Rita Schwartz

SCHWARTZ: Well actually, I just bought two prints at a print show last week.

SULLIVAN: Oh! Weren't those gorgeous? That was a great show.

SCHWARTZ: It was a terrific show.

SULLIVAN: Yeah.

SCHWARTZ: And I do have a collection of Brooklyn stuff, or early New York stuff, downstairs.

SULLIVAN: OK.

SCHWARTZ: I was going to take one to the framer today.

SULLIVAN: What did you -- what are the prints of?

SCHWARTZ: I'll show them to you. They're downstairs.

SULLIVAN: Oh, nice.

SCHWARTZ: Well, one is a wedding gift. I have a neighbor whose daughter is finally marrying the man she's been living with for about eight years. And they're very California. He owns -- he's Jim Henson's son, of The Muppets. They have a daughter together. She has a son from her first marriage. They bought an apartment in Tribeca because Brian Henson is opening some sort of puppet thing 1:00here, I guess. I just saw the ads on television. Anyway, they're finally getting married. I'm invited -- no, I'm the plus one because my grandson -- because they have a five year old daughter. Every time she comes here, she races in to see him. So he's invited to the wedding and I'm his escort. But because they live in California mostly, she always thought the Brooklyn Bridge belonged to her. So I got her a sketch -- a piece of the Bridge. There's not much you can get them. They have a -- you know. Not a McMansion, a mansion in Los Angeles, and they just bought a loft in Tribeca that knocks your socks off. You know, what do I get them, a piece of silver? Had to get my grandson a suit.

SULLIVAN: Oh, adorable!

SCHWARTZ: Too much. Too much. [laughter] Today -- I have to pick him up at 2:00school today.

SULLIVAN: Does he live in the neighborhood?

SCHWARTZ: They live -- they just moved to Wallabout.

SULLIVAN: Oh.

SCHWARTZ: Which is sort of like a newish neighborhood, just coming up again. Or whatever it is. But that's where they just moved. They lived in Williamsburg and they just bought something in Wallabout. But he goes to Saint Ann's Preschool [26 Willow St], so. Today is my day to pick him up. He sleeps over. Tomorrow, I'm the music teacher there. That's what I do. So, ask me everything you want.

SULLIVAN: All right. Well, I'll tell you a little bit about the project --

SCHWARTZ: OK.

SULLIVAN: Before we get going. So this is for -- as you know, it's for the Brooklyn Heights Synagogue Oral History project. And so the questions are mostly about the Synagogue--

SCHWARTZ: Sure.

SULLIVAN: but then we'll start with some biographical information as -- you know, about you in the beginning.

SCHWARTZ: Sure.

SULLIVAN: And then sort of move chronologically, but I have some questions, but it's however you want to recount the history.

SCHWARTZ: Whatever you want. [laughter]

SULLIVAN: OK. OK. And-- OK. So I will slate the interview today as March 16, 2010. I'm Sady Sullivan from the Brooklyn Historical Society. This interview is for the Brooklyn Heights Synagogue Oral History project. And if you would introduce yourself to the recording.

SCHWARTZ: Rita Schwartz. I live at 129 Hick Street in Brooklyn Heights. I've lived in this house for 40 -- maybe 42 years. Married my husband, who died several years ago, but Alan was living in a rent-controlled apartment on Columbia Heights with a view. And he had a funny accent. He was from Kentucky. And when I first met him, I wasn't terribly interested. But then I saw his 4:00apartment. I thought, "Wow! This is sensational." He had the whole city of New York looking out at him and it was rent-controlled. So I said, "Well, he's not so bad after all!" And we lived there for seven years until -- it was a walk-up, of course, but it was a floor-through. It was a wonderful apartment. But dragging two little kids and carriages and what have you and groceries up the stairs and laundry. So we decided to buy. And part of buying was the neighborhood, was the community itself, which was just sort of becoming kid-friendly. I was, at that point, a teaching fellow at NYU, so I was in and out. Alan had been a member of a Conservative -- he had brought up as a Conservative Jew in Kentucky. I was born in New York and I was also from a Conservative Orthodox background. But the rabbi who married us was his cousin, 5:00who was a Reform rabbi. And so we became members of Temple Emanu-El in -- well, not members. We actually -- it was a courtesy membership through his cousin through Temple Emanu-El [1 East 65th St, Manhattan] -- and found it very unsatisfactory because it was too big, too far away, and we really thought that we would want to stay here. Particularly after we decided on Saint Ann's school for our first child, who was then five. So we gave up our view, um, because in those days to buy a house on a river was enormously more expensive than we could afford. It still is -- it still would be! And we bought this house. And part of it was because of this school, which was sort of experimental at that time, but we thought, "Eh, why not?" And partly because it was a neighborhood and because the community of being able to be in a playground, to be able to find people with whom we thought we would grow and with whom our kids would grow. We found 6:00the beginnings of the Synagogue and we went to some services in -- oh, I guess it was in Grace church. And then in -- oh, I can't remember. You know, I've lost dates a lot. But it could have been -- it must have been in the early '70s, after the building was bought at 117 [Remsen], that we became members. Enrolled Laura, my daughter, in the beginning -- well, just the very beginning of sort of a -- it was not a great, full-fledged Hebrew school, but it was Jewish learning. Uh, right at that time, she was in an Episcopal school. Saint Ann's was truly Saint Ann's Episcopal, and Canon Harcourt [Rector of Saint Ann's Episcopal Church] taught religious education. [laughter] So we thought -- because my mother, who was, you know, stunned at the notion of her going to a church school, never could remember the name of the school. She called it "Ann 7:00Somebody." [laughter] I'll never forget the first year Laura was in a Christmas pageant, um, and she walked down the aisle at Saint Ann's church holding a candle, I thought my mother would fall off the balcony. You know, and half the kids in the aisle, you know, walking down -- they were Jewish. But there was this little thing, with the candle and the white robe. So by about -- and Canon Harcourt must have been there until the school -- until she was about in fourth grade. So we really thought she should have, you know, equal shot at -- at Jewish education as well. And -- and um, we -- we joined -- early, in the early '70s -- I couldn't tell you the date -- but found that it was the right place for us. Um, our son went much more reluctantly, um, several years afterwards, and Remsen Street became his -- that's where he went to the dentist. [laughter] That's where he went to Hebrew school. But it was a place where he would run 8:00away from as fast as he could. We had -- uh, I had a nanny that -- we didn't call them nannies then, we called them just housekeepers -- and uh, he was the oldest one at Saint Ann's being picked up because we never could trust him to go to the dentist or to Hebrew school. Uh, so Laura was bat mitzvahed there in '77, I do know that. And she continued through confirmation, right through high school. And some of her closest friends are -- were in her class. Hara Person, who is now the associate rabbi. Stuart Sacks, one or several of the Avram family, were all in that same group of kids who went through bar mitzvah classes and stayed through confirmation classes when they graduated from high school. And they're still friends today, which is, you know, really quite wonderful. And 9:00they all were hanging out last Saturday night at the 50th anniversary gala. It was -- it was -- for those of us who were at the -- three out of the four had parents there. And we were just sort of chuckling about how lovely it is, and there was a picture of Hara Person's daughter's bat mitzvah with my daughter standing next to her holding her son, and Stuart Sacks standing next to them holding his daughter. His daughter and my grandson are now in the same preschool class. So there's some wonderful sense of continuity that you don't always get in New York City. And people who desperately envy me because -- whoop. [phone ringing] Hold on a second.

SULLIVAN: Oh yeah. It's fine.

SCHWARTZ: Hey. Laura, I'm being interviewed by the Brooklyn Heights -- Brooklyn 10:00Historical Society for an oral history. I was just talking about you. Yeah. No, no, no. Ask me the question. It's about the 50th anniversary of the Synagogue and I was just saying when you were bat mitzvah -- OK. Ask the-- Yeah, sure. Whichever works for you. It would be fine. If you have the time to do it, that's fine. He -- he would love it, I'm sure. OK. Bye. She's going to pick him up at school instead of me.

SULLIVAN: Oh.

SCHWARTZ: So I don't have to walk up and down the hill. She teaches at Saint Ann's.

SULLIVAN: Oh, she does?

SCHWARTZ: She teaches theater.

SULLIVAN: Oh, neat.

SCHWARTZ: Right across the street from you.

SULLIVAN: Could we go back for a second just to get a couple of things for the archive?

SCHWARTZ: Sure, sure, sure.

SULLIVAN: What's your date of birth?

SCHWARTZ: Mine? Five -- [date redacted for privacy], '37.

SULLIVAN: And your maiden name?

SCHWARTZ: Itkin. I-T-K-I-N.

SULLIVAN: And you were born in --

SCHWARTZ: New York.

SULLIVAN: In New York?

SCHWARTZ: Yeah.

SULLIVAN: In Brooklyn or in --

SCHWARTZ: In Brooklyn.

SULLIVAN: Um, and so if you could tell me briefly about your parents and grandparents.

SCHWARTZ: OK. I know very little about my father's family. He was born in Latvia. He came here when he was about three. One of -- he came with his mother and two other brothers. He was the middle one. And they were -- they got to this country and found that there father had been -- was dead.

SULLIVAN: Wow.

SCHWARTZ: So my grandma -- he and his brother -- his brother had come here. My father and another brother, the older one, were put into the Williamsburg Boys 12:00Orphanage, which was typical around the 1900s of what -- even if you had a parent, if they couldn't afford to keep you. So my grandmother, whose name was Rachel, kept the youngest son. She then, a couple of years later -- so my father talked to me very little about the orphanage because he found it so distasteful. Oddly enough, my daughter, when she moved to Williamsburg, moved three blocks away from where the orphanage was.

SULLIVAN: Wow.

SCHWARTZ: Well, Williamsburg is really hot now. Then, of course, it was an Orthodox Jewish community. As happened in the traditional Jewish family, my grandmother married her brother-in-law, whose name was also Itkin. And they had four more children together, at which point -- at some point, she took the other two boys out of the orphanage and they were all brought up as siblings, all seven of them, not knowing that they were two different fathers.

SULLIVAN: Oh! You mean the younger ones didn't?

SCHWARTZ: The younger ones did not know that my -- they just never were told that there was a father who died until years and years later. And I never knew about it, that -- you know, some of my uncles were tall, some of my uncles were short. My father was short and dark, my uncles were tall and dark. I look like all of them. [laughter] But they -- until my -- until I was pregnant with my daughter, I didn't know it. Because they insisted on raising them all as one family and not knowing, thinking, there was division, but it was typical of the immigrant family to -- first of all, to have the brother take care of the widow and the children. And to marry. But apparently he loved her for some reason -- she's mean as a moose. But when I was pregnant, we were talking about names for, then, whatever the child was going to be. And my father came up with the name Israel. And I was having lunch with him near his office. And I started to choke. 14:00I said, "I'm not naming a child Israel for any reason whatsoever. [laughter] Who is he? Who is Israel?" He said, "Nevermind. It's just a relative." Still wouldn't talk about it. It was apparently a very painful part of his very poor poverty experience. He and his brothers started a very successful furniture business, office furniture business, and they became assimilated American Jews. Uh, which is, you know, the typical, wonderful story of immigration. I called my mother and I said, "What in the world is he talking about? Who is this Israel?" She said, "Don't tell him I told you, but that was his father." I said, "No, no. His father's name was Louis." She said, "No, no. His father's name was Israel but he doesn't want you to know." [laughter] And she told me the story. And I said, well -- I had a younger brother who died after a circumcision when I was seven. Blood poisoning. So, his name was Lawrence. I said, "Look, whoever" -- 15:00and my parents never talked about it. Once they moved the crib out of the house -- I saw him a few times and then he was gone. And I said, "Whoever this child is, it will be either Laura or Lawrence." And my mother went -- started to weep into the phone. That was the first time, really, we had ever discussed it. And of course it was -- turned out to be Laura, which thrilled both parents. I remain enormously close to my father's family, and to my mother's as well. My mother came -- again, one of those immigrant stories. Her father came first, from a small town in Poland. Sent for my grandmother and my mother. I have pictures of them just before they left Poland. And then -- I guess my mother must have been about four or five when she came. She remembered a little bit about Poland. Uh, stories that she repeated to me and then my grandmother, who 16:00only spoke Yiddish -- she spoke Yiddish, I spoke English, we went back and forth like that. But, um, we had -- she and I had a great relationship. And, uh, this was during -- of course, during the war. And my mother had four siblings, all younger than she was, and then her father died at age 16. She married my father, my father became the father to her siblings, or the older brother. And so the families just took care of one another, because again, they were poor. She had a father who was comfortable, was raising them comfortably, and then he died of -- we don't know what. My mother thought it must have been cancer but who knows. And he was all of 37 at the time.

SULLIVAN: Wow.

SCHWARTZ: So there was my grandmother, an immigrant, no language, raising five kids, with my mother having to go to work right away to take care of them. Um, 17:00during the war my -- I was just reading that book about a New York --

SULLIVAN: Yes, I saw that. I --

SCHWARTZ: I just went to a reading by the author and she just signed it for me, but it brought back so many sort of vague memories of the war because two of my uncles -- one was serving in the Pacific and one was in Europe. And it was a lark for them. They were, you know, two young men, 17 and 18, out of Brooklyn. And there they were in the middle of battle. And it was, uh -- at one point -- I don't know if this is interesting to you or not, but -- my mother gets a phone call from my grandmother screaming to her in Yiddish, "Come quick, the police are here!" We go -- I remember my mother dragging me down the street on a trolley or something to get to my grandmother's house. And the police are standing in front of the house, the sirens are going, and there's a Nazi flag hanging from my grandmother's clothesline. Well, my uncle had sent it to -- you 18:00know, he had purloined it someplace in the middle of Germany during the war, and my grandmother kept saying it smelled bad. So she hung it out to air. And of course the cops didn't understand her Yiddish. She didn't understand them. My mother had to come and translate. We had that flag for years. It went to my brother, eventually. But it was one of those memories of the war -- here it was in a Jewish area of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, with a swastika hanging up.

SULLIVAN: Oh my --

SCHWARTZ: And my grandmother saying it had a bad smell, it came out of a package. But she was also the same woman who would take a loaf of bread, fill up a whiskey bottle with whatever she had -- wine, Schnapps - mix them altogether, stuff in into the loaf of bread, wrap it up in a package, and send it to my uncles, during the war, who would get -- my mother would then get phone calls from other family saying, "Would you please tell us about Joan's bread?" 19:00[laughter] I mean that's how -- she was sure that that would save them. And it did, thank God. They both came back well from the Army. So my thoughts of the war were -- going to see the -- every Sunday, the daily news would publish photos of soldiers. And so we would go every Sunday. Somebody would go -- one my aunts or my mother would go -- to see if either of my uncles were in the pictures. We had lots of uncles and cousins, all --

SULLIVAN: Were they publishing soldiers who had passed or --

SCHWARTZ: No, no, no. Just scenes of -- just soldiers, just to see -- and at one point, they did recognize one of my uncles, who was sitting on a step during a -- it was sort of a Passover meal. And he must have been in France but they never said where, but at least we knew he was alive. But that's how you got your information. You know, because the letters were infrequent, if ever. And we lived -- they lived in terror. I didn't understand the terror of it because I 20:00was too young. But my -- they were describing air raid wardens and my brother and my father of course would go up on the roof with spotters for airplanes. They would, you know, have identification, and they were -- we were saving the city from attack by -- because my father was an air raid warden. Too old to be drafted, which broke his heart. He also had two children [laughter] and he was responsible for a whole lot of people. But yeah, those were the days at Victory Gardens. So that was my mother's family. And they had me -- produced us. My brother, who is older than I was, and me. We then moved -- as soon as the war ended, we had enough money -- they raced us out of Brooklyn as fast as they could to Forest Hills [Queens]. And so that's where I spent my teen years, in Forest Hills. And when I eventually back when to Brooklyn, it broke my parent's 21:00heart. They had worked so hard to get us out. [laughter] All my cousins are getting married and moving to Scarsdale [NY], and here I was moving back to Brooklyn. And when we bought this house, my mother said, "It's a tenement." And I said, "No, no. Mom, it's a brownstone." Of course, she had grown up in a brownstone too, but it was in Bed-Stuy or something like that. And she said, "I know tenements, please. This is a tenement." [laughter] Um, and then, uh, I was a musician all through my early years, which is why I was never bat mitzvahed. First of all, they didn't think it was important for girls. And during the war, I can remember at my brother's bat mitzvah, they all had to get ration stamps in order to get enough flour, sugar, and what have you to cook and bake for the party. But, um -- and it was a big party. I mean, we had lots of family weddings because all of my aunts would marry soldiers, all my cousins -- I was a flower girl at I can't tell you how many weddings because everyone was getting married 22:00in a hurry. And I was the only kid. So there I was, being the flower girl. Junior bridesmaid, flower girl, whatever they called me. All of sort of my mother's cousins and sisters. But that was my war. But all through my childhood, I was a rather good musician, and so I spent most of my time -- although I went to Hebrew school, I had religious instruction. It was tedious [laughter] because it was -- even in those days, I knew I was being segregated as a woman. I was upstairs. My father and brother would be downstairs. I was really unhappy with being upstairs. My Hebrew was sparse. Um, and all the women up there were really talking to one another. They couldn't -- [laughter] you couldn't concentrate on 23:00it anyway. So I spent my time throwing spitballs down at my father, who thought this was the funniest thing in the world. He and I really liked each other a lot. And so, you know, besides that I was studying, I was being taken into various music schools all through my early years. And so I really didn't have time. I had a choice, sort of. But music certainly won out and I was a serious musician and a serious music student.

SULLIVAN: What did you -- what do you play?

SCHWARTZ: Well, there's the piano. I was a pianist then. By the time I got to college, where I was a music major -- I went to the Crane School of Music at SUNY Potsdam. Um, and I'm still a trustee at the college. I'm very, very close to it because it informed my life. It just changed a lot about me. But -- well, once you're in music school, you have to learn everything. I had played flute in high school. So I was playing trombone and the clarinet -- you know, whatever. I 24:00can sort of pick up most instruments. And I didn't begin the study of harpsichord until late in life. That came about 15 years ago. Actually, I think it came about after I paid my kids' college tuition. [laughter] I turned to my husband and I said, "Huff, huff, We can breathe!" [laughter] Um -- oh gosh, that cake! Do you want some?

SULLIVAN: Ooh yeah, sure.

SCHWARTZ: OK. You shut that off or --

SULLIVAN: Um, yeah.

SCHWARTZ: Give me a second. I forgot all about it.

[Interview Interrupted]

SCHWARTZ: OK. There you go.

SULLIVAN: Oh, thank you so much.

SCHWARTZ: The center is too hot. Oh well.

SULLIVAN: So do you know what neighborhood your grandparents were living in? Were they --

SCHWARTZ: Oh yeah. Yeah. My father's family had to move -- they all moved a lot. Because -- did I throw napkins down? Yes, I almost did. You know, in those days if you didn't pay the rent, you had to move. But they mostly lived in Williamsburg and Flatbush. My mother lived in Crown Heights, which is part of Bed-Stuy Crown Heights. And I remember that much more. By the time I have any memory, we lived in Flatbush. And with, you know, extended family all around. So there was always -- because my mother was the oldest, my father was the first to 26:00get married, and also the most substantial, I think, for a while -- um, it seemed as if we always had -- we always had people in our house [laughter]. Um, and as you can see, family Seders were -- or family events -- were every Sunday. It was kind of a family where you didn't need friends because you had so many relatives. I was babysat by I can't tell you how many aunts and uncles. Um, my brother never had to because I had all of these aunts, uncles -- well, the uncles who would come back from the war, but -- and cousins. On my father's side, I have four women -- we were all the same age. And we're still very close. And fortunately, my daughter has the second next generation of cousins. So it's -- you know, if you have a big family -- at my Passover, we'll have about 30 27:00people here.

SULLIVAN: Wow.

SCHWARTZ: And that's just -- I have to cut it short [laughter].

SULLIVAN: Mm hmm.

SCHWARTZ: So they all lived in Brooklyn. I'm the last one in the family living in Brooklyn. From my mother's family, we have a family cousins group, probably about 70 people, and they come here once a year. One of them did a family tree, that I can show you if you want, that is so astounding. And, uh, in '91, Laura was working the theater in Europe. And so she was mostly in East Europe. She was in East -- she was in Romania and places where we couldn't find her. And so I went to meet her and traveled with her -- it was my dime, but she was the tour guide. And before we went, I met with various aunts and uncles. My maternal 28:00grandmother, with whom I was very close, died when I was -- on my 13th birthday. And she would tell stories about the old country. Nobody wanted to ever go back there again, and I can remember my aunts had pen-pals of cousins in Poland until 1939, and then there was nothing. So I thought I would go back to the town where my grandmother and my -- where my mother was born and see if I could find my great-grandmother's grave because I was named for her. And Laura was with me and I thought -- we would-- we went from Warsaw, we hired a car and an interpreter. And apparently I had owned some land. And it was very matriarchal. My great-grandmother or great-great-grandmother left it to -- down my grandmother 29:00to my mother, and she gave me these papers. So I said, "OK, we'll take them." And I didn't know whether it was a chicken coop or a house, you know? [laughter] But when we got to Ostroleka, which was the name of the town -- at first, I had asked one of my aunts, "Aunt Rose, tell me what you knew about this town." Now, my aunt was born in this country, so she only knew it from her mother's perspective. And she said, "Well mama said it was dark when they went to buy fish" -- because I was trying to find a half hour it was from Warsaw -- "and it was dark when they got home." I said, "Yeah?" She said, "So it was about four hours. By sled." [laughter] And I can remember we were having -- all at a family luncheon somewhere. I was smacking the waiter, I was laughing so hard. I said, "Yeah, but we're going in August and I have a car." [laughter] But it was about 30:00a hundred kilometers northeast of Warsaw, right on the Russian border. And sometimes it was Germany, sometimes it was Austria, sometimes it was Hungary, you know. But, uh, by sled. Laura and I got to the town and we were heartbroken because there was no sign of the Jewish community. It was about 20 kilometers from Treblinka. The cemetery had been taken apart and the gravestones used to build the roadways at the concentration camp.

SULLIVAN: Oh my God.

SCHWARTZ: So, you know, how fast do you get out of there? If I wanted to claim the property, they told me in the town hall, I had to become an American citizen -- a Polish citizen. No thanks. [laughter] Um, and at which point, I said, "Get me out of this country." And Laura said, "But mom, the whole thing was going to Chopin's house for a concert on Sunday." I said, "I don't care. Get me out of 31:00this country now." I was panicked. I just hated it. And so we left Poland. There was a memorial for the -- that the survivors from Israel, surviving Jews from the town who went to Israel, came back and built. So there's one small memorial built out of the shards of the cemetery. But it wasn't enough. And I was -- we stood there. I couldn't even weep, it was just too painful. But I am going back to Poland this summer. Whether or not I'll go back to that town, I don't know.

SULLIVAN: What brings you to Poland?

SCHWARTZ: I'm going because I'm a musician. This group, Musica Sacra, I travel with them to study. And so I've been to Germany with them twice and we studied Bach and, you know, we do fairly serious work. I mean, I touched the organ that Bach played on in Weimar and Eisenach. So I'm going to Berlin first, on my own, 32:00then I'm meeting up with them at Dresden for the Dresden Music Festival. And then we go to Prague for the Prague Music Festival and then I'm leaving then I'm going to Warsaw, where we know some people in the Jewish community there. And I'm staying with them and bringing them stuff from the Brooklyn Heights Synagogue. Some Judaica that they need. These are some young women that lived with us. They came from Warsaw. Laura met them in Frankfurt, I think, and they came to New York to study Judaism because they couldn't do it in Poland in the early '90s. And so they wound up, instead of living in Crown Heights with the Lubavitch community, they wound up living with us. [laughter] Because they were just not comfortable there. Um, and we stayed friends ever since. So they're in their 40s now. And the last time we saw them, it was about four years ago, we 33:00were in Berlin. My daughter was performing there. And so they took the train from Warsaw to Berlin and stayed with us for a couple of days. They wanted to see Jack Alan, who is my grandson. Now that's Jack Alan [shows photo]. That's a child who is forced to spend the summer at the beach with his grandmother [laughter]. Unhappily, you can tell. I have a house at Fire Island.

SULLIVAN: Ohh.

SCHWARTZ: We spend most of our summers, parts of summers, there. And my kids grew up there. He can't wait. In about two more weeks, we'll go on out. Sad that he has to spend -- be forced. [laughter] He's a nice little guy. Ah, and I don't have to go pick him up today. Yay! [laughter] He'll be delivered. So I don't 34:00even know where I was, I'm sorry. I keep digressing to Poland.

SULLIVAN: Oh, no, this is all great. Um, so I guess this --we-- I'm interested in your life as a musician. Can you tell me about your education and work?

SCHWARTZ: Yeah, I went to New York public schools and then to the state university in Potsdam, which has a really super music school. I did not want to go to Julliard. I'd taken some pre-Julliard courses -- uh, pre-college courses there, but I didn't want to be in New York. I didn't want to go to Eastham, which was, to me, a trade school. And I knew I wanted something more in my life but, you know, you live in a small --

Forest Hills was, you know, also a neighborhood of -- in the '50s -- Jewish kids. You know, you went to college to get married. Somehow, that didn't strike me as what I wanted to do. And so I found a music school that was affordable, 35:00within the state of New York, 400 miles away so nobody could find me, [laughter] in the midst of the snow, you know, right on the Canadian border. And totally different from my life there -- from my life in New York. I was a minority in many ways. I was Jewish, I had pierced ears, and I was a Democrat. [laughter] I mean, I knew immediately I was doing something to that school.

SULLIVAN: Um, what about women? Was there --

SCHWARTZ: It was a -- not only was it -- you know, it was male/female, but there was a men's college across the street, Clarkson College, which was an engineering and business college, and Saint Lawrence University down the road, which is where I wound up hanging out a lot because I found myself -- you only dated Jewish people. When the freshman women came in, somehow every man within a 10 mile radius got a list of who you were, so they checked by your name. And 36:00suddenly, I started getting calls from various guys whom I knew were Jewish. And I became very popular because there were only four or five us in my class. [laughter] Uh, but I quickly was found by a young man from Montreal who was a hockey player at Saint Lawrence, and spent a lot of time -- he was a year ahead of me, so we spent about three years together. With his -- you know, I had a boyfriend in New York and I had his fraternity pin. And then when I get on the train, I take his off and put on the other one, and nobody knew the difference [laughter]. It was -- and my husband tells me that if he hadn't lost his fraternity pin, he would have given it to somebody, and that would have been the end of us.

SULLIVAN: Was your -- it was your husband that you were dating in New York?

SCHWARTZ: No, no, no, no, no, no. It was some guy. Bobby. Bobby Something. Bobby Wonderful. Mr. Wonderful in those days. And everybody expected, you know, I'd 37:00get out of college and marry him. I got out of college as a music major, knowing I did not want to go teach music in a preschool or in a high school, although I had done a lot of it throughout college. I taught on an Indian reservation and I taught in White Plains and, you know, I got to test myself. And I wound up being a music and dance therapist at the state mental hospital.

SULLIVAN: Wow.

SCHWARTZ: Yeah, which was in Queens. I lived there -- I lived at home for about six months and then moved on to the campus of the hospital. And I worked there for about three years, which was probably the most important three years that I've had. It really informed -- between a small college in the north where nobody had seen a Jew and I had to break through a lot of stuff. I'd never got into a sorority because of it, but I was enormously active and a class reader in 38:00almost, you know -- in politics. I was the only Democrat on the campus, I think. I was running campaigns before I was old enough to vote. And I always had an early political interest. So I just knew that that experience of meeting small town people from all over the state and Canada was very powerful. And taught me about the rest of the world because, you know, you come from a small town in Forest Hill, which is like -- it was very encapsulated then. And so I can remember my parents saying, "All those years of music education and you're working in a mental hospital." And my mother throwing -- and I came home wearing keys because of course all the wards were locked. But I taught music and I taught dance. And I had everything from autistic children to adult senile 39:00psychosis, which was -- it's called -- senility now would be Alzheimer's. But they were in locked wards. Everybody was locked up. I had a drum and bugle core of adolescent boys which was, I mean, great fun. I taught tap dance. I had to take tap dance classes in a hurry. [laughter] Because somebody donated two dozen pairs of tap dance shoes, so I said, OK, I'll teach tap. So I ran out and got a course and I was like two lessons ahead of the teenagers, but it was wonderful. Because they really, you know, they connected. The most important for me was trying to connect with the autistic kids. And they allowed me to do anything then because it was -- anything I could do was better than what they were doing. Those were the days of lots of medication, lots of electroshock, lots of Thorazine. So anytime I could get a kid to let me move them or work with them, 40:00was a step forward for the child. A few of them I even got some speech out of through music. And I had no idea what I was doing. Because, you know. But I wound up going to graduate school. I went to NYU to try and figure out what I was doing. A lot of group dynamics, a lot of psychology, a lot of -- then I got into the -- they called it "recreation and music." So I got into public administration. From there, I was asked to be the play lady at Lenox Hill Hospital [100 East 77th St, Manhattan]. Open up a children's playroom and play ward and be part of the teaching staff for the nursing school. And that's where I met my husband -- when I met my husband. He was in advertising. We went for -- met for a drink at the Ritz Carlton. In those days, you went for a drink. If you liked each other, you had dinner. But if you didn't, you could just say, "We're meeting for drinks." So he invited me for dinner but he didn't enough money, so 41:00I wound up paying for it. I had been dating an intern at the hospital. In those days, also, interns didn't make a lot of money. So Alan knew of my interest in music. He bought the entire series at Carnegie Hall of a pianist that I wanted to hear. And by the time the ten concerts were over, I was his.

SULLIVAN: Awww.

SCHWARTZ: So we hung out for about a year and then we got, suddenly got -- we said, "All right, that's enough." And we got married within six weeks. And that was December of '62. And we went off to Europe. Then I -- and I was still at the hospital until I had Laura. Then I became the teaching fellow. I went back to finish my doctorate -- do my doctorate, um, and I never finished the dissertation. Because I then was pregnant with my son and it was beyond -- they 42:00gave me an office at NYU so I could teach and write, but I was taking my -- you know, I didn't have a computer. I had an electric typewriter which I schlepped out to the beach and was trying to write and trying to run after two little kids. And I said, "Something's giving here." I said to hell with the dissertation. I really didn't want to teach anyway. I really didn't want to be an academic. Um, so I joyfully stayed home for about -- hmm. Three years. Best three years. Where I was a full-time mother. And we lived on Columbia Heights. I'd take Laura over to preschool and Ben and I would just stand on the Promenade and look at the boats. And it was a very active harbor then. So we would look at the boats and the trains and the -- and it was just a delicious time for me and I could spend a whole summer at the beach with them. Then when Laura was five -- 43:00excuse me, I've got to go to the ladies room for just a second.

SULLIVAN: Sure.

[redacted for privacy]

SCHWARTZ: [inaudible].

SULLIVAN: Oh.

SCHWARTZ: Do you want some more coffee?

SULLIVAN: I'm good, thank you.

SCHWARTZ: You are? OK.

SULLIVAN: So why was your -- why did your husband move to Brooklyn? Do you know why he had chosen that place?

SCHWARTZ: He was in advertising. He -- Alan was quite wonderful. He had a great aesthetic. And again, small town Kentucky for the Jewish community was narrow. He was expected to marry a certain person. He went to University of Missouri and was a Journalism major. After school, he was drafted and he was in the Army in Korea, but fortunately, he was in psychological warfare, so he never served in 44:00artillery. He wrote propaganda. I have some fascinating papers that the War Museum [Newport News, VA] is interested in, of the original documents that he wrote.

SULLIVAN: Wow.

SCHWARTZ: They translated into Korean and they dropped him -- they fly-leafed into Korea saying, "They're taking your rice bowls away from you." You know, "Stay with the Americans." And, you know, the North Koreans supposed to -- he doesn't know what they really said because he wrote them in English and somebody translated. But I have copies of them. And when he got out of the Army, he traveled around the world. He worked as a reporter for the Louisville Courier Journal and did stories from around the world. And settled in Saint Louis at an advertising agency with a friend that he had met in Korea. And, um, that world wasn't big enough for him. So he came to New York to go into the advertising 45:00world here. Lived on 94th Street in a tenement, and a man -- the world is so small, I have to -- you know, in the Jewish world, it's like nine people. One of his best friends that he had met in the Army had this apartment on Columbia Heights. Sandy was a reporter for CBS and he was traveling a lot. And he decided he had to move because he didn't like the walk-up. So he offered Alan the apartment. Alan said, "I don't want to live in Brooklyn." You know, he was such a snob. He had finally gotten to the east side of Manhattan. But he moved -- same thing, he saw the apartment and said, "I'm taking it." Now, he and Sandy -- Sandy then became the executive producer for Walter Cronkite. And he and his then-wife -- we all became very close. They had a house at Fire Island near 46:00ours, our kids grew up together, um, and Sandy and I started to sort of hang out and date each other about three years ago. I mean, it's so comfortable because we don't have to talk about each other's histories. His ex-wife knows nothing about it. She lives in the Cayman Islands. She e-mails me all the time. She tells me what she knows of her children. I see more of her children than she does, but I don't let her know. It's one of those, you know, better off not bothering. My kids are delighted because, you know, they've known him for years. He's just a very bright -- I mean, you know, he's doing a book on Cronkite now and one with Mike Wallace. So he's -- but that's -- you know, that's how the world sort of came around. You know, if it wasn't for Sandy, who gave Alan the apartment, I wouldn't have seen that apartment and said, "Wow." And then we all 47:00stayed friends over the years. Then he was the head of CBS bureau in London and then in -- first in Washington and then in London. So we didn't see each other, then they divorced, and then, you know, they would have lunch periodically, but I wouldn't see as much of them. I'd see the kids because the kids were still at Fire Island. It was one of those odd things and then, you know, after Alan died, we just started to have coffee together periodically. We've stayed very close, which is kind of nice. Now, the most important man in my life is five. You understand? If I have to choose between, "I'm sorry, Sandy, I have to baby-sit tonight" or "Sure, I'd love to go to the movies," I'd baby-sit. But I do love adult company. So after I went back to work full-time, I guess Laura was five 48:00and Ben was about three, and I went to work for city government. And I was running all the music programs in the parks.

SULLIVAN: Oh!

SCHWARTZ: Having the best time. I mean, just the best time. This was during the [Major John] Lindsay administration and we had no substance at all, but lots of style. And all these great events in every park. I was just doing programs for handicapped kids and music for senior citizens and all kinds of -- you name it. And that's how I got involved in politics. Because I realized I didn't have any money to do the things I really wanted to do, and I had to figure out the political system in order to know how to write a grant proposal or how to lobby for the things that I truly thought were important. And so I became very close to local politics and from there, I was recruited to work for the City's Department for the Aging. Which I really loved, which was a very great 49:00difference for me, and I also did a lot of the music programs and all the -- we have a community here, Heights and Hills. You know Heights and Hills? Well, I was on the first board and got them their first funding through the City's Department for the Aging. The bus that you see roaming around that says "Funded by the Department for the Aging" -- I got that first bus for them. So, um -- but that came later. But at that point, Heights and Hills offices were in the Saint George Hotel. And it was a welfare hotel then. And we, you know, we were involved in every age group as a community. Again, there was, uh -- the Russian Jews, when they first started to come here, came to the Saint George.

SULLIVAN: Oh.

SCHWARTZ: Through the Synagogue, we would go to them and say, "What do you need? How can we help you?" Now, we were a Reform congregation. This was, again, in 50:00the '70s. We were very young and ambitious. And Al Lowenberg was the rabbi then, part-time. "What can we do to help you?" And, you know, I said things like, "Do you want us to help you buy tuna fish? Do you need a mattress? Do you need to find a place to live?" "No, no. We need a van to take the men to be circumcised." Well I could hear my husband screaming in the background. The thought of an adult male being -- but to them, it was the most important thing to show that they were Jewish. They could not get circumcised in the Soviet Union.

SULLIVAN: I did not know that.

SCHWARTZ: No. I didn't know that. Never occurred to me.

SULLIVAN: Yeah.

SCHWARTZ: So, several times we rented a van. I didn't take them. They didn't want me around. But my husband would drive the van up to Rockland County, to the Orthodox communities there where there was someone who performed circumcisions for them. Alan would leave them there, and they'd stay overnight because 51:00obviously this was not an easy procedure, and then pick them up the next morning. And I -- you know, we swore we could hear the screams from Rockland County down here [laughter]. But it was that kind of, you know, what can we do to be helpful that-- we had a social consciousness very early in the Synagogue. That it was just not for us. It was -- here is a new community. The first stop they hit -- can you imagine leaving Soviet Union, flying to Frankfurt, and then having your choice of Israel or New York? Or flying to Rome and having a choice of Israel or New York. The ones that came here, the first place they came to, was the Saint George Hotel. So there we were with this huge congregation. They would come into the Synagogue not knowing what to do. They had never been in one in their lives. They spoke very little Yiddish. They had no understanding of ritual. And so there we were, out to be as helpful as we could with them. Now, 52:00we did take them shopping. We did help them get mattresses and we did help them get tuna fish and apartments, but it was the circumcision, I think, that obviously stuck out more because we couldn't -- it was just such an unreal thing to be asking. But that was symbolically, for those men, what mattered to them the most. And this happened years and years -- two generations later, when I had -- at one of my last jobs, I had a bookkeeper who was a Russian immigrant and she had her two sons circumcised when they came here. And they were not babies anymore. They were at least toddlers. But even then, coming from Ukraine, she could not get them circumcised. And that was after there was much more freedom. So it was -- but that was the kind of, um, sense that we had. That was about the same time as we opened the shelter. Now, I was pretty instrumental in opening 53:00the shelter. I, at that time, I worked -- I was on the board of the Partnership for the Homeless. Serge [Rabbi Serge Lippe] asked me to write this one to someone at one point. Someday we'll write it down and say how the shelter got started, but I might as well -- I'll tell you.

SULLIVAN: Yeah.

SCHWARTZ: Um. There was a man named Peter Smith. Peter Smith was a great political friend of mine. I learned a lot of government and politics, and those two things are not the same. I learned a lot of government and politics on the street with some wonderful Democrats. My mentors were Basil Patterson, David's [current Governor of NY] father, David Deacon's [phonetic]. They all taught me how to operate on the street, how to get votes, how to be legal, how to be ethical, but still how to get votes. Um, and so, Peter went to jail. He was a 54:00commissioner in Ed Koch's administration. Ed Koch had challenged all the synagogues and churches. We were beginning to have a large homeless problem then. And he challenged every -- I don't remember if I was still at the Department for the Aging or at the Health and Hospital Corporation then. One or the other, but I still did social welfare. And I was a lobbyist for them at that point. I was doing all the political reach and getting huge pots of federal money into the city. Um, and um-- Peter, as part of -- Peter was one of Ed's commissioners, but he was fired because he had done -- there was some fraud in his law firm, and he went to federal prison for nine months. Part of his community service, he decided to open a shelter for the homeless in his parish, at Saint Joseph's Church in the village. Peter being a very devout Catholic. And he was gay, which made it very complicated for him. And he said to me, "Why 55:00don't you open one in your Synagogue?" I was on the board of the Partnership with the Homeless, which he -- he started it. And I said, "Sure. We should." I went to Rick Jacobs, who was just coming into the Synagogue as a full-time rabbi, and he said, "Absolutely we should." And Rick lived in the Village, not far from Saint Joseph's. He lived on, I think, 14th Street. So -- Rick was everybody's dream, by the way. Every, um, every woman's dream. Now, you may hear that from others, but I will tell you -- those of us who had daughters of a certain age took one look at Rick Jacobs and went, "oh my God, he could be our son-in-law".

SULLIVAN: [laughter] Why? What was -- tell me about him.

SCHWARTZ: Rick was a basketball player and a dancer. He was tall, he was very handsome. I'm sure you've seen pictures of him. He was straight. [laughter] And his family had a lot of money. What else could -- and he was a rabbi! [laughter] 56:00It was like, you know, Elijah had walked through the door. And we all had daughters in college and, you know, at that point -- Laura was -- no, Laura's -- I don't think he was there when Laura went off to college. She was just 16 and some when she went. But you know, we were all -- our hearts were all pounding and every mother was going like this. I said, "Well, I'll run the shelter with Rick. I'll get to be buddies with him and Laura will get him." It turns out he married the daughter of a friend. [laughter] And they're happily married, living in Scarsdale with four kids. But he was so open to that kind of sensibility of, let's be useful and let's -- this is the way we should be, not just for ourselves, but for others. And so I remember bringing in people from the 57:00Partnership to speak to the congregation. A little reluctance. Very scary. You know, what will it cost us? We don't have a shower. We didn't have a shower in the old building. Will we meet the regulations? Who is going to sleep over? It was -- it took about six months to convince -- philosophically, everyone was convinced. Mechanically, to get city approvals and what have you, took about six months. They had me on one side and Peter on the other, sort of pushing it, and Rick getting the congregation to come into it. And that -- I was the coordinator for about the first three years. When I didn't have anybody sleeping -- couldn't find anyone to sleep over, it would be my husband or me. And occasionally my daughter when she was home. My son would be there to move furniture and put the beds up. This was all in the basement of 117 [Remsen]. And we'd have probably 58:00eight to ten men every night. The men were rough. The women were rougher. Uh, but that's only from my own experience with working with the homeless. And after about the three years, I thought -- because I put in a lot of time and energy into it and then I was changing jobs, so I walked back -- and others have taken it over. But that's how it started.

SULLIVAN: And so how did those -- do you know how the first men that were sleeping there, how they would find out that there was this --

SCHWARTZ: Oh, no, it was -- they didn't find out. It's very well-coordinated through a central system. The homeless are picked up from a drop-in center.

SULLIVAN: Oh, OK.

SCHWARTZ: And pre-screened. I had insisted that everybody -- we don't have anybody just do walk-ins. They come by bus. They -- pre-screened is to not have drugs or being really outlandish in the behavior. They're guys from the street 59:00who need a place to sleep and a hot meal, and are out in the morning. And it's the same way now, only now it's women. They are pre-screened from a women's drop-in center. And some of them are the same women all the time, sometimes it's different. Uh, but it's been now -- and I remember saying -- this was 27 or 28 years ago -- "Well, at the end of 10 years, we will close this because it won't be necessary. Homelessness will not be a problem."

SULLIVAN: Oh, wow.

SCHWARTZ: "We will sunset this service." Right. Well, we need it more than ever. By that time, I think I was working at the [World] Trade Center. I went from social welfare, homelessness, health services, Medicare, seniors, all the time being involved in the political side of it. And then I get a call to come to the Port Authority at the [World] Trade Center and I said, "I know nothing about the 60:00business of transportation." I was very burnt out from social welfare but -- "Oh yes, that doesn't matter. You know the political world." I said, "I can call a cab. That's what I know about transportation. I can drive a car. I can find the 2 and 3 subway." It turns out that the Port Authority, besides owning the bus terminal, also own the Trade Center and the airports and the bridges and the PATH train and lots of other stuff. And the Port. And it was the most fascinating 12 years. I started there in '83 and ended in '96. And it was an extraordinary time.

SULLIVAN: So what kind of things -- what were you doing there?

SCHWARTZ: I was the lobbyist. I did all the political work for them. I was in Washington and in Albany. And I did all the community -- every time a community got angry about the noise at an airport, they sent me out. Every time we wanted to build -- when we built the AirTrain, I did all the work with the all the communities around the AirTrain and made sure people from the communities had 61:00jobs. Um, making sure we got the money, politically. So it was that kind of -- every time I turn around, it would be another something. It was the most exciting job. Of course, in '93, we had car bombed. And I left in '96, mainly because Governor Pataki came in and I was not going to work -- I knew I couldn't work for a Republican. I knew he'd fire me. So I left. Because I didn't want to be fired by a Republican. Clearly, I'm a strong Democrat. And so I left to go to the construction industry. Again, where I had the best time. And I just left there a couple years ago. Then I worked for the heavy -- all the guys that you see doing road work with digging in tunnels and building the 2nd Avenue subway and digging the World Trade Center -- those are the companies I represented. So I represented all the unions and all the heavy construction contractors. I just 62:00loved it. All the guys and me is the way it was. It's an all-men business still, sadly. But I was able to do a lot of good social stuff. The guys at the Port Authority were the ones who designed the bus for Heights and Hill for me, and we got them to pay for it. So the people were very good about some of my own personal interests and contributed to them. But again, I learned a different world entirely, when you're working with men whose business is to, you know, dig tunnels. And it kept me very busy. Very buys politically. And of course I did some presidential races at that point. Um, then about three years ago, I decided to work part-time, after my husband died and my grandson was born. And I said, 63:00"I've been doing this enough," you know. So now I just do consulting. Um, and I gave up the office. I -- that's my office. I have two clients. I have to be at JFK tomorrow for a business lunch and that's about -- you know, if I don't want it, I don't do it now. It has to be something that I really like and believe in. Now, I'm not going to represent a company that doesn't do anything that I like. I can do that now. Because I can now spend my time, mostly, with this five year old and doing the things that I want to do. Um, I guess you want to talk a little bit more about the Synagogue. I sing in the choir. I coach some of the singers because some of them can't read music. I dropped out of the Synagogue, although I should tell you that in the mid-'90s, I had a really -- we had a 64:00difficult experience.

SULLIVAN: Oh.

SCHWARTZ: My son, at that point, after college -- he went to Bowdoin -- became a commercial fisherman. That's what you do when you're a Classics and a Government major. He was fishing all through college in Maine. Getting lobsters and -- where'd you go to school?

SULLIVAN: Wellesley.

SCHWARTZ: OK, well then you know the lunacy of small colleges and how you --

SULLIVAN: Yep. I actually have a cousin who is a lobster fisherman after -- yeah.

SCHWARTZ: Yeah. Well, he worked as a lobsterman all through college. And Laura went to Brown, which is why she's in the theater. And since he graduated, he went out to Alaska.

SULLIVAN: Oh.

SCHWARTZ: And I went, be still my heart. And, you know, three years in, he was 65:00having the best time. He was just -- you know, he was making money, women were after him. It was the place to be. It was on this -- you know, out in this Bering Sea -- you see this Deadliest Catch film?

SULLIVAN: Yeah.

SCHWARTZ: Well, I don't watch it because that was him. He was critically injured. His head was crushed. Somebody pulled the wrong lever and one of those big pots crushed his skull. And it's the phone call that nobody ever wants to get. "Come quick to Alaska, your son probably won't live through the night."

SULLIVAN: Oh.

SCHWARTZ: How do you come quick to Alaska? It happens that, fortunately, Laura was home. She had been in Budapest. And so, I said to her, "You have to go because" -- she didn't want to go. She didn't want to face it. And I said, "Listen, we all have to make a family decision together, one way or another. Whatever it is, we have to be there." So all three of us flew the next -- 6:30 in the morning, we flew to Anchorage, and he was alive. He got through the surgery but had massive brain damage. And um, two years in the hospital 66:00afterwards. There, we medicate, we [inaudible] home to -- he was in two years worth of hospitals. Um, I had asked the rabbi at the time, it was Sue Ann Wasserman, to visit him. I said, "Sue Ann, he has memory issues. He really needs to be reminded of his earlier life, even though he didn't go past Hebrew in his bar mitzvah. That was significant to him because my father, who had lived with us until he died, coached him. It was a very important part of his life. He needs to hear it, he needs to think about it. Would you visit him in the hospital?" Usually, you don't have to ask for that. She couldn't -- she couldn't deal with it. That was not what she did. "OK. He's home on weekends. Could you 67:00visit him at home?" She never did. I got more and more crazed. I went for the choir rehearsal at Plymouth Church and the cantor said to me, "You can't be in the choir this year because you haven't come to the rehearsals." And I said, "Well, Heather, first of all, I've been singing in the choir for years. I know the music, I'm a musician. And secondly, I've had this other issue with visiting my son in the hospital." "Doesn't matter, you know my rules. You have to leave now." While the rest of the choir stood there with their mouth agape. And as fragile as I was, I went from Plymouth Church here, weeping. My husband was enraged. He called Sue Ann, who backed Heather, the cantor. Then we called the president of the congregation -- he did, because I couldn't do any of it -- who tried to get Sue Ann to change her mind. And she backed the cantor and I -- we 68:00dropped out. Until Sue Ann was gone. We went to several other synagogues. I just felt that this was not being responsive to a long-time member, at that point, with a family tragedy. It really was a family tragedy. It was my kid. And, um, she just couldn't respond -- I just -- I was bruised, very badly bruised.

SULLIVAN: Do you know why -- I mean, why wasn't she able to visit your son?

SCHWARTZ: Emotionally, she couldn't. She just didn't -- couldn't -- she was not a pastoral rabbi. Um, and it was just something she just didn't feel comfortable doing. And I had a very -- I mean, I was not asking for religious counseling. I was asking for familiar voices, familiar -- and I just said -- you know, we were 69:00so bruised by all of it. We were -- the whole family -- we were just fragile. When she left, we rejoined. Happily. And everybody wanted -- there were very few people who liked her and they were very glad to -- she said she could not run a congregation. That was not what she does. I think she's doing education or something now. But certainly, she's not dealing with people much. She was an unhappy young woman. But we had, you know, fine times there otherwise.

SULLIVAN: And so what -- so the process of rejoining, that was smooth?

SCHWARTZ: Yeah. Oh sure. We were coming back because, um, you know. Serge came in. So we were gone for about maybe three or four years. I couldn't go near them. I just felt so unwanted and so, um -- it was -- and friends kept saying, 70:00"Oh, it will be all right." And I said, "No, no. I can't look at her." This is someone who rejected my family when we were very much in need. But, you know, when my husband became ill, Serge was a rock. The difference is so incredible that this is a -- the human -- you know, the compassion. That there was -- wherever he could see him, whatever he could do for us, um -- and when, you know, I finally said to the doctor, "Is it time for hospice?" And he looked at me and he said, "It's over time." And we had hospice here, and Serge was here. And whatever support we needed in terms of the funeral or anything like that, he was absolutely solid. And then two months later, my daughter got married in the 71:00Synagogue. But he didn't marry them, Hara Person did. Which was quite lovely. I mean, my husband was alive long enough to know all the wedding plans, to see her dress, to be part of the -- you know, we knew it was going to be in the Synagogue and that the reception would be there. And, um -- I mean, we were so stunned that she was A, getting married, and B, that she was marrying someone Jewish. It was beyond our comprehension because everyone she had brought home would kiss me on both cheeks and speak several different languages. [laughter] There was a French, there was an Argentinean, there was a Hungarian. You know. All that's fine, whatever. So there was Mark. Mark Greenfield who was just -- we were stunned. And his parents were stunned that he was marrying her. [laughter] There they are [pointing to photo].

SULLIVAN: Oh.

SCHWARTZ: Um, that was actually--that one was taken right in the sanctuary.

SULLIVAN: Oh.

SCHWARTZ: Their covering the huppah -- is my mother's-- the tablecloth my mother made.

SULLIVAN: Oh.

SCHWARTZ: So, I mean, I have a long feeling of tradition. But, so they were married literally two months after Alan died. And Hara, who had gone from preschool through high school with Laura, performed the service, which was quite wonderful. And then a couple years later, Serge did the baby naming service for him. So we have a -- as I said in the journal, I was fifty years and three generations. But, uh --

SULLIVAN: And so they -- your daughter and her family -- do they go regularly to the Synagogue?

SCHWARTZ: No, as a matter of fact, I just arranged with Randy as a gift -- now that they moved closer in -- that, uh, I will support their first three years of membership, starting in September. They'd be coming as, you know, free loaders 73:00on me. Or -- you know, I've been buying extra tickets. They came as my guests. They don't, you know, they don't have any money. They're both teaching in the theater. But, you know, that's what I can do, so that's what I can do. But, um -- and he wants to start Hebrew school next year. He does. He does ask the question of why were people killing all the Jews? You know, he's beginning to get a sense of every story that we tell -- oh, there was pain and Jews suffering [laughter] and did they kill all the Jews? Well no, here we are. But, you know, a five year old starts to ask quite, you know, perceptive questions, so it's got to be age-appropriate answers for him. I will tell you one wonderful episode, probably my funniest experience at that Synagogue, early years. My kids were -- 74:00oh, maybe ten and eight, something like that. It was a Chanukah and we were in the old building in 117 [Remsen] and we were making latkes. And every table had an elder and a bunch -- and I was not an elder yet. My mother was at one table and sitting back to her was another woman of the same age. And they introduced themselves to each other. "My name is Henrietta Itken, and your name is Fanny Mailer." It's Norman Mailer's mother. They begin the competition of the Jewish grandmothers. It was -- and I'm sitting there holding this platter and I'm going to die laughing. And I have a couple of friends with me and we're watching this performance. Fanny turns to my mother and says, "So, are you a member?" My mother said, "No. My daughter is." Point for Fanny. She's a member. OK? But my 75:00mother says, "So, are your children here?" "No." "My daughter's here." Point on my mother's side. "How many children do you have?" Fanny says, "Two." My mother has two. So they're even up. "How many grandchildren do you have?" Well, Fanny -- God knows at that point how many she had. It must have been eight. And my mother says, "Two." So Fanny's up. But then my mother says, "And are they here?" None of her grandchildren were there. Both of my mother's were there. OK. "And your daughter?" says Fanny. "Does she go to business?" Which -- "Yes," says my mother. "My daughter works full-time." "So does mine," says Fanny. So they're both, you know, even up. [laughter] And we're watching this, you know, this measuring of -- "And your son-in-law?" "Yes, they're married. Yes, my 76:00son-in-law, he goes to work, he goes to work." "And your son, what does he do?" says my mother. "Oh," she says. "My Norman, he writes books. Maybe eight." "Books?" says my mother. "My son is a librarian. He has thousands." At which point, my mother is clearly the big winner because she has no idea who she's talking to. And they both turn around and start to eat and my mother's busy with her grandchildren. And I am on the floor rolling around. Because I thought -- you know, it was the battle of the grandmothers. And Henrietta Itken, no matter what, was going to come out on top [laughter].

SULLIVAN: That's great.

SCHWARTZ: It was. It was probably -- and you know, years later when my mother died, my husband did the eulogy and he told that story. Not quite the way I tell 77:00it. But he said, "She was the quintessential Jewish mother and grandmother. And her kids, no matter what, were the tops and the best. And Norman? He writes eight books. My son has a library" [laughter]. It was, you know, "Where did you say he lived?" "My son lives here, my daughter lives here." It was even on a lot of cases, you know. A son and a daughter, a son and a daughter. But -- and I was quite friendly with one of Norman's wives at that point because her two sons were at Saint Ann's with my two kids. And Beverly [Bentley] and I were very friendly, but then of course Beverly was gone. And then I -- you know, we stayed friendly with Norman and various wives because he was always here. And his parents were founders of the Synagogue. Uh, I think there's a -- I think Barney 78:00donate a torah to the Synagogue. Or maybe Norman donated in his father's name. But they were part of the original membership.

SULLIVAN: And did Norman Mailer -- did he attend Synagogue?

SCHWARTZ: Not very often. No, Norman wouldn't. He showed up with his mother periodically, or he'd walk her over. Or some of the kids -- the kids never knew what religion they were because I think only his first wife was Jewish. Um. So the kid's never really got a sense of -- Kate Mailer, who Laura went to Brown with, her mother was the countess [Lady Jean Campbell]. So she wasn't Jewish. Beverly was not Jewish. But the two boys -- I can't -- Danielle and -- the two oldest girls were Jewish. But that marriage didn't last long either [laughter]. But they still have the apartment. They have the last two floors -- top floors -- at 142 Columbia Heights. Um, because Norman, over the years, he had two 79:00houses. He kept selling them off to pay tuition or alimony or what have you. So he wound up keeping an upper duplex in one house where he had a studio and, uh, I think Norris [Norris Church Mailer], his wife now, still uses it. You know, I saw her just recently around. And a couple of the boys are in and out. One of them just called me looking for my son. I mean, they're all still -- that was the quality of living here. Of even though -- I mean, I could run into Steven Mailer, which I did on Montague Street, and he would race after me and give me a big hug. "Where are you, Steven?" "Well, I'm working in a theater company. But this is my girlfriend, I have two kids from my divorce. Where's Ben?" "Well, Ben is--" So they have that same set of connections that either came from going to the same school, the same playground, same Synagogue. You know, they all -- for 80:00being New Yorkers, it's really quite unusual to have that kind of connection. My daughter has it even more out at Fire Island because, again, my grandson is now third generation there. So all of my friend's kids were my kids' age. And now they're out there with their kids. So it's a most unusual -- in a city of rootlessness where if you live in an apartment house, you don't know anybody in your building. And you choose not to. And here we sit on our stoops. Laura said the best time she had recently was she had a -- when they moved from Soho to Williamsburg, they had a stoop sale. And I said, "Anything that's down in the cellar, you sell. Get rid of it. You keep the money." And they did another one the next year for Obama, and they met the most wonderful people. Having a stoop sale in front of my house. They said they met people from the Heights that they 81:00never knew before. People came by to -- and they had a sign up, "This is for Obama." Now, of course I was out on the road with Hillary [Clinton].

SULLIVAN: Oh!

SCHWARTZ: It was an interesting mix in the family because I was -- I have been very close to Hillary over the years. Um, I knew -- met her when she was in the White House, then I worked on her both senate races. And this past race, I was traveling with her for about five months.

SULLIVAN: Oh, wow.

SCHWARTZ: There's a picture of her.

SULLIVAN: Oh yeah.

SCHWARTZ: With Laura. I think Laura was pregnant then.

SULLIVAN: I -- at Wellesley -- we don't know if it was true, but we were told that we -- my roommate and I, my second year there -- that we were living in Hillary's former room.

SCHWARTZ: Oh really?

SULLIVAN: And so tours would come past of, you know, prospective students and we'd be like, "Yes, this was Hillary's room. Yep" [laughter].

SCHWARTZ: Well, it's interesting. There were Wellesley women that I met all over the country. Because they were all wearing Wellesley pins, you know. And they 82:00were -- I'd be in Iowa, I was in North Carolina -- you name the state. And there would be the Wellesley crowd. They were just -- and it was phenomenal. They -- I forget. I think I was in Minnesota, and these women drove from New Mexico.

SULLIVAN: Wow!

SCHWARTZ: All Wellesley women from New Mexico came to work in Minnesota. New Hampshire -- some women came from Canada. They couldn't even vote [laughter] but they came from Canada. It was just a remarkable show. Uh, I saw her Friday. I was invited -- she spoke at the UN on Friday.

SULLIVAN: Oh.

SCHWARTZ: On women's rights. Women's issues. And I was invited. And it was great because there were so many women there that I had met on the road in either Kentucky or -- one of the -- I worked in Kentucky a lot because I stayed with my in-laws. And then when she would come to the state, I'd be with her. So you just met -- and it was so nice. I mean, because she just, she was delightful to me. 83:00When I got pneumonia in the middle of -- I was running the phone banks in New York, and she found out that I was in the hospital and she called me. And I said, "Hillary. You're running for president!" She said, "I know, but you work too hard." [laughter] And the next thing I knew, Lenox Hill hospital has all the -- she must have sent up -- she sent somebody with "Nurses for Hillary" posters, t-shirts, pins. My room was inundated with people asking me for stuff and I'm [gasping noises]. But she's quite spectacular. Chelsea's got a ring now. I saw her Friday. She's got a ring. I don't know when the wedding is. I didn't want to ask her, you know. But she was making sure that everybody saw it [laughter]. I mean, I have a picture some place or another with Hillary looking at one of my grandson's earlier pictures and she said, "Will you please tell Chelsea I want a 84:00grandchild." "Hillary--" [laughter] "I'll take care of it! I'll do what you do. I'll work part-time." Yeah. Yeah, that was -- she was one of the high points of my life. Still is. Um--

SULLIVAN: How did you -- you said that you were a Democrat even starting in college.

SCHWARTZ: Had to be!

SULLIVAN: What was your political education?

SCHWARTZ: Had to be. I was a New York Jew and Eleanor Roosevelt was my mother's hero. And Eleanor Roosevelt wrote a column every day and my mother read it to me every day. And every day we believed -- don't forget, when you have an immigrant family who makes it on their own without a lot of education and sees their kids through colleges and health and survival -- more than survival -- we did well. And this was not because my father was given anything except, you know, go out 85:00and deliver newspapers when you're nine. And my mother, you know, went through high school and then was a secretary so she could support her brothers and sisters. Your obligation -- social, religious, ethical -- is to be helpful to others and to share. And to make sure that we're not, um -- we were never the "me" generation. Maybe it was the war. Maybe it was, you know, Victory Gardens and saving aluminum foil. But it was, um -- if you have a dollar, you give half away. And so there was no -- my father worked -- that picture up there. See the -- I don't know if you can see it with the light shining in it. During the Depression, my father helped that artist, uh -- he gave him food, he let him sleep in an office that he was working on. And he couldn't pay my father back so 86:00he gave him that picture. And it hung in my parent's room all through my childhood until one day somebody came and said to my mother, "That's Mary Magdalene." Well, my mother went into horror. What is she doing with a picture of -- my mother was not an observant Jew in the fact that she practiced her faith every week, but she was to her core. This is who she was and what she believed. What is she doing with Mary Magdalene? She hung it and put it in the closet, never to be seen again. And when my mother died, my dad came here to live. Do you want some more cake?

SULLIVAN: I'm good, thank you.

SCHWARTZ: I'm just picky. My brother took that to his house. And when my brother died, I got it back. It's OK to have Mary Magdalene here. But it was part of -- you help people. So there was no question about -- there was no other party. 87:00Franklin Delano Roosevelt was everybody's hero. He was a Democrat, you were a Democrat. We were not rich. We were not bankers. You know. And part of my husband's family are red-neck Democrats. Hard to talk to them [laughter]. Hard to talk to them about same-sex marriage. Hard to talk to them about abortion. Hard to talk to them about almost anything they don't want to talk about! [laughter] They're very opinionated. But they'll vote Democratic. They voted for Obama. That was a big deal for them. It was a hard choice. And, you know, when I campaigned for Hillary, people said to me, "I can't vote for a Black man." I said, "Well, then don't vote for her. We don't want your vote because he's Black. If you're going to vote for Hillary, let me give you the reasons 88:00positively." And I was in a lot of senior centers and synagogues throughout the country. I mean, I was fortunate to be able to take the time -- I was in Bucks County for Hillary for a month and I could come back and forth. I went back for Obama. Because she had asked some of us who had been -- I was a surrogate, I got to speak for her. Um, and so I got to go to every -- I did mostly senior centers and synagogues. Or anybody else who would listen to me on a subway. And so I'm pretty much -- I'm going to another something for Kirsten Gillibrand [US Senator, NY]. I just e-mailed her about something. Because I keep my political ties up. Um, only because I still have some clients, and also because women's 89:00issues are terribly important to me. Because people like you and my daughter and various other younger women have no clue as to what it mean to grow up without equal rights. And that's one of the reasons I have to be a Reform Jew. Because I can't be second-rate. I remember being seated upstairs or having a curtain put in front of me. Um, the only time I sat willingly was in Krakow. It was the anniversary of my father's death. Uh, I wanted to have prayers said for him. Krakow, in those days -- to find a Jew was almost impossible. And I kept giving dollars out for them to go find -- it took until about nine o'clock at night for them to find ten men to open up the synagogue for prayer. They wouldn't let me 90:00participate. They wouldn't let my daughter participate. We weren't counted. So that was the only time I did it willingly because I understood it was Krakow. That the entire Jewish community was dead. That they found a bunch of old men who were creeping in to do this for me. That I had to pay. And it was for my father. But they still made me stand behind the curtain. And I said, "Still doesn't feel right." I went to too many weddings as a child where I danced with the women. But I didn't realize then. And, you know, for my father who used to want to put me on his feet and dance with me, um, he had to take me out in the back. Because there would be that much separation in some of the early -- in our early lives. And it was not right. Just not right. So, um, there's a sense of 91:00social justice that came to me early in life. It was further developed when I was in college. Again, because I was in such a minority. Um, I wound up having to -- when I was working for somebody or another and there was no Democratic literature in this county at all, in Saint Lawrence County. I had to go to another county to get literature and then I wanted to have a parade. Well I borrowed a donkey from a farm and I was schlepping this burro around the campus [laughter]. And I had about five friends with me. I couldn't find a Democratic friend [laughter]. And they're banging on drums, and the head of the music department leans her head out the window and yells, "Ms. Itkin!" And she was a very strong woman. I was trying to get signatures on petitions. "That is not your instrument. Get back in here!" "Yes, Dr. Hosner [phonetic]." And I had to 92:00take this donkey three miles down the road to return him [laughter]. Uh, but I did get enough signatures. And people would sneak in and, you know, carefully write them. You know, of course I'm a Democrat. You would never be anything but. It's a -- and of course now, you can't even consider -- there's no such thing as a Rockefeller Republican anymore. They're either crazy or they're out. But it came from a whole sense of -- my grandmother, who had a charity box, she had no money. But she had a charity box and we all contributed to the charity box. And then she would turn it over to the rabbi, who -- whatever he did with it. You know, buy shoes for somebody, fine. But that's what you did. I have one 93:00downstairs. And my grandson and I -- that was the one for him -- um, we go up to the bank on -- is it TD Bank right now? I forget what it's called.

SULLIVAN: On Montague? Yeah.

SCHWARTZ: Yeah. And we put all the coins in and they count it for us. And the last batch went to Haiti. Because he understands it doesn't go for toys. Um, this is -- goes for Haitian relief. And actually, we went out and bought soap and we bought a whole bunch of stuff that we put into the box. So that was -- it was more tangible for a five year old to see that the money was being used for children who don't -- he -- how does a child understand poverty? He said to me, "We're poor." I said, "No, you're not." He said, "I don't know anybody who's poor." "Well of course, you don't. Isn't that wonderful?" I said, "Why do you think you're poor?" He said, "We have no food in the refrigerator." I said, "No 94:00dummy, you just moved." [laughter]

SULLIVAN: Yeah.

SCHWARTZ: He said, "But now I have my own room." Before that, they had-- lived in a railroad flat with no doors. And I said -- and you have to be very graphic about what is poverty and why do you have to send toothbrushes to people. Why do you have to put shampoo in a box. But it's, you know, it's what we do. It's why I started the shelter. You know, because it's what you do. I just sent a donation, which I do every year -- it's just, again, it's -- actually I sent it in honor of the Synagogue's 50th anniversary. But I sent it to MAZON, which is, you know, the food program. Usually -- last year, I donated -- usually, it's in 95:00honor of my children or grandchild, but this year I sent it to Serge. Just because. Because I will have a plentiful Passover. There will be lots of people here. It is part of our tradition that if we know somebody who doesn't have a place to go, then they're invited. So I know two women from the Synagogue -- one for sure, maybe two -- who have no place to go. Single women. Um, widows, very often. Whatever the connection. They have no place to go, they'll be here. And my daughter said again to me, "Mom, it's going to be very crowded." I said, "Laura, you say this every year. Yeah. Yeah, it will be very crowded. We'll scrunch together. We'll sit in the next room. We'll shout. But it will be what it is." And that's why I'm -- well this is not for Passover, but that's why I'm 96:00cooking and baking now. Everything is -- I used to be able to do it all in a couple of days. And besides that, my husband was here to help me. But now I just cook a course and freeze it, cook a course and freeze it.

SULLIVAN: That's smart.

SCHWARTZ: And so tonight -- oh, tonight I'm going -- oh, tonight. I was going to have Jackie Alan peel potatoes with me. But, um, I'm going to a lecture at the Met on Hamlet, the opera. I take my son. I have--I kept my opera subscription after my husband died. We go to -- this month, I'm taking him -- my son-in-law -- to see Hamlet. Because my son-in-law's a Shakespearian actor, director.

SULLIVAN: Oh!

SCHWARTZ: And I take -- I use the series in different ways. Because I love it. I 97:00did see The Nose on Saturday. Do you know about The Nose? Over there. There's the playbill. Just look at the cover. It's a Shostakovich opera short. But it was so visual. The music was -- usually you go to the opera for the voice. But here you go for the visual sense of it. It was just phenomenal. I went Saturday afternoon in the pouring rain and then up to the gala. You didn't go to the gala?

SULLIVAN: No.

SCHWARTZ: It was wonderful. It was a wonderful evening. I mean, it was just, it was -- thank God for the two chairs. They just did a fabulous job. It was -- it looked effortless and I know it wasn't. But they just had it running so smoothly. Not a lot of speeches, not a lot of, you know, carryings on. It was just warm. Everybody knew everybody. Well, not everybody. I mean, there were a 98:00lot of new preschool parents that I didn't know. But there was enough connecting. Anne Landman, who did the seating, just did it beautifully. And I had put a table together with my son -- son-in-law and my daughter and a bunch of friends. The rabbi [Serge Lippe] and his wife were at our table, so it was really -- it was just lovely. Everybody got a prize. Everybody got -- there was a silent auction. Um, I have to go over there soon and find out what it is I got. Um, or donate -- I donated my son's house. My son has a house in Cape Breton. And somebody bid high on it. So I just reminded him, "Oh by the way, here's the phone number of the person who's going to call you and you'll work it out with her."

SULLIVAN: So is he -- he recovered well from his --

SCHWARTZ: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. God love him. My son lives in Massachusetts. He has 99:00residual damage. Uh, but he lives alone. Except now he has a new girlfriend. Always has a girlfriend. He doesn't let me meet many of them. But this one, uh, he says is a keeper for a while. She's a social epidemiologist, whatever that means. I know she was pre-med, I don't know what that -- I know she went to Harvard. She's from Ethiopia. So I said to him, "Is she an Ethiopian Jew?" He said, "Give me a break." But she's quite gorgeous. He brought her here last week because -- he and my daughter are very good friends. They're very close. He came -- Laura just directed Madame of Shiao at St Ann's with the upper school and it was stunning. Sixty kid performance that just blew everybody away. So he came down to see it and brought her. So Laura got to meet her at school and he 100:00brought her here for about ten minutes. And she is quite beautiful. And apparently a keeper for a while. Although, she's been asked to go to Eritrea -- is that a place? Yeah. On a Fulbright to do some -- and he does political consulting. He does not fish anymore. But with an earlier girlfriend, he went to Cape Breton on a holiday. Found that he loved the place, bought a farmhouse. So he has this nice farmhouse in Cape Breton that nobody goes to. So we give it away for charity auctions. Uh, he was an Obama delegate to the convention. He's a crazed Obama person. Which is really very interesting because we -- I was in Sioux City with Hillary and she said, "Rita, I hear your son is in Davenport." I said, "Yeah." She said, "Why don't we just bring him over here?" I said, "I don't think it's the right move." I mean, we had a Passover here where I said to 101:00him, "If you open your mouth about politics, you're chopped liver. You're out the door. This is Passover." And, again, there must have been 25, 30 people here, and he kept his word. And my daughter's father-in-law started talking politics. And I -- "Jay, wait a minute! We're reading, we're--" And it was interesting. The women were -- it was-- the place was split. Women, Hillary. Men, Obama.

SULLIVAN: Ahh.

SCHWARTZ: So he's taken after those genes of mine. And he does-- did a lot of work for Obama. He's doing one right now. He's coming up there -- president's coming up there for a fundraiser. And he did a lot of work for the governor. He's on a couple of the governor's commissions. But he has limitations. He has mobility -- his left side was paralyzed, so he has no sensation in his left side. And he's in a lot of pain often. He lost all of his hair because his 102:00thyroid was damaged. So you can see 56 stitches in his head. And he lost his math skills, which broke his heart. He was one of those -- the way I do music in my head, he did math. And that was destroyed. But fortunately, his speech is fine. His motor skills are OK. Um, his emotional -- he gets emotional still. You know, gets ups and lows -- ups and downs. But he's going to a good neuropsychologist. And we're hoping, Hanna, whose last name I don't know -- Hanna [laughter]. She seems to be crazy about him. For some aberrant reason. And he comes here because he's crazy about his nephew. Jackie Alan was named for my father-in-law Jack and Laura's friend Jamie, a woman who died of ovarian cancer 103:00very young. And Alan was my husband. So he's known as Jackie Alan. And he's my guy. Do you have any questions for me? I mean, I'm just going on, I'm sorry.

SULLIVAN: No, this is wonderful. This is -- it's really great. I do have some questions about, like, the beginnings of your connections with, um, with Brooklyn Heights Synagogue. How did you hear about it, how did you --

SCHWARTZ: Oh, we just walked over to it. We just, you know -- it was in the paper. It was in the Brooklyn Heights Press. So we walked in and said -- it was a small building, you know. First we went to -- the high holidays were at the Bossert Hotel. Uh, David Glazer, when he became the rabbi, he used to have the kids come to his loft, which we thought was very glamorous in those days. Um, 104:00and Pam, his wife -- he had a loft on 29th street and he'd have parties for the kids. There wasn't that many. But, you know, a loft on 29th Street? His wife was an architect. And so it turned out to be just another community, it was Hamishi, you know, and just very friendly. Um, and we walked in and it was like, here we are. Some of my neighbors down the street, the Pollacks [phonetic], were members at the same time. Rose Novak and her husband, who lived on Orange Street. So we were all -- and we all had little kids. We all used to walk in and walk out. The kids would hang around. And it was just -- there was no pressure. You didn't have to get dressed up. I could go in like this if I wanted to or, you know, if I had a fur stole, I could wear a fur stole. But nobody did. There was no pretense about it. Uh, and the services would be either at the Bossert or, you 105:00know, various places until we settled on Plymouth. Uh, but it was just an easy place to be. No uh--, yeah, I think that was it. It was reformed enough and not Presbyterian. It had music that I was comfortable with, melodies that were internalized in me. But it was not coming out of an organ out of Emanu-El, which was just too high church for me. Um, and it was -- my husband was actually probably more Reform at that point than I was. Coming from an odd community that he lived in. But he also felt, this is right for us. There was no big deal about 106:00dues or contributing or, you know. We paid because we paid. But there was no sense of, this person has more money than somebody else, this family has less money than somebody else. It was just the easiest -- and I don't mean that -- it was just the-- Al Lowenberg, who was the rabbi when we came there, understood kids. His wife was very lovely. And Laura went into his -- both kids went into the Hebrew school without -- it wasn't a punishment for them. And it was inclusive for us. So I never could -- I never was a member of the Sisterhood because I was working. The things that other women did were mostly done by the older women who didn't work. Most of us -- this was the generation of women who 107:00started to go back to work, so you didn't have a lot of daytime activity. Or I didn't. Uh, and most of the times I was there, it was to pick up the kids from Hebrew school or for a service or for an event, but it was not to be totally involved with the inner workings because we were working. And I think it wasn't until I got caught up with the shelter issue, with Rick, that I began to get to know a lot more people and, um, then I got involved with the program committee and the music committee and -- like that. The natural areas that interested me where I felt I could be useful. And now I'm accompanying the choir. Uh, we're doing -- we have a rehearsal tomorrow night. We're doing, um, a special piece 108:00for the cantor, which she doesn't know about. So make sure she doesn't find out. But she's leaving, so we're rehearsing a special piece to sing for her at her last service. What I try and do is, uh, take individual members who can't read music or don't read very well, and I'll practice with them. I'll just coach them a bit. And then I'll accompany them for the piece. So, I mean, you contribute in ways you can contribute. I mean, I'll cook for the shelter but I don't want to sleep there anymore. Done enough of that. My daughter still does. At least once or twice a year, Laura will sleep at the shelter. But I figure I gave, at the shelter -- [laughter] uh, I mean I was driving the van from the drop-in center and literally, I was driving the van with all these homeless folks for a while. Just because, you know, you just did it. But as I say, I had this period where 109:00as they were moving, that's when I got -- I backed away. And when I said I was going to rejoin and a lot of -- you know, it was right after Sue Ann left. And I went to a service with Serge. And we felt, OK, this is a good guy. May not be my spiritual leader. He's pretty young. But I'm not sure I need a spiritual leader. I need somebody who's honorable and has the same value system. And, um, it works for us.

SULLIVAN: Was there a transition? Did you have a transition in terms of having a more Conservative religious education upbringing to go into a Reform synagogue?

SCHWARTZ: No. No. I was looking for it. Because my Hebrew is not very good. I 110:00mean, I haven't read or studied Hebrew since I was ten and I keep thinking I should. But I know all the prayers. Everything's memorized. And I went to summer camp, so I went to Jewish camps. Um, but I wound up being the music teacher, or practicing. Everybody else was -- I mean, I went to prayer sessions and stuff but I also carried my music with me to camp. But, um, I never felt comfortable in a service that was all Hebrew. One of the reasons I couldn't connect with it all. But also because, um, it didn't-- A conservative service is mostly still for men. When I was in Louisville last month for a funeral, my sister-in-law's 111:00funeral, and it was conducted at a Conservative synagogue where my husband was bar mitzvahed. But the service after the funeral at home, the shiva minyan, was conducted only by the men. They read very fast in Hebrew. I had no clue as to -- my son came with me. Laura was teaching, she couldn't come. And my son is an atheist. So, you know, he'll do what I ask him to do. Like, he'll come for the high holidays because I want him to say Kaddish for his father. He'll do it but he does it for me, doesn't really do it for himself. Um, it is what it is. Laura will do it because of her own feelings for her father. I think -- my son liked 112:00his father, but he doesn't want to do it in an organized manner. But, um, it didn't strike me as relating to me or to my needs. I don't want to be -- I've never wanted to be -- the girl. I was raised in a family where boys were more important. My father was one of six brothers. His poor sister was -- oh God! [laughter] My mother said she married him to get him out of that house because it was so noisy and everybody snored and was dirty. [laughter] And he valued me. My father valued me desperately. Um, but the boy was very important. And when my younger brother died, the sense of losing a son left a lasting impression on me 113:00of how a son matters more, and I was bound and determined -- it ain't me. That's never going to -- that's not part of who I am or who I want to be. So, um, the Reform movement certainly accepted me as a whole person. And my daughter. I mean, I remember my mother saying to Laura, "Laura, you're a girl. You don't have to be bat mitzvahed." And Laura said, you know, "Grandma! Yes, I do so! Of course I'm a girl." You know, my mother's giving her an out. And Laura was taking it as a privilege. And I remember that conversation very vividly because I think, thank God she really knows who she is. You know, and having nothing to do with her religion. It has to do with her own identity. And we worked really, really hard at, you know, understanding who -- I was in that women in the middle 114:00generation. You know, taking care of elderly parents, taking care of kids. Trying to work. Um, it's a very mixed-up time. And we were just the group of women going back to work. I mean, I knew lots of women who stayed home and were full-time mothers. But it didn't feel right. So, I don't ever see going into a conservative -- I mean, I'll go into a Conservative synagogue if that's all that's available, particularly if I'm in Europe. Uh, but it's, you know, I don't care what language you're speaking in. It's got to be speaking to me. And the Conservative and the Orthodox synagogues do not speak to me or for me. I speak for me. I don't need anybody else speaking for me. I don't need a rabbi speaking for me. I don't need a man. And my husband understood that and felt the same way 115:00and my kids feel the same way. So yeah, there was no transition. We are -- and my parents were fine. The minute my daughter was born, they went to their conservative synagogue and named her. Just because they were so superstitious for fear of a loss. They put a Hebrew name on her. And then I said, "Hey, we'll take care of it." And we were not even members then. But, you know, we took care of it. So she was named several places. So was my son. What else?

SULLIVAN: Um-- Let's see. Um, what about some turning points in the life of the Synagogue? So you've mentioned some of the physical different space that -- 116:00where things have taken place. But were there other shifts, you know, changes in rabbi, other --

SCHWARTZ: Well, I think the change when Rick Jacobs came was amazing because he had such vigor, um, and such enthusiasm and the kids adored him. That was quite wonderful to see young people -- for the gala, I was the archivist and I went through 50 years of pictures with the late Marion Cohen. And Marion meticulously marked off, on the back of every picture, who was who.

SULLIVAN: Oh, good!

SCHWARTZ: Oh yeah. Yeah. I saw these little post-its. She did that just about three weeks before she did. Post-its on the back. This lady was -- she told me the name of the person, what hat she was wearing, where the luncheon was being held, in whose honor, gave me the date. It was amazing. So every one of those pictures marked. So as I went through the archives, um, I saw so many pictures 117:00with Rick and kids and the retreats that he pulled together and the classes that he held at this loft with the kids. Um, I used to drive my son and a neighboring kid to his loft and then wait downstairs and have coffee, and also see if they were going to sneak out [laughter]. Which sometimes they did and I would catch them and send them back up. But he had such an energy and such a spontaneous, good heart and opened up the whole sense of social justice that it became more than a house of worship. It became a place for community involvement, understanding of -- you know, the lecture series started. The Bobby List family's lecture. Her husband died very young, so she started the List Cultural 118:00Lecture Series. Um, so, but those all happened -- I give Rick a lot of credit for putting that kind of energy and social consciousness. And he had a congregation that was very wanting of this. Uh, I think many of us came from congregations that were there for religious education. Very closed in and looking internally at themselves. And the awareness that we could be generous with ourselves, that we could get as well as give -- uh, a lot of it came from his leadership. He was probably, for me -- because Al was the traditional religious leader, uh, when we started. I mean, there were a couple of other rabbis that I can't even remember because we would drop in and out of services when we were just with very little kids or without kids. But he was a little 119:00more traditional, a little more formal. His bar mitzvahs were clean, simple. This is what it is. And that was fine at that time. Um, and then we had -- oh, then we had David Glazer for a couple of years. Because he bar mitzvahed my son. And David Glazer was the -- we called him "The Garmento." He was in the garment business. And so people call him "Rabbi Chuck." He was of that sort of -- he wasn't quite sure what his role was. But, uh, and he was not spiritual at all. I think one of the things I loved about David Glazer was his father. His father was a cantor from Poland who chanted in the sound of my childhood. He chanted in 120:00that sort of nasal, very Polish Yiddish. The first time I heard him open his mouth, I thought, "It's my grandmother." I hear her and my uncles in shul and that was the voice. And he would chant for the high holidays and then he would give a sermon in Yiddish. And the sermon in Yiddish -- and again, I had not spoken Yiddish since I was a child. I mean, you don't get to do it too often. It resonated so. And I understood maybe one out of every five words and I cried. I sat there and cried. And he must have done this for about three years. And it was, to me-- that was a high point of being in a synagogue that combined the sounds and the earthiness of my childhood with who I am now. Now, a lot of 121:00people, including my husband who did not speak Yiddish at all, was not raised in a Yiddish household -- he got it but, you know, his background was the Hebrew Union College voice, which is much more traditional and formal. Um, but to me it was -- it went curling somewhere in my gut that said -- this brought it all together. David's father, the cantor. He just -- I couldn't wait to hear him. And sit and cry. And he usually did this for the high holidays. That was a remarkable couple of moments. Um, and I guess the other one, again, because it's -- young Stuart Sacks used to blow the shofar, and his father would call -- would sing the notes and then Stuart, as a kid, would blow. And that kind of 122:00family connection was always wonderful to see. Um, now, Stuart's parents got divorced. His father became gay, moved on. You know, things happen. But Stuart still plays. He still is the one that gets up for the high holidays and plays the shofar. And he's the one who is good friends with my daughter still. So those kinds of connections -- the whole Avram family show up. I mean, it's always, you know. Everybody looks at them and says, you see? Do I have any of my kids here? No. But Avrams have all their kids, all their grandchild, all the in-laws. Everybody shows up. I assume you're interviewing them?

SULLIVAN: Yes.

SCHWARTZ: Yeah. But it's -- because they're kids are remarkable about doing exactly that. They show up. And Eric -- one of the Avram boys, I never can keep 123:00them straight -- has a kid also at the St. Ann's preschool. So it's one of those -- for me, because I'm the only grandmother that shows up there regularly. I see all these friends of my daughters. Uh, and then I see the kids -- it's really that kind of community connection, I don't think you get to many other places. If our Synagogue was much bigger, we wouldn't get that either. I have friends who come here -- my son-in-law's parents, who were very involved in Jewish cultural life and in Zionism, and were presidents of their various congregations in Westchester, would be thrilled to be members of ours. Because they find it -- family, community. Uh, they belong to a much larger -- they moved to Manhattan, they belong to a much larger congregation. Uh, the only -- my husband's cousin 124:00by marriage -- the way these things work -- is the cantor up at [inaudible]. And so I sometimes go with the in-laws and I see Becky. Now they feel a little bit more comfortable because they think, oh well, they're sort of related to the cantor as well. But they don't get that same feeling from a huge synagogue with a thousand members. It has to be more formal. Uh, they have lots more programs, they have lots more activities, but you don't, um, you don't connect as quickly. Just last week, one of the members had a tea -- last Sunday, the Sunday before -- for about 20 women who are single. Uh, and this came about because when I was helping with the auction, with the gala last week, I said, "You know, a lot of women won't come who are widowed, divorced, single. Nobody likes to be put at a 125:00table where everybody else gets up to dance." Now, I'm in the world of politics. I go to parties all the time and I don't -- I feel more comfortable -- you know, I go to lots of parties alone. But they're not dinner dances. And so, can we put a couple of tables together where some of these women are together? Um, which we did. It was my table, for the most part. Because otherwise, we wouldn't get the women to come. And it was -- a couple of us got on the phone and started calling some of these women who said, "OK, if I don't have to sit by myself and feel like -- you know, I love to dance but nobody's there dancing with me." They came. And then of course they all got up to do circle dances and stuff but--. And I danced with my son-in-law. But it's that -- and so Amy Epstein brought 126:00Inera Boginsky [phonetic], two widows, brought a group of women together, some of whom had never been married, some of whom were divorced, and some were widows, to see if there was some way we could bring -- you know, make some connections between people. And that doesn't happen in big communities. And some of the women were still grieving very hard. Whether they lost their husband three years ago or three months ago, they still find it very hard to go into a restaurant alone, to go to -- certainly to travel. To go to the theater or a movie alone. So part of this would be to say, "Hey, we all have to eat. You know, rather than -- I'll be happy to invite you to my house for dinner or let's -- I want to go see Crazy Hearts. Can I call somebody to go with me?" That kind of -- and once we get over the sense of everybody's in mourning -- because some 127:00of the women there were not in mourning -- then I think there's going to be another body. What we're trying to do is make some of these women who say they come to synagogue and they leave feeling worse because there are so many couples and families there and they are there alone. So we said, well there are several activities. There's a women's -- there's a needle point group, there's a book club. There's a shelter. There's lots of other things going on where you can come and hang out with somebody else. Or, if you want to go to a service, or the lecture that's coming up in a couple of weeks -- if you want to go to the lecture, how about three or four of us go together and having dinner beforehand and coffee afterwards? And then you walk in with somebody and you walk out with somebody. Oh, OK. So we're beginning that. So I e-mailed that around. Miriam 128:00e-mailed something else. I think we'll get, out of the 20, maybe we'll get four or five coming to the lecture who might not have. Who -- so if we see that there are activities within the Synagogue itself that can attract them, surely we want more people connected to the institution itself. But if it also means that, you know, you don't get connected to the Synagogue and you go off to a movie together, that's fine too. Because you made the connection through this entity. And this entity will eventually draw you back in. Uh, one of the women who's a great friend of mine called me yesterday and said, "You know, I'm alone. I have no family. I have no children, have no grandchildren. Would you object if I asked your daughter to be my executor?" I said, "I don't object. I would be very honored. But you have to talk to Laura." She said, you know, "You're the closest thing I have to family." And part of it is because we brought her back -- she's 129:00always here for seders, she's always here for whatever it is. And we bring her -- she was at the table with me. Um, and she said, "You know, I need somebody" -- she's in her '60s -- "I need somebody just in case." I think she'll leave something at the Synagogue and what have you. But whatever she does with it, I don't know, I don't care. But it's that sense of she found some connection and she's not -- we have said to her, "Where are your number in case of emergency? Everybody's got to have that." Oh. Otherwise, there are any number of this group of women who are alone like that. And this one, who was at this group, met another woman just like her. Single, never married, family far away. And they immediately struck up a, "Let's do something." Now, whether they'll go to a 130:00lecture together or a concert, whatever. Doesn't matter. But that became the glue that will help them stick together. So that's -- you know, it's another sort of a service. And maybe that way, we'll get more people connected. Who knows? And next year, my grandson will be in the kindergarten. He's not going to the preschool but he'll be starting Hebrew school. It will be kind of fun. Any more questions?

SULLIVAN: Um, let's see. We talked about some key people. What about -- did you know the founders who first sent out a letter, the Huffmans?

SCHWARTZ: No. Sure, I knew Reuven. He was then known as Reuven. Not Rubin or Bob, he was known as Reuven Huffman. Sure, I knew them well. I have a picture of them. They were here for my son's bar mitzvah, my daughter's bat mitzvah. They 131:00came to everything. They had no children, so they came to everybody's events. They were the ones who handed out the cups to the kids and the bibles to the kids. Oh yeah. They were to be respected. Belle's voice was this hideous, nasal Brooklyn accent. I can still hear her chanting. But yeah. Yeah, I certainly did. I think for me, by the way, another extraordinary -- you know, you get these flashes of moments. I did go to Russia with the group.

SULLIVAN: Oh!

SCHWARTZ:You know, there was a group of us, uh, what was it -- three years ago? Yeah, about three years ago. We, um, we had a torah scroll and we had it repaired. It took us a year and everyone studied from it. And it was a European one. We had it repaired and we went to found what was called not a Reform, but a 132:00progressive synagogue in Russia that was identified for us. And we went, about 14 or 15 of us, went to Russia to bring it to them.

SULLIVAN: Oh, wow!

SCHWARTZ: There are lots of pictures of it around. Which are fascinating to see. I just mailed one. So we went to -- we went from Moscow -- we took a bus maybe eight hours to the town of Lipisk. L-I-P-I-S-K, Lipisk. We went with a woman rabbi who was assigned to escort us. I think she was trained in the Reform movement, which is unusual in Russia. But she was trained in England. And she, you know, got us on the bus and made all the arrangements for us in the town. It 133:00was on one of those loopy things. We were all members of the Synagogue, plus a couple of other family members, and a 13 year old girl. Um, the Landman's daughter, Rachel, who is now a senior in high school. But for her, she had just been bat mitzvah. And it was wonderful to have a kid with us. So we were from 13 to 80 in the group. And, uh, several men. And we were on this bus. And I brought a lot of music with me. I did all the traditional music of the service. I didn't know how many copies, so I made 50 copies of -- and had them all bound up. And I'm schlepping these from here to Finland to Moscow, then we get on the damn bus to Lipisk, which is driving through borsch fields. Cabbage and onions for hours, with a driver, Vladimir or somebody, who was, I swear, drunk. And smoked. And 134:00he's driving like this on roads this big. And there's no place to stop except -- between Lipisk and Moscow -- except, you know, like one little town. And you could smell Lipisk and taste Lipisk before you could get to Lipisk because you could see it from the pollution. It was a city -- it was a large city, actually. It was an industrial city making tractors and steelworks. So you could see the steelworks and you could see the layer of fog and pollution over them way before you got there. But you could smell it and it went right into your throat.

SULLIVAN: Wow.

SCHWARTZ: And we all stayed at the Lipisk no-star hotel [laughter]. And went directly to the -- it was sort of look a room they had in a community house where these people were waiting for us so desperately. And it was -- I think 135:00Susan Chadick was the president of the congregation then, and she and her husband Bob carried the torah throughout the entire trip for fear of losing it on a plane. So he kept it with him. And Rachel was reading from it. And they had a woman who was sort of a para-cantor rabbi. And the one that we brought with us. So that Friday night, we had a service. And there must have been, oh, maybe 50 or 60 people there from all over the region. The Jews came from all over the region. They were so dressed up. We were slobs. We came right off the bus. And they dressed for us. They were wearing all their royal medals. They are official collective of the potato -- or whatever they were. They were so impressed with the fact that we came with this torah for them. And we brought books and other stuff. And it was just a wonderful evening. They had a piano -- they had a couple kids, um, one of whom was going to be bar mitzvah. And they had a piano 136:00that had about 12 keys working. So out of tune that it was terrifying. So I sat down, just to tinkle around and fool around, and, you know, finding a note here and finding a note there. A man who had to be in his 70s, a little wizened guy, came up to me and said something in Yiddish about -- "Do you speak Yiddish?" And I answered him a little bit. And he asked me if I knew a particular song. And I said, "I think so. You know, sing it and I can play anything." He started to whisper the song. He had not sung this in 70 years. I mean they were in the Soviet Union. And I played, it was a children's melody. And his voice got bigger and bigger. And then all of sudden, everybody's singing and we're all weeping. And by the end of the evening, my fingers are bloody practically because I'm playing forever. American songs and songs from the service and songs that they 137:00are singing to me. And everyone is having -- and for me, it was -- my heart was pounding. It was quite -- it was wonderful. The next morning, we came back, um, and they served us gruel for breakfast in the no-star hotel. It really was a terrible place. It was the best hotel in Lipisk. And they served us, you know, a hard-boiled egg and gruel or something. And then we went back for a service. And then we left as fast as we could because the pollution was killing us [laughter]. But Olga, who ran the service there, still is in touch with Linda Saznerwitz [phonetic], who had done most of the arrangements for this. And we are all terrific friends still because of it. You know, you have that kind of experience with a group of friends and it becomes even deeper. I just found a photograph that I took of a group of us in Saint Petersburg. And Linda just got 138:00it. I just sent it to her. Uh, and at the gala, she started to laugh. She said, "I just got the picture." She was rolling on the floor because it was a particularly funny moment. But it's those kinds of activities that sort of, you know, people -- I don't go to retreats because it's not at a time -- usually, it's when I'm out at the beach. So that's my retreat. But people who go to retreats have that same kind of -- you know, usually you get to know people through your kids, that you go to the same school or what have you, but um, it's very nice to see the adults do it too. And the one other thing, I think, that we do that's quite special is the "getting to know you" dinners every year. Barbara Zimmerman has been organizing them for years. That's where older members and new members are invited to somebody's home. And I've hosted it several years. I had 139:00hosted it this past year and I had 10, 11, 12 -- I don't remember -- some number of people. Some people I knew well and a couple of new families, which was really nice. Uh, younger families who found that they knew somebody else. And it was one of those nice evenings here where we sat for hours and just everybody either knew each other well or got to know each other well. And so when I saw some of the people at the gala whom I didn't know, they had just been at my house for dinner. And that's really quite special. And that goes on. You know, I've said, either I'll host one or I'll go to one. I'll be the old person at somebody else's house or people can come here. I prefer people coming here because, you know, I like to stay in my own house. But either way, they work well. They, again, help people to connect on both an adult and a kid level. Um, 140:00and my goddaughter, who is now 26, uh, I think Jenna still -- Jenna's a chef. And she will be my sous chef for Passover. Her family has been coming to Passover for -- again, this is a family who's -- they have no relative in New York. They're all in California. So they're part of our extended family. And that happens a lot in Brooklyn Heights, where, you know, if you're from some place else, you're able to have -- and if you have a dining room, you add some more people. And Jenna is just finished -- she works in Maine, mostly, in a restaurant in Maine, but she's here now. And last year she had done an internship in Rome, so she came back and made all kinds of sephardic vegetables. 141:00So I said, "What are we doing this year?" Well, she's going to Israel now, tomorrow, with her mother. I said, "Well, whatever. Whatever you make works for me." You know, it's that kind of community that we have. It's wonderful because when my husband died, strangers showed up. People that I didn't expect to be here came to pay their respects as a member of the community. And we had maybe three nights. And they -- people came. So it helps. And when Jackie Alan is bar mitzvah, he'll be bar mitzvahed there too. And if my son ever gets married to Hanna -- well if she's not Jewish, they won't marry her. But I don't know if she 142:00is or not. I said, "Ethiopian? Is she a Muslim?" Well, there's some Jewish something in her. But whatever. Life is short. I almost lost him. Do I care? As long as he's happy and she's the right person, so be it. They'll have gorgeous kids. She's got long -- she's beautiful. Quite beautiful. Long, dark hair. And she's crazy about him for some reason [laughter]. Any more questions?

SULLIVAN: Um, yes. What about, um, the Synagogue's relationship to other congregations and Jewish organizations in Brooklyn and New York?

SCHWARTZ: Oh, there's a lot. There's a lot going on. I don't get as involved in it now. Um, Serge -- I try and be part of the -- when they have the Muslim 143:00interfaith day and the Grace Church interfaith day. But Serge does a lot of -- I used to represent the Synagogue on the Heights and Hill board. Um, I was the official member so that for Heights and Hill, I could recruit people to sleep at the shelter or I could recruit people who needed help at the Synagogue. I still do that. If I know somebody who's in need of senior citizen services, I'll make that connection even though I left the board, the Heights and Hill board, at some time when my husband was ill. I mean, I dropped off almost everything during that time because I was still working full-time and I needed to spend my time with him. Um, so I don't think the Synagogue has an official person on the Heights and Hill board anymore, but I did for a gazillion years. It was a good 144:00back and forth connection, but it's OK because the head of the Heights and Hill see Serge all the time. They have their own thing going now. Um, Serge is much more open to that than certainly the past rabbi was. She had nothing to do with the clergy, the clergy coalition. And Serge is very open about being part of the whole community. The other synagogues, the churches, the 84th precinct. Wherever they are, there he is. Uh, so I think, uh -- several years ago, when there was graffiti on our steps, um, there was that guy who was putting swastikas on various people's -- various synagogues -- and we were one of them. And, you 145:00know, Serge immediately got -- that was the night -- the next night, the mayor showed up to, you know, show his respects for us. And I know him pretty well, so we were having a nice chat. He was talking about his own mother and her congregation in Massachusetts. She's still in Newton. His mother's 101 now, I think.

SULLIVAN: Wow!

SCHWARTZ: Yeah. Yeah. She didn't come to the last inauguration. She has been there in the past. But, um, so Serge does take the leadership on making sure we are connected. And we have a day with the leader of the mosque on Schermerhorn Street? [500] State Street. And with Grace [Church]. And of course, we're always at Plymouth [Church]. That's our other home. So I think there's always an interplay. Um, people are very busy in the Heights. And it's amazing how many 146:00people are available and wanting to do things because, I think, when you look at -- now that I'm more free during the day -- I was at the Synagogue a lot before the gala because I was doing a lot of skunk work for them -- you could see how many nannies show up. And how many nannies pick up kids after preschool or after the -- now preschool is fairly new. So my kids never were involved in it. You could see a lot more of that involvement. I mean, I'm one of the few grandmothers around now, uh, because I'm lucky enough to be around and to have my little guy around. But I spend more time with him -- I had a nanny here all day yesterday. Jack Alan came back from karate class with two little boys and their nanny, who spent two hours. And I talked to the Chinese nanny [laughter]. 147:00But it's, you know, it's interesting how that has changed. There's many more caregivers than parents around during the day, who pick up kids after Hebrew school or after preschool or what have you. So parents are working hard and very busy, but they do manage. It was wonderful to see young families that I didn't know -- they must have been all preschool parents -- all coming out for the gala, getting to know one another, and they'll all sort of grow up together. If they stick around the Heights, as I did, um, then they will have continuing friendships, or their kids will. And, um, in the sort of strange city and strange world, it's very nice to be able to come back and be connected.

SULLIVAN: What kind of, um -- speaking of families working, both mom and dad 148:00working, what kind of -- I noticed in looking at the history of the Synagogue the changes in leadership in terms of women being -- rabbi, women being president --

SCHWARTZ: Well, it's interesting that in several cases we have women presidents who have been converts. And that always is fascinating to me, that when women convert, they become more involved. Barbara Deinhardt [president 2004-2006], um, Joyce Raskin [president 1992-1996]. I'd have to go through -- I just got the list. Did you see the program from the gala?

SULLIVAN: No, I haven't.

SCHWARTZ: Here, I think I have it. You should keep this because I can get more 149:00copies. [Proceeds to look through The Jubilee: BHS 50; Saturday March 13, 2010]

SULLIVAN: Oh, great. Thank you. Oh, I didn't realize it was at Steiner Studios.

SCHWARTZ: Yeah, yeah.

SULLIVAN: Oh.

SCHWARTZ: I mean, there's a whole history of everything and everybody but I'm just looking at the list of presidents. Um-- oh, Kim [Ezekiel 'Kim' Jacobs', 1968-1970], he was wonderful. He had an English accent. He would give the most extraordinary interpretations of Talmud. Jack [Cohen, 1970-1973], of course, was Marion's husband. I have a sense Herb [Glantz, 1980-1986] was not there. Lola Lee [1986-1988] was a great friend of mine. She now lives -- she runs a bed & breakfast. She was a lawyer. And she runs a bed and breakfast in Maine.

SULLIVAN: Oh. So she was the first woman president?

SCHWARTZ: Yeah. Um, and then came Judy [Fishman, 1988-1992], then Joyce was for a long time. Let's see, she was four years. That was the time we were moving 150:00buildings. Then Anne [Landman, 1996-2000], who was also a convert. Joyce was a convert, Ann was a convert. Linda's married to a man who's not Jewish. And very involved. She's the one who arranged our Russian trip.

SULLIVAN: And is her husband also involved?

SCHWARTZ: No, not at all. Barbara Deinehardt's a convert. Susan is married to Bob Wise, and this is Harry [phonetic] now. It's interesting to see, you know, the women who converted to Judaism are more involved than most any. Then we had --

SULLIVAN: Why do you think that is?

SCHWARTZ: I don't know. I think because once you take it on, because it's not part of your whole life, you really get involved with it. Marge Kramer, who was, um, a surgeon and a convert, would also perform circumcisions. It was amazing. She was always called on because she was very devout after she converted and she 151:00was very good at circumcisions. But-- here's [inaudible] now. But everybody put -- I think we have an ad in here some place. David Glazer put one in, I didn't see that. We did have an ad, I thought. Yeah. It's all I could say, is, just with gratitude. Because, you know, the good times and bad. Wedding, funerals, bar mitzvahs. You know, all the life cycle. Um, I'm going to open the windows. It's getting warm.

SULLIVAN: Spring!

SCHWARTZ: Look at this. [photograph] [inaudible] Here are my guys.

SULLIVAN: Aw. [laughter]

SCHWARTZ: He was a flower boy at that wedding [laughter].

SULLIVAN: Aw.

SCHWARTZ: Uh, yeah. Because it's so neuter -- gender neutral, that's the word I'm thinking of. That there's no specific role for a man or a woman, it's for 153:00whomever, the women feel like it's not a big deal. It is who it is. We are -- you know, we're there. Um, the fact that I prefer a male cantor, only because that's the voice in my head, musically. And it has nothing to do with the religion. It's a -- sort of almost a cultural sense of how that music should sound. I was born with a man chanting. So to me, the sound of that music should be male and it's just organically -- but some of the women cantors have had wonderful voices. Serge has a lovely voice. But it doesn't come from here yet. Uh, I still haven't gotten used to guitars. But again, that's my age and that's 154:00my musical sense. I'm not sure I need a guitar in a synagogue. Just the way I don't need an organ, I don't need a guitar. But Serge plays the guitar. It's fine, it's good for the kids. But the one time we had a woman rabbi, it was awful for me. Um, she had her own problems, she was overweight, she wanted to get married. I think she finally did. I kept far away from her. And it was just a very bad blood between us. And I thought my husband was going to go after her with a rope. But on the other hand, there's Hara Person. Again, I'm at an age where I can't look at these young people as my spiritual leader. I have my own spiritual leader. It's me. But he or she are the connection between our lives, 155:00who we were, who we are, and help us to articulate it. And remind us. That's, for me, that -- culturally -- is fine. Some people like his sermons, some people don't like his sermons. It's not the sermon that I care about. The message is not -- I can read my own message. It's the presence and the stability that it offers to my family is what matters the most. Whether it's a man or a woman doesn't matter. It's just the one woman was particularly difficult, and yet Hara was the one who performed the most important thing, the wedding of my daughter. And I see the two of them, Laura and Hara hugging. I go like this. I don't think of her as a rabbi, I think of her as Hara. But I'm awfully glad she's a rabbi 156:00because she's bright and scholarly and probably the most thoughtful and well-versed. And if you ask a serious question about either ritual or ethics, you go to Hara. And she's an intellectual rabbi, which is really, for this community, very important because it's a bright, educated community. We don't follow blindly. I mean, I've seen people walk out of various sermons arguing. "I don't like that. I didn't like this. I was going to pick this point across." But Serge will say from the pulpit, "If you have any questions or opinions about what I've just said, let's talk about them." He doesn't pontificate. Which is fine because this is not a community to accept blindly. If the rabbi says -- I 157:00have a young cousin, 35 or so, who was brought up in a very assimilated Jewish family. My first cousin's son. She has twin sons. He has become orthodox. He's driving us crazy. He is driving us off the wall. He would not come to his twin brother's wedding because he didn't approve of it. The fact that they had just had a baby -- he said the baby is going to be going to hell. What hell? We don't believe in hell! And he pretends -- he's come to it lately, we think it's sort of a psychotic behavior. But he's come to religion and I think it gives him safety and security to be told, "The rabbi says." And if the rabbi says it and if I have a problem, he'll say to me, "Well, go talk to your rabbi about it." 158:00"No, Peter." Well, he's not Peter anymore. He changed his name from Peter to Ben. And I still call him Peter because my son is Ben. And I said, "No, Peter. If I have a question, I go to me. I don't have a rabbi." He said, "Easier life if you can go to a rabbi to answer your questions." You go to a rabbi to have him ask questions of you but not to tell you what to do. And in the orthodox tradition, if the rabbi says it, that's what you do. So you lose your life. Ugh! So, uh, that was sort of a long-winded way of answering women and men and-- but it is an interesting community because it's a very sophisticated, well-educated congregation. Which you find a lot in parts of Manhattan and here, um, who just 159:00don't do things unquestioningly. There's got to be a rational behind it. There's got to be an explanation. It's not just because it's tradition.

SULLIVAN: Are there, um -- what about connections with the orthodox community in terms of the Synagogue? Like, are there any conversations?

SCHWARTZ: Rarely. Rarely. They bought their building from us. They're in the old building that we were in at 117. Um, Serge has conversations with Rabbi Raskin. They invited us, I understand -- oh, after Purim. They invited us into their congregation because they had a much bigger spread of food than we did. But we don't dress the same way. I don't put on a skirt necessarily. Unless if I'm in Europe and I'm going into a congregation. I will wear the appropriate clothes because I'm not going to insult anyone. And I always bring a skirt, even in 160:00England, because you do. You know, out of respect. In Amsterdam, we had to sit upstairs. But the service was interesting so we did it. When I say "we," it was my daughter and I. But I don't want to go to this service and I don't think too many of us do. Serge talks to Rabbi Raskin. When I had the two Polish girls living with me, I took them there and Rabbi Raskin asked me if I would come and daven with them and I said, "No, Rabbi. I don't do that." And I purposely wore pants so I could not go in. I just -- and then he invited me to lunch at his house afterwards. And I again rejected it because it's -- I don't want to be a hypocrite about it. It's gracious, but I'm not comfortable. And I don't feel as if they think I'm right. So I don't think there's too much interaction. Um, 161:00during -- what holidays? It's Simchat Torah, when everybody's out on the street dancing. They wait to have their -- and it's interesting to see Remsen Street closed off because when we first moved to the Heights, Remsen Street was absolutely WASP. And suddenly we opened up a synagogue on Remsen Street and people that I knew -- parents, particularly, who were Saint Ann's parents -- you could see sort of looking out the window and saying, "Hmm. Look at where they're going. Those are Jewish people." I mean, the Heights was completely different in the early '60s. It was still very WASP-y. A couple of Catholic churches around but, you know, all the Episcopal churches were at full function. Saint Ann's and Grace and Plymouth -- they were hot stuff. I mean, they still are. But much smaller congregations. And so when we started having a street service, you have 162:00to close the street down. The traffic -- this did not do well with the community for a long time. Um, but we, you know, we would close the street for an hour and a half, do the service, and then go back in. Now, with the Orthodox synagogue, they won't come out on the street until we're finished because our music is different. We have women dancing on the street and they don't want to have that connection to us. So we'll go in and then they will start their service later on in the evening. And they'll have the men on the street and the women elsewhere. On the steps or some place else. Women don't get to dance, for gods sakes! Or they do, it's in a corner. You can tell I don't think highly of that. So I can't tell you if other people have interaction with them. I, you know, I know the 163:00building well. My kids grew up in there. But I don't need the ritual bath downstairs either. So -- nor did my daughter when she got married. So it would be -- I don't want that kind of Judaism to be a curiosity for my family. For me, it doesn't work. My son-in-law would go anywhere. He's very open, he's very gregarious. This Sunday, I take my grandson to the Hasidic community because they -- I take him to see them make matzah.

SULLIVAN: Oh!

SCHWARTZ: I do this every year. I've been doing it for a generation. Every year on a Sunday I take whoever wants to go. Um, and he has to wear a hat -- he has to wear a skull cap. The last time, he was four last year and I said, "You've got to put on a hat." Well, he saw some little kid with a Spiderman cap and, you 164:00know, "Wow!" But I said, "That's the deal." And I wore a skirt to go there as well. And we see the matzah being built -- being baked -- and there's all the Hasid women are rolling it and the kids are doing their part and the men are praying. And then you go in the back, in this crazy little place in Crown Heights, and they're putting the matzah into the brick -- you know, the wood oven. And they take it out and if it's good, they use it. If they don't, they say a prayer and break it up. And then we'll buy the holy matzah and we bring it home for Passover. But that's because I want kids to understand what the matzah is about and where it comes from rather than just a box. And to see the process and hear the prayers being said. That's also a part of my own childhood. And that's a part of a tradition that I don't care who's doing it. One year, I brought a little Chinese girl who was adopted and is Jewish. And the Hasids were 165:00fascinated, thrilled with her. "Is she really Jewish?" [laughter] They took pictures of her. And Claire, who is now a senior in high school -- and she'll be here for seder -- uh, I mean, she wants to go every year. She thinks it's nifty. She gets into college -- she was just accepted to Wellesley, as a matter of fact.

SULLIVAN: Oh!

SCHWARTZ: Yeah, she's -- her father's ethical culture, her mother's Jewish, and she's Chinese, and she speaks fluent Spanish. She spent a semester in Costa Rica. So schools seem to want her. She's a little troubled about a same-sex school, but we're trying to convince her that -- and they're offering her a lot of money.

SULLIVAN: Oh, she should do it.

SCHWARTZ: Yeah. Because my son lives -- he has a house. He lives in Cambridge but he also has a house near Amherst. So I said to her mother, "Hey listen, 166:00you've got a place to stay. The deal is good. Um, and she should take it." So we'll know what else she gets into in the next couple of weeks. But it's part of my tradition of getting, you know -- it's very basic. This is called rolling out the dough, this is how they move it from this prayer to this prayer, to rolling to the women pushing it to the men putting it in the fire. And then we put it in the box and we take it home. It's like seeing a cow give milk.

SULLIVAN: That's wonderful.

SCHWARTZ: So that's this Sunday. I think -- yeah. A couple of his friends' mothers have told me that they want to go as well. So that's our connection with the orthodox community. We go see matzah being made. Although, when he lived in Williamsburg, he said to his mother -- you know, in Williamsburg, the whistle blows every Friday night just before Sabbath. Um, and we've explained to him 167:00that's a signal that the sun is going to set. The women have to light their candles and it's the beginning of Sabbath. And he said, "Well, why don't we go? Aren't we going? Don't we believe in -- aren't we Jews? Why aren't we going?" And now they don't live where the whistle blows anymore. But he's got it. He will be -- he's got it. My only grandson. My only grandchild. He's going to get it. Although I'm more interested in getting him to play the piano. So I guess you've heard a lot from me. I don't know how much is useful. Do you have anything else?

SULLIVAN: This is -- no, this has all been wonderful. I have one kind of strange question which came up from reading the -- I was reading the newsletters.

SCHWARTZ: Yeah.

SULLIVAN: And there was a story about a found puppy?

SCHWARTZ: Oh yes, that was my puppy! How did you know that?

SULLIVAN: It was in one of the newsletters and I was like, this sounds like a good story!

SCHWARTZ: Oh, that is a funny story! It was -- we were in Plymouth Church for the high holidays. And the door was open. Everyone was standing and we were on the aisle. My husband was there and I was here. I don't know where the kids were. I think they must have been -- I don't know where they were. And suddenly a beagle puppy walks down the aisle. Maybe five months old. And I went, "Aww!" because we had beagles.

It went all the way around. Rick, who is deathly allergic to dogs, sees this puppy come all the way around the altar, keep walking around, walked through the whole church, came all the way back around, and sat down right next to us. I 169:00pick up the puppy and I go outside. And of course a bunch of kids are hanging around outside. I said -- and this puppy had a rhinestone collar. I said, "Did you see anybody lose a puppy?" "No," said they. "Somebody opened a car door and threw it out." Figuring this was a good place to put a puppy. So I walk back into the Synagogue. It's the holiest day of the year, it's Yom Kippur. And I'm holding the puppy and I turn to my husband and say, "Puppy. Take him home." Alan says, "Sure." Doesn't come back. My husband never shows up again. He is home. We had one dog left. We had a cocker beagle. We had had several beagles and this was the offspring of the last beagle who mated with a cocker spaniel, and so we had a black cocker beagle. And the cocker beagle took one look at this puppy and 170:00screamed her head off. "Get this dog out of my house!" And I said, "This is our dog. It's named Mitzvah." Couldn't help it. I mean, what else could you name this dog? And we kept this dog for 24 hours and my poor dog screamed and cried at us. Now it was one thing when her mother died. Our dog Pucci, P-U-C-C-I, Pucci. But my old dog Trey -- now, she was named after -- we were in Louisville when the dog became pregnant and we were at the Robert [inaudible] Songfest and they were signing, "My dog Trey is ever faithful." So suddenly we came up with this puppy and we named her Trey. And Trey is now screaming her brains out. "Do 171:00not allow this puppy in my house!" And the poor thing was peeing all over the house, but that's OK. But, you know, Trey is now having palpitations. So we said, OK, we can't keep it. The next night, Rick -- I tell him the story and he makes an announcement. "We all know what happened. We saw this dog come in. It was a mitzvah that the Schwartz family took the dog home. They can't keep it because Trey won't allow it in the house. Who wants the dog? It's got to go to a good family or else." And who wound up taking Mitzy, which is what she was called? My friend Wendy, whose little girl Claire is the Chinese girl.

SULLIVAN: Oh!

SCHWARTZ: So they had Mitzy for about eight years until she died. But they had to keep the name. They called her Mitzvah or Mitzy. So we had visiting rights and whenever they went away, we baby-sat Mitzy or took her to the beach with us. 172:00So we felt as if -- you know, Trey calmed down. But Trey was old and spoiled. But it went to -- absolutely stayed in the family.

SULLIVAN: That's great.

SCHWARTZ: Yeah. And they had a garden and Claire had been -- she must have been about three or four then. They got Claire very young from China and so she's -- they've had three more dogs since then. But Claire will be here. And she will bring picture of Mitzy with her. Yes, that's how Mitzvah came. And we've had some wonderful moments. Mostly -- you know, out of the span of the years when I think of it, most of them have been good. You know, I chuckle still when I think of my mother and Fanny Mailer having that debate.

SULLIVAN: [laughter] That's great.

SCHWARTZ: And knowing my mother, I knew she was going to win. No matter what the--[laughter] So anything else I can tell you or if you need me another time, just yell.

SULLIVAN: All right. Well thank you, this has been wonderful.

SCHWARTZ: Ah, you know, I am a lobbyist and I talk a lot, but not usually quite like this and certainly not about me. In my business, I talk about roads and bridges. Would you like me to fill potholes? Would you like me to build a new Second Avenue subway? You know, I can do things like that but--

SULLIVAN: Well, this has been great. I really feel like we, um, you filled in, I mean, as oral history -- the purpose is to fill in that life and the family of what I was able to read in the archives about different turning points in terms of the history, but you bring it all --

SCHWARTZ:I pulled all those archives together. Um, because my daughter, when she was pregnant said -- because she had been married in the congregation and it was sort of a thing she would do in memory of her father -- "Oh don't worry, Serge, I'll take all those pictures and put them in order." So she took all of these pictures and of course, that was the end of it. Five years worth of -- you know, 50 years worth of pictures or 45 years of pictures -- sitting here. And I said, "Laura, are you ever going to do this?" "No."

SULLIVAN: [laughter] It fell to you.

SCHWARTZ: It fell to me. So I went back into the Synagogue and I started hanging pictures up on bulletin boards saying, "Do you know who this is?" And that was the beginning of the gala. This was last winter, maybe in October. Every week before services, I would put up -- and people would identify them and have a good -- or, do you want this picture? Would you like to have a picture of your 175:00kid at a retreat, whatever it was. So people were taking pictures, but I must have had -- and then we went to the basement and we found stuff and archival stuff that was all in Reuven Huffman's house. Serge had taken all of it and put it into a shopping bag. So he hands me this whole shopping bag from the Huffmans. So I had all of Bill and Reuven's pictures and programs and material and sat and tried to sort them out and put some order into them. And that's how we -- did you see the video? We just did a video.

SULLIVAN: No, but I've heard about it and I will see it, but I haven't.

SCHWARTZ: All the pictures that I put together, then made them into a much smaller collection, then gave them all to Scott Seager [phonetic], who put them all on his computer. And then we picked out, from the computer, which ones were visually good and told a story, and tried to get all the rabbis and all the cantors and all the -- you know, different names and faces. And then Dan Cohen 176:00made a much shorter video out of it, which was shown and it was -- but we still have all the material. I don't yet have all the pictures back. I have to finish the sorting and albuming of that stuff. Thank you to my daughter. But now she's working full-time and can't do it. I can. It's a generational thing. So if you need any more material as you go along, I'll find it.

SULLIVAN: Definitely.

SCHWARTZ: But, you know, read the journal. You'll get a sense of -- just by seeing some of the names, you'll get a chance to see who has done what. You know, some of the early presidents really were terrific in raising money --