Meet the Narrators of Dorchester and Roxbury

"The old people all spoke Yiddish. In fact, I assumed at some age, and I don’t know what age it was, that every woman had gray hair and tied it in a bun, in the back, and spoke Yiddish. Why she forgot English and spoke Yiddish, I don’t know, but I guess all the older women I knew spoke Yiddish. Instead of thinking that was their language, I just thought everybody spoke Yiddish when they got older! I do remember that. So, I kind of grew up bilingual..."

"My father always had an accent, but I didn’t know that. Somebody called it to my attention years later, saying, “Your father has an accent.” I said, “No, he doesn't.” But with my grandmother, she thought she was speaking English, and because I was used to hers—but I would have people say, “What is she speaking?” It was a combination of English and Yiddish..."

"Dorchester was an easy city. Everybody was friendly, everybody was on the same financial step. As far as I knew. There was no flouting of “My dress is better than your dress.” When we got to Newton—and that was junior high—I was not terribly comfortable. I thought the people had much more money than I, lived in bigger houses. You know, the whole thing..."

"The one interesting common thread, however, is whenever you tell someone that you're from Dorchester, if they're not Jewish, they want to know what parish you're from. So, you need to know what parish you were from. I was from St. Brendan’s and then St. Gregory’s. That's where I happened to live. Most people from Dorchester are Catholic, or they're not Jewish; they don’t really remember or recognize that there was a Jewish population in Dorchester!"

"...We just had our 50th high school reunion...We had a decent turnout. But there were a few Jewish guys that went to high school with me, who I know very well, who we're good friends with. Went to their weddings, and they went to my wedding. And they didn’t want to go to the reunion because they felt that their experience wasn’t the same as mine. They experienced antisemitism..."

"When I was at the Hecht House playing basketball, freshman and sophomore year, our sophomore year, we had a very, very, very, very, very good basketball team. Half of the team were Black kids, because we got money from the Red Feather organization, so there was no—the Hecht House was not allowed to discriminate, and it couldn't be an all-Jewish—even though it was YMHA, it couldn't be an all-Jewish place ..."

"And the family story was that my grandfather and my father’s older brother, 1925, came over, and my grandmother and my father and his brothers and sisters left, and my grandmother had gold coins sewn into her clothes, and they had the cow, and they went across the borders and went to Hamburg, and got a ship from Hamburg and came over to Boston, because there was already relatives over in here, and my grandfather had already bought a house here."

"There were times when I was younger, a few times when a gang of kids, white kids, beat me up a couple times. It was always underneath, a little bit. For instance, the country club, up until the early 1960s, did not allow Catholic, Jewish, or Black members. Yeah. And you knew that. There were certain places that you don’t go, and you don’t do..."

"Okay, so at Franklin Field, it was physically a wall, because you had the street, you had the sidewalk, and then you had this granite wall that was about two and a half, three feet long, that ran the whole length of Franklin Field. Probably ran a half a mile...You would sit on the Wall, and everybody would congregate. Since at that time, everybody was observant, you would hardly see any cars go by. There was no traffic. Because if a car went by, you’d say, 'Oh my god, who’s that? They're gonna be stricken dead by God!'"

"Don’t forget that I lived on Blue Hill Avenue, which was a main thoroughfare, so you’d hear cars beeping. There was a fire station on Floyd Street. ...So every time somebody pulled the fire alarm, the fire engine would come right onto Floyd Street, which is diagonally across the street from my house. Streetcars would go up and down Blue Hill Avenue, and every so often you’d hear a bell ring—a 'ding ding ding.' They didn’t have horns; they had bells. The conductor would pull a ding, all right? Again, these were all the noises that I would hear—automobiles, sirens, horns beeping."

"Oh, the younger generation? Oh, yeah. Jewish parents; are you kidding me!? Come on! “You go to college!” All right? I mean, there was no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Your parents emphasized you were going to college, to get an education. They didn’t want you living in the ghetto. It wasn’t a ghetto, but you know what I'm saying. “Go out, get an education, become a doctor or lawyer or business man. Get out of the neighborhood.” "

"There are days when I can close my eyes and just walk down and point out each store. I can remember getting my first haircut with Mr. Fishman. I was so scared I think I ran out of the store and threw up in front of his store. I mean, these were all little mom-and-pop stores. There was Maxi’s fish market. You’d go in there, and there was fish all over, all picked in ice. The ice would be dumped up in the middle of the street in the summertime. ...I had Walnut’s Candy Store across the street from my house, which was great. It was a candy store, and they sold ice cream. I'm in heaven, you know?"

"Within several years, we moved—he bought a house that was being constructed on Brookline Street in Roxbury, a two-family house. We moved into that when I was two years old. I don’t remember anything about that time. It was a Jewish area, I guess mostly immigrants. They seemed like regular United States citizens to me, as I was growing up. There was a doctor next door and a pharmacist on the other side. Very interesting people. And there was a temple at the end of the street. It was a very small street, and they built a very large temple. Leonard Bernstein’s father was the president at one time."

"It was the Temple Mishkan Tefila, and it was a huge edifice. The ceiling was painted blue, and it was so high I just knew God was there. You know? As a child."

"It was during the War, and I worked there until my husband-to-be came home from overseas. He came home on a Sunday night, and we were married the following Saturday. That was a funny story, because I had gotten the license. He had written and said, 'Get the license.' All he had to do was come home, get his blood test, and pick up the license. But with all the excitement of his just having seven days’ leave to do all this, come home—and we had a wedding—my mother and dad made a wedding that—and we wanted to be married in a temple, and our temple was all booked up. Because of the War, everybody was booking it up, and we didn’t give them enough notice. So we married at the Temple Israel meeting house."

"My grandparents still had relatives over there, so that they got word of what was going on, and my grandparents on my father’s side made an extreme effort to have what was left of her family over there before the War to come to the United States when that choice was still available. They wouldn't come. 'Who’s going to bother us? We're okay. We don’t want to go all that way. It’s a strange country. We don’t talk the language.' There were a million different excuses. But they never came, and of course, the result is now history. ...It wasn’t until after the War that all of these horrors became so stark, because of the information that we finally had. But we knew bad things were happening to our people, and for that reason, World War II, to the kids of the neighborhood, was personal."

"They were all Jewish businesses. The stores on Blue Hill Avenue would close on Friday for Shabbos and open on Saturday night. Saturday night was the shopping time, and it would come alive. In the better weather, there were stands, fruit stands for example, that went onto the sidewalk. It was just lined up, one store after another. Maxi’s Fish Market— And there was even a specialty shop where you could buy herring out of a barrel. All this guy sold was herring, pickled herring, and he had this large barrel, and he would reach in and wrap it up in a newspaper and hand it to you. That’s all he did. There was the butcher shop. There was the fruit market."

"I think most of the people around there, including my parents, were what we would now refer to as lower middle class. I think that’s the best way to put it. We were not poor. There was food in the house, always. But it was tight. You didn’t spend money that you didn’t have. There were no such things as credit cards. ...But I’ll say this: There was no question in our family that we would go to college. I mean, it was their dream. My mother would save every little nickel, dime, put it away, put it in a savings account. She used to say, 'That’s for your college.' Eventually, it was. It wasn’t much, but—and there was some scholarship money in college, a little bit some, and I took advantage of that."

"I lived in both Roxbury and Dorchester. In both cases, we were living in a multifamily home, with my grandparents on the lower floor. That's my memory of the housing situation, is living in houses that were pretty close together and mainly multifamily. As far as the overall feeling of being in Dorchester and/or Roxbury at that time, it did feel like there were quite a few immigrants, mainly Jewish immigrants at that point. I do remember hearing a lot of Yiddish being spoken, and a lot of kosher butchers, kosher bakeries, and the small kosher stores that were in the area."

"I do remember Franklin Field, especially during the Jewish holidays, because at that point, it was a very popular place for people to go during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, because nobody was driving, nobody was doing anything other than going in and out of the synagogues, and people, if the weather was nice, would just congregate and walk around and talk to each other. I remember doing that with a friend of mine who obviously was also Jewish. We used to walk down there. I just thought that that's the way everybody spends the High Holidays, walking around a field."

"I kind of dismissed my parents when they talked about anti-Semitism. I said, 'I don’t have any restrictions.' ...But my parents always reminded me that it wasn’t very long before that there was institutionalized antisemitism, that you had to list your religion on job applications, and colleges only accepted X number of Jewish students. ...The world was trying to make Jews feel better after that, and we had sort of a façade of feeling a little safer, which my parents always reminded me that, 'Hey, it’s not gone.' And they were right. Because clearly, in this day and age, we're seeing a lot more of those issues coming up."

"I would say that being exposed to other people other than Jewish people in the First National was a great eye-opener, because my life at home was so narrowly focused—Jewish, Jewish, Jewish. Ultimately, my grandmother always claimed that she had to hide in the woods or the Cossacks would have killed her. She didn’t trust anyone, and it was a very terrible way to be brought up. She always used to say, 'The only one you can trust is your family.'"

"It was Jewish, Jewish, and Jewish in all 15 apartments."

"My mother had two brothers, and they both did not want to be Jewish. When they were very young, they managed—I remember one of them telling me they paid $50 each and they changed their name from Cohen to a name called Addison, A-D-D-I-S-O-N, which is very WASPY. We don’t know how they came to it, but my grandmother, she had two brothers, and when they came to this country, somehow that's the name they ended up with—Addison..."

"...I don’t think that we knew terribly much about what was really going on in Europe. I don’t think—the Holocaust, first of all, it wasn’t named that yet. It wasn’t described that way. We knew that it was terrible for Jews, but we didn’t know the extent of it. Or at least I didn’t. "

"That whole area was very heavily Jewish. I did not even know what a Protestant was until well into high school. "

"So you had Franklin Park. And during at least the latter part of the war, I can remember going to—across the street from the Y, they had a gorgeous area called the Rose Garden. I don’t know whether that still exists. And they allowed people to have what they called Victory Gardens, growing their own vegetables. That Orthodox uncle that I mentioned before used to have a garden. I used to go over and help."