MARCIE COHEN FERRIS:  All right.  We’re going.  My name is Marcie Cohen Ferris, and I’m conducting an oral history interview with Edith Furstenberg -- am I pronouncing that right -- for the Weaving Women’s Words Project of the Jewish Women’s Archive of Boston.  And today is March 16th, 2001.  I think that’s right.  And the time is 9:15.  And we are at Carla Cohen’s home, conducting this interview.  And I’m really delighted to be with you, Mrs. Furstenberg.

EDITH FURSTENBERG:  Thank you.

MF:  Thank you for doing this with me today.  The first thing I thought we’d talk about is just real general information about your background, and about where you grew up.  And so let’s start with where and when you were born.

EF:  I was born in 1910.  I’ve always lived in Baltimore, except during the years that I went to school or during World War II.  And I lived in Forest Park, which I think it was a little outside of the city.  And I stayed there until I was four.  It was quite rural.  And I think there were some cows.  And I remember we had a garden with red sage in it.  And at four, we moved to Windsor Hills, where I lived all my life until I left Baltimore in 1931 to attend the New York School of Social Work.

MF:  Tell me who lived in the household with you all.

EF:  Well, at that time, there was my father, mother, and my brother Edward, who was two years older than I was, and then my brother Sidney J was born in 1914..

MF:  All right.  And where were your parents born?

EF:  They were both born in Baltimore.

MF:  Can you give me their names?

EF:  My mother’s name was Clara Lauer.  And her family had come -- well, her parents were born in Baltimore.  My grandparents were born in Baltimore.  And my great-grandparents were born in Germany, and came over to this country about 1850.  One of my great-grandmothers was named Emma Drey (phonetic).  And she and her husband left Germany and came to New York.  Her brother was Edward Drey.  I think he was with the Corn Exchange in New York.  My great grandmother had four children.  My grandmother was the oldest, and was the only girl.  Just before her youngest brother was born (that was Morris), my great-grandfather decided to go to California to the Gold Rush, and when he wrote to his wife my mother had their letters and translated from the German.  He wrote letters for some time and then decided to come home.  And on the way, (he went on a ship around the Cape Horn) he was shipwrecked, was drowned with his money belt around his waist.  And all we have now is the letters that he wrote to his wife.  My great-grandmother, Emma, lived with her brother Edward and the children were raised in New York.  All boys, except for Rosa Belle, my grandmother.  And the youngest was born after his father left -- that was Morris, who went into business, I think, with his Uncle Edward and lived in the Astor Hotel where on his twenty-fifth anniversary of living there they gave him an electric refrigerator.  I knew him well.  He used to come to visit us in Baltimore.  He was a bachelor, and rather proper.  And the noise was too much in our house when he came.  So he would leave from Mt. Royal station, now an art gallery. When he couldn’t stand it any longer, he say, “Now, just take me to the train.”  It might be a 4:00 o’clock train, but he would go after lunch.  And he would sit in the rocking chair until it was train time, and read his New York Times.  He was a very dignified man.  He never married, never had children.  And I used to see him in New York when I went there to school.  He would take me out to a wonderful restaurant, a German restaurant called the Blue Ribbon with my friend and roommate, Elenor Ullman.  After we finished dinner (he was a little tired of us by that time), he’d give us five dollars and say,” Now, take a cab home, because I don’t want you running around the streets of New York.”  So we waited until we got around the corner and then we took the five dollars and went to the movies or to theater, and didn’t see him until the next time.

MF:  Well, that’s great.  You might have said this already, but I was looking at my recorder for a second. What was the initial attraction to Baltimore for the family?  Who came first?

EF:  Well, the great-grandparents I’m talking about went to New York, the rest of the family came to Baltimore.  And I don’t know exactly how they came to Baltimore.  It was the Lauer side, my mother’s family -- and both my mother and my father’s family, great-grandparents came to Baltimore. 

MF:  Do you know generally when?

EF:  About in the 1850s.

CC:  Because Lewis Lauer was there during the Civil War, your great grandfather.

EF:  My grandfather’s father was Lewis Lauer.  And I think they had a shirt factory.  My grandfather told me he remembers that during the Civil War, at the start of the Civil War -- he was a little boy.  He was eleven, so I’m thinking he was born about 1850.  And he remembered the Union troops coming through, and that everybody threw stones at them.  And he often told me about that.  They lived in East Baltimore.  And he went to a private school called Knapps, I think, K-n-a-p-p-s, I think.  My mother and her sister, Edith -- everybody called her Spig -- lived on Carey Street.  And near a little square, I think it was called Union Square, where their nurse used to take them there to play.  And that is sort of Southwest Baltimore, I’ve seen it since, but it isn’t a very good part of town now.  They lived in a house on Cary Street with a little yard in the back.  And my mother often told me they had two servants, African-American servants, she was so sad because Lizzie and the other maid had to go out in the cold to go to the bathroom, because they only had one inside toilet and the family used that.

MF:  And do you have any memory of where in Germany the family came from?

EF:  I think they came from the south, the Munich part, because my mother went there and traced her relatives.  And then my mother had a cousin named Paul Drey, who had an art gallery.  And before the war my parents used to go to Germany, where they used to do a lot of walking – hiking in the Bavarian Alps.  And they used to stay in Munich. And I went there once with them, with a friend and then they went home, and my friend Ellen -- her name is Ellen Frank, she and I went walking and bicycling in Bavaria.

MF:  And that would have been in what--

EF:  1931.  The first time I went to Europe.  I was nineteen, so that was 1929.  And I went with two other girls, one of them was Elenor Ullman who was a first cousin of the Cone sisters who established the Cone Gallery who collected art.  And I remember that I stayed a while alone because my parents went back and I was waiting for Eleanor and her Japanese friend Fukie, who were leaving Wellesley.   So I was in Paris alone at that time.   And we stayed at a lovely little hotel called the Que Voltaire, right on the river.  And I went to visit Ms. Etta Cone (I think Clara Belle had gone home, but Ms. Etta was very nice to me, and she took Elenor and me on a trip to Switzerland.  We had a wonderful experience.  We went to Gruyere, and I think Lausanne.  And then we went off on our own and traveled around. 

MF:  I was going to ask you what that felt like.

EF:  It was great.  Very few girls were allowed to go to Europe alone.  But my parents were very broad-minded.  Then we went to London.  We were going to go to the south of England, to Penzance by the train and we got as far as Plymouth, and I felt very sick; then it turned out that I had jaundice.  And so we didn’t do much more traveling and stayed around that part of England until it was time to go home.

MF:  So you were nineteen at that time.

EF:  Right.

MF:  And you said about 1929.

EF:  Yes.

MF:  So that was a very disturbing time back in the States, with the Depression--

EF:  Yes.

MF:  How was that affecting your travels--this was before the crash, 1929?

EF:  Yeah.  My father was in business.  He was first in the manufacturing drug business with his father.  And then he and my Uncle Walter were (he had gone to pharmacy school -- and they were interested in developing different pharmaceutical products, and were especially successful with a cough medicine that people seemed to like.  And after a while they patented this cough medicine.  It was called Rem.  It was a great success.  And that was, I guess, just after the Depression.  He traveled to different cities and everybody wanted this particular product and so they decided to patent it and do nothing else, except later they developed a cold medicine for head colds, called Rel.

MF:  Did your mother work?

EF:  No.  She went to Vassar.  And I guess she would have been in the class of maybe 1904.  She said she flunked out, but actually, I think on one holiday she got appendicitis and was very sick, and she didn’t go back to college.  And then soon after, she married my father in 1907.

MF:  And so you said your father was in drug manufacturing. 

EF:  Their drug company was called Hollander and Kashland. I’ll show you the picture of where his store was on Lexington Street near the market.

MF:  When you were a little girl thinking about growing up, in your home, did you consider your mother a real role model at that time?

EF:  Yes.  She was very pretty, and she was very well educated.  She knew history, English, several foreign languages.  And she was a very relaxed person, not at all  fussy.  Nobody ever worried about me except my grandfather, who later came and lived with us.  His name was Jacob Lauer, and we called him Picky.

MF:  So until he lived with you it was just your brother, sister…

EF:  I had a younger brother named Sidney who was four years younger than I, who’s still alive.  And then came Emily who was four years younger than my brother, so she was eight years younger than I was.  She lived in New York, Scarsdale, and now Vermont and is married and has, now, five children, she had six, and one died.

MF:  What kind of expectations did your parents have for you and your brothers?  Was it different for what they expected for the girls in your family than for the boys?

EF:  Well, both of my brothers were very bright.  My older brother was two years older than I was.  That was Edward.  He was very good looking and very, very intelligent.  I think he was very close to my grandmother, who lived about a mile away from us, because he was born on her birthday, June the 1st.  She had been a schoolteacher and had gone to Hunter College in New York, after (I told you about her father dying and her uncle bringing the family up.)  I guess she must have been born about 1850 also.  And she was a distant cousin of my grandfather’s.  Her maiden name was Drey (phonetic), and my grandfather’s family was Drey. (pronounced “dry) She came to Baltimore to visit, and they fell in love and got married.  My grandmother was a very intelligent, very well educated, very forceful kind of person; my grandfather was much more gentle and passive.  And I think -- she was a rather strict mother, she had very high expectations.  And she was very proud.  She only had two children, my mother and her sister, Edith.  M aunt was supposed to be a sickly child, so she didn’t go to school.  My grandmother taught her at home.   She moved with them to my parents’ house later.  My mother went on to go Girls’ Latin school and got an excellent education there, knew a lot about history, English, Latin, and several foreign languages.  She could quote Shakespeare.  And she had a very sheltered happy childhood.  There were a lot of Jewish families who lived in Baltimore.  Many of them lived on Eutaw Place, which was in town.  My father and his family lived in the 1900 block of Eutaw Place, and there were a lot of other Jewish families that you may know or not know:  The Berneys, the Hutzlers, the Hochschilds.  And they had a big crowd.  My father’s best friend was Solomon Blum, who later became a professor of economics.  He had TB, and he had to leave town.  He married, and went to Colorado, and then ended in California where he taught labor economics at Berkeley.  But my parents kept in close touch with him and his wife.   And then his daughter and I became very close friends afterward.  Janet married my brother’s best friend, who was Walter Sondheim.  So we had a lot of people who were connected a long time ago.

MF:  It sounds like you had very strong models of women--

EF:  Yes.

MF:  -- between your grandmothers and your mother--

EF:  And my aunt, Edith Lauer.  Well, my aunt had very little formal education because she was supposed to be sickly, and she never really finished high school.  Later, she became a music teacher and taught at the Peabody, which is the best music school in Baltimore.  And then she got interested in social work.  First she worked at the Jewish Children’s Society as a social worker, and then she became Executive Director of the Jewish Family and Children’s Agency, as she knew more about Jewish questions.  Although she hadn’t been to school or college, she went to the Pennsylvania School of Social Work.  And she really had a wonderful career.  She never married.  And then later, when my grandparents got sick (they lived only a little over a mile away) it was a lot for her to take care of them and their household.  And so they all moved in with my parents.  We had a big house and my mother said we were fortunate to have grandparents.

MF:  How old were you?

EF:  I must have been about maybe ten or eleven when they moved in.

MF:  Can you remember how you felt about that?

EF:  Well, my grandmother was fairly tough with me.  She always said she preferred boys to girls.  She adored my brother.  And my brother was handsome and very smart.  And she always said, “Boys are much easier to teach than girls.”  I think she thought that girls “were sort of deceitful.”  And she made a big fuss over him.  And then my father, who always sort of leaned backwards, made a big fuss over me because he said he loved girls.  I was the first girl.  So it all evened out, I think.

MF:  What kind of expectations do you think they had for you when you were a little girl?

EF:  Well, they had more expectations, I think, for the boys.  I think, my father joked a lot about it, but he said he thought it was nice for girls not to be too smart.

MF:  What do you think--

EF:  But I had a very good education.  They were very liberal in many ways.  They never worried about me when I went out.  I was very independent.  And when I was eighteen -- well, I went to camp, a very good girls’ camp called Accomac.  And I went and I had a wonderful time.  I went quite late, fifteen to seventeen.

MF:  Where was the camp?

EF:  In Maine; I guess I was athletic.  I was captain of the hockey team and I loved to swim.  And I made some wonderful friends.  I had a very close friend named Josephine Sonneborn.  And she and Louise Berney and I, we just went with a crowd of kids and met at each other’s houses.  And my parents never worried.  I used to go get on the streetcar and go, if I wanted to go in town because most of the Jewish people lived in town.  There was synagogue there in that neighborhood.  And my friends went to Sunday school and were confirmed.  And my father, his parents had belonged to the Har Sinai Temple where my grandparents used to go fairly regularly.  And as I understood later that my mother’s family had belonged to the same -- it was one of the oldest Reform synagogues, and my grandparents were quite active. My grandfather was on the men’s committee.  And I remember I went a couple of times with my grandmother to Temple.  One day, my cousin Elizabeth, who was my father’s sister’s daughter, said to me, “You know, you really ought to go to Sunday school.”  And I said, “Why?”  And she said, “Because it’s so much fun.”  And I said, “Well, I’ll ask my parents.” I said to my parents, “Can I go to Sunday school with Cousin Elizabeth?”  And they said, “Sure.”  And I said, “How will I get there?”  And they said, “On the streetcar, if you like.”  And then I said, “Well, will you save Sunday morning breakfast…” -- because that was the big family time when we had all kinds of good things to eat, and the family got together.  And they said, “Oh, no.”  So that’s when I decided I didn’t want to go. 

MF:  Do you have memories of ever going to -- were there other occasions where you would go to a temple or a synagogue as a child?

EF:  I went occasionally with my grandmother.  But my father had a good education -- Jewish education at the temple, Har Sinai.  But after he was confirmed (there was no such thing as bar mitzvah, I think, in those days for his friends.).  He said he loved it because he got more presents than anybody else, and he liked that.  He taught Sunday school at Har Sinai when he was a young man. And I think that a lot of the children had fathers in the clothing business in Baltimore, because there were many in clothing manufacturers, pants and suits, who went to that Sunday school.  He told the children that he believed in labor unions; he thought that they were a very good thing.  Some of the parents objected, so he was kicked out.  And then after that, he wasn’t interested in continuing his Jewish education.  And so we didn’t have any, although we always knew that we were Jewish.  My father was very active in Jewish philanthropy and social action.

CC:  Was he active before World War II in Jewish organizations, or did that come as a result of World War II?

EF:  Oh, no.  He was active before that.  After -- my aunt had taught music, and she worked in a settlement and she became interested in social work and she lived in our house. And he was president of the Jewish Council, and Jewish Federation and Welfare fund. Yes, and there was the Jewish Educational Alliance, which was sort of a settlement house on Baltimore Street a long time ago, and then the Jewish Council.  And he was president of the Jewish Children’s Society.  And then he went to New York to a lot of meetings.  He was very active and prominent in getting Jewish children out of Europe.  I remember that when I went to New York School of Social Work, there was a wonderful teacher there in psychiatric social work, and her name was Marion Kenworthy.  And she was on this committee to help get the children out of Germany.

MF:  Was your mother also involved in philanthropy or in Jewish groups at all?

EF:  No.  She was, you know, interested, but it was my aunt, her sister, who lived with us, who was very active.

MF:  What was her name?

EF:  Edith Lauer.

MF:  Did she influence you to go into social work?

EF:  She was a big influence in my life.  She was an unmarried person, very smart and very funny.  And I was very close to her.

MF:  Why do you think she didn’t marry?

EF:  She didn’t marry because my grandparents were old and sick, and my grandmother kept her very close to home.  And I think she had some maybe suitors or friends.  But my grandmother was very dependent on her.  And then my grandfather lost his sight.  He had a “slipped retina,” and he was practically blind.  And we would all read to him. She was very clever and wrote lots of rhymes and tunes, and she played the piano.  And we all learned -- when Gilbert and Sullivan -- the company -- the D’Oyly Carte Company came to Baltimore, we would all go together.  And then she would play the tunes -- the pieces on the piano, and we would learn the words and sing.   And then she would make up rhymes.  So that was one of those things I remember.

MF:  That’s wonderful.  I love that.  Well, tell me, after high school, what happened?  How did you make a decision about what you wanted to do?

EF:  Well, we always talked social work at the table, and it was very boring.  They talked about various aspects.  My father, as I said, was president of the Jewish Children’s Society and my aunt then went to, although she hadn’t had any formal education, went to Pennsylvania School of Social Work and got a degree, which was quite unusual.   And my father was interested in all the aspects of Jewish philanthropy.  But I really was greatly influenced by the humanity of the thing, and I wanted to know more about it.  I went to Goucher because it was in town; you could get in without taking college boards.  And I was afraid I wouldn’t pass college boards, so it was the easiest things to do.

MF:  How did your parents feel about you going to Goucher?

EF:  They thought that was fine.

MF:  Were you thinking that, you know, you would get married, or did you want to work first, or--

EF:  I didn’t think I would get married.  I think my father always said to me, “You can go to school as long as you want.  You can do any kind -- anything you want, but you have to be prepared to earn your own living.” -- which was very “avant-garde” in those days. I didn’t like college particularly.  They had fraternities that excluded the Jewish girls.  I knew a fair number of girls who had come from Park School where I went to school, who went to Goucher.  And I think I got a good education there.  I think the teaching was very good.   I liked especially my history teacher, who was a woman named Stimson, and she was related to the Stimson who was Secretary of State.  She was a marvelous person.  And she used to have some of the girls come up to her apartment, and she would read aloud to us in the evenings.  And that was a lot of fun.  And I also played hockey at school.  And my mother told a story about how I had applied to go to hockey camp.  And although I had made what they called “the varsity,” (we didn’t play anybody) somehow I wasn’t selected to go.  And she thought that it was because they didn’t take Jewish girls.

MF:  What year were you at Goucher, generally?

EF:  I was at Goucher from 1927 to 1931.  I went to camp when I was fifteen, sixteen and seventeen.  When I was seventeen, my parents were going to England, and they were going before I graduated, and so they weren’t going to be there at graduation, but I was with my grandfather.  And I stayed at home and went to all the parties.   And then they offered me a trip to Europe, but I said, “Thanks, but no thanks, I’d rather go back to camp.”  So at the age of seventeen, I had my last year at camp.  And I had made a lot of good friends, and it was a fun, and I went straight to Goucher for four years.

MF:  So that would have been in the early ‘30s?

EF:  Yes,  I graduated in ‘31.

MF:  So antisemitism was really bad during that period.

EF:  Yes.

MF:  Generally, for anyone in higher education.

EF:  There was a quota for Jewish girls.  There weren’t any Jewish sororities.

MF:  Right.

EF:  -- at Goucher.  And I didn’t care.  I didn’t want to be anyway.  But it was rather -- it was sort of boring.  The classes were interesting, but the social life was boring.  Most of the girls were from the south, and they came up to catch husbands at the medical school, at Hopkins. 

MF:  So what kind of social life did you have there?

EF:  I lived at home and my parents had a lot of interesting friends. Well, I had made one very good friend.  Her name was Miriam Flexner.  And her uncle had been prominent in education at Johns Hopkins.  That’s F-l-e-x-n-e-r.  And think I entered into -- I found a letter in which I said I had enjoyed the graduation.  My parents were away and then I went to Europe that year with an old friend.  And again, we met my parents in Germany where my parents used to go for the music.  They were Wagner fans.  And I think they even went to Oberamagau (phonetic).  And they used to climb in the Alps.  They were both mountain climbers and nature lovers.

MF:  So they had strong cultural ties to Germany.

EF:  Yes.

MF:  Did they speak German in the home?

EF:  My mother did -- no, my mother spoke German, but not in the home.  I mean, she and my grandfather sometimes exchanged a German phrase.

MF:  Did you speak any German as a child?

EF:  I knew of a few phrases.  And I think I took German at Goucher and flunked it -- it was a hard language -- and I took Italian instead.  But that year, the year I graduated, I went to Europe again.  And we went to Munich and we had a wonderful time.  My parents and aunt were there.  And then they came back home, and I stayed with my friend there, Ellen Frank.  And we walked and we bicycled and we used to go sometimes in the evening to dance halls and, and went dancing -- it was a very informal -- South Germany was very relaxed.  And I saw these people in uniform, young people in uniform, marching. And we just thought that they were like Boy Scouts.  And we didn’t think anything about it.  And later I knew that that was the beginning of the Nazi movement.  And these were young Germans.

MF:  German youth.

EF:  Yeah.  It was ‘31, so we really didn’t understand what was going on.

MF:  So was your family at all concerned about being in Germany at this time?  Was there any talk about it?

EF:  They stopped later, going to Germany.  But at that time, I don’t think we knew what was really going on.  That was ’31. After that, of course, they stopped going to Europe.  And then they took their vacations in western Canada.  They started to ride horseback at the age of sixty, I guess.  And my father became head of the Trail Riders Association in Western Canada.  And they used to go to Banff and Lake Louise and camp out.

MF:  Did you ride with them?

EF:  I didn’t go with them after that. I went to New York School of Social Work from ‘31 to ‘33.

MF:  Tell me about that.  How did you decide to go New York, the city?

EF:  Oh, that was wonderful.  I think I decided to go to the School of Social Work because I was interested in people and knowing more about how people lived.  And it was a very stimulating and interesting time in New York.  I loved it.

MF:  What was it like?  What was happening?  Where did you live?

EF:  The first year I lived at the International House.  And it overlooked Riverside Drive.  And it was really an exciting experience.  And I met a lot of foreign students.  And then I met people at the School of Social Work.  It was a wonderful year.   The only trouble was that I lived on the Upper West Side, and then I had to take either a bus or go over to the subway and go down and change at Penn Station and go over to Grand Central Station and then go down to the School of Social Work, which was at the Russell Sage Building, which was down on East 22nd Street.   But I loved the courses.  I admired the people who taught the courses.  And I made some friends with the students and it was a very exciting time.

MF:  Any role model teachers that you remember?

EF:  Wonderful.  Yeah, Dr. Kenworthy, who was the Professor of Psychiatric Social Work.  I majored in psychiatric social work.

MF:  Was that a man or a woman?

EF:  A woman.  And she was the woman who worked with my father in bringing some of the Jewish kids over.  And my father knew a lot of people (because he was very active in Jewish philanthropy) who either taught at the school or were active in Jewish affairs.   The first year I was placed -- the school has half-time academic work and half-time placement.  And these three days a week you had academic work and two days you had a placement in a social agency.  And the first agency I worked in was the Jewish Social Service Agency, which was a family agency.  And then I had courses that fitted in with the things I was doing.  And field work was interesting and stimulating.

MF:  I know you had childhood friends that you were still in touch with when you were in college and starting on your social work career.  What did they think about your choices of going into that kind of work?

EF:  I’m trying to think of what my best friends did.  One of them got married very soon -- that was Louise.  She got married very soon after college.  She stayed in Baltimore.  And then I had a friend, Josephine Sonneborn, I think she went to Carnegie Tech, and married somebody from Pittsburgh.  And those were my best friends.   And then Elenor Ullman, the person that I had traveled with one year, we lived together in New York my first year.  And then she did something very interesting.  A very brilliant person, an artist.  And she decided to go with another friend whom I knew to China.  This Esther was going to China to meet her boyfriend, and Elenor went along. And she stayed and taught English in Peking about ’33, I guess. It was very unusual for a woman to go to these countries alone.  And then after she left China -- her parents and my parents were best friends, so we grew up together.  Her name was Elenor Ullman.  Her father was a judge.  And after she left China, she went to Russia.  And I think she taught English in Russia for a while, and painted, maybe, or studied Russian, and didn’t come home, I think -- she never came to my wedding, which was 1934, because she was still away.

MF:  What was it like living in New York as a single woman at that time?

EF:  Wonderful.  It was lots of fun.

MF:  Tell me about that.

EF:  Well, the first year, as I said, I lived in International House.  And then I got to be very friendly with a guy who was in my class at school.  He was half Japanese and half German, which was an unfortunate combination in those days.  But he had come from Amherst, and he was a very nice guy.  I studied enough to do well in school.  New York was wonderful.

MF:  What kind of things would you do for fun?

EF:  Well, I went to Elenor’s mother’s aunt’s house.  Her name was Ida Guggenheimer, and she knew a lot of interesting people.  And I used to go -- sometimes she had parties for her relatives.  And then I knew some people in New York.

MF:  Did you still have Baltimore friends that had come to New York?  Were there many Baltimore connection?

EF:  I don’t think so.  I don’t think most of my friends did that.

MF:  Did you have any expectations about coming back to Baltimore, or did your parents encourage you to?

EF:  I thought that after I graduated from school, I thought I’d get a job in New York, or the best work I could get.  And I was very lucky that way.  Maybe it was because my father had connections, or maybe because I was just lucky, but I got a wonderful job.  By that time I had met Frank, (my husband later).

MF:  How did you meet?

EF:  Well, I met him because a friend of the same aunt who was a social worker, who had been at the Mental Hygiene Society in Baltimore, and then she moved to Indianapolis -- and in the summer of 1932, I think, I was home for the summer -- and she was going to come to visit my aunt.  And she said, in a casual way, “I met this young man who is coming to be assistant resident at Sinai Hospital.  I met him in Indianapolis.”  And I said, “Well, why don’t you invite him over?”-- because things were pretty dull that summer.  So she invited him and we met him on the steps of Sinai where he was a resident.  He was living at the hospital.  And we went to the Severn River.  (It was a club with a group of my parents’ friends who were all Jewish.)  And they called it Benny Birth, because that was short for B’nai B’rith.    It was a very pretty piece of property about ten miles, the Baltimore side, near Annapolis where we used to have a cottage. There must have been about twenty -- maybe twenty-two or twenty-three families who also used to go there.  And they were all people that my parents knew.  I guess they were all German-Jewish -- most of them.

MF:  So Frank came with you.

EF:  And so Frank -- we invited him down to the shore that day.  And then I think, as I remember, we invited him again.  And he had to take a train that went back to the hospital.  He was living at Sinai, because he was a resident there.  And then the summer came, and I went away.  That was ‘32, I think.  And I think I wrote him a postal, and he hardly remembered who the postal was from.  And then when I came back in September, that was then still ‘32, I had this apartment in New York, with Elenor Ullman, my friend.  And she would come back to Baltimore, and Frank would come up to visit.  We had several weekends in New York.  And then at the end of that year, I graduated from the School of Social Work, and I had to find out what to do.  Frank had applied and had been accepted as a resident in psychiatry at the Psychiatric Institute, which is part of Columbia, in New York.  And he was going to go to New York.  And I had gotten an offer from Chicago, from a friend of my aunt’s, Kepecks, who was director of the Jewish Agency there.  Frank sort of encouraged me to look for a job in New York so that we could see more of each other.  He said, “If I go to New York and you go to Chicago, we probably won’t see much of each other anymore.”  So I was very lucky.  My father knew somebody named Slawson who was head of practically the best agency in New York called the Jewish Board of Guardians.  I applied for that job.  I was accepted.

MF:  How exciting.

EF:  It would mean moving to New York in August, so that’s how it all started.

MF:  So tell me about it.  Once you took that job, then what happened?

EF:  Well, we had a wonderful six months in New York.  The first thing we did was, my friends’ parents, the Ullmans -- I think I mentioned them -- he was a judge, and she was a very nice and warm and delightful person -- their daughter, Elenor, had gone to China and then had gone to Russia.  So they didn’t have any children that summer, and they said, “How would you like to go to Rangeley?”  (This was the place they had in Maine, a very beautiful spot.)  And I said, “That would be wonderful.”  Would you like to bring a friend along because Elenor is away?”  So I said I would.  And they said, “Who would that be?”  And I said, “His name is Frank Furstenberg.”  And they were quite surprised at that.  But I invited Frank.  He was going to start his residency at Psychiatric Institute in August, and I was to start my job in August.  So in July we went to Rangeley to visit the Ullmans, and we had a marvelous time, we took the bus back.  Frank had to go to live at Psychiatric Institute, but we saw a lot of each other that year.  And I went to parties there where there were a lot of interesting people.  We had a wonderful time.  But then it was Depression.  And he knew that if he didn’t have a job, we couldn’t get married because in those days, men were supposed to support their wives.  So he decided that he would look in Baltimore.  He thought of going to Indianapolis, but it wouldn’t have worked out.  There were a number of jobs that were available because there were a lot of single men roaming the East Coast, unemployed seamen.  There was a great deal of poverty; it was really the midst of the Depression.  So my father knew some people who were prominent, and one of them was Harry Greenstein, who was head of the Maryland FERA, which is Federal Emergency Relief.  And they had shelters for these unemployed seamen and needed somebody to be in charge of medical care.  And so Frank knew Harry Greenstein because he’d been a patient at Sinai when Frank was an intern.  And then there was another person who was a friend of my father’s, Judge Waxter, who arranged to have him interviewed to be head of the Transient Bureau, which was the place for single men who were homeless. And so he got that job.  And so we decided to move to Baltimore and get married.

MF:  And were you okay about leaving your job?

EF:  And I had only been at my job less than six months when I gave notice that I wanted to go, to get married.  Really, I loved it, and I was, you know, just learning to do casework.

MF:  Did you have mixed feelings?

EF:  Well, it was a wonderful opportunity, the kind of work I wanted--- psychiatric care of children, in institutions and children in foster homes and children who were troubled.  And I liked it a lot, and I was learning, but I had no doubts that I wanted to get married.  And so I gave notice, and they were very nice about it.   My mother came up and we packed up the apartment.  And I came home on Frank’s birthday, which was the 6th of February, 1934. And we were married on March the 8th, in a big snowstorm.  We had a very nice apartment, fourth floor.  And I worked for--

MF:  Where was that?

EF:  In Baltimore.

MF:  Do you remember where?

EF:  St. Paul Street, overlooking the monument.  Do you know Baltimore?

MF:  Uh-huh, a little.

EF:  Well, it’s on the south side of Mt.Vernon Place, and it faced the monument.  And I think we paid thirty-five dollars a month for it, a fourth floor walk-up.   And then I took a job with the Baltimore Emergency Relief, which was very tough, because it was in the height of the Depression, and it was tremendously sad.  And we gave people very little money, and they lived miserably.  I had a block on East Lexington Street where every one of my clients lived -- I must have had oh 100 or more that lived in that neighborhood.  And I would go there and deliver my checks there so I could see how they were living.  And it was hard work and very depressing.  And after a year, I really hated the work, because it was so depressing.  You didn’t have any chance to do anything constructive with people.  All you did was give them too little money.  I think we gave four dollars and thirty cents for food for a family of two.  And it was a miserable job.  So I really didn’t want to work anymore.   I remember that by that time we were ready to move to a house, oh, maybe a mile and a half away from my parents.

MF:  What neighborhood would that be?

EF:  It was Wallbrook, and it was North Avenue.  And we were right opposite the park.  And it had a little backyard, it was very pleasant.  So we moved.  So there was a lot to do, and I just decided I didn’t want to work anymore.  And Frank said that was all right, because he had started private practice and he had the job.  So then I got pregnant about that time, and then I had a miscarriage.

MF:  What year was that?

EF:  By that time it was ‘35 or something like that.  And Alan Guttmacher was my doctor. Maybe you know the name?

MF:  I’ve heard it.

EF:  He was my obstetrician.  And I said, after the miscarriage, “Can I have another baby?”  And he said, “Yes.”  And I said, “Right away?”  And he said, “Well, wait until I get out of the room.”  So right after -- I never had another period -- Carla was born.  And I had been pregnant for 14 months.

CC:  Amazing.

EF:   -- it was really a very happy period.  We lived close to my parents who were wild for Carla.  I have letters, all those letters.

MF:  So Carla was born in--

EF:  In ‘36.

MF:  And then?

EF:  And then I remember I said to Frank:  “If you ever make $4,000 we can have another baby.” And then Mark was born.

MF:  So what was the timing between babies?

EF:  Two years and two months for the first three, Carla, Mark and Frank.  We called him Tammy.  And my parents were very close.  And we just had a very happy, happy time.  And then the war broke out.

MF:  Did you have any help in the house?

EF:  Always had help.

MF:  Black help?

EF:  Yes.

MF:  And how did you find black women to work?

EF:  Well, I think that one of them had worked for my mother, and she had to leave because her husband was sick or something.  And then she came back and worked part time for me.  We paid them terrible wages.  It was disgusting.

MF:  Did you have kind of long-term help, same person?

EF:  Yes.  And then there was a -- I had relatives who lived in the Marlborough Apartments on Eutaw Place.  My grandfather’s sister was Aunt Rosie who lived with a bunch of her nieces, one nephew and a brother-in-law (who had also gone to the Gold Rush) whose wife had died.  Aunt Rosie had never married.   And some of them never married, and they were “too delicate to go out to work,” but women didn’t go out to work in those days.  And Martha, this elderly black woman, had worked for them, who was free, so she came to work for me.

MF:  Do you remember her last name?

EF:  No, just Martha.  And I remember that one time my mother came to visit.  And Martha was old.  And Wiggy said she looked “like a gnarled oak.”  And she was down on her knees scrubbing the floor.  And my mother said -- it was a nice day.  “Martha, aren’t you tired?”  And Martha said, “What I do being tired, and it ain’t nighttime yet?”  That’s the way it was.  Remember?  Do you remember Martha, Carla? CC:  I have a vivid recollection, uh-huh, a vivid picture in my mind.  Tell her about Bobolie.  I mean, that’s so interesting.

EF:  Well, my mother had a very intelligent, good-looking young woman named Margaret.  When my sister was born, she couldn’t say Margaret.  She called her Bobolie.   And Bobolie was very smart, but she had no education and she made a miserable marriage.  She came to work for my mother.  She told my mother she was seventeen, but she was fifteen.  She was the youngest of a large family who came from Virginia.   She was a marvelous cook and was wonderful with kids.  And she was there the night that Carla was born.  She was there the night that Carla was born.  And she was wonderful working for me at that time.  And she had left my mother because her marriage had broken up. She was wonderful with kids; she just had a natural knack.

MF:  Where did you have the baby?

EF:  I had the baby at Sinai.

MF:  How long did you stay in the hospital?  Can you remember?

EF:  Oh, in those days, I think I got out in twelve days for good behavior.  I hated it!  I was miserable and wanted to get home.  I had a nurse for four days.

CC:  Complete the story about Bobolie, because it’s so interesting.  Her life was threaded through our lives.  And especially through my mother’s life.  

EF:  She came when my sister was six months old.  And my sister is eight years younger.  So she was about seven years older than I was.  I was eight when Emily was born, and she was fifteen.  And you know, she saw me having fun, going to parties, going to -- getting a lot of education and she had no education; she was very smart and very capable, and a really super cook. 

CC:  And a good organizer.  She ran things for her church.

EF:  She was very well-organized.  And she had a terrible disposition. 

CC:  Which got worse, too.

EF:  Yeah, because she was unhappy.  And she would fuss at me.  And I don’t blame her, you know, because I was completely thoughtless.  She worked for me for a while, and she worked for my mother for a long time.

MF:  Was she there all day when you were a child?  Was she in the house--?

EF:  Yes.

MF:  -- all day and then also in the evenings?

EF:  Yeah.  And we had a cook besides.

MF:  You had a cook.

EF:  We had a man who helped out.  And then later we had Sydney Nelson, who drove my father after he couldn’t drive anymore.  And he also waited on the table. 

CC:  He had worked for Grandfather at the factory, too.  But there were a lot of retainers around.  There were a lot of people who had been there for many, many years.  And that’s the way I grew up, knowing that, you know, there was Charity, who did the laundry.  And she came a couple days a week.

EF:  And Charity was there when I was born.  And they were just family retainers, I think. 

MF:  But all -- anyone live-in? 

CC:  No.

EF:  Well, Charity lived in when I was young. 

CC:  And didn’t Florence live in later?

EF:  Yes, when Auntie was sick.  She lived there -- she was Bobolie’s sister.  And she came from Virginia.  She was a very classy woman.  And she would leave her husband to take care of the farm, and she would come up and work for a while.  And my grandparents and Auntie, I told you, moved in with us.  And so when Auntie got sick -- she had breast cancer -- Florence came up and took care of her. 

CC:  Auntie had been in New York for a number of years.  She had really become a well-known figure in the welfare field.  And she ran the -- she was head of The Child Welfare League of America -- was she the head of it?

EF:  No.  She worked for a man who was director. She got that job when she was sixty, I think. And she left Baltimore and moved to New York.  And she had this wonderful apartment on 70th Street. 

CC:  That was about 1955, I think -- no, it was much earlier than that -- about 1950.And she loved New York.  And she was having a wonderful time, and then she got sick and had to come home.  And she died in my parents’ house.  Frank took care of her; he really was devoted to her.  She loved him. She was a wonderful person.  And she got a lot of recognition from the Pennsylvania School of Social Work.

MF:  I’m going to go back to Bobolie for just a minute because she seems so interesting.

EF:  Sure. 

CC:  She didn’t die until about, what, ten years ago?  It was pretty recent.

EF:  Right.

MF:  Did they have any feelings -- the black folks that you knew when you were growing up -- about working for a Jewish family?  Was there anything you remember about that?

EF:  No, not at all.

MF:  Do you think there were certain black help that worked mainly for Jewish families, kind of a network of folks?

EF:  Not really.  I remember that Bobolie made the most wonderful matzoh balls, and she was a wonderful cook.

MF:  How did she learn?

EF:  From the Settlement Cookbook.  Everybody learned from it.

CC:  And she always improvised.

EF:  Everybody got the Settlement Cookbook for a wedding present.  It said on the front of it:  “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” 

CC:  But my impression was that the Jewish families had black help, and that the upper class white families had Irish help.

EF:  I don’t think that was true in Baltimore.  We had very few Irish immigrants in Baltimore, I think.

CC:  That wasn’t true in Baltimore?

EF:  I didn’t know anybody who had Irish help in Baltimore. 

CC:  But did you know any gentiles?

EF:  Hardly any. 

CC:  I didn’t think so.

EF:  Hardly any because Park School was mostly Jewish, because private schools in Baltimore didn’t accept Jewish children, or only a few.  We had mostly Jewish friends, although my parents had a number of liberal non-Jewish friends.

MF:  Did it become harder to get black help at any point, like in the ‘30s or--

EF:  No.  That was the Depression when everybody needed work.  And the wages were very low.  And they worked hard, long hours, and got all their meals in the house.  And it was a bad time for African-Americans.

MF:  What other foods do you remember?

EF:  Foods?

MF:  Yeah, her cooking.

EF:  Oh, she was marvelous.  We had mostly southern foods.  I guess -- well, she was born in Virginia.  She was wonderful.  We had fried chicken.  And on Sunday morning we had waffles or muffins or chicken livers.   And I remember we had -- this is funny.  My parents had very good friends named Levin.  And he had been the director of the Jewish Charities – Louis Levin had been sick.  He had a large family and had to go back to the hospital.  And his kids lived with different friends of the Levins, who were Orthodox.  And I remember, he had my father and Albert Hutzler, who had about as much religion as my father --were the “Shabbos goys,” who would turn out the lights for him on Friday nights.  And once the Levins came to our house for dinner.  We had shad, it was spring, and that was the delicacy.  And my mother explained to “Ms. Hen,” who was the cook at that time (an old black woman who had been born a slave) who came to work for my mother when we were kids.  (Her name was Henrietta, and we called her “Ms. Hen.”)  That’s what Bobolie had called her.  And my mother explained to her very carefully:  “Now, the Levins don’t eat any pork products, they don’t eat meat and milk together.  So we had shad that night and it was beautifully decorated with bacon.

[CD NUMBER ONE/FOUR ENDS. CD NUMBER TWO/FOUR BEGINS]

EF:  “Ms. Hen” came to work when we were quite young.  And she was sort of grouchy.  We were never allowed in the kitchen.  She would say, “Get out of this kitchen, or I’ll run you until your heels catch fire!” 

EF:  I was pretty fat.  “Ms. Hen” used to look at Elenor, who was thin, and she’d say:  “Elenor gets poor carrying her eatins’ around.”  Poor means thin.  And then she would come out with these large sandwiches and we would eat them -- in the middle of the afternoon.   And she was a very spotty cook.  Sometimes her things were delicious.  She made one marvelous dish which was called Apple Charlotte.  It was kind of a baked concoction with raisins and apples, and it was served hot.  And it had a kind of a glaze on the top.  That was wonderful.  And she made good southern foods, waffles and muffins and things like that.  She was generally rather grouchy.

MF:  Did she cook at noon and for supper?  Was your big meal at noon?

EF:  No, dinner.

MF:  Dinner.

EF:  And my father was rather fussy.  He roast beef, pork chops, roast leg of lamb, you know, hearty food, meat and potatoes and vegetables.  I don’t remember any salads at all.  Lots of vegetables.  My parents had a vegetable garden in Windsor Hills, which is sort of on the west side.  And in that community (my parents got there, I think, in 1914). In that community, there were four families that were very close; one was the Ullmans.  He was a judge, and she was -- the one that was related to Etta and Clara Belle Cone -- and they were very close to my parents.  And Elenor and I grew up together.  And then there were the Steins.  Julian was a nephew of Gertrude Stein.  And his daughter, Ellen, and I (she was two years older than I was) were very good friends.  And then there were the Albert Hutzlers -- he owned a department store in Baltimore -- his kids were younger -- and my parents.  And two of them -- the families were rich, and the other two were, you know, on the moderate side.  Judges only got were paid very badly in those days.  And my father hadn’t made money yet, but they were close friends.  The two rich ones were much more conservative and they didn’t agree on politics or social questions at all.  Julian Stein once said that Brodace Mitchell, who was a professor at Hopkins, who ran for a socialist government, he said, “Brodace Mitchell is more my enemy than Hitler.”  And that shocked Frank, my husband, very much. 

CC:  He never forgot that.

EF:  He never forgot that.  And so even if they didn’t agree on politics at all, but they had a wonderful time.  Every Sunday morning they would go out for long walks; nobody went except the four couples.  And then in the afternoon, Saturday afternoon, they had big walks through the Mill Race.  We lived on the top of the hill, and down below was a park.  They had all kinds of people coming to walk in the afternoon.  It was sort of an “institution.”  They didn’t have television, radios or computers or organized ball games.  And they walked.  And all kind -- medical students, and all of my family’s friends -- I remember coming in one Sunday afternoon, and the place was filled with people at my parents’ house, just people coming to walk and enjoy each other.

MF:  We had to stop the tape in the middle of the Levin story.  Please finish the story about the shad dinner.

EF:  Oh.  So then when Ms. Hen knew that they were kosher and they couldn’t eat meat, she brought in the shad very proudly, which was all decorated with bacon.  And she hadn’t thought anything of that. 

MF:  So what happened when they saw the bacon?  Could they--

EF:  I think everybody was very tactful, and they brushed the bacon off.

MF:  And any other -- what were your favorite foods when you were growing up?  What did you like the best?

EF:  Meat and vegetables.  And my parents had a garden in the back of their house where they raised vegetables.

MF:  Did they do their own work?

EF:  They had a gardener.  But my mother loved gardening; she loved flowers especially.  And we had a grape arbor.  And one year, I think I was nine, my parents surprised me.  We had a long pergola (phonetic) that went from the house into the garden.  It was a kind of a covered walk.  And on one side, on the left-hand side going down, was a little room where they kept garden tools.  They had cleared that out and made a little kitchen.  And they’d put in a little electric stove, a little ice box -- there were no electric refrigerators in those days -- and all the dishes that my mother and aunt had played with when they were little girls.  And so I began to take food out of the garden and cook it, and invite the neighborhood children in.  And that’s how I learned to be interested in cooking and food.

MF:  Did you like to cook?

EF:  I loved it.  And so the ice man would come on a truck -- or a wagon, maybe, in those days.  And they would bring great big blocks of ice.  And then if you got up on the steps, they would take a shaver and take off shavings from the ice, and I would get the raspberries from the garden and put them in and make what was later called snowballs.  The neighborhood kids would come around and we would have a lot of fun.  I really got interested in cooking at that time.

MF:  Tell me about different holidays that you celebrated.

EF:  Christmas.

MF:  What was that like?

EF:  Wonderful.  I mean, my father loved Christmas, we had a tree, and we hung up our stockings.  And my parents -- my mother and aunt would write wonderful rhymes, sometimes they were parodies on Shakespeare or Gilbert and Sullivan.  And everybody would have a stocking.  And we’d sort of get kidded.  I don’t know, I think my father -- I don’t know if he had that when he was a little boy.  I think he just loved Christmas trees.

MF:  Did any of your other friends celebrate Christmas too, your Jewish friends?

EF:  I don’t think the -- certainly the ones on Eutaw Place, I don’t think they celebrated Christmas.  But then, I don’t remember Chanukah at all.

MF:  Any other Jewish foods?  Like you said that Bobolie made a good matzoh ball soup?

EF:  Yes.

CC:  No, she didn’t make it as a soup.  She made the matzoh balls as a side dish.

EF:  But we also had a lot of soup. 

CC:  Yes, crab soup.

EF:  Crab soup, right. 

CC:  She made the matzoh balls as an accompaniment to the dinner.  They were incredible.

CC:  They were like potatoes, like milky, except they were great big, and they were made out of crushed matzoh, not matzoh meal.  And there was like a pound of butter in every one.

EF:  She used to take a rolling pin and crush the matzoh, and then add eggs and seasonings.  

CC:  Mark knows how to make them.

EF:  Yes and wonderful crab cakes, too.

MF:  She made them.

EF:  Yes, wonderful.

MF:  Any other kind of Jewish things that were prepared for the home, or baked goods like strudels or babkes?

EF:  Miss Hen made an Apple Charlotte.  I think it was the same thing.  Did we have anything else?  Wonderful food.

MF:  Any Jewish holidays that the family celebrated at all?

EF:  Did we?  I can’t remember.

MF:  Or did you go anywhere, like to a grandparents’ house for Seder or--

EF:  No, my grandparents -- you see, my mother’s family wasn’t religious at all.  As I told you, my father’s family had belonged to the temple.  They lived on Eutaw Place with my uncle, who was a doctor.  My aunt married Arthur Barrett and I think he converted to Judaism for my grandparents’ sake; they lived in a large house on Eutaw Place, which is the place where all the Jews lived.   And they had a white servant.  And I think she was Bohemian.  She cooked on the ground floor where there was a room where the family ate, next to the kitchen, where she cooked.  But on state occasions, they would eat in the dining room upstairs, and she would put it on a dumbwaiter and bring it up, but that was rare.  But my father’s family always had -- they had white help, I think foreign-born. 

CC:  I never heard you talk much about your father’s parents.  How old were you when they died?

EF:  I guess a teenager. 

CC:  Was your grandfather still alive when you were a child?

EF:  Yes.  Well, my Grandfather Hollander used to come out every Sunday morning on the streetcar from Eutaw Place, and he would bring boxes with chocolate buds wrapped in silver paper mixed in with bright shiny nickels. 

EF:  And my grandfather used to come out at 6:00 in the morning, long before anybody was up, and he would read Theodore Dreiser.  I remember that.  He would sit in the living room until the family got up.  And then he would have breakfast with us.   And my grandmother -- it was funny, because both of them were short people, and they had four enormously tall children.  My Uncle Walter, my Aunt Alice, my Aunt Rose and my father, they were all six feet tall.  My mother said she never knew -- she thought -- she sort of made fun -- they called my grandmother, “Mummy.”  And she was a tiny little woman.  And she was quite conventional.   

She would come out and stay with my mother sometimes with my parents, in the summer.  She would want to make -- I think she would make grape jelly out of the grapes from our parents’ grape arbor.  I think she thought that it -- you shouldn’t make grape jelly when you were menstruating.  I don’t know why that was.  But my mother said that she was always in that condition, because she hated anything to do with cooking and she never cooked.  And her mother-in-law was very different.  She was small, kind of fearful, not very well… conventional.  But everybody got along all right.  And my grandfather -- I guess they died in their seventies.  I think they always lived with my aunt and uncle and Cousin Elizabeth and her family.  Cousin Elizabeth was one of three, she was the middle child.  And her sister was Ruth, Mrs. Courtney Brown, and she was only half Jewish, of course, because my uncle had converted.  And she didn’t tell anybody that she was Jewish. 

MF:  Was it important to your family that you marry Jewish?

EF:  I don’t think they cared very much.  I think -- my father was crazy about Frank, they agreed on politics, agreed on everything else.  And Frank hadn’t been brought up Jewish at all, because his father had come from Sweden, gone to Newfoundland where he worked in the watch factory.  They lived in the Boston area, and there was a great deal of antisemitism.  So he didn’t acknowledge his Jewishness at all.  Frank said he remembered that he asked his father about Passover and about the Seder.  And his father said, “Do you want to know what a Seder is?”  And Frank said, “Yes.”  And he said, “Well, I’ll show you.”  So he pulled down all the blinds so that nobody would see, because there was such antisemitism he was afraid he’d lose his job.  And he then performed a Seder service.  And that was the way Frank found out about Passover.  When Frank went to University of Indiana, I don’t think he told people he was Jewish -- and he got into a fraternity-- because there was such antisemitism, that no Jewish guy could get into a fraternity.  Then he met a rabbi named Milton Steinberg, through some friends of his who were Jewish; he and Milton became very good friends and Milton got him to go to services at the temple on Friday night.  Frank was very interested and that’s when he decided that he wanted to know more about being Jewish and that’s why he came to Baltimore, because he’d applied to two Jewish hospitals, one in Boston, Beth Israel, and then to Baltimore Sinai.  And he got accepted at Sinai.  And then he was interested in his Jewishness and his background.  Frank’s grandfather was very religious, very Orthodox.  And he had, I think, four sons and one daughter.  And he forced his children to go to services; he’d never earned a living, really, he prayed -- Frank said prayed all the time.  They were very poor and he tried to make the children religious.  And they all rebelled.  And I guess all but Uncle Wolff, who married a Jewish woman, and my father-in-law, they all married gentiles.  But uncle Siggy, who also married a Swedish woman, became very identified with Jewish things later.  Uncle Aron (one of Frank’s uncles came over with Frank’s father) a little afterward, went to Ohio and married a Christian woman, and he had no identification with Jews.  He was a communist; caught up with what was happening in Russia.  Uncle Siggy, the one that stayed in Sweden, went into business with a cousin of Frank’s grandmother, and made some money and helped the family along, it was a successful wholesale dry goods.

MF:  Once you were married, you and Frank were married and he was -- had this kind of interest in Judaism, was that expressed in your home in any way? 

EF:  Well, he wasn’t really -- he was very anti-religious, but believed in Jewish values.

MF:  Right.

EF:  He was anti-organized religious.  But he wanted to be identified with Jewish -- and so was my father.  And so we always were Jewish, -- I think we were brought up in a very Jewish way.  Our belief in philanthropy, our belief in all the values of Judaism.  I think that was very strong.  Don’t you? 

CC:  I like to hear you say that.  I think it was unspoken, but I think it’s very true.

EF:  Oh, I think there was no doubt about it, that the standards of our family were--

MF:  That was kind of the guiding principle? 

EF:  Right, right.

MF:  When you had your own home, did you celebrate any Jewish holidays or do any Jewish cooking or those kinds of things?

EF:  Only from the Settlement Cookbook.

MF:  What kind of things?

EF:  But we always had Jewish friends.  I mean, we completely identified -- and Frank was at Sinai as you know.  And he also was very identified with Jewish causes too, the way my father was.

MF:  We didn’t talk about this too much, but when you were a little girl, Carla was saying, but all your friends and family’s friends were Jewish.

EF:  All, all.

MF:  Any gentile acquaintances or friends?

EF:  Yes.  My father had some -- had gentile friends.  He had one minister, Reverend Smith, who told my father that he, my father, would be a very good Christian, because he had all the ideals of Christianity.  I went to Park School, which was entirely Jewish. 

CC:  But one of the things I was thinking about at Park School just now is -- wasn’t that founded because the children--

EF:  Park School was a private school.  It was founded because other elite schools wouldn’t take Jews, and the public education was very poor.  So a number of Jewish families got together and got this school going, and it’s still flourishing.  It’s not quite as heavily Jewish as it was.

MF:  What other kind of Jewish businesses, Jewish landmarks, do you remember from your childhood -- or Jewish stores?

EF:  Oh, there was -- we lived close to an entirely Jewish neighborhood which was Forest Park, where I’d been born.  And it became entirely Jewish.  And they had a wonderful delicatessen.  We loved all that food.  And they called that “The Ghetto,” because there were all -- a lot of immigrant Jews, and good food, good stores.  That was the best food there was.

MF:  Do you remember any of the names of the delicatessens or the stores?

EF:  Oreck (phonetic) and Pearl (phonetic), was a good one.  That was downtown.  And then there’s a wonderful one that’s still there. Attman’s.

MF:  Lombard?

EF:  On Lombard Street, which was near the--

MF:  Lloyd Street Synagogue?

EF:  -- next to the synagogue.  Did you ever go to that?

MF:  Yeah.

EF:  And that had marvelous -- there was a bakery called Stone’s Bakery.  And the Attman’s Jewish delicatessen is still there, excellent.

MF:  Then when you had delicatessen -- deli food, did you have that at the house, or was that -- you all would go out and maybe--

EF:  No.  We never went out to eat, it was unheard of.  We’d bring it for Sunday night supper.  We’d go up to “The Ghetto” and get pickles and cheese and kosher deli.

MF:  So was that a tradition on Sunday nights, to have kind of an informal supper?

EF:  When the maids went out, we would have Jewish delicatessen.

MF:  So was Sunday maid’s day off?

EF:  We were so completely Jewish, and yet we weren’t religious.  I mean, we were so identified.  My parents, all their best friends were Jews.  And you know, there was Jewish tradition, but not religion.

MF:  Right.  How did it strike you when you left Baltimore, as it being a Jewish place, did you feel like--

EF:  Well, I’ll tell you.  I remember very well.  I went to work at the Jewish Board of Guardians.  And every Friday afternoon, the Jewish Forward would come in, and everybody would gather around and read the jokes.  And I was completely ignorant. I didn’t know what they were saying.  So they would translate the jokes for me.  And of course, New York was so heavily Jewish.   At the time, the New York School -- there was the New York School, and then there was the Jewish School of Social Work. 

CC:  Huh-uh.

EF:  Well, they had separate courses in Jewish tradition, Jewish religion, things like that.  And then they would take courses at the New York School in generic social work.  So I knew all about that. 

CC:  Wow.

MF:  How do you think, as a female going into higher education, do you think your experience differed any from the men you knew in college at that time?

EF:  Well, as I said, I didn’t, my parents were very enlightened.  They felt that I should have the best education.  My mother, you see, had gone to Vassar--

MF:  Right.

EF:  She was very well educated.  You know, my father used to joke to me saying, “I love you because you’re not so bright,” or “I don’t like such brilliant girls,” things like that.  But they wanted me to be independent.  I think independence was a very important part in my life.  And then I think, you know, all the ideals of my parents, things we were taught, honesty and responsibility for your fellow man, these were all extremely Jewish concepts, I know that, and they were very much a part of my life.  And my brother, who is absolutely the least Jewish person you’ll ever know -- although he looks Jewish, and he looks like my father -- married a gentile.  And in a way, I think she was somewhat turned off-- she thought there was too much Jewish talk in our home.  And we talked always about Jewish charities, Jewish people.  And I think she believed that we thought we were better than other people.  And that was interesting, I remember that.  I think that my brother was the least identified with Jewishness.  You see, all the rest of us married Jewish people.  It didn’t make my difference to my father at all.  He always liked it because he had Katherine, who was Baptist; he had Frank who was Swedish; and then the grandchildren, one was an observant Jew, that was David.  He liked diversity.  As I look back on it, I know that there were very many Jewish values in our home without any ceremony. 

MF:  What kind of occasions would everybody come together for, all the family?

EF:  Birthdays and anniversaries, Christmas.

MF:  Where would you celebrate those?

EF:  My parents’ home.  They had a big house, and we always went there.  When the children were little, every Sunday night we used to meet, have dinner with my parents.  And I would put two or three children upstairs to go to bed on the third floor.  And then when we went home (we lived less than a mile away) we would pick them up and carry them home.  So my brother used to come from Washington (Edward) and then the rest of us -- my sister didn’t, because first she lived in Houston.  And she married a German Jew who had come over a little earlier than some of them and was lucky.  But he’s the most antisemitic person in the family. And you know, he didn’t talk about that so much.

MF:  Well, tell me about when you were a young wife and mother, and what that period of your life was like?

EF:  Wonderful.

MF:  I mean, you had--

EF:  Lots of fun.

MF:  -- you had six children by -- what year was your last child born?

EF:  Twins, 1948.  We went away during the war.

MF:  Tell me about that experience too.

EF:  Well, Carla, Mark and Frank (who was called Tammy) were all born in our house in Windsor Hills -- well, North Avenue, really.  It was still in the same -- West Baltimore.  And then the war came, and Frank went into the Public Health Service.  And we were enormously lucky that he was stationed in this country.  We went to a place in West Florida in the Panhandle in a housing project.  It was the bombing airfield, Egland Field; he was the doctor for the civilian population, which was enormous.  And we went to a part of the country that I never knew anything about.  It was very “poor white trash,” as they said.  I mean, they were very poor, very poorly educated.  Carla made a book from his letters home and made them into a book for him.  And he was just a doctor.  And he established a health department.  And he really started a “fee-for-service” program, where people would pay and get very inexpensive medical care.  And he would travel.  It was in that panhandle between Panama City and Pensacola.  And it was a very poor, very rural part of Florida.  And it was an excellent experience.  We lived in a housing project.  And the first one only had a downstairs living room and a kitchen.  And then upstairs were two rooms.  Frank and I had a room and the children all slept (three children then) slept in one room.  And it was an excellent experience for all of us to see how people really lived.  And we stayed there -- we went there in 1942.  And just early in 1945, we moved to Key West.  We got there, I think, like January, we went.  And he had a health center there and gave medical care to the people in Key West.

MF:  And what were you doing during the day -- taking care of three kids?

EF:  Taking care of the kids.  Cooking and doing all the work.

MF:  And did you just put them into school?

EF:  The first year we went there, Carla went to a school on the post.  A very intelligent woman who was the wife of a colonel in the army.  She was interested in education and had a little school.  And Carla went there, and she loved it, and it was perfect.  And then she decided not to have it anymore.  So Carla went to the public school, which was in Nizeville (phonetic).  Now, when I first went there, the native children were pale.  And I said to Frank, “They’re out in the sun all day, why do they look this way?”  And he said, “Because they all have hookworm, and the pigs and the cows and the chickens all roam through the loose sand, and they pick it up through their feet.  So he treated a lot of these kids.  And then the second year we were there, Carla went to the public school.  And the public school had a principal who kept pigs, and I think chickens, maybe.  And he liked it when the children threw out the rest of their lunches, because that’s the way the pigs got fed.  And so the school ground was all kind of sandy, loose sand.  We lived there from ’42 to ’46.  And then we moved to Key West.  And that was another very interesting experience.  And we lived in a housing project for a little while, and then we got a small house.  Key West was marvelous.  The climate was great, except, that in summer -- it began to get hot about February, and it stayed hot until November.  And there was -- of course, there was no air conditioning.  We moved from the housing project to a small house with a yard.  And it was hot, terribly hot.  And then in June (we moved in January).  It was my parents’ anniversary and so we planned to take the children to Jacksonville to meet them.  I was going to take them -- we were going to take a plane to Miami and then a train to Jacksonville.  Frank had a patient who was a leper, and he had to take him to Carville, Louisiana, to be treated.  So we set out at the same time.  He was driving and was going to stop in Miami, and we were going to take the plane -- it was the first time I’d ever been in a plane, I think -- from Key West to Miami.  They pulled down the shades in the plane because they didn’t want anybody to look at installations along the Keys.  In the meantime, Mark had broken his leg, so he was on crutches so we went to Miami, and we went to a restaurant called Child’s for dinner.  And there we met Frank and his patient having dinner on the way up to Carville.  We took the train from Miami to Jacksonville where we met my parents. 

EF:  It was just lovely.  We had a wonderful vacation with my parents.  And then Frank came from Carville, met us in Jacksonville, and then we all drove back to Key West, and they went back by train to Baltimore.

MF:  So his service during the war, the whole time, was for a Public Health Service?

EF:  Yes.

MF:  And how did you generally feel about that part of your life?

EF:  Well, it was in some ways sad, because so many things were happening in Germany and Europe, and we knew about those things.  There was only one paper called P.M., it was a liberal paper.  And we had the radio, but we didn’t really know the horrible things that were happening a lot of the time until later.  And the Miami Herald would come.  And it was a very interesting time.   Frank was transferred to San Francisco.  We moved again.  And by that time I was pregnant with Michael.  We wanted another child who was born in March, 1945.  And by that time, Frank was transferred to San Francisco.  We left Key West in the car piled with all our belonging and went to live at my mother’s house until the baby was born.  Frank left Baltimore in January of ‘45.  Well, Michael was born -- yeah, ‘45.  We stayed with my mother, and Frank went to California.  And then we moved to California in May.  My mother had a friend who was from San Francisco whose sister was in the real estate business.  It was very hard to find housing at that time; nobody would rent to anybody with four children.  So she said she thought she could find us a house for $10,000.  “It’s on the edge of a good neighborhood, Pacific Heights.  There will be a nice school for the children to go to, a large house with four floors.  I don’t know whether you’ll like it,” but I did.  So we bought it sight-unseen for $10,000.  And it was a marvelous house.  And now it must be what, a million dollars.  Close to it.  My children have never forgiven me for that. 

CC:  (Laughs).

EF:  We could have made so much money. 

CC:  We went out on the train from Baltimore to San Francisco.

EF:  No, Nanie went.  And Michael was a baby.  We took all his bottles for four days and opened can of milk for each meal. And we went out on the train and had to take all Michael’s bottles in a -- I guess it was a steamer, with all the bottles and canned milk. We had to change trains. You know, the military service had all the planes, and we weren’t allowed to fly. We stopped in Chicago.  Frank’s family lived in Indianapolis, his sister and her husband and his mother and father came to me us at the train.  And they had gotten us a room at the Drake Hotel, was it?  They’d gotten a suite on the top floor.  And they served us a marvelous dinner.  They wanted to see the baby because they thought they wouldn’t see him for a long time.  And then they drove us to the next train.  We traveled two or three days more. And then we stayed with some friends of my parents until we moved to Clay Street.  Then we had, well, about fourteen months, a wonderful time and we had until VJ Day came along.

CC:  And I can remember, the bomb was dropped.  I can remember coming home and listening on the radio that the bomb was dropped.  And then that was in August, the same year that we moved out there.  And then we stayed until July the following year.

EF:  It was a very exciting time.

MF:  You sound, still, like you were a very flexible and patient woman.  You were able to--

EF:  I was lucky.  Most people had to stay at home and have their husbands go overseas.  I was just one of the luckiest people.  And we had the kids all the time, so I was able to stay home and take care of the kids, and we lived in different kinds of places.

MF:  Did you have any help during those years when you were living--

EF:  Occasionally we would have somebody on the army post would baby-sit a little bit.  Or for a short time in Key West, we had a black woman who was a very good cook.   And she stayed for a little while.  Do you remember that? 

CC:  Huh-uh.

EF:  She made lime pies.  She was wonderful.  And then in San Francisco, I had a cleaning woman, who was Japanese, who came once a week to clean and to do the wash.  And then that would be my day off.  I had a very close friend in San Francisco that I had met in New York.  And we used to go downtown and have fun. 

EF:  No.  Emily and Fritz came and lived at our house. 

CC:  Right.  They came.

EF:  My sister and her husband and baby came out to California and lived with us.

CC:  June 6th is D-Day.

EF:  Yes, and we were there.  And we listened.  There was no television, of course.  We listened to the radio.  We were glued to the radio the whole time.  It was a very wonderful, exciting time.  We thought, you know, the world was going to be better.  The Nazis were gone.  The Japanese were capitulating.   And anyway, then we -- Frank had been offered a job with the Joint Distribution Committee, and was to go to Paris.  But he had signed up to be a regular in the Public Health Service and Dr. Paren (phonetic) -- they wouldn’t let him go because they wanted him here.  But we didn’t go, we came back to Baltimore, and we had a very wonderful life.

MF:  So what year were you back in Baltimore?

EF:  ‘46, summer of ‘46.

MF:  But you know, I always think its so interesting, how different the times feel, that your responsibility, you know -- your husband could go off, and then say to you--

EF:  Yes.

MF:  “You move everything, get all the kids (Laughs), and we’ll see you across country.”

EF:  I thought I was the luckiest person in the world.  All my friends had to stay home with their kids while their husbands went away. 

MF:  Did your marriage feel like a good partnership to you?

EF:  He was interested in his work.  I said we got along very well, because I was interested in him, and he was interested in him.  We got along fine.  Isn’t that right? 

MF:  How did he feel about your work, your interests in social work?

EF:  Well, he always wanted me to go to work -- I mean, whenever I wanted to.  He didn’t hurry me.  But he was always interested in my returning to social work.

MF:  So when did you go back?

EF:  19553, when the twins were in kindergarten.  I met a woman that I knew -- no, Frank met her.  Her name was Sadie Ginsberg.  And she was sort of the “queen of childhood education in Baltimore.” 

CC:  ‘53.  They were five.  Do you think it was later?  I sort of remember you going back to work the year I left for college.

EF:  She said to Frank, “What’s Edith doing?”  And he said, “She’s taking care of the kids.”  And Sadie said, “Well, we need her.  We don’t have a social worker, and we’ve established this nursery school for children with learning disabilities and behavior problems.”  It was on the second floor of a doctor’s office on Eutaw Place.  So I went to work.  The twins were in kindergarten. 

EF:  They went to kindergarten when they were five.  I went to work there part time.  And then I began to work in other places and agencies.  But I never went back to the Baltimore Emergency Relief, which turned into the Department of Public Welfare.

MF:  So how did it feel to go back to work?  What was that like, after you--?

EF:  Well, it was easy, because I only worked part time.  And I never made any money. 

CC:  And you had full-time help.

EF:  And I had help.  They told me that -- when the twins were born, that I had to have help because -- you know, you’d have to stay up all night, mostly feeding one, then feeding the other.

MF:  So what was a typical day like in your house after you’d started back to work -- or kind of do two days for me.  What was it like before you went back to work, and then after you went back to work?

EF:  Well, I think I just did things around the house before I went back to work.  I had plenty of friends, and my parents were around.  And you know, in a way, it was a very easy life.

MF:  What was a day like?  Like what time would you get up, and then--

EF:  I got up in the morning in time to give the kids breakfast.  Some of them went off early and made their own breakfast, didn’t they?  And I had help during that period; I had friends who had children the same age. And it was very pleasant and easy.

MF:  Were you involved in any kind of other activities or volunteer work outside the home?

EF:  I think I was on the Board of the Scholarship Committee, something like that.  But mostly it was Frank who was extremely active.  He was on the American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, and the Medical Committee.  And I was always interested in what he was doing.   I think the only time -- well, there was a time that I did some work for the People’s Un-Employment League.  That was back when we first were married.  It was during the Depression, and there were lots of poor people.  And I think I -- maybe I taught a class of parents, on how to get meals together -- something like that.

MF:  So what time would you usually get home from your work?

EF:  You mean after I went to work?

MF:  Yeah.

EF:  Oh, I would work part time, and I would get home in time to be there when the children came home from school.  Mostly in the beginning, I worked in the mornings. 

CC:  You’re just incredible, you just don’t stop.  I don’t know how you do this!

EF:  (Laughs).  Well, we have to leave, don’t we?

MF:  Well, we can go for just a little bit more.

EF:  We had a marvelous time.  But people didn’t do that in those days.  They just didn’t let girls go run loose.  When my grandfather was there and my parents had gone off -- he used to worry about me, and he used to think that something awful would happen.  I drove at the age of sixteen, and I would go places.  And he would worry about me.  So I didn’t know what it was for anybody to stay up at night and worry that I hadn’t gotten home.  And it was a very liberal kind of life.

MF:  You know what it was like to be raising six kids and how that felt to you, and how you combined -- even though you’re saying, you know, I think -- you know, that you worked part time, that’s a lot.  And all the responsibilities that you had (Inaudible)--

EF:  Well, I think I’m not a worrier.  I think you’re either born a worrier, and my parents and I said that nobody worried since my grandfather died.  You went to New York, “Have you remembered your rubber shoes?”  “Be careful of those cabs,” he used to say to my mother if we went off to New York for a weekend.   My father was very generous, and he loved the German operas, so he would take us to New York on trips.  We’d stay for the weekend, and we’d go to theater, opera.  We were all very interested in theater, which was very good then.  And we had a Ford’s Theater in Baltimore, but we had to stop going because it was not integrated as they wouldn’t allow blacks in the audience, and in some places they wouldn’t allow them on the stage in others.  And so Ford’s Theater was picketed, so we couldn’t go to the theater anymore; so that’s when we would go to New York.  My kids were all involved in the Civil Rights Movement.  I guess we were all involved at that time; my father was a great fan of Roosevelt’s whom he admired very much.  They said, “Roosevelt was a traitor to his class.”  But there was much more antisemitism than there is now.  People couldn’t get to colleges, the medical schools; you couldn’t get to be a resident.  You could be an intern, but you couldn’t be full resident.

MF:  How did you experience that in the ‘50s, to antisemitism?  Was there a great decline after the war?

EF:  A decline in antisemitism?

MF:  Yeah -- or not?

EF:  I think it became -- it was gradual.  Of course there were country clubs that didn’t accept Jews as members to play a lot of tennis.  And there was a Baltimore Country Club that was completely segregated.  And we used to see these wonderful tennis courts that were completely empty, at the Baltimore Country Club, and we were not allowed to play.  But it didn’t affect us very much, because we went places to play tennis where it didn’t make any difference.  And it just was a fact of life.  And I didn’t have very many friends who weren’t Jewish.  I think my parents had more.  But it didn’t affect me personally.  There were parts of Baltimore where you couldn’t possibly live, east of Falls Road, Roland Park, and Guildford were absolutely segregated.  I remember when Frank and I were first married in 1934, and the Guttmachers offered Frank a place in their office. We were looking for a place to live, and opposite was a nice brick apartment house.  And there was a sign on the front, “For Rent.”  So we went to apply.  And then the woman asked us all kinds of questions:  Do you stay up late?  Do you drink a lot?  Do you have wild parties?  And Frank knew exactly what it was happening.  And he said, “Do you mean that you don’t want us because we’re Jewish?”  And she said, “Yes, uh-huh.”  And he said, “Fine.”  And that was that.  I know that, my sister-in-law who wasn’t Jewish went to look for a place to live after she married my brother; she went around with a real estate person.  And then she said, “Well, this is a very nice neighborhood, you know, we don’t take Jews in this neighborhood.”  And then my sister-in-law must have looked very angry, and she said, “Oh, are you Jewish?”  And my sister-in-law said, “Well, half of us and half of us isn’t, but I don’t want to live there.”  So that was just a fact of life.  And it didn’t make any difference, really, because we didn’t even want to live in Roland Park, we thought that was stuffy.   Now, we moved in 1948 in our neighborhood went downhill a lot.  My father tried to keep the neighborhood integrated.  He lived in Windsor Hills near where we lived.  He was head of the Urban League. He had a lot of black friends.  He wanted to keep his neighborhood integrated.  But ours about a mile away, really went completely black.  And our house, which was very old, began to sort of come apart.  And so we moved.  Frank moved his office to St. Paul Street, which was on the edge of Guildford, which was a neighborhood where no Jews lived.  After the 1956 Decision and integrated housing were coming along, he wanted to move near his office, because he said he would love to go home for lunch.   So we began to look.  And by that time, you could live almost any place you wanted.  And we looked at one place that we liked very much, but the man died very suddenly, and his wife wanted to stay, so we didn’t get that.  So it was several years later we began to look again.  And we found this.  But by that time, it was after Martin Luther King was killed and there were riots.  And so we looked in a neighborhood where there was a doctor who wanted to get out.  And in that driveway were two cars; one of them said, “Uphold Your Local Police,” and the other one said, “Support Rhodesia.”  And I said to Frank, “What does that mean?”  And he said, “Don’t you know?  He’s head of the John Birch Society.  And he wants to get out in the worst possible way.”  So we got this wonderful house next to the Guildford Pumping Station, facing the reservoir that was all open on two sides.  And we got it for $42,500 and it was a big house.  Thirty-two years ago, we moved.  And we were there until after Frank died.  It was a wonderful house.  We had lots of fun there.

MF:  And you mentioned Civil Rights.  How were your children and you--?

EF:  They were all involved, very much.  And by that time the twins were in college, everybody had left home by that time.  And they were all very much involved.  Michael was in Chicago, and then he went into the Peace Corps., and went to Brazil.  And Carla was married and lived in Washington and Mark was married and lived partly in Boston, partly in D.C.

MF:  How did you feel about the choices that your children were making with their lives and the ways they were headed off?

EF:  I think that was very lucky.  I mean, they were all extremely liberal to radical.  And we approved of their going on Civil Rights marches.  We were very proud of David’s.  And David and my husband got along very well, just the way my father and Frank had gotten on, because they agreed on politics and none of our children was a Republican, and they were all probably left of us; we were very interested in politics, always.

MF:  Describe what David did for work.

EF:  Well, you know what we do.  He works in the field of educating people for democratic purposes, and he goes to foreign countries and does wonderful work.  He’s extremely hard-working, dedicated, very well respected.  He’s a lobbyist.  And he has his own agency.  You know about that.

MF:  Yeah.  Is that still Common Cause, or--

EF:  No.  He was president of Common Cause. And now he works for something called Advocacy.  He and Mike Perchek and Kathleen have this agency called Advocacy, Inc., which is working for Democratic principles.

MF:  But just to mothering.  And I wanted you to think about how did your style of motherhood compare or differ to how your mother mothered?  Do you think that you retained -- did you model your patterns after your mother, or how did you do things differently than your mother?

EF:  Well, the fact that I worked was a little different.  But I think our styles were very much alike.  I don’t think we worried a lot about what our children did.  I really believe in staying out of their lives and trying not to interfere.   But I think in many ways, we modeled ourselves after our parents.  I think the two things I find most important, of course, honesty, integrity, but after that, I think that generosity is the most important attribute.  And that doesn’t only mean giving to poor people or giving to causes, it also means generosity of spirit, of trying to understand how other people feel, and being sensitive to other people’s needs, and to help when you can.  And that’s very Jewish, I think.

MF:  I do, too.  Do you and your husband pretty much agree on your style of child rearing, or were--?-

EF:  I think he was stricter, much stricter than I was.  He was brought up entirely differently.  His parents were European and they didn’t get along very well.  And his mother had no education because she left Lithuania, I think, when she was seventeen, and came to Sweden.  And she never really learned Swedish, and when they moved to this country, she never really learned I think English very well.  She couldn’t really read and write English very well.  She could write Yiddish.  And after my father-in-law came to this country, the only way they could correspond was she would write to him in Yiddish, because he understood Yiddish. After she came and her children were growing up, my father-in-law said to her, “You had better learn to read and write English, because if your children go away, you won’t be able to communicate with them;” she said, “My children will never leave me.”  She was a very beautiful woman, and she was, I think, quite capable in household things, but she never had a chance to be educated.  She had a very poor bringing up in -- I guess it was Lithuania, maybe Poland.  And she was one of a family of five girls and one boy who were very poor, and everybody finally left home.  She brought some of her sisters to Sweden.  And they lived in a house with her after Frank’s father left for the USA, but they stayed.  There was her older sister, Rachel, who stayed in Sweden and had four sons.  And then there was Rosa, who had two children and came to this country when Frank’s parents did.  And then there was a younger sister, Doris, who also had two children, stayed in Sweden and made a good marriage; we visited her when we went to Sweden the first time.

MF:  How did you get along with your in-laws?

EF:  All right.  But my mother-in-law was difficult.  She was a very unhappy, although she was beautiful.  She and her husband didn’t have a happy life together at all.  I once asked him why he had married her.  And he said, “There were three reasons.  First, because she was beautiful; second, because she was a good cook; and the third reason was that she could sing revolutionary songs.”   But they had a difficult time.  And he couldn’t leave her because she was completely without any skills except housekeeping.  She was a very particular housekeeper.  And so they stayed together, but they never had a very happy life.  Frank knew he had to earn a living, and he thought he might have to go back to Indianapolis because that’s where his ties were, if he wanted to go into private practice.  It would have been a disaster, because he wouldn’t have gotten along with his parents.  And his poor sister stayed and took care of her mother until she died.

MF:  What do you think made your marriage so successful?  What things contributed to such a good relationship?

EF:  Well, I think we had intellectual interests in common.  We were both very interested in politics.  Frank was active, I wasn’t.  And I think that -- he was a doer.  And in those days there was no competition between us.  He did his things and I did mine.  And it worked out very well, because he never did anything around the house.  He didn’t cook; he didn’t help me mostly with any household chores.   I did most of the bringing up with the children.  He was stricter than I was and less patient, and yet he had a great influence in their thinking and their intellectual development.  And he wanted a lot of children.  He told me right away when we were first going together, “I’m old” (he was almost twenty-nine when we married). “I’m old now, and I want a lot of children right away.”  And that was all right with me.  And it was so much -- I was so lucky to be able to and after a while he made a good living, being a doctor.  He never cared a lot about money, never charged social workers, students.  He never charged rabbis or priests or nuns.  He never charged nurses.  He never charged a lot of people, but he made a perfectly good living, and he didn’t care a lot.

MF:  So were there frustrating parts of marriage, married life?

EF:  Well, we never argued about sex, money or politics.  But he was much stricter with the children than I was.  I was very easy going, and I’m afraid I let him do most of the discipline, so I remained the popular one, I think.  And then he became depressed.  He was very depressed in the last years of our marriage.  When he left practice, he was really very depressed, and went for treatment.  And then we went on an ADA trip to China in 1980.  We had a marvelous time.  When he came home, and he really had a kind of recovery.  And he got into something called “Pets on Wheels,” which involved taking pets to nursing homes.  He was really interested and fascinated with that.  After a few years. 

He became quite sick.  He was older than I was, and he was in poor health and was very depressed.  And then he got Parkinson’s.  And I had to get people in to help.  I was able to keep him at home, which was very lucky.  And then he died in 1997.  And I stayed on in the house until just two months ago, then I moved to a residence, an apartment house called Roland Park Place, where life is much easier.  I hated leaving the house.

MF:  Tell me about that.  How did that feel?

EF:  Oh, it was horrible to leave.  I think moving (next to sickness and death) is about the worst experience.  There was so many things I had enjoyed.  It was thirty-two years in the same house, and so many good times we had.  And you know, part of the reason that it was so easy -- because I’m sloppy, and I let things sort of slide a little bit.  And so I had all this huge house to clean out and to throw away.  And my kids were very good, helped me with that.

MF:  So how has it felt, kind of these last couple of years since his -- with -- how’s your life been?

EF:  It’s all right.  I mean, it isn’t fun the way it used to be.  I still have friends.  I still go out to lunch.  I go visit my kids.  I’m very lucky that I have good health.  I’ve just had the most luck in my life.

MF:  Always been in good health?

EF:  Yes.

MF:  Did you have fairly good pregnancies too?

EF:  Easy pregnancy.  And even with the twins, who at birth one of them had the cord wrapped around her neck and almost choked or strangled. It was wonderful to have twins; they were so cute.  I’ll show you pictures when you come.

MF:  All right.  I think we probably should stop.

EF:  All right.

MF:  I’m just going to put a little ending announcement on this tape.  This is the second tape with Edith Furstenberg.  And she allowed Marcie Cohen Ferris to interview her on Friday, March the 16th.  And we began this tape about 10:30, and we’re finishing about 11:50.  Thank you so much.

[CD NUMBER TWO/FOUR ENDS. CD NUMBER THREE/FOUR BEGINS.]     

MF:  All right.  Let me make an introduction.  Today is Thursday, April the 12th, 2001, and it’s a little after 3:00 p.m.  My name is Marcie Cohen Ferris.  And I’m with Mrs. Edith Furstenberg, in her home in Baltimore.

EF:  Roland Park Place, a retirement home.

MF:  And we are continuing our interview.  We’re at Roland Park Place.  And I thought maybe you might -- why don’t we start with letting you read that, because that might be a good way to get that on tape.

EF:  Okay.  It may be too long and boring.

MF:  Well, let’s start.

EF:  Okay.

MF:  And then I can always interrupt you and ask you questions.

EF:  All right.  Now, this is about the houses we lived in:

I barely remember moving from Forest Park when I was four to Windsor Hills, where my parents lived until 1972 (when they died within three or four months of each other).  At first, I think I had a room on the second floor, across from my parents’ room.  I think Edward’s room was next to theirs.  Later it was the study.  But there must have been a door from his room which he asked them to open when he was a little boy, because he wanted to hear them read aloud.  They were reading Beveredge’s Abraham Lincoln.  It was a big house, with a third floor, where I had my room later where I shared the floor with Auntie, a large room, facing front, with five windows, which I always loved watching the changing of the seasons.  There was a kitchen in the back of a small -- and a small room, which was built later, where “Ms. Hen,” (the cook) Bobolie, and George (the butler), and Sydney Nelson later, who were working for my parents, and maybe anyone else who came to help out.  At first, I think there was a nursemaid named Charity, who was sort of a nurse and an upstairs maid, and Ms. Hen, who was the cook.  Uncle Morris came down from New York to visit, where he lived in the Astor Hotel for many years.  I think after twenty-five, they gave him an electric refrigerator for the celebration.  He was a large man with slender legs and a pot belly.  There used to be more than the usual conversation about food.  I remember writing in my diary that they pick on me about being fat, “what about Uncle Morrie?”  Food was a big topic.  My mother never cooked, but consulted with Ms. Hen, whom I never liked (although she was a character) because we were never allowed in the kitchen for any length of time.  After school, when Eleanor and I came home hungry, and, “Please, Ms. Hen, can we have something to eat, she would say, Get out of my kitchen or I’ll run you ‘til your heels catch fire!”  But sooner or later she would appear with a huge sandwich.  Maybe that was partly the cause that I was such a fat little girl.  And it was a source of a good deal of conversation.  I know that Elenor was very thin, and I was very fat.  And Ms. Hen used to say, “Eleanor gets "poor"  -- in quotes -- that means "thin" – “carrying her eatin’s around.”

MF:  That’s great.  I’m going to let you read some more, because it doesn’t take very long, and it’s great stories.

EF:  All right.  Food was a very important part of our family life.  I never saw my mother cook, except to make fudge, which I understood was the most important thing she learned at Vassar.  But we had Ms. Hen (Henrietta Davis, born a slave, but she wasn’t a bit subservient) very gruff and rough.  Then I went on to say about coming home from school, and asking for a sandwich.  Later on, Ms. Hen would say to me:  “It’s just as easy to stand under a tree with berries on it when you find a man.”  So later, I said to her:  “Ms. Hen, I didn’t stand under a tree with berries on it, but berries grew.”

MF:  Did that mean money?

EF:  Yes.

MF:  Yeah.  That’s great.

EF:  We had very good hearty meals, beef and pork.  My dad loved food.  He was annoyed if the meat was too well done.  And my mother would always apologize if anything went wrong.  We would all take up for her and say, quote, "My piece is delicious."  That was the chorus.  Sunday morning breakfast was the high point of the week, muffins, spoon bread and pudding made from corn meal; ham, bacon, sausage, biscuits, eggs any style.  There was smoked white fish when Uncle Morrie came until after many years he confessed that he really didn’t care for it much.  My mother was quite crestfallen at this point because she’d always imagined that that was his favorite breakfast.  And then I told you about Uncle Morris lived in the Astor Hotel.  And later, when I came to live in New York in 1931, to go to the School of Social Work, I would often meet him for dinner; first with Eleanor, then with Frank.  He usually took us to dinner at a wonderful restaurant, German restaurant, called The Blue Ribbon.  After we had stuffed ourselves, he took us to Time Square, gave us five dollars to get a cab.  He didn’t like us to be roaming around at night.  We would thank him profusely, wait until he turned the corner, and then hop into a theater or a movie, after which we could catch the subway for a nickel, and could be home quite soon.  Sometimes when I was very sleepy, I’d take the wrong line and find myself in Harlem or East 25th Street, and would have to catch a streetcar to get to 125th and Riverside Drive where I lived, during that year, my first year at school.

MF:  Okay.  And then this piece, is this something you’d like to share?

EF:  That’s just about trips.  Do you want to hear about that?

MF:  Sure.

EF:  I was -- are you getting this?

MF:  Yeah.  We’re all set.

EF:  I was eleven and Edward was twelve when our parents took us on a vacation, on a camping trip in western Maryland, a place called Swallow Falls.  We had a Ford, or Fliver, as they affectionately called it.  Fords were out of favor because of Henry Ford.  And Dad said, when somebody asked him if he would buy a Ford, he said he might buy it, but he would treat it badly.   We had a lot of trouble with this car because it became overheated going up the mountains.  And when we got to Swallow Falls, our parents left us with some nice farmers because they had to go back to Oakland, or someplace for the day, and have it fixed.  I think I was scared to be left, but had a great time, and learned a lot about farming in that twenty-four hours.

MF:  That’s great.

EF:  The first time I went to Europe, I was nineteen.  I sailed on an ocean liner, alone, where there were some older guys who actually paid some attention to me, which was very exciting.  I was met by my mother in Cherbourg, and we went to Paris, where we met Dad at the Hotel De Quai Voltaer (phonetic), still nice.  We had a wonderful time and went to see and hear Josephine Baker, and lots of other exciting events.  My parents left to go home, and I stayed alone for five or six days.  And Ms. Etta Cone was at the hotel where she stayed and was really very nice to me.  And later, she took Elenor (who was her mother’s first cousin) and me on a trip by auto, to Gruyere, Switzerland.  After that I went to Europe in 1931 with a close friend, Ellen Frank, who was a couple of years older than I was.  And we were staying with my parents for a short time in Germany.  And then they went home, and the two of us went on a bicycle trip in the Lake Country.  It was very brave of my parents.  It was quite unusual for two girls to be allowed to go to Europe in those days.  But it seemed very safe.  I remember once when we were in Germany, we saw some young guys in uniform who looked like Boy Scouts marching.  And we didn’t know until much later they were Nazis, and we didn’t have any idea.  We laughed at them, thought they were sort of pretentious.  Had no idea how later we would be so scared.

MF:  Just as I went back through the interviews, I thought we missed a couple things, but it kind of jumps around from topics.  You reminded me about a story of your father helping Marian Anderson out when she was singing in the area.

EF:  Yes.  They weren’t allowed to have African Americans appear on the stage in some theaters.  And in others, they didn’t allow them in the audience.  And when Marian Anderson came to sing at the Lyric, L—y-r--i-c, there was no place for her to stay, because no hotel would allow her to have a room.

MF:  What time of -- what years?

EF:  That must have -- I’ll have to ask one of my kids that.  Oh, what year was it?

MF:  ‘30s?

EF:  It was more ‘40s, I think.  In the ‘50s -- it was before the Civil Rights, of course.  So my father invited her -- my parents invited her to come to their house afterwards, where they had a large party for her.  And everybody was extremely impressed, because she was a wonderful person, as well as a genius.  It was an occasion.

MF:  Were you there?

EF:  I was.  And Frank was very proud, because he carried her mink coat.  She didn’t have a place to stay, and although my parents urged her to spend the night at their house, she had to get back to New York.  So Frank took Miss Anderson and her accompanist to the station, to the train, where she took the midnight train back to New York.  But it was an unforgettable occasion.

MF:  Do you remember anything that she sang?

EF:  “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, nobody knows but Jesus.”

MF:  Did she have a white or black accompanist?

EF:  White.

MF:  But that was just one performance?

EF:  That was the one I remember.  She also sang, of course, in Washington.

MF:  Was that the same trip?

EF:  It was the same decade.  It was the same, even -- it wasn’t the same time, but it was close to the same time.

MF:  Yeah.  When was that time that she sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial? Eleanor Roosevelt arranged it.

EF:  Right.  That was unforgettable.  It was unbelievable.  It was so moving.

MF:  Were you there?

EF:  Yes.

MF:  You were there.

EF:  Yes.

MF:  What was it like?

EF:  It was just a sea of people, crowds and crowds of people.  And it was wonderful.  I was also there for some Civil Rights -- I can’t remember whether I actually heard Martin Luther King or heard him on the radio, but that was a time when we went to Washington, a number of times for peace marches and for Civil Rights marches.  It was an unbelievable time.  And yet, it was sort of a time of hope.  And I’ve never forgotten that.

MF:  Yeah.  Talk a little bit more about the Civil Rights activities, and how you and Frank and the--

EF:  Oh, we were very much involved.  We went on a peace march in New York, which was just a wonderful occasion.  And then my children were always very much involved in the Civil Rights Movement.

MF:  What inspired you to become involved?

EF:  Oh, well, Frank was always interested in all freedom marches, he was a liberal.  So were my parents, brothers, so were my children.  One of my nephews went to Philadelphia in Mississippi and was arrested and put in jail.  I think I told you that.

MF:  Yeah.  And were there specific activities that your children became involved in that you--

EF:  Mark was in something called the NSA, which was the National Student Association.

MF:  Right.

EF:  He was very active in that.  And all of my children--

MF:  Where did your children go to college?

EF:  Well, they all went to public school.  And then Carla went to Antioch; Mark went to Oberlin; Frank went to Haverford; Michael went to University of Chicago (he went to a small college called Shimer, in Illinois, for a few years, but then got back in) when he wasn’t doing very well he went to Shimer to finish up.  And then he came back to the University of Chicago and graduated.  And then he went into the Peace Corps in Brazil.  So we were very lucky that none of our children were in the war.  Everybody was so against the war in Vietnam.  It was a time of such sadness and revolt, and a certain kind of bitterness, and yet we felt a bond with most all the young people we knew, especially at the University of Chicago.  There was a lot of uproar there.

MF:  Where did the twins go to college, or university?

EF:  Ellie went to NYU, and Anne went to University of Wisconsin, where she met John, who is still her partner.

MF:  Is Ellie E-l-l--

EF:  -- i-e.  Her name is Ellen, but everybody called her Ellie.

MF:  And Anne?

EF:  Is Anne with an "e."

MF:  What about your own peers and colleagues and their involvement in Civil Rights?  Did you feel alone in your feelings, or--

EF:  No.  I think -- well, Lois, especially, I think--

MF:  What was Lois’ last name again?

EF:  It was Blum at that time, and now it’s Feinblatt (phonetic).  And her son was very active at the University of Chicago.  And the Mendeloff’s (phonetic), his father was head of -- chief of medicine.

MF:  How do you spell it?  Do you know how to spell that?

EF:  I think it’s M-e-n-d-e-l-o-f-f (phonetic).  I’ll look it up and tell you.  University of -- see, he was at the University of Chicago, and so was Jeff Blum.

MF:  What about other family members and their feeling about--

EF:  Well, I told you, my nephew Edward Hollander, who was arrested.  They were all extremely active in the Civil Rights Movement, and very dedicated, I think.

MF:  Would you say that that participation in Civil Rights was also just part of a Jewish value that -- or (Inaudible)--

EF:  I think it was Jewish, but it was also many of the young people who were Jewish, who were from Shimer, who were arrested in the South and killed.

MF:  Right.  Tell me a little bit about the careers that your children have chosen.

EF:  Carla was in Housing, HUD.  It’s Housing and Urban Development.  And she was living in Washington.   She lived first on Maryland Avenue, and then she moved to Lanier Place.  And she and David were always tremendously involved in politics.  And after she could no longer work for the government because the Democrats were out, she formed a group of unemployed people who were thrown out by the administration, and all were trying to find out where they wanted to work.  She had a group that she was working with, of unemployed people.  And that was when she thought that she had always loved to read and wanted to own a bookstore.   And Mark did a lot of different things.  I think I told you about it, right? 

MF:  Yeah, I think you told me about Mark.

EF:  Yeah, I did.  And then, Frank has always been in academic life.  He was first a graduate student at Columbia.  And then when he graduated he went to University of Pennsylvania.  He called me, oh, about 9:00 o’clock this morning and asked me if I’d like to come down to hear him talk.

MF:  Right.

EF:  And then I went to hear him talk this morning to a group at the University Of Maryland School Of Social Work.  And he was talking about -- I think he’s been studying teenage pregnant girls for at least, I think, thirty years now.  And as I walked in the room, he said, “And here’s my mother, who’s the person who started me on this” -- because I was at Sinai, and I had asked him to help me with a study on teenage pregnancy and he’s been doing that ever since.  He’s written a number of books, and has gotten to be quite well-known for his work.  And as I walked in the door, everybody clapped, it was very embarrassing.

MF:  And you had gone back to work after you had--.  When did you go back?

EF:  After Carla was born.  The first year I worked at the Department of Social Services.  It was then called Baltimore Emergency Relief.  I went back for a few months one summer when Carla was a baby, and I decided I didn’t want work any more; I wanted to take care of my children.  So then I didn’t go to work for seventeen years.  And then Frank met somebody who knew us pretty well, named Sadie Ginsberg.  And she asked if I would be interested in working because she had formed a nursery school for children with learning and behavior problems.  She and a pediatrician named Dubusky had started a nursery school for children with emotional problems -- physical or emotional problems and learning disabilities.  And they had established a small nursery school.  When she met Frank on the street, she asked him what I was doing.  And he said, “Taking care of her children.”  And she said, “Well, I’d like to have her come to work for me.  I need a social worker.”  So I went part time to this school called the Children’s Guild.  And I worked there for quite a long time.  And it was a very nice place in the city, but it was sort of in a wooded area.  And they were really very congenial, nice people.  And I enjoyed that enormously.  After that, I think I left to -- it’s all down in the curriculum vitae.

MF:  Kind of walk me through the--

EF:  I graduated from Goucher in 1931, the Columbia School of Social Work in 1933 and the Baltimore Emergency Relief.  And then, in 1952, I worked for the Children’s Guild with parents.  And I loved casework, and I never wanted to be a supervisor or director of anything.

MF:  Is that because you liked more direct action--

EF:  I liked working with people, and I always did.  Then I went to Johns Hopkins Children’s Psychiatric Clinic from 1963 to 1965.  When I left there, I worked for the Marriage Counseling Service on Charles Street as a caseworker.  It was extremely interesting, and I liked it a lot.  (I joined the Association of Marriage Counselors.)  But after two years, it closed for lack of funds.  Then in 1966, I worked at Sinai Hospital, in the Family Clinic, that I’ve told you about.  And that’s when Frank Jr. began his studies.  And from ‘66 to ‘68, I worked with teenage pregnant girls -- women, who -- they wanted to continue with their school and to get help with their children, medical care for their children, and to go back to work.  Then in 1970, I think, I began to work for the John F. Kennedy Institute -- now the Kennedy Krieger -- in a special clinic for children with learning and behavior problems.  And I worked with the parents.  The director of this was a pediatric neurologist named Dr. Dennis Whitehouse.  It was a very gratifying job.  And I worked there until 1987 when I retired, but I did do some work with a school in Highland town, because my friend Janet Sondheim was a teacher there, and she introduced me to the principal.  I worked several days a week there.  I liked that, too.  And I finally retired from social work after that.

MF:  So the late ‘80s?

EF:  Frank was sick, and I wanted to be home.  And I really wanted to give my place to someone who would take a full-time job.  I never had a full-time job.

MF:  When was your last child, really, at home, in the house?  When did the last kid leave home?

EF:  The twins.

MF:  What years for that?

EF:  Well, when they finished college, they came home for a little bit, trying to decide what to do.  And Frank was a great believer in young people (as my father had been) being independent and earning their own living and figuring out what they wanted to do and where they wanted to go.  So it just happened -- one of them was going to Boston and one of them was going to Philadelphia, but it ended that they both went to Philadelphia. 

MF:  When did they finish college, the University of Wisconsin and NYU? 

EF:  I can figure it out.  They were born in ‘48, and they were about twenty-one when they finished.  And Michael went into the Peace Corps.  He went to Brazil, in the Peace Corps.  It was the time of the Vietnam War.  And we were very lucky that he got into the Peace Corps, because we all were terribly against that war.  And it was a time of great sorrow when people saw their children being killed or wounded in a war that nobody that I knew believed in.  We thought it was a completely unnecessary thing.

MF:  What did Michael go into?

EF:  He went into the Peace Corp.  Well, first he went to the School of Journalism.  Frank believed in everybody leaving home and finding a field that he or she would be interested in.  And he went to Berkeley, to the School of Journalism.  He was there for, maybe a year or more, and decided that he really wasn’t interested in journalism.  He left Berkeley and came to Boston, decided to go into psychology.  So he went to Harvard, the School of Education, got his degree there.  And he met Barbara, who had been married, lived in New York, had her first child, and then her husband died of cancer when the baby was about maybe three to six months old.  And she had gone back to Boston to live with her parents at first, who took care of Josh for her when she went back to school and got her degree in psychology.  And they’ve been living in Boston ever since.  And they are both practicing psychologists.

MF:  And what about Ellie and Anne?

EF:  Well, Ellie went into nursery school teaching and day care.  And they lived in a part of Philadelphia called Kensington, a poor white working class section of town.  And they both lived in a commune with a bunch of other young people.  And then after a while, Ellie got into teaching at community college English as a second language.  And then she and Mike decided to live together -- and Ellie and John, first, I think, decided to share a house.  And they’ve been with the same guys ever since.  And each of them has two children; Anne, two girls, Hannah and Louisa; Ellie, a boy and a girl, Tom and Nora.

MF:  Okay.  I’m going to flip through some of these because I want to ask you some more questions. Let me ask you a few more things that I think I left out before.  Anything about any of your births, childbirth that we should discuss, or any stories that you’d like--

EF:  My children? Well, yesterday at Carla’s luncheon, they were talking about children and how everybody -- almost everybody at that luncheon felt that they’d gotten married too early.

MF:  Yeah.

EF:  And do you know that?

MF:  That’s interesting.

EF:  And that they -- now, if they had it to do over again -- not that their marriages weren’t happy, because I think almost everybody had a very good marriage, maybe a couple of them had  been divorced.  Eve was there, and she hadn’t been married yet, although she has a guy that she’s going to California with.  But they were talking about things that they wish they had done and didn’t do, and how they got married so young, and had children before they -- especially Barbara, Carla’s partner, and thought that maybe they wouldn’t have had children so early, they would have waited -- not Carla -- because she had her children rather late.  And then I told the story of -- since it was Carla’s birthday -- how I had had a miscarriage before Carla was born.  And Alan Guttmacher, who was my obstetrician, came to see me the day after.  I had a miscarriage and I said to him, “Can I have another baby?”  And he said, Yeah.  And I said, “Right away?”  And he said, “Let me get out of the room first.  I thought that was nice.”

MF:  That’s a great story.

EF:  And when Carla was born, I had been pregnant for fourteen months, because Carla was born right after that.

MF:  Wow.

EF:  It was a long time.

MF:  How did you feel about that question that they asked or that statement about get getting married too young?

EF:  Well, it was a different age, you know.  And I was so thrilled to be married.  And in those days, it wasn’t important what your career was.  I did work the first year after I was married.  But you know, I felt when Frank started his private practice, I thought that maybe we could afford it if I stopped working, and he thought so, too.  So I really was much more interested in his career.  I just didn’t think about going back to work for a long, long time.  And I just had an awful lot of fun raising my children.  It was much less stressful than it is now, to have children.

MF:  Even with six kids?

EF:  Even with six kids.  Well, after I had -- when I had Carla, Mark and Frank, I think I told you, we went away.  And after that, we were away from 1942 to ‘46.  And it was the first time I’d ever had to do things for myself, like the washing and all the cooking and taking care of the kids.  But there weren’t any other distractions, that’s all you did.  And that’s what women were doing in those days.  And I think I thoroughly enjoyed it.  We lived in really primitive situations in those days, because we were -- I don’t know if I told you this or not, I can’t remember.  We lived on a bombing airfield, and in a housing project.  And everybody did her own work, and cooking and washing, and things that I hadn’t had to do.  But there was a kind of a freedom about that, that nobody cared if your house was messy, or what you did.  And you had no schedule you had to keep.  And I was very interested in Frank’s career, because he was doing interesting things.

MF:  Right.  But were there challenges?  What was frustrating about raising a big family to you?  What were the most trying things for you?

EF:  Well, I think that keeping a neat house and getting all the housework done, which I had never done before.  But when I was away during the war, there was nobody to say, “Oh, how messy this is!”

MF:  When you were back in Baltimore?

EF:  Then I came back to Baltimore, and then I had people working for me.  In those days, I’m ashamed to say that we paid them very little.  And I had help.  And Bobolie, the same person that had worked for my mother, came to help me.  And we had people around a lot of times, we had guests and we gave dinner parties.   But if you don’t have any other thing that’s on your mind, it isn’t as stressful as it is now.  I didn’t have to help the children with their homework, mostly, they just did it.  And the parents weren’t involved in the same way they are now.

MF:  Right.

EF:  And there wasn’t that much competition.  All my children went to public school.

MF:  Were you pleased with their educations in public school?

EF:  Well, Carla tried private school.  She tried Park School for a little while.  But she didn’t like it so much.  It was a different kind of atmosphere.  It was more competitive.  And Park School was mostly Jewish; it was a private school, so they were mostly pretty well off.  And I think the kids were interested in clothes, and Carla wasn’t.  And she would say, “The children don’t like me so much at school.  But when it’s time to do their homework, they call me up on the telephone all the time.”  So they all -- I think they had a reasonably good education, although I don’t think it was as good as it would have been in private school.

MF:  They went on to really good schools.

EF:  Colleges, yes.

MF:  Yeah, yeah.  But your life -- you had such a good mix of working, of going to school, then dedicating your years to motherhood.

EF:  You can’t do it now.  It’s impossible.

MF:  And then you had an equally full life in social work.

EF:  I never worked full time in social work, and I didn’t have to worry about salary, because--

MF:  It sounds like the benefits for you from it were that it was--

EF:  Challenging--

MF:  -- challenging.

EF:  -- and interesting.  And I really loved the work and I never wanted to do anything but casework, because I loved talking to people one-to-one, and helping them with their problems with their children.  And maybe I had some background so that it didn’t seem hard and now I couldn’t possibly have done it, because the paperwork is enormous now.

MF:  Yeah, you’d drown in it.

EF:  It’s just awful, with managed care.

MF:  You know, one thing we didn’t talk about before was the death of your parents.  And I just wondered how--

EF:  Well, that was much, much later than when the children were growing up.   It was so nice for me in those years to have my parents close by, because they were very important to my children.  And they lived close enough so that they actually could -- I think I told you -- come by on their way home from school.  And my mother would help them with their Latin or French or history or English.  She was a great reader.  And they had a very close relationship with her.  And we did a lot of things with my parents.  We went on a number of trips with them.  And then they stayed in their same house.   My father was active in Jewish -- I told you that -- in Jewish affairs, the Council of Federations and Welfare Funds.  And he would take the early morning train to New York and go to a meeting.  I told you all about that.  And then he didn’t get sick until his ninetieth birthday in December 1972.  And I don’t know if I showed you any of his talks, but I think I have one to show to you.  He would make a lot of talks for the Jewish charities, he was very active in Council of Federations and Welfare Funds, and also various other Jewish -- I think he was less interested in Jewish education than in social work education.

MF:  When did he pass away?

EF:  1972.  Let’s see, he died in February of ‘72.  And as far as we knew, my mother was in good health.  And right after his death she was operated on and it turned out that she had cancer. And Mark Gann, who is Frank’s friend and surgeon, he operated on both parents.   And after my father died, my mother was operated on for cancer.  Anyway, then she knew there was nothing that he could do.  She spent the summer sitting on the back porch.  And we all -- I came to see her every day.  And we had, you know, a lot of nice talks.  And then once she said to me, “Maybe they should have just let me go when they operated on me.”  And I said, “Well, we wouldn’t have had such a wonderful time with you for these last six months.”  After she became ill, Frank was around a lot, and was very helpful to her.  And then she died in September, I think -- I guess it was the same year, 1972.  Because both my parents said that year regretfully, “We’ll never see another president but Nixon.”  And they were right.  They had a good, full life.

MF:  How did you cope with that time after their death, that kind of loss?

EF:  Well, I think -- you know, they didn’t have funerals.  They had a memorial service for my father.  But my mother didn’t want a funeral, and she didn’t want to be buried.  They were both cremated.  I think some of the children felt cheated because they didn’t have a funeral, a good closing.   They had some meetings for my father -- I mean, the Jewish charities, they had a seminar in Virginia at one of those meetings places.  And that was very good.  But they didn’t have anything the way we did for Frank when he died, a memorial service.

MF:  Tell me about that death, about Frank’s death.

EF:  Well, he had been sick for -- he had been very depressed.  And then he had Parkinson’s.   I was lucky enough to keep him at home, so I didn’t have to put him in a nursing home.  And he gradually got weaker. He didn’t really want to live very much, I don’t think.  And he had been such a vigorous, active person and he had to give up all the vacations. We went to nice places on vacations with friends.  We went -- I think I put it down somewhere.  We went to Europe a number of times.  My parents used to go to Dubrovnik in Yugoslavia every year.  And I guess the last few years, we had been with them there.  They swam every day.  And then in the evening they would have a music festival, dance, and various entertainments outdoors.  It was a wonderful climate, stayed in a beautiful hotel right on the Adriatic, and where we could eat out on a terrace.  A couple of times I brought friends.  Once I brought my cousin, Paul Spear (phonetic), and his wife, Bell.  And then, I think the last time, we went with the Feinblatts.  Once we went to Rome, then to Israel.  I’d never been to Israel and ended up in Dubrovnik.  And we stayed at this lovely hotel, we played tennis in the mornings, and then we would swim, and then walk.  And then in the evenings we’d go to concerts and entertainment.  It was a wonderful way to live.

MF:  Tell me about your first trip to Israel.

EF:  I only went once.

MF:  What was that like?

EF:  It was very impressive.

MF:  So what year was that, generally?

EF:  It was the year before my father died.  It was 1970.  He was ninety.  (He was born in 1881.)  So it was just before his seventieth birthday -- I have a picture of him swimming -- just before he got sick.  And he was already sort of not feeling well, tired.  I think he had cancer of the prostate.  And that was the last time we went to Europe with them.  We had wonderful trips.  Once we went with them to the Hill Towns in Italy and Frank drove.

MF:  Did that trip to Israel influence you in any particular ways?  Did it have an impact on you in any particular way?

EF:  I think I felt very identified with Israel.  But then I also thought that the Orthodox Jews were very rigid.  And I think that we saw the wonderful things that had happened there, and we were very impressed.  But we saw the -- you know, it was after the ’87 war...

MF:  Well, tell me about Frank’s funeral.  What was that like?  Just generally, what was it?

EF:  There was no religion at all.  It was -- the children arranged it, and it was different--

MF:  Where did it take place?

EF:  At the Hopkins Club.  And we were able to get a very big room.  And in fact, we had to keep the numbers down.  And various colleagues, people that, you know, we’d known -- one of them was a friend of Mark’s, who’s Assistant Director of the Portland Symphony.  And he talked about coming to our house during his childhood -- he and Mark were classmates and he liked our family life.   I may have copies of the talks.  I’ll give it to you.  And then another friend of Frank’s -- young Frank, is a professor of public policy. That was Gene Bardak.  And he’s extremely interested in Israel.  I mean, he speaks fluent Hebrew.  He took his children there when they were young.  He talked about coming to our house when he was young.  His mother had died.  And Frank was his doctor when he was a child. The children were in a Hopkins play shop and they used put on plays.  And that’s how he got to know both Mark and Frank very well, and Carla, too.  And we’re still very good friends with him.  He’s observant, but not Orthodox, he started a Jewish day school that his children went to when they were small, in Berkeley.  And they still live in Berkeley. 

MF:  Let’s talk for a few minutes just about women’s issues, maybe, and women’s topics.  First of all, I didn’t ask you, were you formerly involved in the Women’s Movement or feminist activity?

EF:  My children were.

MF:  Your children?

EF:  Uh-huh.  The twins especially were very much involved in the Women’s Movement. 

MF:  And what about women friendships in your life?

EF:  I’ve had good ones.

MF:  What did those mean to you, and how have they affected your life?  What kind of role did they play?

EF:  Well, I have a couple of very good friends at Park School, both Jewish.

MF:  What were their names?

EF:  One was Josephine Sonneborn.  And she married -- first she married in Pittsburgh.  And then she moved, and she and her husband got a divorce.  And she moved to Bedford, Pennsylvania.

MF:  What did you like about her?  What made her a good friend?

EF:  Josephine, she was a beautiful and charming woman.  And we had a very nice time together.  She and Louise Wertheimer and I were very good friends.  Louise married Richard Berney; they were very important to me.  I don’t think we thought much about Women’s Liberation in those days.  Everybody got married and had children early.  Josephine got a divorce.  And she -- Kitty Falk (phonetic) was Josephine’s sister.  And I don’t know if you know anything about her. This fellow named Falk was in the steel business in Pittsburgh.  And Kitty was Josephine’s older sister.  And she had five children.  And when the youngest was three, she suddenly left home and later moved to Israel in a very beautiful house there.  She had this house in Jerusalem which we later went to visit on our trip to Israel. 

MF:  Did you find -- do you think it’s a generational thing, that woman in your -- in particular ages of your life have shared more at certain points -- I guess what I’m asking is:  Have your women friendships changed over the years?  Because like I find, you know, just with my mother, she’s not been as frank with her friends -- I mean, she’s often saying to me:  “You women today, you talk about everything.  You talk it to death.”  And she says, “We kept our things to ourselves.”

EF:  Well, we certainly kept all matters of sex to ourselves, that was one thing.  But I think that--

MF:  What about frustrations, just generally, with daily life?

EF:  Well, we were a lucky generation, because there were very few divorces, and very few unhappy -- the people we went with, except for a few couples.  But most all our friends were very happily married.  I don’t know why that was; whether it was because they were much more acceptance of role was an entirely different thing.

MF:  Yeah.

EF:  I never expected Frank to go into the kitchen and cook, or even take things out of the refrigerator.  He never fixed a meal in his whole life, and that was all right with me.  And I didn’t expect him to do those things until much later, when we were both working, and the children were all -- left.  But then he didn’t do it then, because he wasn’t brought up that way.

MF:  Right.

EF:  And I think it was much clearer what you had to do and what he had to do.  And our life was so much easier than people in your generation, and even in Carla’s generation, I think.  Although those women, yesterday, talked about how they shouldn’t have gotten married so early.  They should have had more chance to -- and it was surprising that a group of twelve women all got married in their early -- most all got married in their early twenties.  It isn’t true of your generation.

MF:  No.

EF:  Not at all.  My granddaughter is thirty; she’ll be thirty-one.  And now she had a very steady boyfriend.  In fact, he converted to Judaism.

MF:  Yeah.  I married in my mid thirties, late thirties.  Other women friendships that were important to you later in life?

EF:  I had a lot of very nice friends.  I think -- we had a Thursday luncheon group -- I just came where we have lunch every Thursday at the Hopkins Club.  And they were -- one of them was Janet Sondheim.  Her husband is ninety-two, and he’s still working for the Greater Baltimore Committee.  And then we had very good friends, the Guttmachers who were identical twins.  They were both doctors.  One of them was a psychiatrist and the other an obstetrician.  He was big in Planned Parenthood.  That’s something that I’ve always been tremendously interested in, is people having babies when they wanted to.  And Frank by the time we went away and came back, he had a practice.  And doctors did all right.  We didn’t belong to a temple; we didn’t send our children to a private school.  We didn’t belong to country clubs.  But you know, we did all right.  And he was perfectly willing to have me stop working.  And he never said, you know, “Why don’t you earn a living, too?”

MF:  Yeah.

EF:  And then my father was very generous.

MF:  What about -- are there certain women that you would identify maybe as cultural heroines in your life or any role models?

EF:  Well, one of my good friends was Carola Guttmacher, who came from Argentina and married this friend of ours, Manfred, who had been divorced.  She was much younger than he was, and took her exams after she got here, and became quite a successful child psychiatrist.  Her husband was Manfred Guttmacher, who was the psychiatrist for the Supreme Bench of Baltimore City.  We were very good friends.  We went away with them a couple of times.  I guess the Sondheims and the Guttmachers were our best friends.   She went into child psychiatry and after Manfred died I worked at the clinic where she was psychiatrist.  And then since then, her husband became Chief of Psychiatry at Harvard, and they moved to Boston, so I don’t see her anymore.

MF:  Were there national women figures that you ever admired or influenced you in particularly strong ways?  Mrs. Roosevelt?

EF:  Oh, yeah!

MF:  Marian Anderson.

EF:  Mrs. Roosevelt was, you know, a remarkable role model for everybody.  I mean, she was a woman who was dedicated to social issues, and a strong person.  In fact, we belonged to the ADA, which was the Americans for Democratic Action.  And we went to her home in Vall Kill once.  And we were so impressed with her.  She was a role model for everybody in my generation, although she was my mother’s age, not mine.

MF:  Right.

EF:  In my generation, who would I--Maybe we skipped a generation.  Well, I think that in those days, women didn’t go into medicine very often.  John Sondheim, who’s the son of Janet and Walter who were my friends, he married a woman named Emily Sondheim whose mother was one of the first doctors that I knew.  She was in Planned Parenthood.  She’s not much older than I am, but she has trouble walking, and she has trouble seeing and hearing, she was a wonderful person and I admired her very much.  Anyway, there were a number of women who were beginning to go into medicine at that time and law.

MF:  Your aunt was a role model for you.

EF:  Yeah, for social work.

MF:  One thing that we didn’t talk, that doesn’t have much to do with anything, but I was just curious.  We didn’t talk about shopping and stores, and the kind of businesses that you, you know, bought clothes at in Baltimore.  Can you talk about that for just a few minutes?

EF:  I don’t think that I was a fashion model in any way.  I wasn’t terribly interested -- I was more interested in friends and tennis and food and social questions. And you know, in my day at Park School, you were required to go out for athletics.  I think it was the first time that women were really -- felt that they were -- could be good athletes.  And although I was, I guess, captain of the hockey team when I went -- I went to an all-Jewish camp called Accomack.  And I remember Friday night services at that camp.  And Mrs. Arnold, she wasn’t a religious Jewish person.  But I remember this so well, because it was so funny.  She had Friday night services.  And it was the night when we had cinnamon buns; I remember that -- fish and cinnamon buns on Friday night.  And fish is certainly more a Catholic tradition than it is a Jewish, but that was it.  Everybody, I mean, at every table there was somebody who had to go out to get the food.  So we would sit on the edge of our chair until she finished.  And she would go:  “What is so fine as a virtuous woman?  Far above pearls is her value.”  And then she’d say, “And she eateth -- and then I’d get up like that -- eateth not the bread of idleness.”  I remember that very well.

MF:  That’s great.

EF:  And I thought she was yelling at me.

MF:  That’s great.  Right.  (Laughs).

EF:  (Laughs) so I jumped.  But I remember those services, but, know, I don’t think anybody took them seriously at the camp I went to.

MF:  Right.

EF:  And it was something it was Friday night, and that’s what we did.  I don’t know.

MF:  But when you were a little girl and you had to go clothes shopping and that kind of stuff with your mother, where did you all do that?  Where did you buy clothes?  Where did you do all your shopping?

EF:  Well, department stores.  Hutzler’s was the big department store here.  And then my sister-in-law’s mother was named Slesinger had a dress shop where I used to go with Louise, my sister-in-law.  She was a very good friend of mine.  And her mother, Miriam Slesinger, was the first woman I knew that went into business with her husband.  He had a shoe store.  And then she established a woman’s clothing store on Charles Street.  And I used to go shopping there with my mother.

MF:  What was it called?

EF:  Slesinger’s, S-l-e-s-i-n-g-e-r.  And her daughter’s name was Louise, and everybody called her Wiggy.  And she and my brother were sweethearts from the time they were teenage. My brother never cared about another girl in his life.  And then he married her, I think, in ‘28, when they were both so young that they couldn’t get their own license.  And then after we got married, they moved to Washington, and he worked at the New Deal Agencies.  They built a house on Chainbridge Road, which is still lovely. 

MF:  Yeah.  We live right below there.

EF:  It was a beautiful part of Washington.

MF:  Yeah, that’s a really great area. What about shopping for food when you were a young wife?  Did you shop any of the markets?

EF:  Well, after I got married, we lived downtown.  We lived on St. Paul Street, which is one of the main streets, in an apartment with four floors.  And I was working that year.  And Frank was starting in practice, and he was in charge of the Transient Bureau.  I told you all that.  And we used to go shopping after work.  He’d pick me up, and we’d go to the Charles Market, on Charles Street.  And when you were shopping in those days, you could get a steak for, I think, thirty-five cents a pound, and chops for less than that.  We would climb the four flights of stairs, and then I would do the cooking.  I mean, it never occurred to him to do the cooking.  And that was one of the reasons I wanted to stop work, because I was tired of going to market and doing it, and going to work every day, and taking his clothes to the cleaners, and being the traditional wife.  It was too hard.  So I was delighted to stop.

MF:  And the markets were a really unique part of Baltimore.

EF:  Absolutely.

MF:  Not the same.

EF:  And Lexington Market in those days was an outdoor market.  The only trouble was when we went to theatre, the rats jumped out at you.  But then it had very good produce and very good food. 

MF:  What’s the Rotunda?  What was that?

EF:  Oh, that was a shopping center.  That was much, much later.  I think that must have been, what, ‘50s or ‘60s.

MF:  Was it built as a shopping center, or was it--

EF:  No.  It was an insurance company at first.

MF:  Right, right.

EF:  And then they built a shopping center.  It’s not doing very well, I think--

MF:  No.

EF:  -- because people are going to the big malls.  But the Jews have moved way out in the suburbs, I guess to get away from the city and from crime.

MF:  Was it important to you to stay in this area when you were -- as you were selling the house?

EF:  Oh, yeah, yeah, very important.

MF:  You didn’t want to move out?

EF:  No.  I don’t want to move.  I love flowers and trees blossoming and all that, but I don’t want to move out in the country.  I love being in the thick of things, and enjoying -- we have some theater, and some very good music.  And it’s all close by.  And Hopkins is close. 

I take courses.  They have something called Evergreen Society, which is sponsored by Hopkins.  And I take all kinds of wonderful courses there, and it’s ten minutes away on Charles Street.  And I go to exercise class on Charles Street.  I mean, it’s all within walking -- I mean driving distance.

MF:  Besides Frank’s illness, have you had other health problems that were challenging?

EF:  I’ve been enormously lucky, just enormously.

MF:  Well, how did you deal with his depression?

EF:  Well, that was hard too.  He did go to psychiatrists and lived at home.

[CD NUMBER THREE/FOUR ENDS. CD NUMBER FOUR/FOUR BEGINS.]

EF:  It was in the AMA Journal -- it said, “Marriage, the Synchronization of Neurotic Characteristics.”  And it was a wonderful article.   But it makes you think that when you have a good marriage, you sort of -- one of you sort of makes up for what the other one has or hasn’t.  And I think that was the good thing.  I think because I had two very brilliant brothers that I always thought I was, well, a little dumb, I wasn’t as bright as they were.  But Frank always thought -- appreciated that part of me.  And I think I told you that he always said, you can fight about anything you want to fight about, but you must never say to another person, “oh, you’re so dumb, or you’re so lazy,” or “you’re so careless, and you always do this or you always do that.”  And that was one of the things that I live by, never to cut a person down.

MF:  Or be judgmental. Well, what kept you together kind of together during that time when he was so depressed?

EF:  Well, he was depressed off and on in his life.  He was depressed, and then he would come out of it. The year we went to China -- I told you that.

MF:  So like clinical depression?

EF:  Yeah, it was clinical.

MF:  That they would have treated today with--

EF:  Yeah.  And he did go to psychiatrists.  He was very good about that.  But they didn’t have the drugs, the anti-depressant medication -- that’s right -- that they have now until the very end, and by that time it was too late.  And he came from a family of depressed people.   I think his mother was a very unhappy woman, and she was very depressed.  And his father never had a very good life.  They just didn’t get along very well.  And I just was lucky because my parents did have a good marriage.  Although we disagreed about -- he was much stricter than I was, and he made -- he was harder on the children than I was.  And it was easy for me, because I could be the good one most of the time.  But he had very high standards, both -- and I think that -- and this might be Jewish, I don’t know -- that generosity is a very important attribute to me, not only, you know, in giving away money, because my parents did give away a lot of money, but -- and my father was very insistent that we not just throw away money on material things, but that he -- I think he said a fifth of his income he would give away, a lot of it to Jewish causes, but also to integration.  That was very important to him; he believed in black and white equality.  It was very hard, it still is.  And now there are articles, I don’t know if you’ve read any of them in The New Yorker about welfare clients?  Maybe I’m pessimistic, but I don’t see -- although integration has made some strides, I still think that the life of poor people and black people is very, very depressing now.

MF:  I think you’re right, too.  Were there any of these photographs that you wanted to tell me anything about specifically?  I was looking at some of these older ones.

EF:  Well, I was going to tell you one thing that you asked me about.  I have had the most amazing luck in health.  The last time I was sick was just before my parents died, and that must be almost thirty years ago.

MF:  Amazing.

EF:  And I’ve never been in a hospital since my children were born or right afterward.

MF:  What do you attribute your good health to?

EF:  I think it’s partly -- my parents were athletic and they did a lot of walking, and a lot of hiking.  And we had a place down on the Severn River near Annapolis.  I think I told you about that. And I think -- and we were made to go out for sports at Park School.  Whether we liked it or not, we had to go out.  And I think that nowadays they know that -- especially women, have to do that.  And then I think I told you my mother told me about menstruation, and said “Now, some girls go to bed for some days each month, and they’re sick and they take medication.  I hope you don’t do that.  It’s so unattractive.”  But it’s partly an attitude that you shouldn’t whine, and you shouldn’t make a big fuss. 

MF:  Did she talk to you about sex at all, your mother?

EF:  I can’t remember that she ever sat down and talked about sex with us.  And I’m not sure if I talked to my children about it.  I think that we recognized -- I think we were more liberal than most of my friends about when my children began to bring people of the opposite sex home.  I don’t think I said, “You have to sleep here, you -- I know I didn’t.  I think I trusted their judgment.  And we had a lot of kids coming into our house, especially during the college years.  I don’t think I -- because I don’t believe in that kind of thing.  And I think people -- you trust your children to have some kind of judgment and to be considerate, in a way, to other people.

MF:  Right.  Any of the photos that you want to talk about at all?

EF:  Well, this must be Seder service before Frank died, at Carla’s, because here’s David.  And I think that’s Ellie.

MF:  Are the Seders usually at Carla’s?

EF:  Always.  We never had Seders in our house.  And I told you that we celebrated Christmas, but not religiously.  But we gave each other presents.

MF:  You know, I interviewed another person that was saying that their mother kept a kosher home and so when they ate crabs, they would only eat them in the basement so that it wouldn’t mess up the rest of the house.

EF:  I remember when my mother-in-law came, and we were having hard-shell crab.  She really was utterly pained.  Of course, she had grown up in the kosher home.  Now, I don’t think I’ve talked to you much about Michael and Barbara who live in Newton, Massachusetts.

MF:  I was going to ask you one thing…

EF:  Boston, Newton--

MF:  Have you saved recipes?

EF:  Sure, of course.

MF:  Maybe we can look at some recipes, too.  You know, I’d love to see any recipes that you have that have been important to you over the years.

EF:  Really (Laughs)?

MF:  Yeah.

EF:  Well, I just made a cake for Carla’s Seder, which was a chocolate torte that has no flour in it that I bring every year.  And then yesterday I brought chopped liver that my mother-in-law -- we never had that -- either of those two things in my house.  But my mother-in-law taught me how to make the chopped liver, and using chicken fat, I think.

MF:  Right, schmaltz.

EF:  Right.

MF:  So this is Michael in Boston.

EF:  Yeah.  That’s Michael and Barbara.  And he’s been -- you know, they’re both psychologists.  He’s a very important person in my life, but I don’t see him all that much because he lives so far away. 

MF:  How many grandchildren, total, do you have now?

EF:  Twelve.  And this one, this is Nora.  She would go to restaurants and sleep all through the noise.  We finally realized she had hearing loss and they handled it very well. Although she missed out on the talking stage, that eighteen month, twelve to eighteen months.  She’s had to have some special ed.  But now she’s going to a private school.   Francois, Mark’s son, went to the Quaker School in Washington, Sidwell.  But mostly, now -- now, Sarah this is Frank -- Frank and Nina -- Frank and Anna Anne Renda were divorced. And this is Sarah with her little girl -- little boy.  And then her husband just left, so it was sort of a -- it was a sad thing.  And I’ve just been out to San Francisco to see her.  That’s a very -- here’s Seder at Carla’s.  And this must be our anniversary. 

MF:  It looks like a lot of fun.

EF:  Uh-huh.  You see, I had no Seder at our house.  Sometimes I went to the Feinblatt’s for Seder, or the Levine’s, so that’s how I knew about Passover.  

MF:  Did you used to eat fried green tomatoes?

EF:  Of course, of course.  That was a southern dish.  And there are lots of -- you might want to look at them.  Here’s Mark when his children were little.  That was a long time ago.  That must be nearly twenty years -- over twenty years ago.

MF:  That’s great.

EF:  And then we used to take the kids to a place down in Virginia where we had parties called.  Graves Mountain Lodge.  Did I tell you about that?

MF:  And was that a place you’d go to?

EF:  Yes.  Now, this is Carla at Frank’s memorial service.

MF:  Right.

EF:  And this is Grave’s Mountain Lodge, when we went horseback riding.  Here’s Michael in our backyard with the grill. Food was very important always.

MF:  Oh, grilling. 

EF:  There’s Carla’s son.  Now you know what they all look like, so you could recognize them.

MF:  That’s great.

EF:  And here’s once when we went to Sweden and met all of Frank’s relatives.

MF:  Wow.  That must have been great.

EF:  And I think this is -- these are the twins.  I don’t remember -- I went with Frank and Nina, his wife, she’s a lawyer, in Philadelphia.  I don’t know you’ve ever seen her picture.  There are the twins, a long time ago.  I don’t know, they’re all mixed up together.  

EF:  And this is Carla when she was young.  Isn’t she pretty? 

MF:  Oh, gorgeous.

EF:  That’s a long time ago.  This is one of those family breakfasts in the old house.

MF:  Yeah.  It’s wonderful.

EF:  And that’s Mark’s son Francois and his girlfriend, who’s Indian. He is getting a PhD in history at Hopkins.

MF:  She looks lovely.

MF:  So we’ve got recipes for the chocolate torte that you make for Passover.

EF:  That’s brownies.  Everybody knows that one.

MF:  I love what you said about your mother making fudge.

MF:  Is that an important skill for Vassar girls? 

[INTERRUPTION IN RECORDING]

EF:  -- (Inaudible) got the Settlement Cookbook for a wedding present.  And it had a little heart, and says “The Way to a Man’s Heart is through his stomach.” Now, Bobolie, the cook that was so wonderful, she made matzoh balls from that.  And she made the most wonderful things.  And she got it mostly out of the Settlement Cookbook.  And matzoh balls were, but she made them by taking whole matzos and squashing them, soaking them, and then making matzoh balls out of them.

MF:  Were there certain things that your mother prepared that--

EF:  My mother didn’t cook at all.  But Bobolie cooked and maybe she had a great influence on us, especially Mark who was a pioneer in bread making and now has a restaurant in Washington called “The Bread Line.”

MF:  Your mother made the fudge.

EF:  Right.  Good memory.

MF:  That’s so funny, because I swear I’ve heard several women speak of their mothers that were Vassar types--

EF:  Is that right?

MF:  -- that, you know, it was like kind of an act of resistance.  The only thing they would know how to make would be something like divinity or fudge.

EF:  Well, they were getting away from that stereotype of the Jewish mama, and, always in the kitchen, “Eat a little bit.  My mother never said that because -- she said, “Eat a little less, “because I was a fat little girl.  But she was kind.

MF:  So that was a conscious action to--

EF:  She had nothing Jewish in her background, so she couldn’t be identified -- now, my mother-in-law, she was exactly the opposite.  She did everything that Jewish women did.  And I remember once that -- she was always and always ailing.  Maybe that’s the reaction.  She always had something wrong with her.  She was very nervous.  She didn’t get along well with her husband.  And “She had gas both ways,” she said.  And once we came to visit her in Indianapolis.  And I think my sister-in-law made a very good dinner.  And Frank, my husband, said to her, “Well, Mom, there’s nothing wrong with your appetite.” Whereupon, she pushed herself away from the table and didn’t eat anymore.  Because if you were sick you couldn’t eat, and you didn’t feel well, and you were nervous, and it just was part of it. 

MF:  So why would Bobolie make matzoh balls -- for what occasion? For Passover, generally?

EF:  Or in the spring.

MF:  You didn’t have Seder.

EF:  No, we didn’t have Seder, we just loved them.  She also made spoon bread, and all delicious things that were very important to us, but it wasn’t Jewish.  The Settlement Cookbook is Jewish.  Did you ever read it?

EF:  Really?  And then there was also something called Thoughts for Food.  Did you have that?

MF:  Yeah, Thoughts for Buffets.

EF:  Right, exactly.  My mother had that.  And Bobolie would fix that for luncheons, and then, your mother wasn’t southern, though, was she?

MF:  No.

EF:  These were -- a lot of them were southern dishes.  This is a wonderful crab recipe.  See, do you eat crab?

MF:  Uh-huh.

EF:  Well, these are crab recipes.  They’re really wonderful. 

MF:  Did you used to eat out much?

EF:  No, no.  When I was a child, never.  The only time we ate out after we were married and the children were young was on people’s birthdays.  We went to a place where they had steak.   It was under the bridge on Guildford Avenue.  And I’d have to get the kids all cleaned up and brushed and combing and everything, and we went out to dinner.  And everybody got steak on a sizzling platter.  You remember those kinds of metal things, and they sizzled?  And you got French fries with them.  And that was the biggest treat.

MF:  Do you think food plays a particularly important role in Jewish identify?

EF:  Oh, of course.  Of course.  Don’t you?

EF:  I think it’s because when you went to a Christian party, they had lots and lots to drink, but not much to eat.  And in Jewish families, they had lots and lots of food and not much to drink.  And I don’t know if that was true or not.  Do you think so?

MF:  I do.  I do think it’s true.

EF:  And gentiles were people who often got drunk, and Jews hardly ever do.  They said it was because they had ceremonial wine.

MF:  No, I think food plays a -- especially in the south, I think it’s an interesting expression of Jewish religious practice, because--

EF:  Well all the Jewish holidays you had special food, potato pancakes, for instance.  Now, Bobolie used to make wonderful potato pancakes.

MF:  Now, would your mother ask her to make specific things like that?

EF:  Yeah, sure.  Sure, they planned the meals together, but she did the cooking.  Bobolie began by being the upstairs maid.  When Ms. Hen left, she was the cook.  And she just had a gift.  I mean, Ms. Hen wasn’t a terribly good cook.  There were certain things that she made that were very good, like Apple Charlotte.  Do you know what an Apple Charlotte is?

MF:  Yeah.

EF:  It’s just wonderful.  But she wasn’t a marvelous cook.

MF:  And then you enjoyed cooking, didn’t you?

EF:  I loved it.  And I think I told you how I got to be interested in cooking.  I think I told you that on my ninth birthday there was a long pergola leaned down from our kitchen to the garden.  A covered walkway.  And one side there was a room where they kept garden tools.  You passed it as you went into the garden.  And in one year they surprised me and cleaned out this shed where they kept the garden tools, and made a little kitchen out of it.  And my mother and aunt had small dishes.  And they put an electric stove in (there was no such thing as an electric icebox).  They had a little icebox and a little stove, and lots of dishes, and a little table.  And then I would entertain the neighborhood children by making things.  And we had a garden, so I used to pick raspberries.  And when the iceman came -- he was on the truck -- he would shave off; it was like snowballs.  And then you would mix raspberries and sugar and make the most delicious concoction.  Oh, that was a lot of fun.  But maybe that’s why I got really interested in cooking and all my children are good cooks and love entertaining.

[END OF INTERVIEW]