Mother/daughter team Ruth Hertz Weber and Emilia Lopez-Yañez venture off the beaten track to bring audiences a one-of-a-kind album that transcends generations. This project began as a labor of love when Ruth set the poems of her late Grandma, Betty Karon Hertz, to music so that the story of her impoverished childhood in Russia, her daring escape during the Bolshevik Revolution, and her life as an immigrant in the United States could be forever memorialized.
Follow along as Betty picks Mushrooms in the forest at the age of eight to keep her family from starving; as she dreams of a life as a writer, I Had a Dream; and as she hides in a trench on her parent’s farm, I Am a Tree, during the numerous invasions of her town which occurred before the Holocaust. The journeys and struggles of each immigrant are fascinating and we hope you will enjoy this one, set in song. |
Judges from the Vocal Chamber Music Category of The American Prize 2019 wrote “Soprano sings and plays oboe--very impressive in any context. In new music, especially so. A certain style and feeling, vaguely pops and quite surprising in a way…arresting to watch and listen to.” James A. Cox from Midwest Book Review (Library Bookwatch) wrote: "I Had a Dream: Songs of an Immigrant is an extraordinary music album by mother-daughter team Ruth Hertz Weber and Emilia Lopez-Yanez..... Emotional and poignant, I Had a Dream: Songs of an Immigrant is utterly unforgettable and worthy of the highest recommendation for personal and public library music CD collections." http://www.midwestbookreview.com/lbw/feb_22.htm#LibraryCD Interview with Hammond Chamberlain from Beyond the Playlist https://directory.libsyn.com/episode/index/id/22427267 Kathy Parsons of MainlyPiano.com wrote " Had a Dream - Songs of an Immigrant is an album that truly defies categorization (always a plus, I think!). Songs of an Immigrant is an inspirational journey in song and is suitable for all ages. It's very beautifully done! San Diego Troubadour Magazine -album review https://sandiegotroubadour.com/i-had-a-dream-songs-of-an-immigrant/ Interview CBS8 – The Zeveley Zone https://www.cbs8.com/video/news/ local/zevely-zone/mother-and-daughter-celebrate-hanukkah-by-sharing-family-heritage/509-0e674236-0acb-4a7e-aef3- 
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The 'Great' Story
As told by Betty Karon Hertz
My mother was born in Roseve, Russia. She almost died at birth and was given the name Alte to live long. Her mother came from a wealthy family on her father’s side. They lived in Slutsk. They lived in a very beautiful home, and they even had electricity.
My grandmother, Minye, was a business woman. She made cheeses, knitted stockings, and bought eggs from farmers and sent them to Minsk.
My grandfather, Orche, had two brothers. The oldest was married to a wonderful woman who was like a mother to my mother.
My father, Pesach, was very poor, and Batsheva, my mother, who was very beautiful and a few years older, were brought together by a matchmaker. They went for a walk and he asked to marry her and she said, “Yes.” My father had struggled when he was growing up (his father had died). He was glad to marry because my grandmother Minye provided for them and took care of them and the children. They had four children, Soral (Sarah), Yentil (Jeanette), Blume (Betty), and Aron (Harold). Sarah was two years older than Jeanette, who was one year older than me (Betty), who was two years older than Harold.
My father was a tailor, “but he couldn’t sew”. He made clothes for the villagers. He had one worker, Petrok. My father was also a volunteer fireman in Europe. He and several friends went to America in 1913. They began their trip at the river, which was very close to our house, and I remember when they left the whole family stood at the river and cried. The war broke out in 1914. My father sent money and letters but kept getting them back. No one heard from him for eleven years. When my father came to the United States he had very bad luck. A year after he arrived in the United States, he wanted to go back to Russia. (Fortunately, he didn’t.) He carried the head of his sewing machine on his shoulder and looked for work. He also tried to be a butcher and a baker---but that didn’t work out. He tried other things and didn’t succeed. He started out in New York, then went to Kansas City, and ended up in Easton, Pennsylvania. He said, “This is it. I’m not going anywhere else. I’m going to die here.” He bought a horse and wagon and started to buy old clothes and junk. He didn’t do well at this either.
I was born on Shavuot in 1908 (later decided it was June 10) in Roseve, Russia. We lived in a little shack of a house. The floor was wood—every year my mother would paint it red. There was one room with beds all around the room. A big bench and table were in the middle, and the room was divided by a closet. One side was a kitchen. There was an oven with an attached heater or smaller warming oven called a rupke. We often got sick from the fumes from this oven. We had to search for firewood. We had only cold water which they had to bring in two pails on their shoulders, from the wells. There were two of them about a block on either side of our house. It was very dangerous in bad weather because it was very icy. We kept the water covered in the forhuis, an unheated area like an entryway. There was an additional area outside called a shpeichel, like a pantry. We had a “badim,” loft, which we reached with a ladder. We put a lot of dirt up there for insulation. We had a cold cellar where we kept potatoes, beets, pickled cucumbers, sauerkraut, carrots and apples. There was a long wooden tub, a multer, for bathing, and a round metal tub for washing clothes. In the summer we bathed in the shpeichel area and in the winter inside. In the summer they washed clothes in the river. We used candles for light and also “kinolamps,” kindling sticks in containers in the wall and also kerosene lamps. The walls wouldn’t burn because they were plaster. The outhouse was just a hole in the backyard with no seat only boards to stand on. Rich people about a block away had a sutke (outhouse). Everyone went barefoot except on Shabbat.
In front of our house was an open yard. The fenced garden was in the back with three purple plum trees and one green plum and thirty-nine apple trees that my father planted before he left for America. Jeanette planted and took care of the flowers, strawberries, raspberries and tobacco, which we dried and sold. Later we had to plant a special grass for the cow under the trees because the trees grew so big that the other things would not grow underneath. These apple trees grew huge golden apples that had flecks inside like honey. We couldn’t keep them over the winter so we sold them in Minsk. The last few years we rented the orchard except for one tree.
We had to cross someone else’s yard to get to our field that was about thirty feet by two miles. We hired someone else to plow and help with the weeding, but we planted and did everything else. We carried the vegetables in sacks on our backs from the field to the house. We had one row of potatoes, enough for a whole year. Then there were rows of radishes, turnips, beets, cabbages, lima beans, other beans and cucumbers. We sent the better vegetables to Minsk. Sarah had a stand where she sold vegetables to the villagers on Sundays. We kids went into the woods by ourselves to pick mushrooms and blueberries.
My great-aunt, Dvorshe, owned a store that had everything. She told my mother to take whatever she needed. She took very little—only necessities. A herring would last the family two days. In exchange for items my family would hide black market items in the cold cellar for Dvorshe until she needed them. Dye was one of these items. The store was always closed on Saturday, so they would come every Sunday to visit. One time my mother had only one apple, and she cut it up and served each one a quarter.
We had some chickens that we kept in an area under the stove. Sometimes we would open it and the chickens would run around the house. We had a cow in a stable next to the shpeichel. When we milked the cow we put the milk in narrow pottery jars. The cream rose to the top and we churned it into butter which we sold. We made cheese out of the buttermilk and sour milk. One year we had to sell the cow because we couldn’t feed her. We didn’t have anything that year. We couldn’t afford any meat or fish, and we had no rye for bread and no dairy products because we sold the cow. Our hands swelled with blisters because we didn’t have enough food. We had to put grease on the blisters.
We practiced a fanatic orthodox Judaism. You couldn’t comb your hair on Shabbat or Holidays in case you pulled one out. You couldn’t tear a leaf. “Cheder”, religious school, was only for boys, but Sarah went for a few years. I went to the Rebbe to learn to read the Torah portion. I read for my grandmother who was blind. I went to another private teacher to learn to read and write in Yiddish. My cousin, Chana, had a daughter, Riva, who had rheumatic fever. They hired a big, tall French woman to teach her. My grandmother sent me there. I didn’t have a book or a pad, and I could only listen. Then I went to a Russian school. We had to pay for school and books. After awhile my mother couldn’t pay the money, about a dollar, so I went to the teacher to give him back the book. He gave me the book and insisted that I come anyway and not pay. At Christmas time my mother gave me eggs to bring him for a gift. He told me to take the eggs home because we needed them more than he did. I always liked reading, but I didn’t have any books.
We played a game like jacks with little lamb bones. In another game, we threw a stick in the air and hit it with another stick. The furthest one won. On Passover we played a game with walnuts we’d hit. We made a doll out of rags, and we played cards for matchsticks and sang and danced. In the summer we went swimming in the river.
My grandmother, Minye, came to live with us when I was ten or twelve years old. Even though she was blind, she had lived by herself. She knitted stockings. I took her to synagogue on Saturdays and Holidays. We moved the “rupke”, warming oven, to make room for her bed. The floor beneath her bed was cement.
The War started in 1914. The Poles were the worst, then the Germans, Cossacks and Czechs. When they passed through, a few soldiers stayed in each house. The Germans were nice but took everything and shipped it to Germany. The Poles were there when the Bolsheviks came. They were fighting in the streets-shooting. Our family started running. Jeanette and Harold were separated from the rest of us and ran to another village. No one knew if they were dead or alive. The rest of us crawled under a barbed wire (we had to help my grandmother who was blind) and ran to the basement of a brick building. Later, when we came back, we found that we all had survived. Only one man in town was hurt—his arm was shot off when he resisted the burning of his house. Many peasants were found dead in the fields with their swollen bellies cut open.
The villagers knew which women had no husbands at home. Some of them were bandits. One came and knocked and knocked until my mother opened the door. He tried to choke her, but the four children screamed and screamed so much that he ran away. The family went to stay with another family for a few days. The son went to see if our house was alright and found about twenty-five soldiers there. The next day, when the soldiers left, we went back to our house. While the family was there, they would only assign one soldier to the house because there wasn’t any room.
When Sarah was sixteen years old, she decided to look for our father. She went to HIAS in Warsaw, Poland and they were able to locate him. It was illegal to cross the border at that time. Sarah had to have a false passport. She met a boy who she knew from Roseve. He had crossed legally. He recognized the “authorities” near them and told her that she should pretend to be shopping and he would start to run to distract them. She was able to get away, and when they caught up with him, he said that he was running for exercise. She claimed to be an orphan because that was the only way to get into the United States. When our father heard this he became very nervous and thought that he was going to get in trouble. He sent money for her and told her to bring “another one.” My father sent us stockings. We only kept one pair and gave away the rest to others in appreciation for what they had done for us. He sent plaid fabric which we made into a two-piece dress. He sent shoes with points on them and I had a shoemaker take the points off. He sent some food including a Crisco-type condensed milk which we gave away.
Jeanette didn’t have a passport either and had to cross into Poland illegally. First, she went to a cousin who lived in Resk, about three miles from the border. He hid her in an area above the oven. She stayed there about three weeks and they had a false passport made for her. The cousin hired and paid for a hay wagon and hid her in it to cross the border. The extra money that our father had sent was sewn in Jeanette’s clothing because there were pickpockets. My sisters got to Amsterdam and then came to Ellis Island on the “Zealand.” Jeanette was so sick on the ship that she had to stay in the infirmary. They didn’t think that she would survive. When she felt better, people threw oranges at her in celebration.
Later, the borders opened, and the rest of the family could go legally. My father sent passports for the three of us, my mother, Harold and me. My father was concerned because Sarah and Jeanette had come as orphans. He got help from a judge in Easton who had taken a liking to him. The judge helped him fill out the papers and told him if he were ever questioned he should say that there was a war and he had lost contact and thought we had been killed.
We sold our house to a man who was supposed to “keep” my grandmother. Instead, he decided to throw it down and build a new one, and my grandmother had to move. A relative’s family took her in because it was a mitzvah (good deed) to do that.
We needed to get our papers to go to America. We went to Minsk and stayed in a hotel. Each time we went to the office in Minsk we were told that we needed more papers.
Before my father went to America, he went to the “county” of Capulye to make our birth certificates for us. (which we didn’t know about). He made Jeanette and me one month apart and made me the older one. Instead of sending the papers we needed to Minsk, the papers were sent to Roseve. I had to go to get them. I went to Slutsk by train. There I looked for a peasant to take me to Roseve. I went on a horse and wagon with a man I didn’t know. ON the way, the horses reared up and I almost fell out of the wagon. In Roseve, I went to the post office to get the papers and then went to see my grandmother. She cried so much when I had to say goodbye to her. Then I took a horse and wagon back to Slutsk and stayed overnight with my father’s sister. The next day I went to Minsk and arrived very late at night. If it had taken one more day, the passports would have not been good, and we would have had to start the whole thing all over again.
The three of us went to Riga, Latvia where we stayed for a month. It was very cold there, so we bought boots with fur up to the knees. When we got to Cherbourg, France it was warm, and people pointed at our boots. We bought other shoes there.
We were supposed to go on a big ship, “the Amsterdam.” I heard that a smaller ship, “Zealand,” was leaving three weeks earlier so I decided that we should go on that one. When my father got word that we would be arriving on that ship Sarah and Jeanette began to cry because they thought that someone was coming to get them since they had come illegally. (It was the same ship they had come on.)
We went on the boat at night and slept in bunk beds. In the morning we couldn’t get up because we were so sick. My mother had bought a bottle of schapps in Riga, because someone told her it would make us feel better. We used a cane to steady ourselves. A young guy, who got off the boat in Canada, threw away the schnapps and the cane because he said that they wouldn’t let us in if we had them. The trip took nine or ten days. Toward the end we felt better. We arrived in Ellis Island on a Sunday but couldn’t get off until Monday, February 11, 1924. When we arrived in the United States, my mother had $3 left. My father came to pick us up. He had bought me a beautiful taffeta dress with little buds and a big, bulky sweater. I wore that dress all over. It was all I had. We were very poor.
In Easton, we lived in a little rented house on North Hampton Street. It had three rooms downstairs, and two rooms upstairs with a narrow, winding staircase. A seamstress had a shop in the basement. The toilet was outside. We had to enter the house through an alley, like a tunnel. The land-lady lived two houses away and kept chickens in a coop near the door to the house. When Morris later came to visit, he let the chickens out by mistake when he went to the toilet at night.
Later, my father bought a house on Sixth Street. It was an attached house with a separate entrance. My father took part of a bedroom and made it into a bathroom with a toilet and a bathtub. My mother planted a garden and grew all kinds of vegetables. The garage was in the back of the house.
We had lot of friends of all ages. We had a phonograph, and all of our friends would come to dance, and our neighbors would come in to watch. My mother would serve fruit. A friend had a car (very few people had cars) and we would all pile in six, seven, eight of us would sit on laps. We went to dances at the armory. We had to pay to get in. Girls would stand on one side and boys on the other. We would also walk to the shops and go up a big hill on Third Street, about one hundred steps.
My father was very strict. We had to be home at a specific time. He was a generous man. If anyone knocked on the door and asked for help he would give them all the change in his pocket. He also collected money for others and helped them get jobs and homes. He had a beautiful singing voice and was very active in the shul that was two doors away.
When I got to America I had to go to school because of my age. They put me in the first grade even though I was much too old. I could do all the arithmetic, but I couldn’t understand how to talk. Then they put me in the fifth grade. But I didn’t want to go to school anymore. My father was very poor, and I wanted to get a job. I went to “continuation school” at night to learn English and I got a job in the day.
My first job was in a silk mill. I took the bus there early in the morning. I had to redraw thread from one spool to another before the weaving process. Then I got a job in a pants factory. It had been Sarah’s job. One time I went into a store in Easton where Jeanette did alterations. They asked me to be a model for them, but I was too shy. I went to buy a coat and they told me they needed someone to do alterations. I said that I didn’t know how to do that, but they insisted and had confidence in me. I had to shorten fur coats…and I did it. Once, when the owners were out, the phone rang. I picked it up and heard someone talking but I hung it up because I had never talked on a phone.
Sarah went to New York and met Sam by accident in Coney Island. She had known him in Poland. When she and Sam got married they lived in Passaic, where he had been living.
Jeanette went to Passaic to stay with Sarah. She got a job and paid rent. I went to visit. We all took a walk on Main Avenue. Sarah said, “Do you want to see Pushkin?” (a famous writer with lots of hair.) Morris was with a group of his friends and he said, referring to me, “That’s a new one.” We both turned around to look at each other.
A year later I went to visit Sarah again. Morris was a block away sitting with other people. He said that he had to meet that girl. Morris came over and asked what time it was. It was ten to six. We talked for a long time. A week later he to me to Palisades Park and then dinner and ice cream and then back to Sarah’s house. He kept calling me in Easton. The seamstress got the calls and he told her he was coming. I said, “no” but he came every weekend.
Instead of his traveling, I went to live at Sarah’s. We got married in his sister’s house about nine or ten months later on June 3, 1928.
Morris was born in Ryznoi, Poland on April 10, 1904 (or thereabouts). He and his twin sister, Dora, were the youngest with six older sisters: Rose, Clara, Jenny, Rebecca, Ruth, Marsha. Their father died when Morris was three or four years old, leaving their mother, Chana, to struggle with eight children.
Morris was very sick as a child. He was wrapped in a prayer shawl and given the name Chayim (life)…and he got better. They had nothing and suffered from hunger most of the time. They resorted to eating grass. Morris had marks on the back of his neck from malnutrition. One time, he had night blindness that was cured by inhaling the steam of cooked liver.
The family wanted Morris to be a rabbi so that he would be taken care of. Instead, he decided to leave Europe at eighteen because of the war…he did not want to serve in the army. His sisters, Rose, Clara and Jenny, were already in the United States. Rose and Clara had come by way of Denmark. Rebecca was going to go but changed her mind. Morris could only get into the United States by going to Argentina first. He had no trade, and he did not speak the language, so he became a waiter. First, he roomed with friends, but when the money ran out, he slept in the restaurant. They would lock him in there at night. When his friends ate there, he would give them extra food. He managed to leave Argentina after nine months. Cousins agreed to take responsibility for him.
Morris could not find a job. He stayed in a boardinghouse. He had no money to pay for meals so he would buy a roll or a donut and go to the movies because he was so embarrassed that he was not working. He was capable of doing all kinds of things like plumbing and carpentry and electrical work, but he chose tailoring because the other jobs were “dirty.” He learned a specialty, buttonholes.
Morris and I would send money to Europe whenever we could. When World War II started, we couldn’t get any letters from the family. Only one letter got through saying, “If you die, you die once. The way we are living, we die everyday.” None of the other sisters survived.
Morris’s work was seasonal, so he was without work a lot. He never made a lot of money, but we managed because I was a good manager. Morris bought me a sewing machine. I said that I really didn’t know how to sew but I soon taught myself.
Julius, was named after Morris’s father Yudel, and was born on May 25, 1929. Jules was a beautiful baby, 5lbs, 12 oz. It was hard to pull the baby carriage up the outside steps, so we moved to a four-room downstairs apartment. We lived there for four years. We used to go to Easton for vacations and stay two or three weeks. Sometimes Sarah or Jeanette would come at the same time with their children. The attached house was empty, and we would sit on the floor and play cards.
Times were very bad financially, but we always had a lot of company. I always made a lot of food—all the Jewish foods. People would sleep on the sofa or on the floor or two or three in a bed. We visited a lot too. One week we would go to Sarah’s and the next week she would
come to us. People would sometimes send a postcard that they were coming, and sometimes they would just show up.
Jules would watch me divide up the money for rent, electricity, food, etc. When the ice cream man would come and I would want to give him money he would refuse and say, “you need it for rent.”
We had not had another child because of the Depression. You couldn’t get a job even if you were willing to pay for it. I longed for another baby. I looked in every carriage. Finally, I made the decision. Mildred was born on February 28, 1940 and was named after my grandmother Minye. She was like a little “doll.” She weighed 5 lb. 8 oz. When we got word that Morris’s mother had died, Milly was a month old. We gave her the middle name Arlene.
We decided to buy a house in 1943. The house was cheap because it was in receivership. It was dilapidated and everything needed to be replaced. Morris went to work to work fixing and repairing and cleaning up and planting grass and flowers in the backyard. He made arches and closed windows and doors. He put in kitchen cabinets and a new bathroom, made closets and painted and wall-papered. We lived in that house for thirty-four years.
The year after we moved into the house, I went back to work weekends. Later I decided to get a job in a sewing shop. I worked in many shops over the years. Even after I recovered from surgery for colon cancer I went back to work because I wanted to get a pension and drug benefits for working twenty years for the same union.
(Betty would always say, “With all the problems, if I had to do it again, I would.”)
My grandmother, Minye, was a business woman. She made cheeses, knitted stockings, and bought eggs from farmers and sent them to Minsk.
My grandfather, Orche, had two brothers. The oldest was married to a wonderful woman who was like a mother to my mother.
My father, Pesach, was very poor, and Batsheva, my mother, who was very beautiful and a few years older, were brought together by a matchmaker. They went for a walk and he asked to marry her and she said, “Yes.” My father had struggled when he was growing up (his father had died). He was glad to marry because my grandmother Minye provided for them and took care of them and the children. They had four children, Soral (Sarah), Yentil (Jeanette), Blume (Betty), and Aron (Harold). Sarah was two years older than Jeanette, who was one year older than me (Betty), who was two years older than Harold.
My father was a tailor, “but he couldn’t sew”. He made clothes for the villagers. He had one worker, Petrok. My father was also a volunteer fireman in Europe. He and several friends went to America in 1913. They began their trip at the river, which was very close to our house, and I remember when they left the whole family stood at the river and cried. The war broke out in 1914. My father sent money and letters but kept getting them back. No one heard from him for eleven years. When my father came to the United States he had very bad luck. A year after he arrived in the United States, he wanted to go back to Russia. (Fortunately, he didn’t.) He carried the head of his sewing machine on his shoulder and looked for work. He also tried to be a butcher and a baker---but that didn’t work out. He tried other things and didn’t succeed. He started out in New York, then went to Kansas City, and ended up in Easton, Pennsylvania. He said, “This is it. I’m not going anywhere else. I’m going to die here.” He bought a horse and wagon and started to buy old clothes and junk. He didn’t do well at this either.
I was born on Shavuot in 1908 (later decided it was June 10) in Roseve, Russia. We lived in a little shack of a house. The floor was wood—every year my mother would paint it red. There was one room with beds all around the room. A big bench and table were in the middle, and the room was divided by a closet. One side was a kitchen. There was an oven with an attached heater or smaller warming oven called a rupke. We often got sick from the fumes from this oven. We had to search for firewood. We had only cold water which they had to bring in two pails on their shoulders, from the wells. There were two of them about a block on either side of our house. It was very dangerous in bad weather because it was very icy. We kept the water covered in the forhuis, an unheated area like an entryway. There was an additional area outside called a shpeichel, like a pantry. We had a “badim,” loft, which we reached with a ladder. We put a lot of dirt up there for insulation. We had a cold cellar where we kept potatoes, beets, pickled cucumbers, sauerkraut, carrots and apples. There was a long wooden tub, a multer, for bathing, and a round metal tub for washing clothes. In the summer we bathed in the shpeichel area and in the winter inside. In the summer they washed clothes in the river. We used candles for light and also “kinolamps,” kindling sticks in containers in the wall and also kerosene lamps. The walls wouldn’t burn because they were plaster. The outhouse was just a hole in the backyard with no seat only boards to stand on. Rich people about a block away had a sutke (outhouse). Everyone went barefoot except on Shabbat.
In front of our house was an open yard. The fenced garden was in the back with three purple plum trees and one green plum and thirty-nine apple trees that my father planted before he left for America. Jeanette planted and took care of the flowers, strawberries, raspberries and tobacco, which we dried and sold. Later we had to plant a special grass for the cow under the trees because the trees grew so big that the other things would not grow underneath. These apple trees grew huge golden apples that had flecks inside like honey. We couldn’t keep them over the winter so we sold them in Minsk. The last few years we rented the orchard except for one tree.
We had to cross someone else’s yard to get to our field that was about thirty feet by two miles. We hired someone else to plow and help with the weeding, but we planted and did everything else. We carried the vegetables in sacks on our backs from the field to the house. We had one row of potatoes, enough for a whole year. Then there were rows of radishes, turnips, beets, cabbages, lima beans, other beans and cucumbers. We sent the better vegetables to Minsk. Sarah had a stand where she sold vegetables to the villagers on Sundays. We kids went into the woods by ourselves to pick mushrooms and blueberries.
My great-aunt, Dvorshe, owned a store that had everything. She told my mother to take whatever she needed. She took very little—only necessities. A herring would last the family two days. In exchange for items my family would hide black market items in the cold cellar for Dvorshe until she needed them. Dye was one of these items. The store was always closed on Saturday, so they would come every Sunday to visit. One time my mother had only one apple, and she cut it up and served each one a quarter.
We had some chickens that we kept in an area under the stove. Sometimes we would open it and the chickens would run around the house. We had a cow in a stable next to the shpeichel. When we milked the cow we put the milk in narrow pottery jars. The cream rose to the top and we churned it into butter which we sold. We made cheese out of the buttermilk and sour milk. One year we had to sell the cow because we couldn’t feed her. We didn’t have anything that year. We couldn’t afford any meat or fish, and we had no rye for bread and no dairy products because we sold the cow. Our hands swelled with blisters because we didn’t have enough food. We had to put grease on the blisters.
We practiced a fanatic orthodox Judaism. You couldn’t comb your hair on Shabbat or Holidays in case you pulled one out. You couldn’t tear a leaf. “Cheder”, religious school, was only for boys, but Sarah went for a few years. I went to the Rebbe to learn to read the Torah portion. I read for my grandmother who was blind. I went to another private teacher to learn to read and write in Yiddish. My cousin, Chana, had a daughter, Riva, who had rheumatic fever. They hired a big, tall French woman to teach her. My grandmother sent me there. I didn’t have a book or a pad, and I could only listen. Then I went to a Russian school. We had to pay for school and books. After awhile my mother couldn’t pay the money, about a dollar, so I went to the teacher to give him back the book. He gave me the book and insisted that I come anyway and not pay. At Christmas time my mother gave me eggs to bring him for a gift. He told me to take the eggs home because we needed them more than he did. I always liked reading, but I didn’t have any books.
We played a game like jacks with little lamb bones. In another game, we threw a stick in the air and hit it with another stick. The furthest one won. On Passover we played a game with walnuts we’d hit. We made a doll out of rags, and we played cards for matchsticks and sang and danced. In the summer we went swimming in the river.
My grandmother, Minye, came to live with us when I was ten or twelve years old. Even though she was blind, she had lived by herself. She knitted stockings. I took her to synagogue on Saturdays and Holidays. We moved the “rupke”, warming oven, to make room for her bed. The floor beneath her bed was cement.
The War started in 1914. The Poles were the worst, then the Germans, Cossacks and Czechs. When they passed through, a few soldiers stayed in each house. The Germans were nice but took everything and shipped it to Germany. The Poles were there when the Bolsheviks came. They were fighting in the streets-shooting. Our family started running. Jeanette and Harold were separated from the rest of us and ran to another village. No one knew if they were dead or alive. The rest of us crawled under a barbed wire (we had to help my grandmother who was blind) and ran to the basement of a brick building. Later, when we came back, we found that we all had survived. Only one man in town was hurt—his arm was shot off when he resisted the burning of his house. Many peasants were found dead in the fields with their swollen bellies cut open.
The villagers knew which women had no husbands at home. Some of them were bandits. One came and knocked and knocked until my mother opened the door. He tried to choke her, but the four children screamed and screamed so much that he ran away. The family went to stay with another family for a few days. The son went to see if our house was alright and found about twenty-five soldiers there. The next day, when the soldiers left, we went back to our house. While the family was there, they would only assign one soldier to the house because there wasn’t any room.
When Sarah was sixteen years old, she decided to look for our father. She went to HIAS in Warsaw, Poland and they were able to locate him. It was illegal to cross the border at that time. Sarah had to have a false passport. She met a boy who she knew from Roseve. He had crossed legally. He recognized the “authorities” near them and told her that she should pretend to be shopping and he would start to run to distract them. She was able to get away, and when they caught up with him, he said that he was running for exercise. She claimed to be an orphan because that was the only way to get into the United States. When our father heard this he became very nervous and thought that he was going to get in trouble. He sent money for her and told her to bring “another one.” My father sent us stockings. We only kept one pair and gave away the rest to others in appreciation for what they had done for us. He sent plaid fabric which we made into a two-piece dress. He sent shoes with points on them and I had a shoemaker take the points off. He sent some food including a Crisco-type condensed milk which we gave away.
Jeanette didn’t have a passport either and had to cross into Poland illegally. First, she went to a cousin who lived in Resk, about three miles from the border. He hid her in an area above the oven. She stayed there about three weeks and they had a false passport made for her. The cousin hired and paid for a hay wagon and hid her in it to cross the border. The extra money that our father had sent was sewn in Jeanette’s clothing because there were pickpockets. My sisters got to Amsterdam and then came to Ellis Island on the “Zealand.” Jeanette was so sick on the ship that she had to stay in the infirmary. They didn’t think that she would survive. When she felt better, people threw oranges at her in celebration.
Later, the borders opened, and the rest of the family could go legally. My father sent passports for the three of us, my mother, Harold and me. My father was concerned because Sarah and Jeanette had come as orphans. He got help from a judge in Easton who had taken a liking to him. The judge helped him fill out the papers and told him if he were ever questioned he should say that there was a war and he had lost contact and thought we had been killed.
We sold our house to a man who was supposed to “keep” my grandmother. Instead, he decided to throw it down and build a new one, and my grandmother had to move. A relative’s family took her in because it was a mitzvah (good deed) to do that.
We needed to get our papers to go to America. We went to Minsk and stayed in a hotel. Each time we went to the office in Minsk we were told that we needed more papers.
Before my father went to America, he went to the “county” of Capulye to make our birth certificates for us. (which we didn’t know about). He made Jeanette and me one month apart and made me the older one. Instead of sending the papers we needed to Minsk, the papers were sent to Roseve. I had to go to get them. I went to Slutsk by train. There I looked for a peasant to take me to Roseve. I went on a horse and wagon with a man I didn’t know. ON the way, the horses reared up and I almost fell out of the wagon. In Roseve, I went to the post office to get the papers and then went to see my grandmother. She cried so much when I had to say goodbye to her. Then I took a horse and wagon back to Slutsk and stayed overnight with my father’s sister. The next day I went to Minsk and arrived very late at night. If it had taken one more day, the passports would have not been good, and we would have had to start the whole thing all over again.
The three of us went to Riga, Latvia where we stayed for a month. It was very cold there, so we bought boots with fur up to the knees. When we got to Cherbourg, France it was warm, and people pointed at our boots. We bought other shoes there.
We were supposed to go on a big ship, “the Amsterdam.” I heard that a smaller ship, “Zealand,” was leaving three weeks earlier so I decided that we should go on that one. When my father got word that we would be arriving on that ship Sarah and Jeanette began to cry because they thought that someone was coming to get them since they had come illegally. (It was the same ship they had come on.)
We went on the boat at night and slept in bunk beds. In the morning we couldn’t get up because we were so sick. My mother had bought a bottle of schapps in Riga, because someone told her it would make us feel better. We used a cane to steady ourselves. A young guy, who got off the boat in Canada, threw away the schnapps and the cane because he said that they wouldn’t let us in if we had them. The trip took nine or ten days. Toward the end we felt better. We arrived in Ellis Island on a Sunday but couldn’t get off until Monday, February 11, 1924. When we arrived in the United States, my mother had $3 left. My father came to pick us up. He had bought me a beautiful taffeta dress with little buds and a big, bulky sweater. I wore that dress all over. It was all I had. We were very poor.
In Easton, we lived in a little rented house on North Hampton Street. It had three rooms downstairs, and two rooms upstairs with a narrow, winding staircase. A seamstress had a shop in the basement. The toilet was outside. We had to enter the house through an alley, like a tunnel. The land-lady lived two houses away and kept chickens in a coop near the door to the house. When Morris later came to visit, he let the chickens out by mistake when he went to the toilet at night.
Later, my father bought a house on Sixth Street. It was an attached house with a separate entrance. My father took part of a bedroom and made it into a bathroom with a toilet and a bathtub. My mother planted a garden and grew all kinds of vegetables. The garage was in the back of the house.
We had lot of friends of all ages. We had a phonograph, and all of our friends would come to dance, and our neighbors would come in to watch. My mother would serve fruit. A friend had a car (very few people had cars) and we would all pile in six, seven, eight of us would sit on laps. We went to dances at the armory. We had to pay to get in. Girls would stand on one side and boys on the other. We would also walk to the shops and go up a big hill on Third Street, about one hundred steps.
My father was very strict. We had to be home at a specific time. He was a generous man. If anyone knocked on the door and asked for help he would give them all the change in his pocket. He also collected money for others and helped them get jobs and homes. He had a beautiful singing voice and was very active in the shul that was two doors away.
When I got to America I had to go to school because of my age. They put me in the first grade even though I was much too old. I could do all the arithmetic, but I couldn’t understand how to talk. Then they put me in the fifth grade. But I didn’t want to go to school anymore. My father was very poor, and I wanted to get a job. I went to “continuation school” at night to learn English and I got a job in the day.
My first job was in a silk mill. I took the bus there early in the morning. I had to redraw thread from one spool to another before the weaving process. Then I got a job in a pants factory. It had been Sarah’s job. One time I went into a store in Easton where Jeanette did alterations. They asked me to be a model for them, but I was too shy. I went to buy a coat and they told me they needed someone to do alterations. I said that I didn’t know how to do that, but they insisted and had confidence in me. I had to shorten fur coats…and I did it. Once, when the owners were out, the phone rang. I picked it up and heard someone talking but I hung it up because I had never talked on a phone.
Sarah went to New York and met Sam by accident in Coney Island. She had known him in Poland. When she and Sam got married they lived in Passaic, where he had been living.
Jeanette went to Passaic to stay with Sarah. She got a job and paid rent. I went to visit. We all took a walk on Main Avenue. Sarah said, “Do you want to see Pushkin?” (a famous writer with lots of hair.) Morris was with a group of his friends and he said, referring to me, “That’s a new one.” We both turned around to look at each other.
A year later I went to visit Sarah again. Morris was a block away sitting with other people. He said that he had to meet that girl. Morris came over and asked what time it was. It was ten to six. We talked for a long time. A week later he to me to Palisades Park and then dinner and ice cream and then back to Sarah’s house. He kept calling me in Easton. The seamstress got the calls and he told her he was coming. I said, “no” but he came every weekend.
Instead of his traveling, I went to live at Sarah’s. We got married in his sister’s house about nine or ten months later on June 3, 1928.
Morris was born in Ryznoi, Poland on April 10, 1904 (or thereabouts). He and his twin sister, Dora, were the youngest with six older sisters: Rose, Clara, Jenny, Rebecca, Ruth, Marsha. Their father died when Morris was three or four years old, leaving their mother, Chana, to struggle with eight children.
Morris was very sick as a child. He was wrapped in a prayer shawl and given the name Chayim (life)…and he got better. They had nothing and suffered from hunger most of the time. They resorted to eating grass. Morris had marks on the back of his neck from malnutrition. One time, he had night blindness that was cured by inhaling the steam of cooked liver.
The family wanted Morris to be a rabbi so that he would be taken care of. Instead, he decided to leave Europe at eighteen because of the war…he did not want to serve in the army. His sisters, Rose, Clara and Jenny, were already in the United States. Rose and Clara had come by way of Denmark. Rebecca was going to go but changed her mind. Morris could only get into the United States by going to Argentina first. He had no trade, and he did not speak the language, so he became a waiter. First, he roomed with friends, but when the money ran out, he slept in the restaurant. They would lock him in there at night. When his friends ate there, he would give them extra food. He managed to leave Argentina after nine months. Cousins agreed to take responsibility for him.
Morris could not find a job. He stayed in a boardinghouse. He had no money to pay for meals so he would buy a roll or a donut and go to the movies because he was so embarrassed that he was not working. He was capable of doing all kinds of things like plumbing and carpentry and electrical work, but he chose tailoring because the other jobs were “dirty.” He learned a specialty, buttonholes.
Morris and I would send money to Europe whenever we could. When World War II started, we couldn’t get any letters from the family. Only one letter got through saying, “If you die, you die once. The way we are living, we die everyday.” None of the other sisters survived.
Morris’s work was seasonal, so he was without work a lot. He never made a lot of money, but we managed because I was a good manager. Morris bought me a sewing machine. I said that I really didn’t know how to sew but I soon taught myself.
Julius, was named after Morris’s father Yudel, and was born on May 25, 1929. Jules was a beautiful baby, 5lbs, 12 oz. It was hard to pull the baby carriage up the outside steps, so we moved to a four-room downstairs apartment. We lived there for four years. We used to go to Easton for vacations and stay two or three weeks. Sometimes Sarah or Jeanette would come at the same time with their children. The attached house was empty, and we would sit on the floor and play cards.
Times were very bad financially, but we always had a lot of company. I always made a lot of food—all the Jewish foods. People would sleep on the sofa or on the floor or two or three in a bed. We visited a lot too. One week we would go to Sarah’s and the next week she would
come to us. People would sometimes send a postcard that they were coming, and sometimes they would just show up.
Jules would watch me divide up the money for rent, electricity, food, etc. When the ice cream man would come and I would want to give him money he would refuse and say, “you need it for rent.”
We had not had another child because of the Depression. You couldn’t get a job even if you were willing to pay for it. I longed for another baby. I looked in every carriage. Finally, I made the decision. Mildred was born on February 28, 1940 and was named after my grandmother Minye. She was like a little “doll.” She weighed 5 lb. 8 oz. When we got word that Morris’s mother had died, Milly was a month old. We gave her the middle name Arlene.
We decided to buy a house in 1943. The house was cheap because it was in receivership. It was dilapidated and everything needed to be replaced. Morris went to work to work fixing and repairing and cleaning up and planting grass and flowers in the backyard. He made arches and closed windows and doors. He put in kitchen cabinets and a new bathroom, made closets and painted and wall-papered. We lived in that house for thirty-four years.
The year after we moved into the house, I went back to work weekends. Later I decided to get a job in a sewing shop. I worked in many shops over the years. Even after I recovered from surgery for colon cancer I went back to work because I wanted to get a pension and drug benefits for working twenty years for the same union.
(Betty would always say, “With all the problems, if I had to do it again, I would.”)