Meet the Narrators of Chelsea

"I don’t really feel like I ever left Clark Avenue. It doesn't really matter what you physically do; it’s where your head is at. A lot of people who started out in Chelsea might be living in Marblehead or Newton or Wellesley or whatever, but they're still connected to Chelsea, because that’s what made them who they are, I really think..."

"It’s interesting, because at a very young age, I knew Yiddish totally. Part of the reason was not exceptionally nice, but my Bobie and her sister that lived in Everett were very Orthodox. They didn’t wear makeup, they had buns on their heads, and they wore the nylons with the garters below the knee. Well, on Shabbos, their younger sister...would come over, and the three of them would lie down to rest in the middle of the afternoon, and they would gab in Yiddish..."

"We used to go into the church on Clark Avenue across the street from me, and we used to put on Christmas/Hanukah programs. I remember a couple of people were singing solos, and we were on what’s like the bima in the church, and it must have been the steeple had a draft, but every time we lit the Hanukah candles, the candles would go out, and we were whispering, 'God doesn't like this.'"

"Chelsea is my home. Chelsea is my beginning. Chelsea is like my father. It is part of me. I belonged there. I grew up there. It gave me the skills, the tools, the atmosphere, the culture—very important—and the set of traditional values that I carried forward in my life..."

"My grandparents were Shomer Shabbos people. I grew up Orthodox up until maybe when I was 12 or so, and very close to Walnut Street Shul...You keep the Sabbath completely. You don’t put on lights, have somebody else to do it. You don’t cook..."

"It was all three-story wooden tenement houses, all lined up, all along the street, on the side of the Walnut Street Shul, and across the street of it. Then the street next over had the Williams School. So, we lived there. But it hasn’t changed..."

"Today we would consider my family growing up as poor; we didn’t know it back then. Because of his religious beliefs, whenever there was a Jewish holiday—and there were lots of them—he did not work. And if you don’t work, you don’t get paid. Life was very hard. My mother was a very good financial manager. No one went hungry. We ate well. We were clothed well..."

"My father was a wool sorter. Back in the days before all the DuPont-created fabrics, it was wool, and wool was recycled and so forth. He was a rag picker! Down on 2nd Street in Chelsea, there were a number of these shops before one of the great Chelsea fires decimated that whole area. That was the industry. It was very hard work..."

"It shaped me for who I became. The fact that growing up on Bellingham Street or going to the Shurtleff School—we were exposed to people of all nationalities, of all backgrounds, and whatever. It basically allowed me, and I assume others as well, to have a freer association with all kinds of people. Growing up in Chelsea literally prepared me for life..."

"Shurtleff Street Synagogue. My grandfather helped building that. There was a cornerstone on the shul, which is sitting on my back deck. My husband surprised my mother when she was 90 and—because now it’s a Spanish church—and he had someone actually remove the cornerstone..."

"It wasn’t kosher, but it was very Jewish. And the one thing that stood out and I miss terribly is my father sold lox, but not packaged. He would buy a big lox, and it would be on a slab in the store, and he would hand-slice it. And I can’t tell you how delicious, because it was thin..."

"And when people came into the store and they didn’t have money, they said, 'We'll pay you next week.' I mean, everybody was honest. My grandfather, to keep records—you know a carton of cigarettes—he would tear up the carton, take one of those slats from the carton, write your name down, like 'Goldstein' and then he’d write how much you owed. And it was all in Yiddish. And that’s how he kept records..."

"My father's market was a kosher market, and actually, when he came to this country, he was so young and he had no money. First came to New York, and then he had some cousin living in Chelsea, Massachusetts, by the same name—Abraham Kaufman. So he came, and that cousin had a meat market, so my father went into the same business. That's how he got into it..."

"Well, the house was kept as a kosher home. We had two sets of silverware, for meat and for dairy, and the same with the dishes. For Passover, all of that was removed and we had Passover utensils. Everything was separate. I remember it was a lot of work for my mother. Then one day, my grandmother said to her, 'How absolutely ridiculous,' she said, 'to change dishes and go through all that work when you have such a clean home. It isn’t even necessary.' So giving her the right..."

"[My mother] was born in Boston, Massachusetts. I have her birth certificate and everything. But when she married my father, he had not yet received his final citizenship papers. There was a rule, then—there was a law—that if a woman, an American citizen woman, married an alien, she lost her citizenship. I could show you the proof of it..."