon you.  If you want to bring him up as a Jew, you convert to Judaism. And you circumcised him, if it’s a boy.  Then you bar mitzvah him, and he’ll be a Jew.”

VG:  Gene’s--.  You talked earlier about Gene’s spirituality, which you said is keeping him going.  Does Judaism play a part in that at all?

RS:  No, it doesn’t.  In fact it did, but he left it.  And part of the reason I think he left it was because he went to the [unclear].  You see since--.  As long as his father was alive, it was not permitted to talk about religion.  He became interested in religion after he grew up.  And he was searching for a spiritual quality.  He went to the [unclear] who gave him the same routine that my Mama was giving me, you know, it was strict.  You had to believe in God.  God was this, that or the other thing.  Gene studied.  He studied with him.  He studied with another rabbi.  And he found that that was not spiritually rewarding to him.  He is a lover of music.  He plays music.  He played it for many years.  He studied it.  One day he read in the newspaper that there is a church Emmanuel in Boston that plays Beethoven’s Cantata every Sunday.  And he went there and the minister, [unclear], and embraced—

VG:  [Unclear]

RS:  Huh?

VG:  Translate that.

RS:  Embraced him.  And for the first time Gene had a surrogate father who was accepting him because big Gene was very cruel to his sons particularly to Eugene.  And here he had a loving father and gorgeous music. And so he goes to church regularly.

VG:  To Emmanuel.

RS:  To Emmanuel.  Since then, of course, they’ve become famous for their music.  And what’s his name, the Japanese conductor, Asaka, what’s his name, conducts them.

VG:  From the VSO, you mean?

RS:  Yeah.  And Gene has become a pillar of Temple Emmanuel -- not temple, church.  What is interesting is that his knowledge of Jewish history, knowledge of Biblical material, serves him very well because from time to time he’s asked to preach. 

On Thursdays, they have lay preachers.  And every sermon that he has preached challenges some of the things that are being said within the church as being contradictory to what it was meant to be.  And establishes the origin of the church into reason.

VG:  Well, have you gone to church with him?

RS:  I’ve been once.  But I don’t like to have to bow my knees when they invoke the name of Jesus.  And I don’t want to stick out like a sore thumb because I refuse to get down on my knees.  You see, I don’t worship anybody.  I don’t worship anybody.  The only time that, for example, I bow my head is in temple when we do the special—

[End of Tape 5, Side B]

VG:  This is side two of the fourth interview on February 7^th 1997 with Ronya Schwaab. 

RS:  I’m finished.

VG:  Okay.  Let’s take a turn back in time.  I wanted to ask you to give me a little bit of information about your political activities during the 1930s, which you have referred to somewhat in interviews over the last few times.  You’ve mentioned the WPA.  You mentioned your sister, and I can’t remember if it was Sema or—

RS:  Ann.

VG:  Ann.  Who was active in—close to the Communist party.  And you talked about talking on the soapbox.  You told me the story about you talking on the soapbox.  So I wanted you to--.  That was a time of tremendous political ferment in this country, and I’m wondering if you can give me a little more information about your—about what you did during that time.

RS:  During that time, for nothing.  I danced in WPA, which meant a good part of the day was occupied with that.  And in order to maintain myself, so to say, financially because you were only getting twenty-five dollars a week or something like that, I also began to pose, because I began to study the dance.  And you had to pay for lessons you were taking, so I needed money with which to pay.  My political activities were very limited, in the sense that once Roosevelt was elected--.  See, I spoke on his behalf -- for one thing, because I felt that he represented the best interests of America.  And for another thing, because I saw the rise of antisemitism and the people who were running against him who had that cartoon with Sidney Hillman standing, and said the implications were that the Jews were going to cause a great deal of trouble, including killing Uncle Sam.  So that the presence of antisemitism was something that troubled me very much.  Nevertheless, I was not particularly active, because I was very busy with the dancing and the teaching and the posing.  That was my principal interest.  It wasn’t until after—until the late thirties when the Depression came, you know, and the market broke, and when antisemitism became so rabid, so pervasive.  There was Father Coughlin, who lectured every Sunday on the radio, spewing the most horrible antisemitic statements, speaking on behalf of the Catholic Church.  And there were all kinds.  There was [Henry] Ford, who had a newspaper.  I’m talking about the Ford whose cars we used to drive at the time. Who, again, implicated the Jews in every conceivable crime against the United States.  And there was just the beginnings of the involvement of blacks seeking freedom for themselves from terrible oppression.  So that I became involved, for example -- one thing -- with a strike for department store workers, because they were being treated abominably and they didn’t have a union.  Then I became involved in trying to help the blacks achieve a measure of equality, because as a Jew I felt that injustices to any group is bad, no matter.  The Jewish issue was only active because of the amount of antisemitism.  I wasn’t this concerned, for example, about the Jewish issue per se, which I did not take on until after Hitler and after I severed relations with big Gene, you see.  Until then, I was interested in everybody who endured any kind of prejudice or injustice.  And so that was my activity.  But after I separated from Gene, which was after the ’45 war.  During the time that this was going on, I was terribly troubled.  But we didn’t really truly know--.  People knew.  Rabbi Weiss knew.  He went to see president--.  But I didn’t know the extent of the damage of the devastation of the Holocaust until after the thing was over and books began to be written about it.  When I left Gene, that became my principal interest.  And it was at that point that I said, “Well, Hillel had said a long time ago, ‘If I’m not for me, if I’m not for me, who will be?’”  Because I was shocked that America and England and France all didn’t allow a single person to escape.  Twelve hundred of them or eleven hundred came on a boat.  They had originally been promised that Cuba would accept them.  Cuba changed its mind.  They went to America.  America rejected them.  And they went to France and to England.  They all rejected.  These were escapees from Germany.  And eventually--.  I believe the name of the ship was the St. Joseph.  I don’t remember precisely.  But I can tell you that when I read about these things—and this is ‘45--.  This was before ’45, before the end of the war -- I was appalled.  [She refers to the SS St. Louis, whose 936 German Jewish refugee passengers were turned away from foreign shores in 1939 – ed.]And so I decided I’ve already done the things for other people.  But Hillel says, “If not for me alone, who am I?”  Well, I knew who I was.  I had done for the blacks.  I had done for the unemployed.  I had done for the hungry.  I had done for the blacks.  Now it was time for me to do for me.  And it was at that point that I became very much interested in the Jewish problem.  And it was shortly thereafter that I began actively participating in what I regarded as my Jewish involvement. 

VG:  Let me go back and ask you if you can’t give me a little specifics on one or two of the things that you said.  When you talk about that you were involved with, for example, a strike or a union work at a department store.  What specifically--?  How were you involved?  You weren’t working at the store at the time, right?

RS:  I wasn’t working in the department store, my sister was.  It was Ohrbach’s. 

VG:   Okay, you mentioned that.

RS:  And they were not allowed, for example, to sit down behind the counter, even if there was no customer there.  They had to clock themselves when they went to the bathroom.  They were constantly being stopped from doing what is human.  And I was outraged.  And I used to go on picket lines with them, although I was not a member of the department store workers.  For that matter, I was not a member of the black people either.  But I fought--.  The Scottsboro Boys--.  I don’t know whether you know anything about it—

VG:  Yes, yes.

RS:  --because you’re too young, perhaps.  But the Scottsboro Boys became my issue.

VG:  And what, for example, did you do in relation to the Scottsboro kids?

RS:  I used to go up picketing.  We used to go out marching.  We carried signs.  We wrote letters to various government agencies to see whether we can alter the course of events.  We did. In my group, when I was studying dancing with Anna Sokolow, I—there was a sit down strike for some noble reason relating to blacks.  And there was a black young man in my group.  And the two of us rode all night, sitting up in a train to get to Washington, so we could participate in this sit down.  And the element of color or anything like that never entered my mind, because I was not an American and I didn’t have the tradition of Americans who had prejudices against blacks.  I didn’t.  I didn’t have prejudices against anybody.  Well, this is the sort of thing that I meant.  I was involved in anything that was of interest to humanity, so to say.  I was concerned with everybody.  But when the time came and I realized the devastation that was taking—that has taken place and the cruelty and the indifference, and the complete abandonment of the Jews by all democratic countries—at that point, my disillusionment with the democratic countries was very profound and my concern for the Jews.  And remember, by 1948, Israel came into being.  And for me that was still another new facet in life that warranted my attention and my love and my care and my devotion.  So also at that time I became very much involved with Soviet Jewry, because I remember studying that we have to redeem our Jews, not the good Jews, but Jews.  And when I used to finally bring them here, extracting them from the teeth of Stalin, and I lectured, they reproached me.  Some people in the audience would say, “They don’t even want to go to shul.  They’re not religious.”  And I had to explain to them the historic development.  “Well, why are we taking all this time to bring them here?” And the answer is, the admonition was not, save religious Jews or good Jews.  They may be lousy Jews, but they’re Jews.  And I don’t stop to figure out who they are.  And that became my philosophy. 

VG:  Let me just back up and ask you one more question, and then we can go ahead.

RS:  Keep asking them!

VG:  Obviously, probably a lot of the activities that you were involved in the thirties were activities in which the Communist party was very active.  What was your relationship--?  Were you aware of that?  What was your relationship to the party?

RS:  Very friendly, very friendly.  Because the students--.  Remember, I was going to college at night, City College, like that.  Everybody belonged to some organization, which was a branch in some way connected.  And I looked upon the Communist party with a great deal of compassion and favor, because I felt that they represented hope for humanity.  For the same reason that many Jews believed that the Revolution in Russia, including me, was going to be a respite, because Russia was dominated by the most extraordinary bad czars and their courts and the church.  And the result was that life in Russian was bad for everybody, most particularly for Jews.  And the Revolution, at the outset, declared quite simply that any antisemitism will not be tolerated.  And, indeed, they couldn’t afford the luxury of tolerating it, because many of the people who were early involved in the revolutionary movement of Russia were Jews.  They were the most educated and the most intelligent.  And many of them belonged to the Communist party.  And so when they opened up the schools and allowed children -- not on a quota basis, but all children -- to go to a school without having to pay, I looked upon it very favorably.  And, indeed, for a long time continued to think that they are—that they hold the promise for the future, so that there won’t be rich and poor, and that everybody would be equal.  Well, it took me a little while, and the rest of the world quite some time, to figure out that that’s not what they were about.  They had their own class distinctions, and their own prejudices, and their own restrictions.  Not just upon the Jews, but all nationality groups were being in some respect coerced into being Russified. Their language was not allowed to be used in their schools.  Their cultures were not being encouraged.  The Soviet Union was determined to make Russia the dominant -- .  And Russia was surrounded with fifteen other minority groups who had their own languages and their own cultures, their own dances and their own--.  And Russia was not being very kind.  And when they found a group of people which for one reason or another they thought were against the Communists, they exterminated them or exiled them to some remote place in the Ural Mountains where they were never seen or heard again.  So the fact is that at the time that you’re referring to, I looked very favorably upon Communism.  Its—at least its philosophy, as it was expounded.  And I always kept saying, after all, Jesus Christ was in some respect the first Communist, because he said, “And the poor will inherit the earth,” you know.  What better proof can you have about the nobility of that kind of a philosophy?

VG:  So was it your involvement with Soviet Jewry that caused you to begin to change your ideas about Communists and the Soviet Union and—

RS:  Before the involvement, I had read books.  First of all, it happened during the war, when I was already disillusioned when Stalin signing a pact with Germany.  That was the first blow about the integrity of Stalin and what he represented.  It was the first serious blow.  And many people who were pro-Communist felt that that terminated their interest.  Then, as always, I read.  And when I read a book called My Father by Svetlana Alliluyeva, who was the daughter of Stalin, and she described how prejudiced he was against the Jews.  And that her lover, who she was going to marry, was a Jew.  And what he did to him.  [Her Jewish ex-husband was sentenced to ten years in Siberia – ed.] Well, that was the beginning of it.  But then there was a whole spate of books that came—I don’t remember in what order—but [unclear] spoke out, you know.  Sakaroff spoke out.  Solzhenitsyn came back from exile and wrote books, One Day in the Life of Ivan Igbanovich  […Ivan Denisovich – ed.] or something.  Then he wrote The Cancer Cell [The Cancer Ward – ed.].  Then he wrote some--.  He had antisemitic overtones in his—he was exposing what Stalin was doing.  And insisting that it didn’t begin with Stalin, that it actually began with Lenin.  But for my purposes I didn’t have to go into history.  Suffice it to say that when I went to visit my uncle in Kiev in 1964--.  This is at least, what, ten years after the war ended. 

VG:  Yeah, twenty.

RS:  Twenty years.

VG:  Yeah.

RS:  I witnessed things that raised one hair at a time.  And as a result of those experiences that I had the first time on a friendly visit.  I didn’t go there for any political reasons.  But what happened during that visit was enough to confirm in my mind that it was something I had to fight against with my whole life.  And I did.

VG:  Had you heard from your family at all during the war?

RS:  Yeah.  We heard from them shortly from my aunt who was living in Gomel at the time.  And--.  But everything that came from them was so censored that only certain lines remained. 

She wrote something about Uncle Joe, meaning Joe Stalin, the father of our country.  That remained.  But what she said about hunger and what she said about tyranny was all crossed out.  So all that remained was that Joseph Stalin was the loving father of the country.  My uncle simply wrote from Minsk that they needed help.

VG:  Did they write in Yiddish or in Russian?

RS:  No.  They wrote in Russian because my mother read Russian, I read Russian.  And I—after I got married I moved to Boston.  I began supplying my uncle with packages every -- twice a year, as much as we were allowed to do.  They had to be brand-new things with the labels still on to prove to the Russian government that they were not used things.  And there were only certain amounts that you could send at a given time. I knew what was valuable in Russia at the time and I would pack cartonfuls of that stuff.  It cost an awful amount of money to send it.  And he in turn was able to give some of it to my aunt in Gomel.  She refused to receive packages because her daughter was a member of the Communist party.  And she was afraid that if she received packages from her Jewish relatives in America, that it would put her in jeopardy.  He was willing.  And I used to send them wonderful packages.  And they were able to sell—keep what was appropriate for themselves, and what they didn’t need which represented luxury items, they would sell in government shops, and obtain the ability to go to the international stores and buy the things they wanted.  But that’s a story by itself.  Really, my visit with my uncle in 1964.  I don’t know whether you want to hear about it.

VG:  Yeah.  Yeah.  Why don’t you tell me about it?

RS:  In 1964, I arranged with my mother that I would be the representative, because we were fairly comfortable financially.  I would go to Russia and I would visit Yaakov and his family in Minsk.  I went to an agency here and told her what it is I wanted to do.  I was going for a whole month alone.  And she worked out an itinerary.

VG:  You were no longer married at this point?

RS:  Oh, I was still married.

VG:  You were still married.

RS:  That was before.  I was still married.

VG:  Okay.

RS:  She worked out an itinerary on the basis of flights.  So she said, “You’ll go from—to Moscow.  Then you’ll go to Sochi.  Then you’ll go to Kiev.  Then you’ll go to Minsk and from Minsk you’ll go to Kiev,” or some such thing.  The agency that was responsible for making these arrangements sent back word and said, “No.  She cannot go from Moscow to Sochi.  She can go only from Moscow to Minsk.”  My agent looked at the map and said, “But there are no flights from Minsk to Sochi.”  They said, “That’s none of your problem. That’s our problem.  We tell you she has to go.”  And you know they did--.  There was nothing free about these things.  Anyway, they allowed me all of two days in Minsk.  So I stayed in Moscow for the number of days that I was allowed—

VG:  And did you have family in Moscow?

RS:  No.  I had nobody in Moscow.  And I hoped, I begged, for more days in Minsk.  I hadn’t seen them in forty years.  And they said, “No.  It’s impossible.  There is no hotel room in Minsk for you.”  So from Moscow, I went to Minsk for two days.  I stayed in an elegant hotel, which was virtually empty.

VG:  You couldn’t have stayed with your --.  Did you want to stay with your family?

RS:  I wanted to, but they won’t allow you to do that.  And any ways, there was no room.  And you had to visit your family during the day.  At twelve o’clock you had to be back at your hotel, or the doors were locked and you would remain on the street and be picked up and taken to prison.  So by eleven thirty my poor uncle would start trembling, “Ronichka, [speaks in Russian].”  You know, he was very worried about the fact that I may be late in case the taxi is delayed.  Two days to catch up--.  I left at age fourteen.  I came back a middle-aged woman.  Hadn’t seen them in all these years.  What was amazing is that I asked questions, and they wouldn’t give me any answers.  But they plied me with questions, and I talked and talked and talked until I was hoarse.  The last—the second day that I was there, they made a big party.  My aunt came from Gomel.  My—his son, his wife, some neighbors.  They put on their table all the things they were able to gather during the time to make it very presentable.  And we were sitting around the table and again, they were plying me with questions.  And finally at one point where it was a little bit quiet, I said, “Dada,” to my uncle, “If I paid for it would you be able to go to Israel for two weeks, just to see the new country?”  Well, if I had thrown a bomb into the house I couldn’t have done better.  My poor uncle turned red.  And he said to me, “In that fascistic country, I wouldn’t put my feet there.  With the sex perversion, with their killing of Arabs on the street!”  And he was spewing.  And I sat there absolutely terrified, because he looked like he was going to have a heart attack, you know.  So I sat there very quietly, listened to his diatribe.  And finally we changed the subject.  But the mood had changed.  Late in the afternoon he took a nap and I went for a walk with Rosa.  That’s his wife, my new aunt.  I had never met her before.  And I said, “Why was Dada so cross with me?  What did I do?”  And she said, “Ronichka, you don’t ask questions like that, not with a son and his wife sitting there and their neighbors.  He had to answer you that way because somebody—one of them, or possibly all of them, will report the question to the KGB.  And if he had answered anything other than what he did, he would be in trouble and you would have gotten him there by asking a question whether he wants to go to Israel.”  I said, “But he kept raving about how good it is for the Jews!”  She said, “Don’t be a fool.  That’s what we have to say.”  Well, that was--.  I said, “How is life for you here?”  She said, “Finster and bitter.”  Finster is dark, and bitter is bitter.  Well, I thought to myself, “What the hell is this all about?”  I was appalled.  But I said goodnight to them.  And they said they’ll come to the airport tomorrow, early in the morning, to see me go to Sochi.  I come back late at night, eleven thirty, and I’m called down by Intourist.  And I’m told you can’t go from here to Sochi.  You have to go from here back to Moscow and from Moscow to Sochi.

VG:  And what was in Sochi?

RS:  I--.  Sochi was on my itinerary.  Sochi is a place for vacationing.

VG:  You didn’t have family there?

RS:  No.  No.

VG:  Okay.

RS:  Remember, I was only allowed two days with my family.

VG:  So you mean you were there for a month and you had—and in that month you had just two days with your family?

RS:  That’s all.  Well, they called me down in the middle of the night, “Mrs. Schwaab, you can’t go from here to Sochi.  You have to go back.”  “But why do I have to go back to Moscow?”  “When you get there, they’ll explain it to you.”  Well, I don’t have to tell you I didn’t sleep that night.  And anyway I had to get up very early.  And at the airport I saw my uncle and my aunt and my nephew and I said, “I’m sorry, but I’m being sent back to Moscow.  I don’t know why.”  They were terrified.  And I was, too.  Why was I going back to Moscow?  I arrived at Moscow and Intourist [the Soviet travel bureau that Stalin established to control the movement of foreign tourists – ed.] didn’t expect me.  So there was nobody to meet me.  And this is the rule: Intourist has to meet you as you come off the plane.  Then they take you to the hotel or whatever you have to do.  And here it was obvious that they had made some mistake.  But Intourist wasn’t there.  So I’m frightened.  Everybody’s—the plane is emptied out and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.  My luggage is on the plane.  They take my luggage off and carry it for me.  And they take me into the lounge.  And I don’t know what I’m waiting for.  Finally, someone turns up.  And I am frightened out of my life.  And he says, “Don’t worry.  There will be a plane from here to Sochi at three o’clock in the afternoon.”  This is morning.  This is about ten o’clock in the morning.  I said, “Three o’clock.  Why do you need me here?”  He says, “Don’t worry.  We’ll explain everything.”  And he goes away, and leaves me sitting there and doesn’t come back for an hour.  And I have to go to the bathroom.  I don’t know where the bathroom is.  And the bathroom stinks when I finally find it.  It’s terrible.  And he comes up again at eleven or eleven thirty or twelve and says, “Madame Schwaab, you will be the first one on the plane when the plane is ready to leave for Sochi.”  “But why am I here?  Why did—?”  “You’ll have everything made clear to you.”  And they don’t tell you anything.  Well, it was getting to be one o’clock.  I hadn’t eaten.  And I wanted to send a cable to my uncle to tell him that I’m all right.  I still don’t know why I’m in Moscow.  And again, he leaves me and goes away.  And finally when he came back this time I said, “I’m hungry, and I don’t know why you’re keeping me here.  But I want you to take me immediately—I want you to take me to a post office where I can send a cable to my uncle, because both of us are scared out of our wits.”  Well, when you begin to cry and yell, they pay attention.  “You don’t have to go to the post office here,” he said.  “When you get to Sochi you’ll send a cable.”  I said, “Oh no.  You already --.”  I don’t remember what words I used, but I meant to say: you’ve pulled my nose long enough.  I’ve been here since ten o’clock this morning.  It’s already one o’clock.  And you tell me you’re giving me honor.  I’ll be the first one on the plane.  I’m not interested in being the first one on the plane.  I want to send a cable.  Well, when you begin to bellow like that he says, “All right.”  So he took me to where I could send a cable.  And I simply sent a cable to my uncle saying, “I’m all right and I hope to reach you after I get to Sochi.”  I couldn’t explain to him because I didn’t know why I was delayed like that.  Sure enough, the plane arrives at three.  And I’m being escorted like the Prince of Wales.  And someone sits down next to me who was obviously a representative of the Communist party and he begins probing me.  “[In Russian],” he says, “you know, you’re being honored.  You’re the first one on the plane while everybody else is waiting.”  I said, “I don’t consider that an honor.  I consider it an insult!”  I said, “Why are you singling me out?”

VG:  This is all in Russian?

RS:  Well, how else can I talk to him?  I’m in Russia.  He starts asking me, “Do you have a home?”  “Yes.”  “An apartment or a home?  Do you have a bathroom all your own?  A kitchen of your own?”  And I talked to him and answered him, because I have no options.  And finally the plane takes off.  He’s still with me and we arrive.  And he goes off and he says, “There’s some error.  Intourist isn’t here, so you have to wait until they come and pick you up.”  So I think to myself, for them, this is the second time that Intourist isn’t there to meet me.  Why?  And there is no post office and there is no telegram.  It’s a tiny little place.  Sochi is a summer place.  And again I cry and I yelled, but there’s nobody to yell to.  The one or two people who are around say, “We cannot do anything.  We have to wait for Intourist to come.”

VG:  What month is this trip in?

RS:  Huh?

VG:  What month were you traveling in?

RS:  It was summertime.

VG:  Summertime.

RS:  Yeah.  Finally an Intourist turns up.  “Madame Schwaab, we’re ready to take you to the hotel.” 

VG:  Mazel tov.

RS:  They take me to one of the most beautiful hotels which used to be one of the palaces, because Sochi is the summer place for the czars.  Now it’s a resort for workers who come on their vacations to the beach, with all kinds of wonderful things.  And I want to know, why was I sent to Moscow?  Finally somebody explains to me, there is no direct flight from Minsk to Sochi.  The reason they originally suggested that I go from Moscow to Sochi, from Sochi to Kiev, from Kiev to Minsk, was because that was the logical way to do it.  But Intourist was stubborn, and made a mistake and said, Let her go directly to Minsk.  And there was no flight.  You could fly all day to the Urals and everywhere.  It begins in the morning and comes late at night to Sochi.  That’s why--.  And I had to pay the extra fare for going back to Moscow.  But it took all of this time to figure out that my agent said there is no flights from Minsk to Sochi, except to fly all over the Soviet Union.  That was the reason!Well, I wrote to my uncle and explained that it was--.  But for the second time, because a mistake was made there was no Intourist, which meant I wasted hours at the airport waiting for someone because you don’t know what—where you’re going on your own.  When I was in Sochi, I decided I might as well enjoy whatever there is enjoyable.  So I went to the circus.  The circus is one of the most exciting circuses I’d ever been to.  And as I was sitting there, they began flying through the air, no net.  And me, I’m a coward.  So I look down like this, so I shouldn’t see. 

VG:  With your head in your hands, covered your eyes.

RS:  And I bumped my head with another lady who also was down there.  And we began to talk.  And she said, “I speak English.”  And I said, “Fine.  I speak Russian, but I’ll be glad to speak English.  It’s easier.”  Well, we finally got up. We watched the rest of it. And we became friends.  She was on holiday.  She had lung problems.  She had lived in Leningrad.  The reason I tell you these details is because it has a point.  She had lived in--.  She was a teacher.  She lived in Leningrad.  But Leningrad has a great deal of moisture in the air, and it wasn’t good for her.  And they suggested that she’s better off in a certain part of Siberia, which is beautiful, and crisp and dry.  So she lives in Siberia and she teaches there.  But this is her holiday and she’s in Sochi.  “Oh,” I said, “that’s fine.  Why don’t you come and meet me at the hotel tomorrow and we’ll go to the beach together?”  “Oh,” she said, “that will be lovely.”  “And then we’ll have lunch together.”  She said, “Fine.”  And promptly, I had a collection of gifts to give to these people.  She came, picked me up.  We went to the beach together.  And at the gate, the woman who’s sitting there—there’s somebody sitting there all the time, checking on—

VG:  To the beach, the gate to the beach?

RS:  The gate to the beach.  She starts yelling at her in Russian.  “You know that you’re not supposed to go to the beach with an American.  This is a beach only for tourists, only for international visitors, not for Russians.  You go to the diki, the wild beach!”  And I hear her scolding this woman, scolding her terribly.  But she says to her, “This time you can go in, because I don’t want to embarrass you and your host.”

VG:  So she thought that you didn’t understand Russian?

RS:  Remember, this is the first time.  After a while, I spilled the beans and they knew I spoke Russian.  And that wasn’t so good for me.  Anyway, so she let us go in and we had—we stayed on the beach and we had lunch.  And she said to me quietly, “I will probably never see you again, here is a gift.”  We exchanged gifts.  And she never was able—because it would have been dangerous for her and for me if she repeated the idea of coming to see me. 

VG:  Was she Jewish?

RS:  No.

VG:  No.

RS:  But don’t forget, I wasn’t there for my health.  I was there for my—because I wanted to see my family.  And I am Jewish.  But in this instance, she was in greater danger than I.  After that, since I heard there was such a thing as a diki beach, not tiki the way we know it, but diki, which means wild, which means the Russians go to that beach.  We have the exclusive right of going to this beach.  From then on I went to the other beach. There they let you in, because there’s nobody at the gate.  It’s only the Russians.  The Russians were as crowded as sardines.  But when they saw me, cute bathing suit, cute figure, they moved around and they made room for me on the blanket with them.  And they were delighted to have me with them.  And they asked me and I had three sons.  “Yes, I have three sons.”  Oh, they have wonderful daughters, and they’d like me to suggest that the sons would marry their daughters.  Well, I said I haven’t got the right to marry off my sons.  And finally, the last day that I was there—

VG:  Who were the people that you sat with?  Were they people that you knew or just people--?

RS:  No.  I don’t know anybody.

VG:  So you just sat down.

RS:  On the beach. 

VG:  Okay.

RS:  They see that I am different and they invite me over, hoping that I’m from America and that they can marry off their daughters to somebody, you know.  Are you finished?

VG:  Nope, still going.

RS:  Well, when I went back to the—my own beach—it wasn’t always convenient for me to walk so I went there, because the very following day I was going to go on a trip to see the surroundings of Sochi, a full day’s trip.  And I took with me all the things that we generally carry: postcards and all kinds that I put into my bag.  And gathered up the things at the end of my stay at the beach and went to pack for the one day that I was going to be away.  When I--.  And it was a beautiful ride.  When I came back,, the woman in charge of my floor, to make sure I don’t come in with anybody else but myself, says to me, “Madame Schwaab, here is your swim cap.” Now, I had an unusual swim cap.  It was the usual rubber thing.  But it had rows and rows and rows of nylon lace.  It was beautiful.  And she said--.  She doesn’t ask me, “Is this your cap?”  She says, “Madame Schwaab, here is your swim cap.”  I thanked her and I said to myself, “Isn’t it amazing that these people are so honest!  They would give their right eyeteeth for a cap like that, and yet they return it to me.”  And for a long time I go along harboring a very warm feeling.  And then I say, “Oh, you goddamn fool!  How could they know it was your cap?  There are so many other international visitors.  How did they know it was yours, unless you were watched?”  Of course I didn’t say anything, but I wrote down in my notes, “My cap is returned to me the next day.”  And then I—that’s the story.  The first trip taught me that you were watched all the time, that someone reported on you, that antisemitism was wild, that nobody went to shul, that nobody was allowed to practice Judaism, that they didn’t dare speak Yiddish [telephone rings].  That was the beginning.

[Recording paused.]

RS:  So, after that, when I came back I wanted to lecture about my experience there.  And I was amazed that most Jewish organizations kept saying to me, “Don’t rock the boat.”

VG:  Who did you speak to?

RS:  Well, I went -- you know, on Franklin Street, 12 or 21 Franklin Street had all the Jewish organizations: American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, Jewish Community Council.  There were all in the same—

VG:  Boston?

RS:  In Boston.

VG:  In Boston, downtown.

RS:  It’s called the White House in Boston, the Jewish White House.  And they said, “Ronya, this is not a good time to talk about it.  Please don’t talk about it.” Because they had their reasons.  They said, “Don’t rock the boat.” They were afraid that if I revealed things about Russia, that it would make life for the Jews more difficult, because that sort of thing travels.  So I said, “Well, but I have learned things that you people don’t know.”  “Well,” they said, “as a matter of fact, we do know a great deal.  Yours was very personal.”  So I simply told my friends.  And they would gather in their big homes, acquaintances, so there'd be twenty, twenty-five people and I would tell them about it.  On another occasion—and that was very important—I was in Kiev, finally, you know, from Sochi to Kiev.  Again, I was not met by the Intourist because they didn’t expect me to come from Sochi.  They expected me to come from someplace else, from Minsk or someplace.  Anyway, this incident left quite an impression on me.  And that was I had been told--.  Again, he didn’t come for me so I arrived at the hotel very late.  I was carrying a gift.  It was on another trip.  I’m carrying a gift for somebody in Kiev.

VG:  Wait.  This is not the trip in 1964.

RS:  No.  That was—

VG:  A later trip?

RS:  A later trip.  Because the next trip was in ’65 with Hadassah and that had dramatic overtones about which I can tell you.  But now I’m relating a particular incident that happened—

VG:  On another trip.

RS:  ’67, probably.  Somebody from Brookline gave me a gift to deliver to her cousin in Kiev.  But because I don’t know what hotel I’m going to stay in, and Intourist didn’t come for me, again I raised hell.  But they finally came and took me to a hotel.  For the first time I know what hotel I’m in, but it’s late at night.  I’m hungry.  It’s very hot.  No air conditioning.  Well, I spent a miserable night.  The next morning, first thing, I went up to see the Intourist.  This time I said, “What the hell are you people doing to me?  Everywhere I go, the Intourist is not there to meet me.  And I haven’t got the right, because I don’t know where I’m supposed to go.”  “[In Russian].” “Don’t worry, Madame Schwaab, today I will make it worth your while.  You’ll forget all your grievances.” Here’s a representative of the Communist party.  “I personally [in Russian].  I will personally escort you to places that will warm the cockles of your heart.”  So I said, “Yes, but before I go any place you’re going to take me to a—where I can send a cable to the people who were expecting me yesterday.”  And I didn’t come until late at night.  “All I want to do is tell them what hotel I’m in and that I will be in at six o’clock so they can—

[End of Tape 6, Side A]

RS:  Yesterday was the sixth.

VG:  Okay.  This is February 7^th 1997.  And this is the fourth interview with Ronya Schwaab.  We’re together again in her home.  This interview is being conducted under the auspices of the Jewish Women’s Archive Temple Israel Oral History Project in Boston, Massachusetts. So let’s see, for starters actually what I want to do is comment on how you’re dressed, and why you’re dressed the way you are because of what you said about your past.  You’re coming back home with me for Shabbos dinner tonight.  It’s Friday afternoon.  And when I came in I said, as usual, you were dressed—you look lovely.  And you said you were wearing special Shabbos clothes.

RS:  Well they’re not strictly Shabbos clothes. But I dressed especially carefully selecting what I was going to wear because I was invited to Shabbos dinner at your home.  And the reason it seems to me that I do that is because when we lived in Europe, however poor we were came Friday we cleaned our house until it sparkled and Mama would dress us in whatever best clothes we had, modest to be sure. And she would put on the one and only Shabbos dress she had with a pretty kerchief.  And then she would [unclear].  She did the same thing when we came to America.  But by then my interest in the Shabbos lint was not as intense.  And gradually, I simply drifted away from it.  But the idea of being invited when someone else is observing Shabbos, presumably lighting candles, and actually said, “Come to our home for Shabbos dinner.”  Then I feel that recollections of what it was like are very vivid.  And I like to dress in the prettiest things I’ve got, not fancy, but something that will make me feel particularly festive and make the people who invited me to feel that I regard the invitation to Shabbos dinner as something very special.  That’s why I dressed the way I did.  [Laughs]

[Recording paused.]

RS:  I think because I was—

VG:  Wait a minute.  Let me--.  I turned the tape off.  So let me phrase the question so it’s on tape.  Okay?

RS:  Okay.

VG:  I’ve noticed in both reading your reminiscences and in all of our conversations that you are someone who without even being asked the question has given a great deal of thought to your emotional life and to your feelings that you’ve had.  And you talk about.  And in places where you don’t want to talk about it you say—like with your marriage.  This happened, it was difficult and I don’t want to talk about it.

RS:  That’s right.

VG:  But it’s clearly a thread that we pick up on all the way through when we talk about your life.  And I’m wondering, as I said, I find that unusual in general and particularly unusual for someone of your generation to be that conscious and articulate and public about your feelings.  So I’m wondering why that is.

RS:  Well, it’s really a complex question.  And the answer is complex.  However, I think that in my efforts to delineate the stages which prompted articulation in speaking and, also, the periods of emotional and spiritual growth, which necessitated that I articulate for myself and from those—to those with whom I speak why I think as I do.  Let me begin.  Ann used to say that I spoke like a peasant.  And the idea of my being able to speak in your language if I spoke like a peasant in my native tongue, which was Russian, surely I would translate it into ugly speech in English.  So as I have told you before the need to learn to speak English like an American became acute, with me, almost an obsession.  And so I learned to speak.  I practice speaking.  I participated in discussions in debates to enable me to think on my feet and to speak articulately.  Then when I became involved in political activities, considerably later, it became necessary that I be fully cognizant of the damage that certain elements might do to America and to my people.  And what I can do about counteracting it as an active American rather than the rose American.  That required speaking and articulating my ideas.  Then came a period of intense illness.  And that illness was a depression.  During that depression life ceased to have any meaning for me.  Until then I was a very enthusiastic person.  And it appeared as though I will never see the sun again.  Everything was bleak.  Of all the illnesses I’ve had, and I’ve had plenty, the one thing that I thought I would never come out of was the depression.  But when it finally lifted—the doctor kept assuring me that it will.  And it did, eventually.  When I began to realize that I’m feeling good again, that I’m seeing things--.  You know, like they say in the Bible, “they have eyes but they see not.  They have ears but they hear not.”  Suddenly I saw and suddenly I heard.  Not suddenly perhaps but gradually.  And so what happened was I began to be very concerned about other people’s problems in a much more compassionate, much more personal sort of way.  So when someone said, “I have a pain and I cannot move” or something, it wasn’t enough for me to say, “Sorry to hear that.”  This time I sat with the person and listened to what she had to say, or he.  And genuinely made an effort to help.  But in order for her to speak to me and tell me, she had to feel that I’m profoundly interested.  Because it was not just a superficial, “How do you feel today?”  You know, the way people say, “Have a good day.”  It was not that.  That was the beginning really of my spiritual growth.  And because I grew spiritually I learned a word called haname, haname, which means I’m here.  And suddenly the word took on such meaning so that whereas in the past, before the depression, I was naturally concerned with big things.  You know, Soviet Jewry, going to the Soviet Union, extricating Refuseniks.  But now I became in a very conscious way interested in the person with whom I was at the particular moment.  In order for them, or her, or him to recognize the genuineness of my feelings, I had to articulate how I felt because the only time people will open up is if you open up to them.  And so I would tell that part of my story in which I could illustrate that there was a way of getting over this particular thing and that this is the methodology, speaking and being heard.  I learned to listen.  All of that requires on the one hand your overwhelming attention to what someone else is saying, but until you’re able to articulate to them why you want them to speak, which means that you’re speaking.  And once they feel the genuineness of what you’re trying to say to them, they will respond.  But in addition to that, as you probably know, I’ve done a great deal of public speaking.  And there again, in some way, if it’s possible, you introduce things from your own life in order to relate it to the subject.  More importantly, you speak with such heart that people listen to you much more attentively than when you’re reading a technical paper.  I never read notes.  Never read a paper.  I may refer to a note.  But once I know what the thing is about I speak extemporaneously.  So the process that I’m trying to show you from the time when I learned the language until the present time, involved the absolute need to speak out both my emotional state, my problems, why I was depressed, what depressed me.  People don’t generally reveal these things about themselves.  I don’t mind revealing them because I’m not ashamed of them.  You see there is still a belief in some people’s mind of my own age that if there is cancer in the house they don’t talk about it.  If there are emotional problems, mental problems, it’s ashunder.  You don’t talk about it.  You kind of put it under the rug.  Well, one of the reasons, I think, that I have survived my problems is my ability to talk about it and illicit as much help as I possibly can from people who listen to me.  Briefly, that’s the reason why I, unlike most people my own age, have a tendency.  That doesn’t mean that I go out into the lobby and start talking about my emotional problems or how I resolve my emotional problems.  I can only give you one rather amusing incident.  I was recovering from a double pneumonia and I was in a recovery place, one of those.  And it was very, very unpleasant there.  I didn’t like it.  Dr. Nashala, my wonderful primary physician, came to visit me, but as a friend.  He wasn’t supposed to come in.  Only the physicians on duty were entitled to be there.  And I said to him, “Oh, Dr. Nashala, I’m so tired of having the kind of mind that I do.  I’m busy with everything.  I don’t sleep here.  Everything bothers me.  Can’t you do something about it?”  He said, “Like what?”  I said, “A lobotomy so I don’t have all of those problems.”  And he looked at me and he started to laugh.  And he said, “Ronya, if you had less of a mind than what you’ve got, you would have been dead a long time ago.  It’s because of your personality, because of your mind that you are here and you’ll come out of there.  You’ll go home and you’ll start doing your thing again.”  That’s the answer I think [unclear].

VG:  I was--.  I noted when we were talking about your childhood--.  When you talked about how you felt bad when your—because you felt like you were not a good looking child and you felt like—you were wondering whether there would be any space in your father’s life, for example, when you came to the United States—

RS:  Right.

VG:  And you said that was--.  I asked you did you talk about that with your mother.  And you said, you never talked about that with your mother.  That was the kind of thing that—

RS:  You never discussed that kind of thing with Mama.

VG:  So you moved out of a place where the focus was totally on survival really.  But somehow you cultivated your, and kept your emotional life alive.

RS:  Alive.  At the beginning, teachers encouraged me.  And they told me, “Tell her to get off your back” or some such thing.  And all of that was very significant to me.  In addition to that, although I was aware of the fact that I was not beautiful the way Ann was or as delicious as Semichka was; nevertheless, there was a young man going to college at the time—a cousin of ours—who told me that I was the best, the smartest, the most beautiful of the lot.  Now that is a very important stepping stone toward giving you self-confidence.  And that’s another story because that’s my first important--.  It wasn’t a love affair.  It was--.  He loved me.  I used him as a stepping stone.  I liked him.  But not the way I liked other fellows eventually.

VG:  Yes.  I think that actually—and I’ve lost track of which tape it was on.  But I think that you did talk about him on another tape.  So I think we have that, that relationship—

RS:  It’s possible

VG:  On tape.

RS:  But the people who influenced me in my development emotionally and spiritually were this young man, teachers, reading—tremendous amount of reading and Rabbi Mehlman.  And my studies, Biblical studies and the temple as a totality had enormous spiritual effect on me. 

VG:  That’s something I’d like to--.  We’ve touched on that and that’s something—

RS:  You see it’s difficult to give you details of that.  It isn’t the subject—subject like [unclear].  It’s from the moment I began going to the temple I felt for the first time that I belonged somewhere.  Because throughout my marriage the idea of religion was taboo.  And when I came into Temple Israel at that time there was Rabbi Gittelsohn.  But he, too, made me feel very welcome. And although he himself didn’t support me in the things I was doing, he didn’t regard my involvement with Soviet Jewry in his scheme things as important as his involvement in the black situation, the condition of the blacks.  Nevertheless, when there was an opportunity for him to have me up on the bemoth, he had me there and I lectured on Soviet Jewry.  And it was funny that when the first time Rabbi Friedman--.  Perhaps you don’t know—

VG:  [Unclear]

RS:  Invited me to speak one day.  I sat on the bemoth and I didn’t know the procedure was.  “Will I know what to do when to do it?”  And when Rabbi Friedman introduced me, he said, “Ronya just told me that she doesn’t know what the procedure is because she’s not familiar with procedures in temple.  And I can tell you only one thing.  She may not know the procedure in temple, but she’s the best in her search for redeeming Jews by doing what she’s doing for Soviet Jewry.”  Now these were all very, very encouraging and inspiring things for me to hear.  And while he didn’t swell my head to have all that praise showered upon me--.  And by the way, Rabbi Mehlman was very lavish in his praise of me.  And when you know, when a person who as a child has had very little praise and then as an adult she begins to receive praise from all sources, she begins to think of herself, “Maybe I’m not this ugly or not as stupid or not as dull, or not as whatever it is that I thought of myself.”  And it was a very encouraging way to get me to grow.  Praise has a great deal to do with the fact that I’m able to speak—speak openly.  Because it was through all of these various threads of encouragement and praise that I realized how important it was that I communicate with people.  And so--.  That’s a long winded answer.  But that’s why I speak freely about my emotional problems or about my spiritual growth or whatever else you can manage to ask about.  The only thing I don’t want to talk about—and I’ve already indicated—is that it doesn’t add to the body of influences that have made me who I am.  If anything, it was a negative period in my life.

VG:  You mean your marriage.

RS:  Yeah but even there--.  This is the amazing thing.  I--.  Shortly after we moved to Boston I was invited to give a book review because they had heard that I was supposed to be a good book reviewer.  And I didn’t drive at the time.  And I said to Gene when he came home from the office, “Would you drive me?  I have a speaking appointment today to do a book review.”  And he said, “I may be your lover, your husband, the father of your children, but I’m not your chauffeur.  If you’re smart enough to give book reviews and talk and have people listen to you, you should be smart enough to learn how to drive a car.”  And he wouldn’t drive me.  Well that was a challenge.  So naturally, I had to take a cab because I had no other way of getting there.  But that drove me to take lessons in driving.  And I must say that for the how many years that I drove--.  This was shortly after I came to Boston.  I don’t remember how many years.  I’m not good at figures.  But the point is, that it gave me freedom the likes of which I had never had.  And when I separated from Gene I was able to drive everywhere and deliver lectures everywhere.  And each time I drove the car some place I said, “Bless Gene for having forced me into it.”  So that even the negative things, indeed, only the negative things drove me to do things.  And the positive things inspired me to do things. 

VG:  It’s a good lesson.

RS:  Huh?

VG:  It’s a good lesson to know, to learn.

RS:  Well I hope to teach it to people.

VG:  I’m curious.  In the 1970s recently when the women’s liberation movement became, came onto the scene, or the second wave of the women’s liberation movement, were you involved with that at all?

RS:  Not politically, not in the sense that I joined a group.  But I became interested to the extent of reading and giving lectures on women and literature, women in the art, women in the theatre.  It opened up an area that I simply had not encompassed until then.  And to that extent, I was vitally interested.  But having been through a revolution, the period when it first began after the Friedan book was written, there was a reaction that I found onerous; this business of not wearing your bra, the business of burning your bra, you know, that kind of thing.  Or wanting to appear on the beach—if it’s all right for men to just wear trunks, why can’t women just wear trunks?  I found that onerous.  So I didn’t buy into the whole concept.  But I realized that at the outset of a revolution, extremes are indicated.  Then when the revolution finally settles in, it becomes involved in the principle things that are surely important, for example, women in religion.  I listened to every lecture that had to do with women.  And I listened to women from the Catholic church, for example, who wrote books about the terrible condition of women in the religious order of things.  And of course, I was interested in seeing how women have changed prayers virtually to make it neutral so it isn’t just male.  And some of it is very beautiful.  Or the women’s [unclear] or whatever it is, that appealed to me.  And in that I participate but not in the sense of becoming a member of the Friedan or of any other group.

VG:  The reason I asked you that question was because the women’s movement coined the phrase that the person was political.  And a lot of—during that time a lot of women began speaking about issues that had been identified as just belonging to that one person in an emotional kind of issue as actually having a political basis.  And so I was wondering whether or not your willingness to talk about your emotions in any way was impacted by that period of time.

RS:  Well, they in a sense--.  In a sense there was a personal element in it because unlike—because as a woman I was not trained, children were not—Jewish children were not allowed—girls were not, for example, boys studied from the time they were three or four or five.  Girls never learned anything.  I’m talking about the shtetl.  Then Mama used to say to me, “When you’re with a fellow, don’t be so smart.  Let him talk and you listen.  Don’t impress him with how smart you are.”  Okay.  When I was married there was a neglect of my needs but an emphasis on his needs.  And while secretly I harbored disappointment or disillusionment or anger or whatever it is, I was not yet able to articulate.  It’s only when I was ready to sever the relationship that I realized that I was taking a tremendous amount of guff.  And that it wasn’t necessary.  And the reason why, at that time—remember, this is thirty-five, forty years ago—in Jewish circles divorces were not looked upon very favorably.  Marriage was for life.  And so you felt a sense of guilt that you have failed.  And that, too, was a curse upon women because it was “now you’ve failed”.  The marriage failed largely because of him not of me.  Perhaps I contributed to it because it takes two to tango.  And I’m not—I’m not excusing myself from whatever contribution I might have made.  But one of the contributions that I definitely made was to assume that that’s the way it had to be, and therefore, complied with it.  And encouraged him to believe that he’s right and I’m wrong.  In that sense there was a personal element to it until I learned that my growth as a human being began after I remained alone.  That is something that is explicit in my own mind and I can clock it virtually. 

VG:  Can you explain that a little more?

RS:  Well, he regarded me as his little girl, his little slavey, his little this, his little that.  I could never discuss things with him on any kind of a level.  He was much more educated than I was and he always made me aware of the fact that, “who am I, a little Russian immigrant to challenge him on certain things.”  And I accepted it because not having had the education—he had a master’s degree—I felt he’s probably right.  What I discovered is that he was right to the extent that I was not qualified to discuss certain things with him.  But what he was wrong about is that he was preventing me from learning how to go about developing myself by constantly saying, “this is your role and this is the way it’s got to be.”  Whereas once I severed relations I went through a very lonely period, but then began to bloom.  And I have grown ever since.  And what is interesting the people who need me now, who heard me speak twenty-five or thirty and forty years ago, say, “I heard you speak and you were wonderful.  Do you still do it?”  And I say, “I’m better than ever.”  And they’re surprised when I tell them that because it almost seems self-congratulatory.  But the truth is that I am better than ever because I’ve in the meantime accumulated so much more experience, so much more knowledge and if I may say modestly, wisdom.  And so there is where my growth began and it’ll never abate.  It stopped during the time when I was depressed or very ill.  But it goes on every day.  I don’t think that there is a day when I don’t learn something that adds to the body of my knowledge.  Incidentally, do you remember you once asked me what I did, how we played?  And I said something, we didn’t have the real tools but we played something that resembled jacks.

VG:  Yes.

RS:  I came across it.  She is recalling things in her life.  She’s—

VG:  She is Tilly Olsen.  You’re reading Tell Me a Riddle.  That’s what you’re referring to?

RS:  That’s right.  The principal character in it is recalling something from her life, recalling many things.  And somewhere on page eighty, I believe it is.  I underlined how they were playing jacks.  And she describes, we didn’t have a ball and we didn’t have jacks.  We had stones, different colored stones, flat ones and round ones.  And we would toss one up and grab everything before the--.  And I thought you’d be interested in this.  I was describing it to you and now here it is three weeks later or a month later I read about it.  Now this, the reason I mention it, is because that is probably the most interesting thing about my life.  That when I read something, when I learn something the next day or the next week or the next month I read something that reinforces that knowledge.  And for that reason the knowledge becomes much more profound.  Now playing a game is not a most important thing.  But it’s happened with everything that I know.  Even when I was learning new vocabulary, if I learned a new word, a word I had never heard before, I was always enchanted and try to find sentences to use it.  And the next day in the newspaper or in a magazine or some place I would come across that word in a sentence where it made sense.  And that reinforced my knowledge of that particular word.  And by the way, I think one of the reasons I speak as articulately as I do because there are people who have their writing language and people who have their everyday language and then people who have their lecture language.  I don’t have that.  This is the way I speak all the time whether I’m giving a talk or whether I’m talking to you or whether I’m talking to the neighbor next door.  I don’t have separate vocabularies.  I have accumulated a good vocabulary and I’m able to articulate well.  But that’s because I use it all the time.  There are no special occasions for which I save it.

VG:  Did you want to read the—

RS:  Well, if I can find it.  But it doesn’t really matter.  You know about it.  It’s not very significant.  I’ll find it for you if you want me to.

VG:  No.  That’s okay.  We can—

RS:  It’s not a most important thing.

VG:  But while you brought that up I want to—I want to describe for the tape because you’ve been talking about you’re constantly learning and that will never end.  I want the—whoever’s listening to this tape to know what you’re surrounded by.  You’re--.  On the table next to you you have newspapers, books and pieces of books for various presentations and just learning that you’re doing.  So just tell me again what they are.

RS:  Okay.  Whenever I happened to be sitting I am surrounded by material which happens to be of interest at that particular moment.  And sometimes when I bring up the mail and my newspapers come, I’m in such a hurry to read what’s in the newspapers that I put aside what I was reading or studying and read the newspapers.  Because, by the way, all my reading material, with rare exceptions, relates in some way or another to what I love best, my own people.  So I receive three newspapers, the Forwards, the Jewish Advocate, and then on my bed is the New York Jewish Week.  Those are my three newspapers.  Then I have about four magazines: “The Jewish Congress Monthly”, “The Reformed Judaism” magazine, “Hadassah”, and “The Peddler”, “The Book Peddler”.  All of them I read.  In addition to that I read books. and most particularly when I’m preparing a lecture I read, underline, cut out those pieces that I will eventually present.  So that there is hardly a day when I’m not reading something that would be of interest Saturday afternoon in my discussion group or the day that I’m going to give a lecture or adds to the knowledge that I already have for my own purposes. 

And the result is that at my bedside there stands a chair because I don’t have room enough.  And on that chair are at least three or four books and some magazines.  And so every often if the book is very harrowing or very frightful I read it during the day.  And in the evening I read Paritz’s book, The New Middle East.  That’s not harrowing.  But he writes very well.  Well, that being the case, you can readily see I don’t visit in the dining room when we have our lunch here.

VG:  Do you eat in the dining room here?

RS:  We have a dining room but I’m one of the few people who doesn’t eat in the dining room. For one thing, I have difficult hearing other people.  It’s too noisy.  Too many people are talking.  And for another thing you sit at the table with other people and they chatter.  And you lose an hour, an hour and a half.  To me the time is precious because I haven’t got so much time left.  I take my tray upstairs, eat--.  It takes me fifteen or twenty minutes to eat what portion of it I’m going to eat, wash out the dishes, put away the rest of the food and get back to reading or to walking or to exercising, or to the things that are necessary to maintain my physical health, and my intellectual pursuits.  That’s how I spend my time.

VG:  Would you say you spend most of your day by yourself?

RS:  A good part of the day by myself, yes.  The only time I become lonely is on the weekend when I find myself with virtually nothing of particular interest and nobody to visit with.  I don’t like going down and visiting with large groups that gather downstairs.  Again, because I cannot hear when there’s a big circle of people I cannot hear what so and so is saying, and because I, frankly, don’t find what they talk about interesting.  So I find that there are times on a Sunday or on a holiday when I’m quite lonely because I don’t have any friends.  And the friends that I do have are very busy people.  Sophie, my musical friend, is likely to be teaching or giving a concert.  Sylvia, my other very good friend, is likely to be engaged with family or with people with whom—where she lives.  And there are very few of them.  So that what I have learned to do is those are the days that I try to begin to write again, reminiscences, too.  So far I’ve written some number of pages.  But as a general rule I’m alone a great deal.  And that, by the way, explains--.  During the years that I was very intensely busy there was not time to cultivate long friendships.  I began rather late.  Remember I was married for twenty-six years.  And when I remained alone I was at a loss what I was going to do.  I didn’t have a friend to my name because the couples that were friendly with us after a while severed their relations from us.  So it became a process of learning how to go about the business of cultivating new friends.  And what happened is I got involved in organizations. And there again, before I was there too long I became the president.  And as the president everybody admired you and everybody looked up to you.  But nobody would say, “come and have a cup of coffee with me.”  Then I lectured.  And at lecture time, two hundred, three hundred people all raved about me.  But when I got through I climbed into the car and went back alone.  Nobody out of those--.  They all now when they see me say, “Oh I heard you and you were absolutely wonderful.”  But in some respect they thought I was above them or something.  Well the truth is I’m a very amenable person.  But there was no time to cultivate the kind of friendships that girls have, you know, my best girlfriend or something.  I didn’t have a best girlfriend.  So what friends I have are more or less my own age, bedeviled with, more or less, the same physical problems that I have, unable to drive, which I cannot do anymore, and various other limiting elements that prevent this sort of friendship.

VG:  So you don’t have any close friends here in the building?

RS:  In the building this woman who called and asked whether she could come down, I have made her my friend.  But again, she thinks that I’m the cat’s meow. And I keep saying to her, “You know, you are so gifted with a sense of humor.  I may excel in whatever I do.  Don’t make me feel that I’m somebody special.”  She said, “But you are.”  I said, “Well, I’ll tell you something.  I once read a story about—I think it was Maurice Samuels who wrote the book.  I don’t remember now.  But it said, ‘Don’t try to be Moses.  Try to be the best who you are, because each one is altogether different.’  And we have different gifts and we have different personalities.”  And I encourage her to be my friend.  She happens to have lots of friends and family.  And even though she’s severely injured now—she broke her arm.  And I brought her food and that’s why she called to ask if I’m free for her to come down and return my dishes, which means we have a visit together.  But it’s very difficult to cultivate friends here because they’re truly limited or have their own friends from long ago.  There’s another woman with whom I’m very friendly.  But comes the weekend her friends come and snatch her away.  She plays bridge.  She goes to the movies every Saturday whereas I’m busy going to a discussion group every Saturday.  But in between we are kind of friendly.  But she’s not free to go places because she had her leg amputated.  And she’s a difficult person to suggest that we go to the museum together or that we go--.  And then neither she nor I drives.  And I wanted to go out and get flowers for you today.  Well where could I go around here, you know.  If you don’t have a car you’re limited.  So it’s difficult at age eighty-seven to develop friendships.  Nevertheless, I have developed a new friend, younger than I, driving.  And that’s a story by itself.  And that’s part of my spiritual growth.

VG:  Shall we have that story since you’re at it?

RS:  Well, I was--.  My son’s illness, this son’s illness, Gene’s, has had a very devastating affect upon me.  And Harvard Community Health Plan has offered us a course, a six-week course, conducted by a Dr. Budd, B-U-D-D, which he developed, which had to do with your personal health improvement: physical, emotional.  And it consisted of six weeks, an hour and a half each.  There were about thirty or forty people—thirty-five people in the group.  And what we did was discuss our problems and see why we react the way we do.  And if there is anything can be done to change our reactions.   Now my reactions to tragedy are very emotional reactions.  It has something to do, I think, with my ethnicity because with us it was always, “Oy vey” and you know what will happen tomorrow.  We weren’t satisfied with the tragedy that was happening in the particular moment.  But we were always conscious of whatever it is that will happen next time because we were always in a threatened situation.  And I imbibed and inherited those characteristics.  So when we were presented with specific questions, the first question he asked me when he got to me was “Was there anything that you could have done to stop your son from having a severe heart attack?”  My son was fifty-six years old at the time it was happening.  He lived in Stolton.  He had his own life, hardly ever--.  And the answer was, “Absolutely no.”  Well then he said, “Is there anything you can do now to change his condition?”  “Yes, I could love him.  I could take care of him to some extent.  But I can’t alter the fact that he is still very vulnerable.”  “Well is there anything you can do in the future which would prevent him from having another serious heart attack possibly death?”  I said, “I can give him my love.  I can try to nurture him.  I can help him financially a little bit.  But I can’t stop things from happening.”  So he said, “But your feeling of depression and frustration is based on the fact that you grieve over what happened and suffer over what might happen.”  And he said, “If you live in the past and you project into the future you will be very unhappy.”  And as a result of taking that course I tried very hard not to call Eugene every day, twice a day.  I don’t call him at all now.  And it took a great deal of discipline.  I wait for him to call me.  Because I was becoming intrusive in my great solicitude and my great concern I was passing onto him a feeling of apprehension that perhaps he didn’t have. Then before three weeks are out, the doctor suggested that we select a buddy.  And the woman sitting next to me, a very attractive woman—to me she looked very young.  I said to her, “Well, we’re the only two older people here. Everybody here is very young.  Would you like to be my buddy?”  She said, “Oh yes, let’s.”  And we became buddies.  And eventually, which meant we had to call each other.  We had to give each other brief biographies.  Eventually we became very good friends.  As so now Nita and I are good friends.  And we even went to the movies a couple of days ago.

VG:  What did you see?

RS:  We saw Shine.

VG:  How did you like it?

RS:  I was so depressed.  I was stunned because what I was reading—not this book, but the one called In This Dark House, the father terrorizes the children.  And then she’s severely crippled emotionally for the rest of her days—

[End of Tape 6, Side B]

VG:  This is the side A of the second tape of the fourth interview with Ronya Schwaab.  It’s February 7^th 1997.  Go ahead.

RS:  I insisted that he take me for to send a cable to these people to tell them the name of the hotel and what time I would be at home. And finally he agreed.  When we got there I went over to the window, began writing the name and the address, handed it for the money and she said, “No that address has been changed.”  And I said, “What is it?”  And she gave it to me.  He in two steps was over me.  And he said, “I told you I want to help you.”  I said, “I told you, I don’t need your help.”  But in the few moments that he was overlooking my rewriting it with the new address, he did something.  And I don’t know what it was, until later.  He took me to a nursery where they take care of newborn babies while the mothers work.  And he said, “See, you should be interested in the wonderful things that we do, not in your complaint about Intourist not coming on time.”  Fine.  We visited for an hour or two and we were driving back to the hotel.  At that time I was smoking and I didn’t bring my cigarettes with me.  And women are not allowed to smoke in the open in Russia at that time.  I said, “You know, may I have a cigarette.”  “Oh,” he said, “take the entire box,” he says.  “I’m so delighted.”  I insisted I don’t want the box because the cigarettes are very, very strong.  I just needed to charge up a little bit.  But he insisted.  I took out one cigarette, put the rest in my pocket.  Smoked for a while and finally we got home.  And when I came into the hotel, and unloaded what I had in my bag, I threw the box on the table.  And on the back of it was the name and the address of the people to whom I had sent the telegram.  And my heart failed.  Here I am supposedly concerned with Soviet Jewry betraying them by giving him an address and a name.  And he saw it, because I was rewriting the cable.  I was sick, sick.  But he called for me in the afternoon and we went for the afternoon excursion.  They were not supposed to come until six o’clock in the evening.  As we’re walking a woman comes over and she says to me, “You’re an American?”  I said, “Yes.”  “Will you take this letter and mail it while you’re in America to my relatives in Chicago?”  And I said to myself, “Either she’s a plant, or she’s stupid.”  Here I am standing with a member of the Intourist and she’s offering me a letter to mail, because she doesn’t dare mail it from Russia.  I said, “You have a post office here, and you can mail it yourself!” Because I wasn’t taking any chance.  And he said to me, “That’s the way to handle the situation.”  Nearly six o’clock, I’m waiting for them to come home to come to see me.  And I’m trembling.  And finally six o’clock on the dot they knock on the door.  And I open it and there are three of them with flowers to come to greet me.  Russians are very much flower oriented.  And I said, “Ronichka, Ronichka, we know that you brought us gifts but we’re interested in seeing you.”  And I said, “Wait a minute.  Before you are being so friendly with me, I betrayed you.”  “[Unclear]?”  “What does it mean?”  I said, “Look.  Look at this box.  I sent you the cable to let you know.”  “Oh”, they said, “don’t worry about it.  We were here yesterday because we knew you were here.  You were due here yesterday early evening.  So we came immediately.  And we had to give our name and we had to give our address.  And he’s being over conscientious.  They already know that you’re going to see us.”  Well, we walked--.  They said, “This is no place to talk.  Let’s go out.  We’ll take you to our house and we’ll have supper together and we’ll talk.”  And they took me to their house.  And they said, “Don’t feel badly.  They knew we were there.  They have our name.”  Because they said, “We are used to that sort of thing.  One of the men who came had spent thirteen years in Stalin’s Gulag without ever having committed any sin whatsoever, simply because he was Jewish.”Well, I went to their house and they used a common kitchen with three other tenants.  Nevertheless, we spent an evening talking, visiting.  Not political, just [unclear], how her husband, you know, the people who sent them the gift.  The woman in whose house I was is the person to whom I delivered the gift.  But there were other members of the family.  The following day I was going away from Kiev to wherever I was going.  And she said, “Can I see you tomorrow morning?”  I said, “Sure, come and have breakfast with me at eight o’clock.”  She said, “Fine.”  For the sake of this conversation, her name was Mary.  About seven thirty, someone knocks on my door.  I open it and there was another woman who was at the house, also a cousin.  I said, “What are you doing here?”  She said, “I know you had an appointment with Mary for eight o’clock.  But I needed to see you, because I know what she’s seeing you for.  She wants more things for Tunya to send to her.  But I came to tell you, I need it more than she does.”  So she came a half-hour earlier.  I felt the indignity, the idea of coming to beg earlier so that Ann or Mary or whatever her name was wasn’t going to get it.  That she was going to get it.  And that was when I began to realize that these people were a product of their environment where dignity, and pride and courtesy didn’t figure.  You simply grabbed what you could, when you can, no matter at whose cost.  And so when subsequently I lectured on the Soviet Union and people began telling me how discourteous and how aggressive the people are when they come here, I defended them.  And I said, “If you were brought up in that environment, I wonder how courteous you would have been?” And they complain that they’re not religious.  “They don’t want to go to shul.”  And I said, “If you had been denied and punished for being Jewish, and the idea of going to shul was tantamount to taking your life in your hands -- here we are in America.  How often do you go to shul?  How many Jews do we have here who don’t go to shul?”  And I used to have to argue with members of my audience to defend them.  And to this day I do it, because we have a large group of Russians who live here.  And they don’t behave the way we expect them to behave.  And I try to explain to the people here that they’re a product of their culture and their environment, and that we have to wait until the future generation for them to become Jews again.  And that’s at least two of the stories.  Then there was the third one.  In 1965, that I know for a fact, I went with Hadassah.  And we went as an invited group.  There were twenty-four, all specialists in one field or another. There was a woman who was in charge of nursing at Hadassah hospital, a woman who was in charge of ophthalmology, a woman who was in charge of surgery.  Each one knew her very special field and what Hadassah was doing in those fields.  I was invited simply because I had been to Russia before in 1964 when I visited my family, and because I spoke Russian, so I was the intra-family interpreter.  Because they assign you a very competent interpreter. And we were invited everywhere.  We were invited into hospitals where, with the interpreter, the person who knew the particular area was able to speak with a great deal of authority, and express to them that there was a great deal of wonderful work they were doing researching their field.  Then one day Charlotte Jacobsen who was the leader of the group and who became a very important person in Jewish affairs here said to us, “I want us all to go to Babi Yar.”

VG:  Actually, I was just--.  As you were starting to talk about this trip I was trying to remember whether you had talked about it on another tape.  And in fact, now that you’re starting this story, yes, you told the story about Babi Yar and how you finally ended up going there.

RS:  So--.  But there were many other experiences because I went subsequently.  But by then it was not a matter of not knowing what to expect.  It was a matter of knowing what to expect, but knowing how to handle the situation.  Because when I was there in 1970—I believe that was the last time I was there—at least—or ’67, I don’t remember now which particular year it happened.  I believe it was the last time I was there.  I had been—had become friendly with a person who had relatives here.  He was a very knowledgeable man.  And his name was Yaakov.  And I used to -- whenever I got to Russia generally contacted him from outside by telephone from outside by telephone, not from the hotel, because those were all bugged all the time.  And Yaakov told me about his life story.  But he had been connected with the Jewish theatre, which was very successful.  And there was a famous man, whose name now eludes me, but I’ll dig it up, who was one of the most active.  He was a director.  He was an actor.  He was renowned the world over.  And Yaakov was a member of that group, and that was his field.  And then when the Stalinists disbanded everything that was Jewish -- literature, printing, movies, theatres, synagogues, schools -- they were determined to obliterate memory on the part of the Jews.  Yaakov remained without work to do because he was a luftmensch.  He wasn’t trained in any particular--.  He was a highly intellectual man.  But he wasn’t trained in anything in particular—

VG:  Now luftmench is—

RS:  A luftmensch is—

VG:  Luft is air, right?

RS:  An air man, a person of air.

VG:  Meaning an intellectual.

RS:  Huh?

VG:  Does that mean an intellectual?

RS:  It doesn’t really mean an intellectual.  But an intellectual who does not have training for anything else.  He thought of an idea.  Russia is full of rivers and ships that go to different--.  The Soviet Union was huge, is huge.  And ships that plied the inner rivers are filled with people going and coming to the big cities.  He suggested to the department of culture that it would be a wonderful idea, since people who live in Moscow and Leningrad and Kiev had museums to go to, why don’t we mount floating exhibits?  Have the artist come along, whenever the ship stops or while it’s in the process of going, lecture to the people, explain to them what art is all about, and have them see that.  And that way, he said, we will be able to really develop a cultured people by simply bringing art to them, instead of having them come to us.  And they thought it was a wonderful idea.  And it was experimented with, and it was one of the great successes.  So every time that I went to Russia—after the first time—I met with Yaakov, and he would tell me the glories or show me newspaper clippings of the praise he got for doing the work.  After a while there were many ships that were doing these and many people who were responsible for seeing to it that all of this took place.  The last time I was there—I believe it must have been in ’70—he said, “You know, everybody that had anything to do, especially the leaders, that had anything to do with organizing this project are being rewarded.  All of us are being allowed to go overseas to visit in Poland and in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and in Rumania.”  They were not allowed to go west, but they were allowed to go to their satellite countries.  And he said, “I’m the only one, because one other man who will not be able to go.”  He was the creator of it.  The reason was that each one who was in that field had to fill out an application telling about his background, whether there was anybody Jewish in his family.  And Yaakov couldn’t deny he was Jewish.  His grandfather was a member of the Bund when he was alive.  His great grandfather was a rabbi.  He said that’s why he was disqualified.  And nobody but he and one other man who was Jewish could not go abroad.  And if I needed further proof of the misery, the bias, the ugliness, the horror --.  The last thing that happened in Russia that I was aware of was on August 12^th 1952, when a group of Russian/Jewish intellectuals, thirteen of them, were shot in the Blanca, the prison outside of Moscow.  Now they were ardent Communists, they were—they did everything that Stalin wanted them to do.  They were members of the anti-Fascist group that Stalin organized when Hitler invaded Russia.  Because he wanted them to go—since they were Jews, they would have access to Jews in the west.  He wanted them to go to plead with the Jews in the West to influence the government to open the second front and to support them financially.  And they did.  And they came back very encouraged by the response on the part of the people here. But when Stalin was through with them in 1952, just before he died, he had them executed because they had had contact with Jews outside.  And so to this day, it usually comes the same day when we observe the holiday called—

VG:  Tisha Ba’av.  Is it Tisha Ba’av?

RS:  Tisha Ba’av.  And we observe that day.  And for years I performed in skits having to do with the thirteen who [unclear].  Well, that was my experience.  So with that kind of a—with that kind of a background in what was going on there it was logical that I should devote myself to the Refuseniks and to other people.  And that’s why I went there so many times.  And then was able to write petitions for them, was able to do all sorts of things that other people couldn’t do.  I didn’t belong to any organization.  And I wasn’t bound by any of the restrictions that organizations placed upon people.  I could do what I wanted to do.  I paid my own way.  And so if you ever speak to Rabbi Mehlman you’ll know what I was doing. 

VG:  Let’s pick up on this next time.

RS:  Sure.

VG:  Okay?  Because now it’s time for-

RS:  [Unclear]

VG:  Shabbos.  It’s already Shabbos.  It’s time for dinner. 

RS:  Okay.

[End of Tape 7, Side A]

[Side B of Tape 7 is blank.]

VG:  Okay.  So today is--.  Let’s see what is today—

RS:  Eighteenth.

VG:  June 18^th—

RS:  Tomorrow’s the nineteenth.

VG:  Nineteen ninety-seven.  This is Vicki Gabriner.  I’m with Ronya Schwaab.  And we’re doing--.  I forgot how many.  This is, I think, the fifth interview with Ronya.  And this is side A.  And today we’re going to go over some photographs.  Okay.  So this is a photograph from the Jewish Times.

RS:  That’s right.

VG:  It’s says “reaffirmed support for Soviet Jewry,” and it’s a picture of you and Ted Kennedy is in the background—

RS:  And other members of American Jewish Congress.

VG:  Okay.  Let’s see.  What’s the year here?  This is 1983, May 5^th 1983.

RS:  Yeah.  It’s very disjointed.

VG:  That’s okay.

RS:  But that was the picture of that—

VG:  Oh yeah.  This is the picture you love.  It’s from December 12^th 1985.  And it’s a picture of Ruth Bonner, mother of Yelaina Bonner, sitting and holding her face in her hands.  And it’s—

RS:  It’s one of--.  Actually she looks like the Madonna to me.

VG:  Yeah.

RS:  You know, she has an extraordinary face.  She has since then died.

VG:  And you knew her.  You knew Mrs. Bonner?

RS:  Not only did I know her, I saw to it that she was supported.

VG:  You want to say anything about that?

RS:  She refused to become—to give up her Russian citizenship, because she wanted to go back to Russia eventually. And the result is that she was receiving no assistance from the government, which normally would come to her the way most of the immigrants who came from Russia received help.  She lived with her daughter and son-in-law, and they were not particularly kind to her.  At that time she smoked heavily and she needed money to buy a card, to send a thank you card to me, for example, or a birthday card.  And she needed money.  So I went to Rabbi Mehlman, and every month for a long time he gave me $50 and I converted it into cash and gave it to her.  And then one month she said, “No more.  I don’t need it anymore, because I’m going back to Russia.”  Before then her daughter came here and I spoke with her, with Yulaina.  And I said, “You know your mother is hell-bent on going back to Russia.”  And Yulaina said, “See if you can induce her not to come.”  But she’s an elderly lady and she’s not well, and her wishes have to be respected. 

So she went back.  And apparently left for at least a year, or possibly longer.  And then she contracted pneumonia, and she died in Moscow.  But she reveled being in Russia, in the culture with which she was familiar and the language.  She never attempted to learn English.  So, in some respects, it was necessary for her to go back there.  Besides, she was with Yulaina during that time because Sacharov [Soviet human rights activist and physicist awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 – ed.] was still under arrest, you know.  And she died, apparently, before he was set free.  So that’s the story.

VG:  In what year did she die, do you know?

RS:  I don’t remember.  All I can tell you is that if you can establish the date of when that picture was taken—

VG:  Yeah.  The picture, the newspaper date here is December 12^th 1985.

RS:  Eighty-five.  So she probably went back around, I would only have to estimate it, around ’87.  But at best it’s a guess.

VG:  Right.

RS:  Why I kept this was because for a period my name was—

VG:  Okay.  Let’s just say--.  Let’s just say what it is.

RS:  Yeah.  There’s a picture of me, and an announcement that I’m a lecturer.  And I’m there called Ronnie Schwaab. And the reason for it is that my future mother-in-law, before I was married, disapproved of me, because I was an Eastern European Jew.  She was German.  And so to please her I changed my name to an American name, Ronnie.  And for a period this was how I was being advertised.  There are people who to this day call me Ronnie.  But at the time when I separated from my husband I said no more.  I’ve already had my name changed to Rose at the--. When my father applied for his citizenship papers they asked, “How do you spell Ronya?”  “I don’t know.”  They said, “Call her Rose.”  So until I graduated from high school, I had my full name Ronya on my diploma.  After that, I met Gene and tried to comply with what his mother wanted.  She disapproved of me.  So I became Ronnie.  For many years I was Ronnie.  And this is the announcement of my—

VG:  Right.  It’s interesting though.  It says here Ronnie Schwaab.  And then next to your name is an asterisk.  And then down here it says, “also known as Ronya,” in quotes.

RS:  Because I was very unhappy with Ronnie.  So I thought that might be of interest to you.

VG:  Yes.

RS:  This is me conducting a Seder. 

VG:  Okay.  This is conducting a Seder—

RS:  At—

VG:  Here?

RS:  It was three years ago.  And it was, to be precise, April 14^th.  And two of my grandchildren were there with me at the time.

VG:  Is this one of them in the picture?

RS:  Yeah.

VG:  This is who?

RS:  The other one will be elsewhere.  I guess that’s—that’s Allison.  You don’t know anything about Allison.  Some day I’ll tell you, because it’s a complicated story.

VG:  Allison is your—the grandchild you found late in life.

RS:  Yes.

VG:  You’ve talked about her.

RS:  Okay.

VG:  So this is--.  Just for the tape again, this is a picture of Ronya.  You’re standing with your glasses kind of tipped down toward the end of your nose and you’re reading from a paper.

RS:  I’m reading a prayer.

VG:  Reading a prayer.  Okay.

RS:  Oh, here is the same—both grandchildren.

VG:  Uh-huh.  Okay. 

RS:  Daniela and Allison.

VG:  Okay.  So Daniela is this person?

RS:  Yeah.

VG:  Okay.  Daniela’s on your left and—

RS:  And she’s speaking to a neighbor who is sitting next to her.

VG:  Yeah.  Actually let’s see--.  As you--.  Well the picture of you with your two grandchildren to your right is Daniela and to your left is Allison.

RS:  Is Allison.

VG:  Okay.

RS:  Okay.  Well, this might interest you.  Dean was dying.  Dean.  And I was very anxious to show him that I’m wearing the gifts he gave me.  So I had a friend of mine come here.  He took a picture.  These—both necklaces, the one I’m wearing now, the jade and the big jade that he gave me—

VG:  Beautiful.  Exquisite.  Are the earrings too are from him?

RS:  No.  The earrings I had to match.

VG:  Beautiful.

RS:  Then he gave me a Chinese jacket, which had a history to it.  And it was very beautiful, but I never have occasion to wear it.  In order to show the sleeves I had to extend my arms, so that they will see what it looks like.

VG:  Beautiful.  I can see why you wouldn’t have too many occasions to wear this, though. 

RS:  No. No.

VG:  But it’s exquisite.

RS:  He gave me a ring, a jade ring, which I cherish.  And this picture was taken to show two things.  First of all, he gave me this black cashmere stole.  It’s not a stole, it’s a long one.  It wraps around—

VG:  A wrap, yeah.

RS:  Absolutely elegant.  Secondly, I had to show the ring.

VG:  These pictures are all very well done because you posed exactly the way you need to for the particular item to be—

RS:  Because I wasn’t—

VG:  Seen clearly.

RS:  Yes.  I wanted it to be visible.  Okay.  This--.  I belonged to the Yiddish class.  And one day we were doing—bringing in some crazy hat and tell a story about it, you know, that type—in Yiddish.  So someone loaned me this hat because I didn’t have and we took pictures.

VG:  And did you have a story to go with it?

RS:  Huh?

VG:  Did you have a story to go with it?

RS:  No.  I don’t remember.  I made up a cock and bull story, because it wasn’t my hat.

VG:  And this photograph on the back is dated December 1991.

RS:  I’m amazed that I have that recorded.  And finally, this doesn’t have anything at all.  I was in Florida with a friend.  And my niece gave me this lovely jacket.  And it was the first time I’d had a chance to wear it.  In fact, Sema has exactly the same jacket, and she wore it at the occasion last Sunday.  Well of course—

VG:  What, the National Yiddish Book Center opening?

RS:  Yeah.

VG:  Uh-huh.  Yeah.  This is--.  So Babette gave this to you, Sema’s daughter?

RS:  Sema’s daughter. 

VG:  Yeah.

RS:  Gave it to me as a gift.

VG:  And her daughter’s name is Babette, right?

RS:  Her name is Babette.

VG:  Right.

RS:  Well, she’s the one who wrote this book.

VG:  Right, which we--.  I want to talk about that further on in the tape, too.  So, anyway, in this photograph you’re wearing—it’s a jacket that’s white with purple, red and—

RS:  I’ll show it to you if you want, because it’s beautiful.  Well, these are all letters—

VG:  Okay.  Let’s—

RS:  But I’ll tell you, some of them are very personal.

VG:  Oh, okay, well—

RS:  It says they were from a man who was admiring me.

VG:  Oh well, if it’s too personal—

RS:  Huh?

VG:  If it’s too personal we won’t—

RS:  Well, no, it doesn’t say anything, but he gives a description of me.

VG:  I see.  “She’s barely five feet.  She is so well proportioned and carries herself so that she looks tall.  From her trim ankles to her becoming hairdo, she exudes femininity.”

RS:  Right.

VG:  Woo!  Okay. 

RS:  This, I don’t think belongs here.  But I thought you might be interested to see it.  I refused.  And he said that he still thought that I would consider it.

VG:  Right.  Well, these you might want to keep in a--.  You probably wouldn’t want these to be exhibited at Temple Israel.

RS:  I don’t think so.

VG:  No.  You keep it for the Ronya—keep it for the Ronya Schwaab archives.

RS:  Well, I thought you’d be interested.

VG:  I’m absolutely interested.

RS:  I mean, there are others.

VG:  This says, “Ronnie, whatever house you rule will be made into a home by your soaring spirit.  My it always be overflowing with love and health and beauty and sweetness and happiness—

RS:  He continued to love me for years until he died.

VG:  Okay.  This is from 1966.

RS:  Self-bound.

VG:  So—

RS:  I don’t know how I managed to save it.

VG:  I don’t know but you must have saved these--.  Probably you should will your papers to a—or give your papers to a library or something and—

RS:  Why would they be interested in a lover pursuing a--.  I don’t think so.  Dean.  Piece by piece—

VG:  Let’s see.  What is that?

RS:  Well, that’s a poem that was written by somebody who’s somebody’s son that I know.  And it’s a very good poem. 

VG:  Uh-huh.  Oh this is—

RS:  Oh, this is from Temple Israel.

VG:  Yeah.  Okay.

RS:  I don’t--.  It doesn’t belong—

VG:  No.  Don’t need that.

RS:  And what’s this?  I don’t know what this is.  You’ll have to—

[Recorder is turned off and then back on.]

VG:  This is a letter dated April 19^th 1995, which is a thank you note from Kathy Glickweil and the Newton Public Library thanking you for donating your book to them, which I think that’s--.  We’ll put that in our file.

RS:  Okay.  This, you see, when Sakharov--.  We worked for Sakharov particularly.  But ours was a Jewish organization.  And when it was suggested that we ought to do a concert, a tribute to Sakharov, I felt that it was important that we also include Sharansky, and at that time Prolovsky [sp?], because these were two Jews.  And they were working for the same thing, for freedom.  And it was at Symphony Hall, and I was the chairman of that function.  It was an enormous function.  And this is the announcement.  And it’s called “In Praise of Courage.” 

VG:  Uh-huh.  And this is dated February 9^th 1981.

RS:  Yeah.

VG:  Okay.  So here comes a stupid question.  Sakharov is not Jewish?

RS:  He’s not Jewish.

VG:  Not Jewish.  Okay.

RS:  But Yulaina, Yulaina is Jewish and her mother is Jewish.  But they never recognized their Jewishness particularly.  However, her mother spent--.  “I would like to thank you for volunteering time out of your busy schedule for my project.  I appreciate your support and cooperation of putting it together.  Always be--.”  I don’t know who it is.  I don’t what this project is.  I was busy on every front.  These are pictures of Dean.  That’s Dean.

VG:  Huh.  Now he looks like—

RS:  He doesn’t look like me and he doesn’t look like his father.  But he’s a combination of both. 

VG:  He looks like Donald Sutherland, the actor.

RS:  Okay.

VG:  Yeah.

RS:  He was so handsome.  He was so beautiful.  There he is walking in England.  These were taken of him in England. 

VG:  Beautiful.

RS:  Here I am with my other granddaughter, with Jocelyn. 

VG:  Okay.  Where is this taken?

RS:  This was taken in—not far from Woods Hole.

VG:  This says Glacier Park Waterfall.

RS:  That’s right.  But I was visiting her in Woods Hole, and we traveled together to interesting points.

VG:  Glacier Park Waterfall is in where, what state?

RS:  It’s probably in Wyoming.

VG:  Oh.

RS:  But I’m not sure.  This is—these are the two girls: Jocelyn and Daniela when they were very, very young.

VG:  Okay.  These are winter shots, in black and white shots -- they’re beautiful -- hats down over their eyes.  Yeah.

RS:  And here I am with Jocelyn again.  And she wrote where we were.

VG:  So you didn’t go to Woods Hole because Woods Hole is in—

RS:  I know that it was--.  That’s me in Florida.

VG:  This someone’s house?

RS:  Huh?

VG:  That’s someone’s house?

RS:  Yeah.  By the way, this is the mother—we won’t put it in—but this is the mother of Allison, the birth mother.  And here Gene and Allison and I are at the restaurant together.  And here’s Allison and I—

VG:  That’s a nice shot under this painting that you have of your kids.

RS:  Yeah, because don’t forget, her father is in this painting.

VG:  Yeah.

RS:  And here’s Allison, and her birth mother and I.  Because these are all, to me, very interesting pictures.  They have nothing to do with--.  Here’s Allison, and I and Gene.  This was taken in my old apartment because I’m still standing next to a chair -- that was quite an unusual thing.  [Laughter]  Me in an apron.

VG:  Party at Ronnie’s, May 8^th 1991.

RS:  What did I say?

VG:  Party at Ronnie’s, May 8^th 1991.

RS:  Yeah.  I was still partying in those days.  That’s the same time.  That’s the same, Dean.  Okay, by the way, this is Jocelyn as she looked when she put up her hair.  She looks very mature there, but she’s a handsome woman.  Daniela is a beauty.  None of them have anything to do with you.  The rest are all letters of praise for my reminiscences.

VG:  Let’s see.  Well those, I think, are relevant. 

RS:  They are relevant so look at them.

VG:  Okay.  Wait.  You have--.  And there’s a photograph in here.

RS:  Oh, yeah, these are the Russians.  Yeah.  Those are the ones that I’m saving for the Russians.

VG:  And who are they?

RS:  They are my uncle and aunt.  Now I read the back of it and it says, “[in Russian]”, I guess cousins.  And it’s Rosa and Yaakov [in Russian].  And they don’t give a date.  But that was--.  There should be another one.  There is a picture of him.

VG:  Okay.  So these are--.  These two people are your—

RS:  My--.  He’s my uncle and she is his wife.

VG:  And your uncle’s name is Yaakov?

RS:  Yaakov, Yaakov Vaskapinsky [sp?].

VG:  Okay.

RS:  And here he is with his first wife who died in childbirth.

VG:  Okay.  So—

RS:  And this is Yaakov.

VG:  I just want to identify it--.  You know, what I’d like to do actually, if we could, is make copies of these, because these are—

RS:  Go ahead but you have to return them because I have to give them to cousins who—his children and grandchildren who have arrived in New York.

VG:  These are the people who found you—who found you finally or who you found?

RS:  Through my reminiscences. 

VG:  Right.  And this person, this single shot, is of whom?

RS:  That’s the same Yaakov as a—in recent years before he died.

VG:  Okay.  So the chronological order of these is first there’s a picture of him with his wife and his wife is wearing a tie.  And the second picture—

RS:  Is of him with his second wife, Rosa.

VG:  And they’re in winter—they’re in winter garb.  His wife is wearing a collar that kind of comes up.

RS:  There should be more.

VG:  And then there’s a single shot of him.

RS:  Now these two—he had another sister, plus my mother.  Her name was Elena.  And these are Elena’s grandchildren.

VG:  Uh-huh.

RS:  That’s one picture and here she is again.

VG:  And they are?  Where are they?

RS:  They’re in Russia.

VG:  They’re in Russia.

RS:  But I couldn’t see them because they lived in Gomel whereas my uncle lived in Minsk.  So my Aunt Elena came to Minsk when I was visiting with them.  You see I can’t read all of that.  Some of it is not very clear.  But it gives the date at least, which is ’60, 5.3.60.

VG:  Right.

RS:  But there are much more current pictures and I don’t know where they are of the cousins who came to America recently.

VG:  Tell me-- you know, I can’t remember because I didn’t have a chance actually to go over all the tapes before we came here this morning. But the story of how you found these people is that your—

RS:  Well, these people--.  I don’t seem to have the other pictures.  I must have them in a separate envelope.  The people that I visited in Russia were my uncle and his wife and their daughter and their son.  And they are--.  My Aunt Elena came to Minsk so that she would be there.

VG:  Okay.  So this uncle who is in this picture you saw when you went to Russia?

RS:  That’s right.

VG:  Okay.  And—

RS:  And Elena, his wife, of whom I don’t have a picture came to—

VG:  You mean his mother, his mother—

RS:  To her brother’s home in order to visit me.  But the children did not because she was protecting both her daughter and the grandchildren, because they lived in a restricted area.  And they couldn’t—they couldn’t receive anything from me.  They couldn’t correspond with me.  She would write a letter to me, put it—send it to Yaakov, Yaakov put it into his envelope.  When I send them packages, I send packages that were priceless for Yaakov and his family and for Elena and her family all together.  And he would then distribute it because Elena refused to receive anything from the United States because the government was up against that sort of thing.

VG:  And let me just say--.  Elena was his—

RS:  Sister.

VG:  Sister, okay.

RS:  Yeah.  I must find a picture of those who are now in America whom I have met as a result of the--.  And that I don’t seem to have here.  So it must be somewhere else.

VG:  Shall we go on a little search?

RS:  Well—

VG:  Right now—

RS:  Just--.  I know approximately where they might be.

VG:  I’ll pause this and we’ll—

[Recording paused.]

RS:  That’s a replica.

VG:  Yeah.  And this was what, again?  This was—

RS:  That was when he died, I had replicas made, about a hundred of them, and people took them.

VG:  And this was a sign that he made for you once when he was at your house?

RS:  That’s right.

VG:  “Today’s a day for monumental achievement.  Awaken me.”  And this you have hanging in your bedroom, yeah? 

RS:  Yeah.

VG:  It’s beautiful.

RS:  Of course it fell down.  Someone’s going to have a hard time disposing of my things.  They’ll just take them wholesale and throw them out.

VG:  No.  They’re going to take them wholesale and put them in the library.

RS:  Well, I know that there are additional pictures of me when I was nine months old.

VG:  You should put me in charge of your papers, Ronya.

RS:  Huh?

VG:  You should put me in charge of your papers.  I’ll dispose of them.

RS:  It never occurred to me to think of that.  I wish somebody would take care of them.

VG:  You wish someone would take care of your papers?

RS:  My papers.

VG:  You want--?  I would be delighted to be assigned that task.

RS:  I could write out a—

VG:  Yeah.

RS:  The only thing that the children may want are things that pertain to them.

VG:  Yeah.

RS:  But, for example, I have bunches and bunches of book reviews.

VG:  Yeah.  Put me in your will.

RS:  Huh?

VG:  Put me in your will.

RS:  Well, the will has already been written.

VG:  Or write a statement.  Yeah.

RS:  I’m going to write a statement, which will—

VG:  Who’s the executor of your will?

RS:  Lisa, my niece, Eli’s daughter.  Now wait a minute.  Maybe we have them here.  [Rustling.]

VG:  Is she coming here today, Lisa?  Is that what you said?

RS:  Yeah.  She’s coming in at twelve thirty.

[Recording paused.]

RS:  [Unclear] would you?

VG:  Okay.  This is a picture of you.

RS:  Yeah.

VG:  Yeah.  Let’s see.  Is there a date here?  No.

RS:  There is Eli.

VG:  Black and white shot of you.  Yeah.

RS:  There is Eli as a--.  And here’s Daniela.

VG:  Your brother.  Okay.

RS:  Daniela, she’s just so beautiful.  I bought them interesting clothes from Israel.

VG:  Nineteen seventy-seven.  This is your grandchild.

RS:  This is Jocelyn.  But I’m hoping--.  That’s me, by the way, with my older sister.  It must have been a hundred years ago.

VG:  No, no date.  Black and white shot.

RS:  Yeah.  See some of them have something written on them, like ’27.

VG:  Let’s see.  Now who is that?

RS:  That’s me.

VG:  That’s you.

RS:  Yeah.

VG:  So this is in the States?  Yeah.

RS:  Yeah, that was--.  And that’s me.

VG:  That’s you?

RS:  I think so.  Sure, it’s me.

VG:  Now tell me what you have on your head in that picture, the little bandana or—

RS:  Or something.  I was trying to be Japanese or something, judging by the rags.  But that’s me with Sema and my best boyfriend, the one who loved me the most.

VG:  A select--.  It says “a select group from the zoo, 1929.”  This is Sema with the long braids?

RS:  Yes.

VG:  Wait.  And are you in this picture?  Is this--?

RS:  Yes.

VG:  This is you?

RS:  Look.  Here I am.

VG:  Oh, on the left.  Again with the bandana, shmatta on your head.

RS:  [Unclear] That’s Sema and me in her kitchen.

VG:  And who’s that?

RS:  My sister, Ann.

VG:  Okay, so those are the three sisters in Sema’s kitchen.

RS:  And you know, Sema always looks older than the rest of us.

VG:  I know it’s interesting.  I noticed that on Sunday.  She looks older than you.

RS:  Yeah.  She looks even older than Ann.

VG:  Yes.  Now what year—in what year did Ann die?

RS:  Oh, she died about twelve or fourteen years ago.

VG:  Oh, so this is—

RS:  This was taken when she was alive and kicking.

VG:  Yeah.

RS:  That’s Ann [laughs] posing.  She was quite beautiful, by the way, when she was young.

VG:  Wait.  This is your sister?

RS:  Yeah, Ann. 

VG:  Ann.  Yeah.  Look at that.  This must have been in the twenties.

RS:  Yeah.  Well, we came in the twenties.

VG:  Yeah.  And here is—

RS:  I don’t know.

VG:  [reading] “A pair of tough girls in Palisades Park.”

RS:  Yeah.  It must have been me, and somebody else.  But it’s unrecognizable.  Here, however, was Sema and Ann and I, the last time Ann visited in New York.

VG:  She lived where, Ann?

RS:  She lived in California.  Here I am and here is Sema and Irving, the man who loved me and committed suicide because I refused to marry him.

VG:  And this says 1928.  It’s a group of people.

RS:  Yeah.  Well, I’m still waiting—

VG:  Oh, and there’s Babette in that.

RS:  Here’s Babette.

VG:  And you add it to the picture of the three of you.

RS:  Oh boy.

VG:  Don’t tell me.

RS:  That’s me.

VG:  Woah, Ronya!

RS:  Well, I--.  Don’t forget that I was a model.

VG:  This is a nude picture.

RS:  Yeah. 

VG:  That is a fabulous shot.

RS:  Huh?

VG:  I need this for my private collection.  [Laughter]

RS:  What do you need it for?

VG:  Well, it’s a beautiful picture.  I worked as a nude model, also, Ronya.

RS:  Huh?

VG:  I worked as a nude model, also, in art classes.  I’ll compare—I’ll compare photos with you.

RS:  Okay.

VG:  Okay.  And this is a—

RS:  This is many years ago.  Babette and Ann were going to California together.  And I’m somewhere there.  Sure.  I’m right here.  And this is Babette.  She’s so beautiful.

VG:  You were right here, or there at the end of the table?

RS:  At the end.

VG:  Next to the child and the—

RS:  Yeah. 

VG:  High chair.  Now who is this?

RS:  When Dean died they had an exhibit of his work, a memorial-like.  And this is one of the instructors and Gene and I.

VG:  Okay.  Would you rather not have any of this stuff shown that’s—

RS:  I’d rather not.

VG:  Yeah.  Okay.  So let’s not--.  Yeah.  Okay.  And this is--.  This piece of single shot--.  Is this you?

RS:  That’s me.

VG:  That’s you.

RS:  And why did they save this?

VG:  Farshteis nisht?

RS:  That’s me with Eugene when he was an infant.  But there’s a picture of me at my—when I’m six months old.  And if I don’t find it this time it’ll be a shame because I looked at it fairly recently.  Here I am at Brandeis University. 

VG:  This is Brandeis Summer Institute, 1965.

RS:  Yeah.

VG:  Were you a student there or a teacher?

RS:  Yeah.  I was a student.  I have been a student all my life.

VG:  This is from Dean, ‘Happy Mother’s Day.’

RS:  Yeah, from Martin, from Dean, from Dean.  Happy Mother’s Day, Dean.  Look what he does.  Ain’t—

VG:  I think it says ‘caught -- ain’t caught up with you yet.’

RS:  Because he felt that I was very active.  [Laughter]  And so he’s trying to catch up with me. 

VG:  That’s great.  Oh no, and you know what else it says?  It says, “old age”—

RS:  Okay, yeah.

VG:  ‘Old age ain’t caught up with you yet.’

RS:  Right.

VG:  So it’s you running.

RS:  Him chasing me.  Well, no, that’s somebody else whom you don’t know.  Oh, this is the professor from Brandeis University.  She is one of the very active-- the three of us are very active in Technion.  And here I am with the other student.

VG:  Okay.  This is a student from—

RS:  Technion.

VG:  From Technion.

RS:  Yeah.  Okay.  Here is Lisa and me and the two of us walked her to her chupah.

VG:  Wait.  Lisa is—

RS:  My—his daughter.

VG:  Oh, okay.  He was not alive when she—when she married?

RS:  No.

VG:  No.

RS:  That’s me and my husband and Eugene, when he was a baby.

VG:  And from Myrtle Studios in Brooklyn.

RS:  Well, I still haven’t got the right thing.

VG:  Well, you know, you’re guaranteed it’s somewhere in the house so—

RS:  I know it’s in the house.

VG:  It’s just a question of where.

RS:  My dear, you don’t know!  Despite the fact that this is such a small apartment—

VG:  I’m going to have to come back some time and do a search with you.

RS:  I’m going to do--.  You know, I spend my lifetime searching.  Because there’s a picture of me that I would like to give you for the exhibit, because it’s me at age six months with a groysen tuchis!  I weighed thirteen and a half pounds.  And they put me on a table and the thing, the tuchis, rolled over.  So they moved me up into a big chair.  And there I am.  It’s a wonderful picture.  Well, none of this is good.  What did I write here?  ‘Dean awakening.’  I see. 

VG:  Well, you know what, Ronya?  When they go—when they read this tape over they’re going to—they’ll hear your description of the picture and you have many months now to search your apartment.

RS:  Honey, I’m intent to go through that god-darned apartment.  See, this is Lisa and her husband.

VG:  Yeah.  Nice shot.

RS:  And Don, then, that’s her baby; that’s an adopted baby.

[Recording paused.]

RS:  And I have pictures of me in costume somewhere.

VG:  Okay.  Well.  Pictures of you as a young dancer.

RS:  Yeah.  I wasn’t a very young one, but I--.  This is an interview that I was having with a wonderful woman who died.  And they photographed us.  Her husband photographed us while I was talking to her.  She was a marvelous person.  We went together to Israel.  Her husband was a psychiatrist.  And we went to Israel together to interview newly arrived Russians.

VG:  Uh-huh.  When was that?

RS:  I don’t remember.

VG:  And what did—

RS:  When they began arriving, it could have been probably in the seventies, early seventies.  And because I spoke Russian--.  Yeah.  These are all insignificant because--.  By the way, that’s a picture of my father.

VG:  Oh really?

RS:  Um-hmm.  Well, okay—

VG:  And your father died in what year?

RS:  Oh, I had it somewhere.

VG:  A long time ago.

RS:  Yeah, a long time ago.  Mama died much later, but also, a long time ago.  But they were no youngsters.  They suffered terribly.  That’s Eugene, my lovely Eugene.  Every time I see his punim, I smile.

VG:  Well, Ronya, you know, maybe in my first task as your—as the guardian of your papers, is that we should—we will embark on a project of sort of gathering your papers and identifying them and putting them in—

RS:  Yeah.  But the thing that I wanted for the exhibit was the pictures of the—of Valia.  Valia was a little girl, my grand--.  She was the daughter of Yaakov when I visited.  And I had a picture of her. And this is the Valia, the daughter, that came with her daughter and son-in-law and two grandchildren.  And I had pictures.

VG:  And found you.

RS:  Huh?

VG:  And found you through your reminiscences.

RS:  Yeah.

VG:  And the story was that they thought you were in Brooklyn, right, and not Brookline.

RS:  That’s right.  Oh, I didn’t even remember having this.  I was touring with a group of people on a boat called The Jerusalem, and we were about to go out someplace and we were photographed.  Oh well.  Lots of things can happen when you live a long time.

VG:  That’s right.

RS:  You’re not going to use this.

VG:  No, no.  But I don’t want you to put that away because I have to strike a bargain with you for this picture.

RS:  You can have it.

VG:  We’ll discuss it after--.  Okay.

RS:  You can have it, but not for any purposes.

VG:  No, no, no.

RS:  Only for your personal--.  As a matter of fact, I tore up another one that was much more, you know, the front view because I was afraid somebody would come across it and not know in what context.  Because when you’re a model—

VG:  Yes.

RS:  You have to have pictures taken.  And a dancer--.  But it’s yours.

VG:  Thank you.

RS:  If you want it.

VG:  Yes, I’m going to frame it.

RS:  I’ve not the slightest idea when it was taken, because we had to have pictures in order to qualify for--.  Well, here it is, ‘Dean Awakening,’ but it has lots of other things--.  I cannot have an envelope for everything.  And yet I’m missing one important envelope in which there’s a picture of me.  Because everything is so crowded, what I’ll have to do--.  Oy yo-yoy, yo-yoy, yoy-oy.  Square dancing—

VG:  Picture.

RS:  Yeah.  Ah, I just found a treasure.  That’s my sister, Ann, as a little girl.  There must be the picture of me here.  Come on and shake it out.

[Recording paused.]

RS:  That’s Anna Sokolow dancing.  I loved that.

VG:  Okay.  This is Anna Sokolow.

RS:  Yeah.  Those are unrelated to me.

VG:  This is when you knew her, when you were dancing with her.

RS:  Sure, I danced with her.

VG:  Who’s that little boychik?

RS:  He was the adopted child of my sister, Ann.  I haven’t the slightest idea.  Here is Eli as a soldier.  Here’s my father.

VG:  Okay, let’s see, there’s Russian written on the back.  It says ‘1922.’

RS:  That was shortly after he lost his eye.  I don’t know what I’m doing here, no, no.  You wouldn’t know who he is.  I don’t know.  I seem to be surrounded with mics.  I don’t what I’m doing there.

VG:  This is you?

RS:  Apparently it’s me.  Daniela.  Now these are very old ones.  No picture of me.  There is--.  I tell you there is a reservoir somewhere.

VG:  Now who is this?

RS:  It’s Sema.

VG:  Sema?

RS:  Yeah.

VG:  ‘1929, at the beach.’

RS:  Yeah.  Here’s a picture of my mother.  For her to be smiling is unique!

VG:  That’s your mother on the right?

RS:  Yeah.

VG:  Ah, she looks very much like Sema.

RS:  Yeah.  The two resemble each other amazingly.  Eli resembles my father and I do, too.  Here is Eli when he’s two...  I hope you’re shutting off the thing because none of them are significant.

VG:  No, it’s on.  Who’s the person--?  Oh, ‘Mrs. Zied is mad because she is not as pretty as Mrs. Chernin, June 5^th1949.’  [Laughs]  That’s what it says on the back of the picture with your mother.

RS:  I wonder who wrote that, because I didn’t write that.

VG:  Who’s—

RS:  My mother is beautiful.

VG:  Who’s Mrs. Zied, a friend of your mother’s?

RS:  How should I know?

VG:  Okay.

RS:  Okay.  Here I am taken out of that picture with one of my children, I believe. 

VG:  What, you have three children there?

RS:  I have all three?

VG:  There are three kids there.

RS:  They are Eli’s children.  They’re not mine.  Look how buxom I look there! 

VG:  So this--.  Because I want to get this down.  The picture we’re pointing at is the picture that’s over--.  It’s to the right of your window in your living room.  And it’s a picture that’s—

RS:  But this was taken in my other house.

VG:  But that picture was done by your son.

RS:  By Dean.

VG:  By Dean, right.

RS:  Sure it is.

VG:  And there’s a story with that, which I actually put on tape, but I lost that part of the tape.

RS:  Yeah.  I have pictures of that picture.

VG:  Didn’t he make that picture for someone and that person didn’t like it.

RS:  Yes.  He made it for Mrs. Singer and she was told that he looks like an antisemite.

VG:  Uh-huh.  And so you bought it from her.

RS:  I bought it from her, gave her $25 extra for it to sell it to me.  She paid $100.  Look, I’m putting things away that are not of any interest to you, family, Eli and his wife and children and I--.  Okay.  Remember the picture you saw of me in a costume with my aunt and uncle?  Here’s a picture of him.

VG:  Of your uncle?

RS:  Uncle Tevye.

VG:  Okay.  That was the picture in Babette’s. 

RS:  That’s right.

VG:  So we want to say on tape—

RS:  If I don’t find a picture of me I’ll kick myself in the pants, because that’s the only thing that has any relationship to me as a--.  These are all unrelated.  I mean, I may be in them, but after all--.  Yeah, that’s another attempt at photographing that picture.  That’s my father and Sema’s husband, Martin.  That’s Ann and her husband.  Nobody will be interested in any of that.  Here’s Ann and her husband.  And here’s another picture of them.  I don’t know whether it’s Babette or Sema.  It doesn’t really matter because it doesn’t--. 

VG:  Now what is this picture of?  This is a picture of—

RS:  Yeah.  It’s a picture of the family.  Look.  Ann is there.  I’m trying to see where I am.  Somebody’s lying down.  I don’t remember--.  I know that I was teaching at a camp and there should be some pictures. 

Oh, hell, these are all too many.  Program.  Why am I saving this?  Student committee.  I don’t know what--.  [Rustling]  ‘Ode to the Virginia Voyage’ or something.  I must have had a reason for not—

VG:  Music students of Wellesley and Newton High Schools, Wellesley High School auditorium, May 8^th 1959.

RS:  What auditorium?

VG:  It’s—present Wellesley High School auditorium—

[end of tape 8, side A]

RS:  --picture of Sema.  Sema when she was very young and when she was being married.

VG:  Okay.  This picture appears in Babette’s—

RS:  She’s very beautiful.

VG:  Story--.  Yeah.

RS:  You wouldn’t know that that’s the Sema you saw Sunday.

VG:  Okay, she has a braid.  Looks like she has a braid around her hair.  It’s a black and white—

RS:  Yeah.  She had long hair.

VG:  Shot.  Yeah.  It’s a beautiful shot.

RS:  She cut it because she couldn’t cope with it anymore.

VG:  And which is that picture there?  Oh, this is Sema and her family, right?

RS:  Her family.

VG:  Yeah.  What’s Babette’s, what’s the brother’s name, her son?

RS:  Rick.

VG:  Rick.

RS:  We went out to dinner with him and his wife.  He lives in Stoughton.  And that’s Babette.

VG:  Uh-huh.

RS:  Oh, here are my father’s May 15^th 1966 at the Baron Hearst Cemetery.  Look.  Jeremiah Chernin.  You wanted to know when my father died.

VG:  Oh, this is the unveiling, 1966.

RS:  Yeah.  Here is again a picture of Sema that’s rather nice, and one of the most beautiful pictures of Ann.  It’s really glorifying her.  But she was quite pretty when she was young.  And this is a Seder picture where all of us are there beginning with Ann, my mother, Eli, Bobby, me, my husband, my father, Sema, Martin and Rick.

VG:  That is a great shot.  And Ann was not married at the time.

RS:  She was unmarried at the time.  Oh boy, am I a flapper!  Here are my two siblings, Eli and Ann, my three, Sema.

VG:  Oh yeah.  Ronya, do we know the year here?  No.

RS:  No.  I don’t know what that is.  I don’t know what that is.  Here is Sema and my father.  Oh no that’s—

VG:  Let’s see.  And on the back of that picture it says, “Sema wears them short and father wears them full.”  [Laughter]

RS:  Well, see, those who had the wisdom to put down something--.  Was it Sema who wrote it?  Yeah.  Full.  They certainly are full.  Well, I haven’t found what I want.

VG:  Well, we will have to do this again.

RS:  I haven’t found what I want.

VG:  We know it’s in the house, so it’s just a question of searching.

RS:  Obviously, it has to be somewhere here.  You see, I’ve pulled out things that I didn’t even remember I ever had.  I tell you because the quarters are so small--.  I used to have a huge breakfront and in it was two large cabinets and drawers.  So pictures were held there.  And while I didn’t know precisely which picture was where, those were the three places that I knew the pictures were lying there.  But now whenever I can find a place where I can tuck it in, I put it into envelopes and I tuck it in.  And it’s no good.  It’s no good because I don’t know what’s in it.  Sometimes--.  Square dancing—and yet the picture of me square dancing is not in there.  So I evidently removed it and put it with a picture of me at age six months or nine months.  And that one is really quite an interesting picture.

VG:  Can we--?  I did this with you once before and then the tape didn’t come out.  So I wanted to do it again.  But could we just take a brief stroll around your apartment and identify things that are—

RS:  Meaningful.

VG:  Yeah.  Partly in interest if seeing if any of them might be relevant to use at the—

RS:  Well, I don’t know.  Did you put these aside because you think they were relevant?

VG:  Yeah.  I’ll show which they are in a little bit.

RS:  Okay.  As long as you think they’re relevant.  Every time I sit down it hurts.

VG:  So let’s take a stroll around and you can—

RS:  Yeah.  I’m going to have to walk.

VG:  So, okay, we talked about this first picture here that your son did.  And then this picture that’s over your couch—

RS:  This picture was taken in our garage.  We lived on Dudley Road.  And Jack Wolfe was at that time a struggling artist, very well known but couldn’t earn a living.  So Gene commissioned him to do a portrait of himself, a portrait of me and a portrait of the three boys.  And the three boys were posed.  He couldn’t schlep them to Stoughton.  He came.  He virtually lived at our house.  And we arranged the children on that big—our first big bed, you know, a double bed, a mattress.  That’s what they were sitting on.  And Dean, always the defiant one, said, “I want to be like this.”

VG:  Okay.

RS:  Yeah.  And Eugene—

VG:  He’s in the middle, lying down with his head in his hands.

RS:  And on the right is Dean who was down--.  You notice they each have different styles.  He was done almost like a Modigliani, very simple lines.  He was the artist.  Eugene was the philosopher, and he’s posed as a philosopher in the most abstract of the three styles here.  So that’s him.  This, of course, is Gene, so you know the story about that.

VG:  Yeah.  That’s the one we were talking about before.  Right.

RS:  And because there are many things in this picture, when you really begin to look very closely, that his nose is almost that of a donkey rather than of a man.

VG:  Yeah.

RS:  See how long it extends?  And that’s why they thought that he was an antisemite.  But there are all kinds of details that I don’t even know the meaning of.  Plus the border, which was Moroccan or Eastern or somewhere from the Middle East, because he was fascinated with Middle East art.  And I don’t know, this is like the little man, the “Fiddler on the Roof” or something.

VG:  Yes.

RS:  And he’s holding a Kiddush cup.

VG:  Yes.

RS:  But there are some things about his--.  For example, if you study closely, the eye seems to have as though it has birds around it.  Anyway, she saw it all or her friend saw it and said, “This is not an old Jew.  It’s an antisemite.”  So she rejected it. 

Now you’re not interested--.  This is Martin’s very amusing little thing.  I believed he called it the circus.  Martin was Sema’s husband.

VG:  Okay.  And this is over your table in the living room.

RS:  Yeah.  And, of course--.  No.  That’s a painting that was done by a young student whom big Gene supported.

VG:  Okay.  But also what I want to do is that all over your apartment you have—

RS:  I have wonderful Russian things that the Russians sold me when they needed money--

VG:  Oh, they sold it.

RS:  --when they came here, because these things are not done anymore.  See this is not—it’s pretty common, but not this.  And so it was done—

VG:  Now what’s different about this?

RS:  Well, the workmanship is very hand made.  For example, I’ll show you what I mean.  You covered it over.  [Pause]  This is Ukrainian.  It was just given me as a gift by the young dancer for whom I have worked.  And I’ve gotten him all kinds of jobs.  He went to Russia to the Ukraine to help his wife be interviewed for coming to America and he brought me this.

VG:  Okay.  This is a little plate with an egg. 

RS:  Yeah.  It’s all hand made.  And you notice it doesn’t stand correctly.  The back is not even, because it’s hand-made.  Everything about it is hand-made.  This—

VG:  I’ll get the egg, yeah.

RS:  Okay.

VG:  This is a Kiddush cup?

RS:  Yeah, this is a cup that comes, which is a rarity.  And it’s from Kiev.

VG:  Beautiful.

RS:  Very beautiful and the plate goes with it.  These are all gifts from Russians, from grateful Russians.

VG:  Made in the USSR.

RS:  But she considered this a treasure.  Of course it was made in the USSR.

VG:  So you have this stuff all over your house which was both given to you as gifts and sold to you when people needed money.

RS:  When they needed money I gave them whatever money they needed and--.  So for example, this has a whole set, the big ones here.

VG:  Oh yes, this is a big bowl and cups.

RS:  And it came with the--.  Yeah.  And by the way, you can serve liquor in these.  You can serve wine in these, because these are hand made.  As a matter of fact, I kept flowers in that with water [unclear].

VG:  That’s the vase you’re talking about there.

RS:  That vase and those big bowls and this are part of a whole set including this.  And I paid $150 or $200 at the time.  You couldn’t get them now for any price now.  This I bought in Russia, because I thought it was very amusing.

VG:  And this is a--.  It’s a little—

RS:  Little doll, woman, and the body moves.

VG:  Yeah. 

RS:  I gave away all the beautiful gifts that I had bought for children, you know, at that time.  Now, this of course, is Dean’s work. 

VG:  Okay.  And this is--.  Let’s see.  Let’s identify where it is.  This is in your living room just as you’re getting ready to walk out of the living room into a little foyer.

RS:  He calls it a spring landscape and April ’68.

VG:  Right.

RS:  Schwaab.  That was before he changed his name.  That’s a pretty landscape.  Now, everything you see here is from Dean.  He wrote a letter to Dr. Suess while he was visiting with me one day.  Read it.  He misspelled the word ‘garden.’

VG:  Oh yes.  “To Dr. Seuss, in whose gardens and cities I wander as I did years ago.”

RS:  And these are the characters—

VG:  Yes.

RS:  From Dr. Seuss’s--.  This is what he had in his portfolio when he was applying for his master’s degree in Alfred University.

VG:  These are all sitting on a music stand, actually, which is right in front of—

RS:  Yeah.  But I bought the stand for that.

VG:  Did you?  It’s a beautiful stand.

RS:  Yeah.

VG:  Yeah.

RS:  It was worthwhile.  You see in those days I could do things.  There should be another one of these, because I lost one.  Is there another one?  Yes.  There has to be.

VG:  Oh, is it this one?

RS:  Yeah.  There.  And that’s him doing ceramics.  And this is the other one.  Subtle colors, it’s so beautiful.

VG:  Beautiful.

RS:  And well, the other, the one we skipped was a tree that he did, I don’t know, very early.  Does it give a year there?

VG:  I think it says ’63.

RS:  Sixty-three.

VG:  Yeah.

RS:  I mean, he had the imagination of a great artist.  Well, by the way, I have been helping this dancer.  His father lives here.  And he’s forever grateful to me.  He’s the one who said, “You’re the God in my family.”  He was an engineer, a famous engineer in Russia, and he wanted to reward me some way.  So he dedicated his book to me in Russian.  And it’s an engineering book so, you know--. 

VG:     Wow, so wonderful.

RS:  Nevertheless, my niece’s husband is a scientist.  And he recognized some of the words that relate to it.  But I could barely read his handwriting.  It’s dedicated to someone who he regards very highly, because he says he has nothing to give me.

VG:  So that’s the inscription that he wrote to you on the inside of his book.

RS:  That’s right.  That’s right.  I mean, people don’t know what to do with me.  What could he give me, you know?  So I said to him, “I’m very grateful.  I’m going to keep this.”  But who’s going to care about this after I die, you know?

VG:  Vicki.

RS:  Vicki, good.  Now, this, of course, was given to me instead of a fee when I was lecturing.  It has the Ten Commandments.

VG:  This is hanging right next to your door.  Oh, it opens up.

RS:  It opens up.

VG:  That’s very interesting.

RS:  Yeah.  I think it’s very interesting.  And I have--.  I could hang it outside, but I prefer to have it in my house.  These are gifts from the Russians—

VG:  Okay.  We’re in your kitchen now.

RS:  And one is from Vicki.

VG:  One is from Vicki which we’ll--.  From her recent trip to Israel.  But these are—

RS:  These are Russian—

VG:  Cutting boards.

RS:  You know, I use them all the time.

VG:  Yeah.  They’re beautiful.

RS:  But I try to use these and I--.  She by the way says, “I have good news for you, it’s time to eat.”  In Russian, “[unclear].”

VG:  Now, do you cut on the side that the—

RS:  Yeah, I cut it.  I use it as a board.  I use the backs to put hot things on it.  This is a picture—

VG:  A picture underneath your clock.

RS:  Huh?

VG:  I’m just identifying where things are in case I need them—we want to use any of them.  So I’m just saying that this is a picture hanging under your clock. 

RS:  Hanging under my clock.  But that was done by what’s her name, by Dean’s wife, and it’s a self-portrait.  And it’s very good.  I like it.

VG:  It’s fabulous.

RS:  Oh, of course it’s not an exact replica.  This was done by Dean.  And it’s a beautiful thing.

VG:  That’s to the left of your clock.  Yeah.

RS:  Its subtlety is very beautiful.  See again, I don’t have room enough so I put things down.  Even though they’re very beautiful I put them where hardly anybody could see it.  When I was in Russia, they gave me some of their finest things.  This was a self-portrait of someone and it was considered.  I brought it home, I framed it.  But in the other house, I had plenty of room where to hang these things.  Here, I have to just find little places where—that’s empty, you know.

VG:  And this is in your foyer hanging next to the door to your bathroom.

RS:  Yeah.

VG:  Ronya, did you—you moved here from where?

RS:  From Watertown.

VG:  And you lived in a large—

RS:  Yeah.

VG:  House or an apartment.

RS:  No, it was an apartment.  It was on the sixth floor.  And it was a one bedroom, but the living room was as big as this whole apartment.  Plenty of wall space, and then my bedroom was a big one.  And things were hanging in the kitchen, too.  This was done by an artist in Russia who was considered a state artist.  That meant the highest award that they can give to a Russian.  They used to call him a state artist.  And this was done by him.

VG:  Okay.  Just let me say we’ve entered your bedroom, and this is on the wall to the right just as you come in.

RS:  And this was done--.  It’s a little gem by Martin.  I think it’s a little gem.  Well—

VG:  And this is a gem.  I love this picture.

RS:  This is done by Jack Wolfe.

VG:  The one who did the painting of your sons.

RS:  Yeah.  And when my husband looked at it and Jack said to him, “Gene, what do you see there?”  He says, “I see a woman who’s going to have to live for another fifty years to be as contained as that woman.”

VG:  So this is hanging over your bed, and this shows you smoking a cigarette.

RS:  Oh, in those days I smoked.  And I was not so big.  He just made me—he gave me a grandeur that I--.  You know, I was slender.  And he distorted everything.  One arm comes out of a hole and the other one—

VG:  Yeah.  It’s a very incredible painting.

RS:  Huh?

VG:  It’s a very incredible painting.  I think it’s quite wonderful.

RS:  Yeah.  Well, I wasn’t very happy.  And I didn’t like the idea that he did a profile of me because it was--.  My eye looked bulgy.  And he said, “Stop being silly.  It’s beautiful.”  Well—

VG:  It’s a beautiful piece of art.  It’s a—

RS:  Of course this is Dean.

VG:  Okay.  Now we’re next to the mirror in your bedroom.

RS:  That’s a self-portrait of Dean, but he was very depressed.  That was when, I guess, he was depressed over the situation with Julie and the baby.  My children are very, very conscious of propriety of the right thing to do for people.  But Gene is almost bordering on insane.  He thinks somebody in back of him doesn’t see the theatre, the play, the ballet, he goes down on the floor. That’s Gene.  This is an abstraction that Dean did, multi-colored, multi--.  He uses different media.

VG:  Okay.  So what we did was we went to your mirror and we moved to the right, which is the picture depression, then we moved to the right and that’s where you have framed the “Today is the day for monumental achievement, awaken me.”

RS:  That’s right.

VG:  Yeah.

RS:  “Awaken me.  Are you going to let me sleep?  Well you leave me to—at—if you--?”  What is the last thing?  “While life passes me by,” huh?  “If you love me at all, awaken me at nine a.m.”  He had to tell me all of this.  It was beautiful when I saw it on the door.  And now when I wake up, that’s the first thing I see.

VG:  And so--.  And then he went to sleep and you awakened him?

RS:  Of course.  With a message like that you think I--.  He says, “If you love me at all.”  And I sure loved him.  That is a—

VG:  Now we’re back to your bed.  We’re to the left of your bed.

RS:  --silk screen.

VG:  Oh, by whom?  By—

RS:  Huh?  It’s a silk screen.  Looks very Japanese.

VG:  Yeah.  And your son did that?

RS:  Yes.  He did all kinds of things.  By the way, he also did ceramics that were very beautiful.  I’ll show them to you.

VG:  Now, did he frame this for you or did you frame this?

RS:  No.  I did all the framing.  He couldn’t afford to pay—

VG:  That’s nice framing.

RS:  I spent a good deal of money framing everything precisely the way I felt it needed to be.  That had to be framed in black.  This had to be framed in a light color.  This needed a simple gold frame.  And that is also done by a Russian.

VG:  This is over your bed.  Yeah.

RS:  Because it simply got there, because this is the only thing I could put there that would not bang my head.

VG:  And down on the little night table next to your bed behind your radio is the picture of you, the Ronnie Schwaab picture.

RS:  That’s right.

VG:  Slash, Ronya.

RS:  Ronnie Schwaab.  Okay.  I left one thing out that’s rather important, and that’s his ceramics.

VG:  Okay.  Your house is like a—

RS:  Like a museum.

VG:  Like a museum.  Yeah.

RS:  But look how disorderly everything looks now.

VG:  Oh, I was wondering about that.  That’s beautiful.

RS:  He did that.  And he did many other things.  He did colored windows, glass colored—colored glass windows.  He did tiles that were absolutely beautiful.  And he did this.  And, of course, Gene arranged the bouquet for me from dried flowers.  He dried the flowers himself.  Gene felt that Dean left him a heritage of his work.  Dean left a book of his work.  And Gene felt that he wasn’t doing anything for me by way of memorializing me.  So he did all kind of floral arrangements for me.  And then he wrote a—he wrote a jazz piece, a piano rag.

VG:  “The Corker.”

RS:  That’s right.  And he dedicated it to me.  He said, “Mother, you should have something that belongs to you.”

VG:  Wow.

RS:  It’s very funny, you know, because he used words from a summer, it says.

VG:  Here, “’The Corker Piano Rag,’ dedicated to Ronya Schwaab in lifelong gratitude.”

RS:  Yes, my children were all grateful to me.

VG:  Oh, here’s the words: “My gal’s a corker.  She’s a New Yorker.  I buy her everything to keep her in style.  She’s got a head of hair just like a grizzly bear.  Hot dog!  That’s where my money goes.  She’s got a pair of eyes just like two lemon pies.  She’s got a long, long nose just like a rubber hose.  She’s got a pair of lips just like potato chips.  And the rest is to be ad-libbed,” it says.

RS:  [Laughs]

VG:  That’s great.

RS:  But he wrote the rag.

VG:  I didn’t know he was a—

RS:  He’s a classical musician.  He plays the piano, classical.  But then he became interested in rag.  And he used to play Joplin, until I began to like Joplin; he introduced me to new things.  And then he himself wrote this rag.

VG:  So you’ve produced artists and—

RS:  Huh?

VG:  You have produced artists.

RS:  I have produced creative people.  I have produced people who concern themselves with what goes on in the world. 

Dean was very attentive. He even--.  Despite the fact that he was quite poor, he adopted a little black boy because he felt that the blacks were being discriminated against.  When the boy grew, he was able to shift for himself.  So it was not a formal adoption, but he lived with him. 

And Eugene on Mother’s Day plays the piano for homeless women.  And then later, if he’s got time, he comes to see me.  Yeah.  I mean that’s the kind of children that they were, they are.  Eugene still is very solicitous.  Of course, the other two are dead.  And, of course, you’ve seen the picture of the book.

VG:  Yeah.  This is the book.  Let’s see.  It’s piled under.

RS:  Yeah.

[Recording paused.]

VG:  Okay, so this is Osaka prints.

RS:  Yes.

VG:  By B. J. Schwaab.  This is your son.

RS:  Yeah.  Oh, by the way, this is rather amusing.  A woman, Penny, that I was referring to before—

VG:  Yes.

RS:  Dedicated to me in the Watertown Public Library--.  They have gathered material from Russians who were learning how to speak and write.  And they put it together in a book.  And she came across this one.

VG:  Vikyra Byofskya.  “A person who I admire.  Ronya Schwaab is a woman who I admire.  Ronya is a beautiful woman, eighty-three years old.  She’s pretty in spite of her ages.  [Laugher]  She’s graceful, her clothes always wonderful and elegant and fit to her.  She is a very smart woman.  She read the books, papers about three to five hours every day.  And she study herself and teach others.  She makes the beautiful reports about American writers.  She can talk about some writer and his works more than one hour without looking up anywhere.  [laughs] Ronya loves people who need a helping and help them.  I know a lot of people who Ronya has helped.  Ronya was married and three sons but one of them died.  She have two sons now and one granddaughter and love them very much.  She loves music, art.  She have a lot of the paintings her oldest son who died who was the beautiful painter and many pictures other painters.  Ronya have been helping my family enter to a new life, to a new country.  We helped her move to a new apartment.  I love Ronya and I wish her all the best.  I wish to her live on the earth until she can walk, read, think and help the people.  Kira Byofskya.”  That is really beautiful.

RS:  Isn’t that something?

VG:  It’s really beautiful.  We’re putting it into our pile.  Yes.

RS:  Huh?

VG:  Yes, we’re putting that into our pile.

RS:  Yeah.  It just occurred to me.

VG:  And, let’s see, this is—

RS:  My mother and father.

VG:  Okay.   You have--.  These are pictures on your—

RS:  Pictures of her and a photograph of him.

VG:  And let’s take a minute and look at this.  We can identify the pictures in here.

RS:  Okay.

VG:  This is—

RS:  This is Babette.

VG:  This is Babette, who’s Sema’s daughter. Right.  And she wrote a thesis called “Our Story: Mother and Daughter, An Intergenerational Heritage—Remembering Continuity and Connectedness.” 

RS:  Right.

VG:  And in it she has a lot of—

RS:  Pictures.

VG:  She has color xeroxes of some photographs.

RS:  But the one--.  The one that might be—if you can photograph it, this one.  I’d like that to be—

VG:  Okay.  So this is on page 99A.  And this is--

RS:  This is my sister, Ann, my older sister, me.  Remember, I gave you the picture of Tevye, he’s my uncle.  And Sema.  And Sema is my aunt.

VG:  Okay.  Great picture.  And you’re in--.  What are you doing here?

RS:  We’re wearing Ukrainian costumes.  We’re all dressed in Ukrainian costumes because, you know, in Russia to be photographed, to go to a professional photographer, you had to have special kind--.  You just didn’t go in your ordinary clothes.  And since we each had costumes—he’s wearing it, and we are wearing it.  And of course I used to do a lot of--.  When I grew up, I knew every dance.  I was a born folk dancer.  And so here we are.  I don’t think Ann looks particularly good, and I look like a white rabbit.  But it’s a good picture because it was taken when I was probably ten years old, which means it’s about eighty years ago or seventy-five years—

VG:  And Sema was not born yet in this picture, or she was too young?

RS:  She was too young.

VG:  Too young to have her Ukrainian-type thing.

RS:  --visiting in Loev with my grandparents and his children.

VG:  And she also has in here--.  She has maps of where you came from.  There’s a lot of photographs of early documents.

RS:  Yeah.  But this is a passport.

VG:  Yeah.  And whose passport is this?

RS:  Well, let’s see.  It must be my father’s.  Yepershersky biyette.  This is the ticket for the passenger from--.  This has all kinds of Russian.  But for whom it says—

VG:  Is this the name here?

RS:  Yeah.  Yelma Yelmachenyen.  That’s my father’s passport and his ticket for the boat.

VG:  Okay. This is a—

RS:  [Unclear]

VG:  Yeah. She’s labeled everything so we can--.  Okay.  And this is—

RS:  Now that’s us.  You notice that in this picture there are just Mama and Sema, and Chaya and I.  Chaya was called Ann.  Okay.  When we came to America--.  This was taken in 1886. 

VG:  No.

RS:  No.

VG:  Oh, this must be the date of birth.

RS:  My mother’s birth.

VG:  So your mother’s date of birth—

RS:  Eighteen eighty-six.  And we sent this picture--.  This was photographed in order for Mama to get the--.  And when it came here papa had a photographer insert his head in the middle.  And I had a picture of that.

VG:  Which we’ll find.  This is on page 122 of Babette’s book.  And then on page 123—

RS:  What’s that?

VG:  “Declaration of alien about to depart for the United States.”  So this is Sophie Togering?  This would be your mother.  Well this just says “Chaya, age 15, Rafael.”  Are you thirteen?  Sema, age eleven.  [Unclear] was born 1886 so this is your mother.

RS:  No, it doesn’t--.  My mother’s name was Sonya and it was Yesefisky.  But this is—[unclear]—

VG:  This is the American Consul office.

RS:  How did they convert Yesefisky to Chernin?  Oh, I see, it’s giving her married name.

VG:  Okay.

RS:  My mother’s name was Sonya Chernina.  And that’s Chernin, or something like it

VG:  Okay.  And so this is her--.  These are amazing documents that you’ve showed me.

RS:  Absolutely.  Those are basic documents of our arrival—

VG:  Yeah. So this is--. Right.

RS:  -- of coming to this country.  See Jeremiah Chernin, my father—

VG:  Right.  That’s her reference.

RS:  My reference.

VG:  Yeah.

RS:  Okay.  That’s the house—

VG:  One twenty-four—

RS:  In the Bronx.

VG:  Okay.  This is on page 124.  It’s at 231 East 174^th Street.

RS:  That’s right, 231 East 174^th Street.  That’s an address I’ll never forget.

VG:  [Unclear]

RS:  Yeah.

VG:  And then page 125.  Fabulous picture.

RS:  I didn’t know these things existed.

VG:  Yeah.  I wonder who--?  I mean that’s such a—

RS:  Well, I was away from home a great deal of the time.  In the summers I used to teach at camps.  And then when I began really to dance and pose I moved away, because it would have been impossible for Mama to endure to know that I was doing these things.

VG:  And this is—

RS:  Blind in the right eye.  That means my papa, Jeremiah Chernin.

VG:  Certificate of naturalization.

RS:  Yeah.

VG:  This was the citizenship papers.

RS:  Yeah.  And again, Chaya--.  This time he gave us much older age than we were in the hope that we’ll be able to get work much faster because you had to have documents to prove that it’s time for you to work.  What year—when did my father come here?  Does it give a year here?

VG:  Let’s see. 

RS:  No.  That’s not when he came, when he became naturalized.

VG:  Yeah.  It’s 1949.

RS:  Nineteen forty-nine.

VG:  June 5^th --.  Oh, no, no, sorry, 1925.

RS:  That’s when he became naturalized. But I wanted to know when he came here.  I think it was in 1913.

VG:  Oh.  I don’t think it--.  I don’t see that it says that on here.

RS:  I’m surprised that they don’t ask for that.  But I know that he came in 1913.  This is my mother.

VG:  Certificate of citizenship for your mother.

RS:  And here she’s called Sema Chernin.

VG:  Sema or Sonya?

RS:  Sonya Chernin, because that’s her name.

VG:  Okay.  And this is April 29^th 1932.

RS:  But what is this?  “This to be given—”

VG:  This is the certificate of citizenship.  Yeah.

RS:  We came here in 1924.

VG:  Yeah.  So did you get naturalized automatically through your parents?

RS:  No.  I--.  Eventually, I was naturalized automatically.  But when--.  It was desirable to have your own naturalization.

VG:  So do you have your naturalization papers?

RS:  Somewhere.

VG:  Somewhere in this pile.

RS:  There’s Sema.  And that’s when she graduated from college.  And that’s here.  She’s such a lovely looking—

VG:  And 129 is—

RS:  That’s her husband, Martin.

VG:  Her husband.

RS:  Very handsome.

VG:  Yes.

RS:  He was a handsome man.

VG:  Page 130.

RS:  Yeah.

VG:  These are--.  Who’s this guy in the middle that—

RS:  I don’t know who he is.  She probably tells you.

VG:  Okay.  It’s probably identified in here somewhere.  County Clerk’s office—

RS:  State of New York.

VG:  Nineteen forty-seven.  A census report.

RS:  Oh, that’s what it is, a census.

VG:  Given name--.  Let’s see.  Hanish.  Oh, this must be Sema’s husband.

RS:  Sema’s family, yeah. 

VG:  Okay.  That’s Sema’s husband’s family.

RS:  Yeah.

VG:  Page 132, these are pictures of Sema and Martin.

RS:  Yeah.  Look at the difference.  This was taken when they were first married.  This was taken when they were at the marriage of their son.  They’re different—

VG:  Now Martin’s no longer alive?

RS:  Huh?

VG:  Martin is—

RS:  Martin?

VG:  Right.  Is not alive? Her husband.

RS:  He died.  He had a heart condition for many years, but he lived.

VG:  Let’s see now.

RS:  Hey, maybe in there—

VG:  I don’t think so.  No.  In here is a picture from Frank, it says ‘Moulin Rouge in Hollywood.’

RS:  Yeah.  That’s when Bobby and I were visiting in California.  Here’s Bobby, and here’s me and here’s Ann.  But there should be a picture—

VG:  Yeah.  It’s not in here.  This is a letter to—

RS:  I never sent.

VG:  You sent to--.  Oh, I don’t know.  You never sent it or she gave it back to you?

RS:  It’s a bit late for your birthday.  I don’t remember.

VG:  So there are some really interesting documents in—

RS:  Yes, there are.

VG:  In this.

RS:  And I’ll be glad to let them be displayed.

VG:  Yeah.

RS:  But you can’t display them all so—

VG:  No.  What’s going to happen is someone’s going to listen to this tape and they’re going to listen to all the tapes and they’ll decide what, you know—but these naturalization papers that you have or that she, your sister must have are wonderful.

RS:  They really are priceless… wonderful…

VG:  And, yes, I recall seeing this picture where your father adds his—so I know it’s somewhere.

RS:  Sure.  The picture of me, the picture of my father inserted in this there is somewhere in this house.

VG:  And we are going to find it.

RS:  I’m going to have to go through everything I own.  And it’ll take me forever. 

VG:  So perhaps we should call this a day in terms of talking.  It’s almost noon.  We’ve gone through all your—what we have.  We still have the great search left.

RS:  Well, the search is going to be up to me.  I’m going to just have to keep searching one place at a time until I’ve exhausted--.  You see I kept pulling out things from there.

VG:  Right, right.

RS:  And I don’t even know where things belong any more.  But I will, I will search until I find it.

VG:  So the question is, with the stuff that we’ve pulled out that I think would be relevant, you want me to leave it here at your house—

RS:  No.

VG:  Or do you want me to take it with me and hold it—

RS:  Take it, for God’s sake!

VG:  So that--.  Okay.

RS:  Because if you leave it here then I’ll have to keep looking over and over again.  I don’t want to look at them.  I know what I’m looking for now.

VG:  Okay.  So, I’ll take the things that we pulled out and I’ll keep them.

RS:  And I will write an addenda to my will.

VG:  Yeah.

RS:  Because I don’t know whether you’ll be interested in all the reviews and stuff like that.

VG:  Yes, no, I think you are important--.  Well, I think everyone’s story is important.  You know, everyone has a wonderful—

RS:  Of course, otherwise you wouldn’t be bothered.

VG:  And you’ve done so much.  I think that your papers should be kept together.  And, you know, maybe someday someone will—

RS:  What?

VG:  Honor you.  I don’t know.

RS:  Make it much easier for me, because I was going to clean my drawers and throw them out.

VG:  No, no, don’t do that, please.

RS:  Because, look, my one remaining son and Lisa are not going to read everything that’s there.  I know what’s there and why I saved it.  But if I could put it together and give it to you my drawers would become empty.

VG:  Oh, so you want to--.  It’d be my pleasure.  So let’s--.  We’ll make that a project.

RS:  I’ve got a project now!  And I’m determined.  Because those two pictures I want.

VG:  Good.

RS:  Okay.

VG:  Okay.  Genug.

RS:  Genug, genug, genug.

[Recorder is turned off and then back on.]

RS:  But there’s a vast difference between reading and seeing the nuances on the page.

VG:  Yeah.

RS:  And I feel that as long as I have vision I’ll be able to continue living because this is all that dispels my loneliness is reading, going to classes, going to lectures, going to-- and lecturing.  And it’s amazing what it does for me. 

You see it’s true they’re the beneficiaries and they consider themselves honored when they have me here.  But I keep telling them, without being overly humble, that it’s as good for me as it is for them.

VG:  Sure.

RS:  Because now that I cannot go out lecturing, I no longer have an agent.  Nobody asked for me and the few who did, I said, “Unless you come for me and bring me back, I have no way of getting to you.”  So they don’t want that, because most are senior citizens and they don’t drive themselves at night.  So the fact that I have a built in audience here, and that I can prepare myself, which by the way is tomorrow—

VG:  Yeah.

RS:  And it’s a complicated book.  I have thirteen or fourteen pages of notes.

VG:  Which is the book you’re doing tomorrow night?

RS:  Shalom Japan.

VG:  Oh, right.

RS:  And I intend to do it tomorrow.  But this evening and tomorrow the early part of the day I’ll be busy, because the paralegal is coming for me to sign all kinds of documents, including my will.  And I have to have witnesses.  I’ve already lined them up, but I have to call them and remind them that it’s tomorrow at one o’clock.

VG:  So will you put a note in, an addendum in tomorrow?

RS:  Huh?

VG:  Will you put an addendum or—

RS:  No, not tomorrow.

VG:  Oh.

RS:  Because she’s not my attorney.  She’s a clerk.  She’s a paralegal.  I will write out in my own hand and have it typed that papers, pictures that the children don’t want--.  In fact the children have taken most of the pictures.  You were right that I’d want to save the ones of Allison and Daniela and the pictures of Jocelyn because they may want them.  But insofar as other things are concerned, especially papers, I’d like you to have.  And you can throw them out—

VG:  No, no.  In fact, I think that it’s probably one of the things that the Jewish Women’s Archives will be talking about.  I mean, at the moment they don’t have a place.  They’re not a physical entity.  But I know that they’ll be interested in—

RS:  Who’s funding them?

VG:  You know, I don’t know.  They’ve probably gotten grants.  I’m not sure exactly where the money’s coming from. That I don’t know.

RS:  Of course, what I haven’t really resolved with Daniela and with, for example-- .  Until now I had two grandchildren, until a few years ago.  And for them I made all kinds of provisions because they were really left.  Their mother went through everything when Dean left and that was it.  So I have been their base whenever they needed anything.  And so in my will—in the previous will I wrote—

[Recording paused.]

VG:  Okay.  We’re continuing with another story.  But actually we’re going to run out of tape in the middle.

RS:  I’m so glad I found it.

VG:  Now wait a minute.  Wait a minute.  Hang on a minute.

[Recorder is turned off and then back on.]

VG:  Continue this on another tape.

[end of tape 8, side B]

VG:  Okay.  Now, this is tape two of our conversation on June 18^th.

RS:  Dean was not happy with his name.  The first name was given him because in the hospital, he was a preemie.  And in the hospital they said, “He’s so bright.  His eyes are so keen.  He’s so bright--.”  And everybody kept referring to him as being ‘the keen baby.’  So big Gene, the father, decided we’ll call him Dean Whitman Schwaab.  Schwaab, because his father’s name was Schwaab.  Well, as he grew older he said, “I don’t like my name.”  But of course, his father was very adamant about it.  But by the time he graduated and got married and moved to Alfred—because he as going to Alfred University for his bachelor degree—he applied to the court and changed his name.  Dean was something that was just--.  He says, “I’m not Dean.  I want a name that I choose by myself.”  He chose Joel.  And he didn’t like Schwaab because Schwabia, on which the name is based in Germany, is a militant.  And that was connected with Germany which was known to be, you know--.  After all, by the time he went through Alfred, Germany had already done twice its work in destroying humanity.

VG:  Schwaab is named after a place in Germany?

RS:  There is a Schwabia [a.k.a. Swabia], a province that’s particularly famous for its militancy.  And he said, “I’m not a militant person.  I like peace.  And I don’t want Schwaab to be my name.”  And he changed it to Joel Whitman Dana.  And from then on everything that he wrote was by Joel Dana.  And that’s why the play, which was written by him in 1979 was under the name of Joel Dana.  So I continue referring to him as Dean.  But when I’m with Daniela or with Allison or with Jocelyn, I try to remember that his name was Joel, not Dean.  But, after all, he was born, and I lived with him until he was married, until he changed his name.

VG:  Right.

RS:  And it was Dean.  And I got used to it.  People still call me Ronnie for the same reason.  Well, anyway—

VG:  Do you think that--?  Did changing his last name at all have anything to do with changing it to a name that was less identifiably Jewish?

RS:  Schwaab is not Jewish.  Schwabia is German.  His father was a Catholic.  My husband’s father was a Catholic.  And they had people in the church and their name was Schwaab.

VG:  Your husband’s father was Catholic and his mother was what?

RS:  Jewish.

VG:  Jewish.  And so he was brought up as a what?  As a—

RS:  Nothing.  Neither one of them believed.  You see, they believed in Socialism and in Communism.  And they used to go to Eugene—what was his name?

VG:  Debs.

RS:  Debs.

VG:  Yeah.

RS:   And my son was called Eugene Schwaab, named after Debs, Eugene Lincoln Schwaab.

VG:  Eugene Lincoln Schwaab.

RS:  Right.

VG:  Interesting name.

RS:  So, he was brought up.  He never knew he was Jewish.  He was brought up in a non-Jewish community where his mother and father lived.

VG:  You’re talking about your husband?

RS:  Yeah.

VG:  And did they live in some kind of a Communist community?

RS:  No.  They lived in a community outside of New York that was largely non-Jewish.  And she was proud of her German origin, but not of her Jewish.  She didn’t want any religion.  So Eugene—big Gene--.  I keep referring to him as big Gene.  Otherwise, you see, if my husband were a Jew in any sense of the word, he wouldn’t have named a son after him when he was still alive!

VG:  Unless he was Sephardic.

RS:  Huh?

VG:  Unless he was Sephardic.  I mean Sephardic Jews do that but—

RS:  He was not.  In any event, Eugene is called Eugene Lincoln Schwaab, Jr.

VG:  So your--?  Was your husband’s name Lincoln, also?

RS:  His name was—

VG:  Was it Eugene Lincoln Schwaab?

RS:  That’s right.

VG:  And had he been named after—

RS:  He was named after—

VG:  After Debs.

RS:  After Debs and Lincoln, because freed the slaves.

VG:  Very interesting.

RS:  Okay.  And Dean was called Whitman, Dean Whitman Schwaab and Dean was called Dean Jefferson Schwaab.

VG:  And Whitman was after Walt Whitman or--?

RS:  Huh?

VG:  The Whitman is after whom?

RS:  It was the poet.

VG:  It’s after Walt Whitman?

RS:  Huh?

VG:  The poet, Walt Whitman?

RS:  Walt Whitman.  And Jefferson--.  I mean, my husband was a historian of American history and he wanted his children to bear the name of people that he regarded as very significant in the development of American democracy: Lincoln, Jefferson, Whitman, the poet.  And, of course, to Dean, because Dean was an artist he assigned Whitman.  But I have problems because they were Gene, Dean and Dean.  And think about what happens when you’re angry and you’ve got to get at one of them.  And you begin, “Dean, Gene, Dean,” you know! And when Dean was born he said, “You didn’t really want a little boy anymore.  You’ve got two of them.  You wanted a girl so you would have called her Queen?  And you would be able to make her dance.”  Because I had been a dancer, you see.  That was his big hang up, that he wasn’t wanted as much because he was a little boy.   That isn’t the case at all.  Later, he discovered other things why perhaps there would have been resistance to him.  But—

VG:  What do you mean?

RS:  Well, when he came to Boston after he graduated from university—he was attending Columbia at the time—I was still [unclear] come to visit him with girl friends.  And I didn’t know anything about anything.  Besides, remember, I was brought up in an environment where homosexuality was considered taboo.  Moreover, I studied Freud, you know, the famous psychiatrist, and he said it was an illness.  So I go completely unaware.  We’re sitting on the grass outside of Mass General where Dean is dying.  And he said to me, “Mother, I think you ought to know that I’m gay.”  Well, it took my breath away at the beginning because, remember, I was brought up in Russia.  I was, you know, these are very important factors in our personalities.  And at the beginning I said, “What about your love affair with this one, that one?”  “Well,” he said, “I tried.  I tried having love affairs with girls.”  And he said it didn’t work.  And then he said--.  So I said to him, “Look darling, I’m not prepared for this new shocking bit of news.  However, you are my son and I love you; whether you’re gay or straight I don’t really care, because you’re my son.  I’ve loved you all my life—your life.  I’ll continue loving you.”  But he wasn’t satisfied, because he wanted me to accept his culture.  And the culture was something I was rejecting out of hand.  And I said to him, “Look dear, as long as I live I cannot accept a culture which commits fifty sexual encounters in a given day by going to the baths.”  I said, “To me, that’s fucking.  Dogs do that.  Human beings, if they want to make love, become attached to someone.  They may change at the end of five months, or something like that.”  But the idea of going daily into baths, which he was doing, and into massage parlors and meeting anybody who was a pretty little boy, and you had sex with him.  I said, “To me it’s not just immoral, it’s unaesthetic.  And I resent that kind of--.”  “What do you know,” he says, “that heterosexuals do?”  I said, “I know all about it.  Your father was a philanderer.  But he didn’t have fifty encounters in a given day.  He had a mistress for a period of time.  Then he went on to another mistress.  But,” I said, “So don’t expect me to fall for this culture, so-called culture.  I think the idea that you’re coming out--.”  He said, “We’re finally coming out of the closet!”  I said, “That’s all to the good.”  But he never forgave me for not accepting his culture.  And when he became very sick, very, very sick, his whole personality changed and he became very bitter and angry and frightened about the fact that he was facing death imminently.  And he used to hurt me.  Deliberately say very, very unkind things to me that devastated me.  There were times when I didn’t want to see him again.  And yet the next day he would be gracious and loving and kind.  But he didn’t heal the wounds.  So the last time I visited him, he began a long unrelated sort of lecture to me.  Presumably it was invoking my sins of some sort.  And he ended up--.  And my mother at age eighty-five—at that time I was eighty-five—wearing a handsome cashmere sweater.  And I thought to myself, “What has that got to do with all the things you’ve just finished saying?” Because I didn’t understand that they all related to me because they were--.  I couldn’t recognize them.  All I know is that when I got through I felt as though I’d been through the wringer.  And I went to Sema’s where I slept. And I said, “I have to see him tomorrow.  And I don’t think I ever want to look at him again, because he’s so hurt that he needs to cut other people into pieces.”  And Karen, who was his very good friend, platonic, and who became the administrator of his will, he used to devastate her.  And Roland, his lover, with whom he came here one time, he was--.  Everybody whom he loved he hurt.  Sema was the only one who escaped, because she never criticized.  She never made any kind of reservations.  He didn’t ask her to.  And Sema could afford the luxury of just listening to him because he needed somebody to hear him, you know.  So he was very fond of her and he never, never said—.  Sema said, “If he ever said anything hostile to me I’d throw him out of the house.”  But you see I couldn’t do that, because I didn’t want him to feel that he was being rejected by me.  So I continued taking punishment.  And I think one of the [telephone rings]—

[Recorder is turned off.]

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[1]Sidney Hillman was the head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, an advisor to Roosevelt, and a key founder of the Congress of Industrial Unions.

[2] The New York Times reported in 1944 that Roosevelt told his party leaders to “Clear it with Sidney” before choosing his vice-presidential running mate.

[3] ‘Garnishment’ is a way of collecting money from a defendant who owes it.

[4] Estimates vary from 33,771 to 150,000, according to an article in Brandeis graduate school’s history journal.

[5] According to Hadassah’s site, however, their trip was in 1966.