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Nahanni Rous: Hi, it’s Nahanni Rous. Welcome back to Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women’s Archive, where gender, history, and Jewish culture meet.

Ronya Schwaab: 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.” I didn’t sleep all night at the excitement that I will be perforating the matzos!

Nahanni: Ronya Schwaab was born in 1909 in Loyev, Belarus. She grew up in the nearby city of Gomel. At the time, Gomel’s population was more than half Jewish. Ronya’s happy memories of preparing for Pesach are set off against a darker background—pogroms against Jews, and the chaos and violence of World War I and the Russian Revolution. In 1924, when Ronya was a teenager, she and her mother and sisters crossed the Atlantic Ocean by ship and joined their father in America. As an adult, Ronya devoted her life to helping other Jews escape from the Soviet Union.

Nahanni: When Ronya was in her late ‘80s, she shared her story for the Jewish Women’s Archive oral history project “Women Whose Lives Span the Century,” a partnership with Temple Israel in Boston, where Ronya lived for most of her adult life. Vicky Gabriner conducted the interview.

Vicky Gabriner: Today we’re in Ronya’s home.

Nahanni: Ronya’s interview is one of hundreds in JWA’s online oral history collection, which we’ll be dipping into this spring on Can We Talk? In this episode, with Passover around the corner, we’ll hear excerpts from Ronya’s interview. She describes Pesach in Belarus a century ago, her exodus from the Soviet Union, and her fight to help others escape persecution.

Vicky: Good morning.

Ronya: Good morning.

Vicky: Now we’re ready to start the interview. Tell me what your strongest memories are of growing up in Russia.

Ronya: 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 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.

Vicky: What language did you speak in your home?

Ronya: I spoke Russian fluently.

Vicky: Is that what your parents spoke?

Ronya: 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. 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 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.].”

Nahanni: That’s a tongue twister to show off Ronya’s Russian pronunciation.

Ronya: 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.

Vicky: I want you to talk a little bit about how your family expressed Jewishness in the home.

Ronya: Well, in the home, the rituals were observed very, very closely. We had only kosher food. We observed Shabbos. 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.

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

Ronya: Men.

Vicky: The men did it.

Ronya: Women were not included in anything except cleaning and preparing. Girls were actually forbidden to study. 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. We observed holidays very, very, very rigidly. 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. 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.

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

Ronya: Oh my God, we went around for chometz, and then you went someplace to discard the chometz. There was a whole production having to do with chometz. 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.

Nahanni: Ronya is alluding to the violence and persecution Jews had faced, even during her young life. There were pogroms before and during World War I, in Gomel and the surrounding towns. During the war, Ronya’s grandmother hid her from Polish soldiers who were raping Jewish women and girls. The Russian Revolution brought its own troubles for Jews, who were targeted by tsarist militias and by Bolsheviks. During these years, Ronya’s father lived in America. She didn’t even know him; he was just someone who sent packages of food from New York.

Ronya: And finally in 1922 or thereabouts, Papa sent us what is called shifscartn, which is tickets for a boat to get to America. By 1922 American laws admitting refugees from Russia were very restrictive. But we were— Both the Russians let us out and America let us in because we were being reunited with my father. 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. Well, February 2, 1924, we arrived to these wonderful shores of America, the goldene medine. And suddenly, the ship stopped rocking and I stopped feeling sick. And we saw the Statue of Liberty. I didn’t have the remotest idea what my father would look like. 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 and very withdrawn.

Nahanni: In the goldene medine—the Promised Land, where streets were said to be paved in gold—Ronya’s father had no workmen’s comp and had lost an eye when he got burned working in a soap factory. But he had bought an apartment in the Bronx that was ready when Ronya and her mother and sisters arrived. It seemed like a palace to Ronya; there was a doorbell and flushing indoor toilets.

Ronya worked at Macy’s throughout high school and graduated with honors. As a young woman, she drifted away from her traditional upbringing. She lived on her own, became a professional dancer, and worked as a nude model.

She also became an activist. She was involved in sit-ins for the Scottsboro boys, nine Black teenagers in Alabama falsely accused of raping two white women in 1931. And she picketed for department store workers who didn’t have a union.

Ronya stopped dancing and posing when she got engaged, because her husband was against it. They got married in 1939, the same year that World War II began.

Ronya: I didn’t know the extent of the devastation of the Holocaust until 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 Loyev 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 could easily cope with.

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

Ronya: Yes, from my aunt who was living in Gomel at the time. 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. My uncle simply wrote from Minsk that they needed help.

Vicky: So part of your family survived?

Ronya: 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. And 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 life was very tough for them, nevertheless they came back after the war, and I visited them.

Nahanni: Ronya went to see her family in Minsk in 1964. She hadn’t seen them in 40 years. The Soviet authorities restricted her movements and only let her spend two days with them. She was not prepared for how guarded and scared her relatives would be.

Ronya: 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. 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.

Late in the afternoon, he took a nap, and I went for a walk with Rosa, that’s his wife. And she said, “Ronichka, you don’t ask questions like that, not with a son and his wife sitting there and 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.” 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 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. 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.

Nahanni: The Soviet regime violently suppressed dissent, and the culture, religion, and history of Jews and other minority groups. Ronya threw herself into working on behalf of Jews who wanted to escape. She took multiple trips to the Soviet Union, always shadowed by Soviet minders. Once, she was visiting Kiev with an American group, acting as their translator. They asked the Soviet tour guides to take them to Babi Yar, the Nazi’s mass murder site outside the city where Ronya’s own relatives were killed.

Ronya: 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?” He said, “There’s no time for that kind of nonsense. We will not give you the bus.”

Nahanni: Eventually, the authorities relented.

Ronya: And we went to Babi Yar. And it’s a wild ravine. It’s difficult to picture that close to 90,000 Jews were killed and buried there.

Nahanni: New research shows that the number is smaller, though still of course shocking. Between 55,000 and 65,000 people, Jews and non-Jews, were killed at Babi Yar.

Ronya: It’s just an indescribable thing. And one of the people who came with us was a Russian, a Russian Jew. And he sang “El Maleh Rachamim.” 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 Maleh Rachamim.” And it left a permanent impression on me.

Nahanni: Around this time, while Ronya was becoming more and more immersed in the political struggle of Soviet Jews, she was simultaneously working to liberate herself from her marriage.

Ronya: I was fed up with how 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, but 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.

Nahanni: Through her temple and other Jewish organizations, Ronya helped to resettle Soviet Jews in the Boston area. She poured her heart into the work—teaching English, helping immigrants find jobs, and speaking publicly on behalf of the cause. It was a continuation of the activism of her youth.

Ronya: 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.

Nahanni: Ronya Schwaab grew up in a time and place where religion was mostly a man’s purview. By the time she was in her mid-80s, she was leading Passover seders for the residents of her retirement community. She did it her way: bringing in contemporary sources about the Holocaust and about the modern-day exodus from the Soviet Union and Holocaust survivors. At the time of her interview, Ronya was preparing to lead a seder for the third year in a row.

Ronya: 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.

Vicky: Today. Genug.

Ronya: Genug.

Vicky: Genug.

Ronya: I should say so!

Vicky: We’re finished.

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Ronya Schwaab died in 2001 at the age of 92. Two of her three adult sons had predeceased her. You can hear Ronya Schwaab’s full testimony—all nine hours of it—in JWA’s Tanner oral history collection at jwa.org/oralhistory. The online collection currently holds more than 300 interviews.

Thank you for joining us for Can We Talk, the podcast of the Jewish Women’s Archive. Our team includes Jen Richler and Judith Rosenbaum. Our theme music is by Girls in Trouble. Find us online at jwa.org/canwetalk or on your favorite podcast app.

I’m Nahanni Rous. Happy Passover and chag sameach. Until next time.

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